If fractality were a religion, Euclidian Bath might be seen as some kind of hell.

I imagine that, at the moment of first freezing, the pattern of frost is set.  So should a mutant, winter-dwelling butterfly flap its wings near your windscreen, a different pattern would appear than if it had not.  Dirt and debris on the screen, the micro-climate around the vehicle, the shapes of eddies: they must make for the variety of possibilities.  It’s about turbulence.

In an October interview, Benoit Mandelbrot said this:-

The word turbulence is one which is actually common to physics and to social sciences–to economics. Everything that involves turbulence is enormously more complicated: not just a little bit more complicated, not just one year more schooling; it’s enormously more complicated….

The behaviour of economic phenomena is far more complicated than the behaviour of liquids or gases.”

In the same joint-interview, Nassim Taleb said this:-

Never in the history of the world have we faced so much complexity combined with so much incompetence in understanding its properties….

You may have chain reactions we never imagined before. These come from intricate relationships in a system we don’t understand.”

So I guess we should beware of those who tell us confidently to expect future economic events to follow a familiar pattern.  They tend to be the same people who did not expect the current situation.

For those who did not catch the original video, here it is:-

Warren Buffett famously said: “you only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.”  As this is a family blog, I had to photoshop out the entire world economy, but you get the underlying picture.

I think those diamond patterns in the sand are self-similar. Waves clearly are.

If you feared I’ve been all washed up on some mental desert island, worry not.  I’m planning a real post for later today. It should include words like “judgement” and “decision-making“. But remember: no predictions.

Correlation does not equal causation.  But since abandoning refined carbohydrates I’ve developed a passion for brassicas, the more lightly cooked the better.

Happy New Year.