Continuing... How has Taleb made his name? Look at the above graph. The blue line represents a normal or Gaussian distribution, also known as the "bell curve." Events on the far right or ar left side of that line, where the blue is approaching zero along the X axis, are sometimes call hundred-year storms. If we think of this in a finance/business context, the blue line may represent what a certain business thinks are its profits for the coming year. The tip of the bell represents the most likely result (a modest profit in line with that of most of its competitors, perhaps.) Toward the right end of the curve you get to ever higher but more unlikely profits, to the left you get losses, and then ever larger losses, though here too the fall-off in the line toward the zerobase of the X axis implies that certain disastrous results are very unlikely. But what if probabilities in finance don't have a normal outcome distribution? If you draw a flattened curve with "fa...