Washoe County Library System

Explores the role of luck, specifically the concept of "regression to the mean," in everyday life, exploring how failures to understand chance and random variations influence choices and perceptions of truth.

"[Taleb is] Wall Street' s principal dissident... . [Fooled By Randomness] is to conventional Wall Street wisdom approximately what Martin Luther' s ninety-nine theses were to the Catholic Church." - Malcolm Gladwell, "The New Yorker" Finally in paperback, the word-of-mouth sensation that will change the way you think about the markets and the world. This book is about luck: more precisely how we perceive luck in our personal and professional experiences....

In this story, a child is visited by his first chance and unsure what to do with it, he lets it go. Later on, when a new chance arrives he reaches for it, but this time he misses and falls. Embarrassed and afraid, he begins ignoring each new chance that comes by, even though he still wants to take them. Then one day he realizes that he doesn't need to be brave all the time, just at the right time, to find out what amazing things can happen when he...

From the Trojan Horse to a photograph snapped in Vietnam, world history has been shaped as much by chance and error as by courage and heroism. Despite impossible odds, invincible armies fall in bitter defeat to weaker opponents. How and why does this happen? What decides the fate of battle? In this fascinating book, Erik Durschmied takes us through the major conflicts of historyfrom Agincourt to the Civil War, from Crimea to the Gulf Warand reveals...

"A frustrated general in Napoleon's army, billeted with one of Berlin's finest families. Elisabeth, a passionate young woman living in that house. The young man with whom she locks eyes through a window as he's engaged in a sexual encounter at the moment Napoleon makes his grand entrance. An entrepreneur in New World exotica, whose house is the setting for the tryst. A slave from Suriname, Mr. Hendrik, with his resentful white American companion,...

"If you could rewind your life to the very beginning and then press play, would everything turn out the same? Or could making an accidental phone call or missing an exit off the highway change not just your life, but history itself? And would you remain blind to the radically different possible world you unknowingly left behind? In Fluke, myth-shattering social scientist Brian Klaas dives deeply into the phenomenon of random chance and the chaos...