One of the first things to accept as an investor is that you will occasionally lose money – sometimes a lot of money – on the way to earning a decent return in stocks. The market will take unpredictable twists and turns throughout your lifetime. When one of the...
Remember in high school when you had to read The Odyssey? Homer’s epic told the story of Odysseus’ journey home to Ithaca, which included a part where Odysseus and friends had to sail past the island of Sirens. The Sirens sang a song no sailor could resist. But if...
I’m really excited about getting a new iPhone. I’m rather attached (addicted?) to my phone, so I rarely think twice about shelling out several hundred dollars to get a new one. I can even say it’s an extremely reasonable purchase to make, because I...
My exploration of complex adaptive systems started with Per Bak’s infamous sandpile experiment, which captures all the essential characteristics of a complex adaptive system. With the sandpile example, we saw that you couldn’t only consider the individual grains of...
The idea of complex adaptive systems might sound overwhelming, but an experiment conducted by physicist Per Bak makes the concept easier to understand. If you drop one grain of sand at a time onto an empty table, a small, cone-shaped pile begins to form. As the pile...
