On the last question give me a little time to look up a paper. I'll post it. Essential it shows how the strategy of most long-short hedge funds work. I'd have to look again, but one of the major high frequency strategies uses a version of this.
I'd love to read it, but the easiest way to answer your second question is to point you to 'A non random walk down wall street.'
One huge assumption that Black-Scholes makes is that returns are normal distributed. This is not done for empirical reasons rather mathematical ones, namely it is so convenient.
The bottom line is that you must take care of the IP aspects of your online business. We tend to forget such things as registering your copyright, your trademarks and maybe some patent (if you came up with some groundbreaking stuff, such as the "buy now" button).
I married a lawyer, so she handles this for me. That's a potently dangerous strategy, so if your risk aversion is higher, you may try reading this book instead:
Legal Guide to Web & Software Development
http://www.amazon.com/Legal-Guide-Software-Development-CD-Ro...
This seems like a really bad idea to me (except for the last part).
I've seen capuchin monkeys eat the fruit of Strychnos, the genus that strychnine comes from. That could be a fairly risky thing for a human being to consume, especially if you happen to eat any of the seeds, then all bets are off.
Many monkey species, especially those that eat leaves (these would be the most common species you'd encounter, at least in the new world) walk a very fine line between eating enough of a given plant to satisfy their energy budget and eating too much and poisoning themselves. A human following their example is likely to end of with a stomach full of undigestible fiber, get sick, or worse. Energetically, you'd probably spend more calories following the monkeys around than you'd gain from any food you'd collect.
Now eating the monkeys, that might be a good idea, but the primates you'd most likely encounter would be in social groups, and once you kill one of them, it will be very hard to kill another from the same group.
I saw a show on monkeys once where a species of monkeys discovered that by eating the wood charcoal from nearby villages they could eat more of a plant that was normally somewhat toxic to them, the charcoal acting as a filter for the toxin.
There are of course variations of this trick. If you can't find a monkey, either a quail or a toucan will do just fine. I have some friends who were in a military survival training mission in the Amazon.. For many days all they were able to find was swamp cabbage (palmito). Then they found a toucan... The monkey trick didn't work because the trees are very very tall.
Energetically, I bet you'd spend more calories following the bird than any calories you'd gain from food you collect. On the other hand, I've been told that toucan is quite tasty.
Yes, but that probably isn't enough of a savings. We don't have a toucan's digestive system, and can't process large amounts of fruit quickly through our digestive tract like they can. It's a case of starving with a full stomach.
I wonder why they spend so much time eating nasty things like larvae in these courses. There's lots of fish in the Amazon. Snakes and lizards are quite tasty too. I guess it must be the easiest thing to catch.
