About

cygnyx

cygnyx is a contraction of CYGnus and oNYX.

In finance the black swan meme is a metaphor for inappropriate generalizations. This metaphor has broken down a little with the widespread knowledge of Cygnus atratus which are clearly black swans. An onyx swan is in keeping with the orginal metaphor since onyx is an ambigous color: red or black or something else … Cygnyx is a reminder that there are many unknowns.

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.

Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, 2 February 2002

Implementation

This page and the cygnyx profile is located on github along with a gist.