This book is neither fact nor fiction. It’s something in the middle. It’s about the universe and time and is a book for ordinary inquisitive people to read. Curious people who feel disconnected from much of the complex and jargon-heavy logic about the universe and time that comes from scientific or religious quarters. But the contents of this book might interest a broad segment of scientists causing them to raise their voices, hands and arms in agreement or most probably disagreement. Words like rubbish, stupid, and it’s a naïve falsification may be uttered. So be it. This book is readable for the uninformed because most of it is in plain text and pictures with some elementary mathematics sprinkled here and there. Various simple questions are posed as to why our universe exists and how it happened. That happening was what the book terms a grey swan moment. Time will not tell if that moment was even a moment because time is an earthly fabrication of our imagination and is not real. Read this book and gain a fresh perspective on what has, is and might happen.

The #1 English-language bestseller in China--the book that is shaping China's planning and policy for the future. A "gray rhino" is a highly probable, high impact yet neglected threat: kin to both the elephant in the room and the improbable and unforeseeable black swan. Gray rhinos are not random surprises, but occur after a series of warnings and visible evidence. The bursting of the housing bubble in 2008, the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and other natural disasters, the new digital technologies that upended the media world, the fall of the Soviet Union...all were evident well in advance. Why do leaders and decision makers keep failing to address obvious dangers before they spiral out of control? Drawing on her extensive background in policy formation and crisis management, as well as in-depth interviews with leaders from around the world, Michele Wucker shows in The Gray Rhino how to recognize and strategically counter looming high impact threats. Filled with persuasive stories, real-world examples, and practical advice, The Gray Rhino is essential reading for managers, investors, planners, policy makers, and anyone who wants to understand how to profit by avoiding getting trampled.

Even leading capitalists admit that capitalism is broken. Green Swans is a manifesto for system change designed to serve people, planet, and prosperity. In his twentieth book, John Elkington—dubbed the “Godfather of Sustainability”—explores new forms of capitalism fit for the twenty-first century. If Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “Black Swans” are problems that can take us exponentially toward breakdown, then “Green Swans” are solutions that take us exponentially toward breakthrough. The success—and survival—of humanity now depends on how we rein in the first and accelerate the second. Green Swans draws on Elkington’s firsthand experience in some of the world’s best-known boardrooms and C-suites. Using case studies, real-world examples, and profiles on emergent technologies, Elkington shows how the weirdest “Ugly Ducklings” of today’s world may turn into tomorrow’s world-saving Green Swans. This book is a must-read for business leaders in corporations great and small who want to help their businesses survive the coming shift in global priorities over the next decade and expand their horizons from responsibility, through resilience, and onto regeneration.

Readers of Eudora Welty's stories often encounter a protective and domelike nighttime sky, the moon and constellations beckoning a character to venture beyond the familiar, visible world. This striking metaphor for the human need to seek out the unknown serves as an anchoring image in Daughter of the Swan, Gail L. Mortimer's study of Welty's lifelong inquiry into the nature and contexts of knowledge. Mortimer argues that Welty's views on epistemology and the elusiveness of certainty lie at the heart of this writer's subtle and revelatory work. Employing the psychoanalytic object-relations theories of Nancy Chodorow and Carol Gilligan, she reveals how Welty uses assumptions about relationships to shape her characters' consciousnesses. Mortimer also contrasts Welty's world with William Faulkner's; each elucidates the other's remarkably different ways of perceiving humanity, relationships, and approaches to the unknown. The author then turns to Welty's childhood to consider her evolving sense of what--and how--things can be known. Her childhood with adults created impressions of a benign, wondrous, orderly world. As Mortimer observes, Welty eventually replaced these impressions with the realization that adults frequently distort and withhold the truth. Welty's own family's conception of love as a kind of shield, and her resistance to this protection, finds its way into much of her fiction. For many Welty characters, this protective love becomes an obstacle to fuller understanding. Mortimer invokes two of the writer's most beguiling images, the circle and the labyrinth, to demonstrate that "the perceiver" who is "both an insider and an outsider" is best able to recognize and assimilate new knowledge. In The Golden Apples Welty contemplates the difficulty and fascination implicit in this quest for knowledge, given the ambiguous nature of what we know--and given our language's surfaces, and of masks, myths, and falsities to create benevolent illusions. Ultimately, Mortimer concludes, Welty comes to see the concept of protective love as a limited one and, in The Optimist's Daughter, for instance, she advocates instead the courage to face even the harshest realities. Recognizing the richness of Welty's artistry, Mortimer views her through the lens of various literary traditions, including that of Shelley and Yeats. The latter's poem "Among School Children," from which the title of Mortimer's study is borrowed, summons the image of the swan to reflect the solitary human soul in search of knowledge. In that same spirit of wonder and curiosity, Eudora Welty's fiction illuminates the conditions of that search.

"Our Indifferent Universe" presents 903 poems written 2015-2017 by Surazeus that explore what it means to be a human in our indifferent universe.

Marvel at our universe, with its billions of galaxies and the planets of our solar system. Explore Earth and all its breathtaking landscapes. Take a front-row seat at the impressive spectacle that is our weather and plunge to the depths of the ocean with all its hidden treasures.

The most influential book of the past seventy-five years: a groundbreaking exploration of everything we know about what we don’t know, now with a new section called “On Robustness and Fragility.” A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives. Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don’t know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the “impossible.” For years, Taleb has studied how we fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we actually do. We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world. In this revelatory book, Taleb will change the way you look at the world, and this second edition features a new philosophical and empirical essay, “On Robustness and Fragility,” which offers tools to navigate and exploit a Black Swan world. Taleb is a vastly entertaining writer, with wit, irreverence, and unusual stories to tell. He has a polymathic command of subjects ranging from cognitive science to business to probability theory. Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications, The Black Swan is a landmark book—itself a black swan.