This document discusses various topics including venture capital, catastrophism, Immanuel Velikovsky, data collection limitations, uniformitarianism versus catastrophism, social networks in alternative asset firms, normal distributions, reconstructing reports of wildfires, Tiger Woods and hitting .400 in baseball, human performance limits, and how errors and anomalies can correct understanding and reveal general patterns according to Francis Bacon.

1. Venture Capital , Catastrophism , & the Redemption of Immanuel Velikovsky Paul Kedrosky Oct. 24/2007

2. Far better an approximate answer to the right question , which is often vague , than an exact answer to the wrong question , which can always be made precise . J. Tukey (1962), Annals of Mathematics and Statistics 33:1-67

6. First things first

15. Why?

16. If I am interested in, say, the distribution of the intensities of hurricanes, I cannot just “collect data more frequently”: I will just have to wait for the next hurricane to arrive. Source: R. Rebonatto, Plight of the Fortune-Tellers (2007)

17. Catastrophism vs. Uniformitarianism

18. With correlations growing across all strategies, alt asset firms are in a social network ... they just didn’t know it .

19. The trouble with normal

20. A putative 100 mile long by 10 mile wide (160 × 16 km) wildfire reported in 1889 was reconstructed to an area of chaparral 40 times smaller … Source: Goforth and Minnich, 1996, Ecological Applications , p. 779-790

26. Tiger Woods & .400 hitters

30. Blind spots , predictability and the right wall of human performance

33. Errors of Nature , Sports and Monsters correct our understanding in regard to ordinary things, and reveal general forms . Francis Bacon, Novum Organum