On January 26, American physicist Yaneer Bar-Yam wrote a short paper with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, best known as the author of a best-selling book called The Black Swan, and data scientist Joseph Norman.  The paper was called “Systemic risk of pandemic via novel pathogens”. It warned that the novel coronavirus emerging in Wuhan in China threatened the world due to “increased connectivity” causing it to potentially spread in a “nonlinear” way.  Nonlinearity makes pandemics hard to predict as it involves known and unknown inputs, unexpected interactions like wet markets and the prevalence of air travel, and so on. Bar-Yam and…

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