Hurricanes and elections are what's on everybody's mind these days. Here in DC, we certainly didn't feel Sandy's wrath head on. It stormed, we lost power for a night, and that was that. It felt like just a "normal" storm although the pictures below that I took yesterday in Rock Creek Park tell a different story.
By Wednesday evening the city was pretty much running again, and Halloween celebrations went on as normal. We took Lil' S trick-or-treating, by which I mean we put him in a zip up giraffe outfit and pushed him around the neighborhood with some friends (I asked some of the kids we encountered if they knew what he was, and they guessed a cow, which was pretty funny.) Our friends have a two-year old, and she was good for about three houses before she got tired, so it was a pretty brief excursion, which is fine. There were a lot of kids out in our neighborhood, but we didn't get any trick-or-treaters at our place (my parents, who were in town visiting, we on candy-passing-out duty, in case). We live on a very busy street, and although there's a big sidewalk, there's no real incentive for parents to take their youngsters up to the main street when there are plenty of houses to hit up on the less-trafficked side streets. So now we have a giant bowl of candy that I've been dipping into a little bit each night. I've been eating it according to my Official Mixed Bag Candy Power Ranking which is as follows.
Tier 1: Like
Twix
Snickers
Tier 2: Kinda like
Kit Kat
Reese's Peanut Butter Cups (a little overrated)
Nestle Crunch (a little underrated)
Tier 3: Like only in a pinch
Milky Way (would be ranked higher if not for the existence of Snickers, whenever I eat a Milky Way I think, "Where are the peanuts?", it's such a let down)
Almond Joy
Peanut M&Ms
Tier 4: Don't really like but will eat anyway, because they're there and I hate wasting things
Regular M&Ms
I haven't gotten to Tier 3 yet, I've been mainly working on Tier 1, but I've worked in some Tier 2 as well. S, to her credit, hasn't been touching it at all.
So, let's talk about the election. It's on Tuesday (as if you didn't know). Finally! I think the entire nation is feeling a bit like Abigael Evans right now.
Nate Silver is now giving Obama an 83% chance at winning, and he's actually a bit bearish compared to Sam Wang who puts the president's reelection as a near certainty (between 98%-100%). Wang sums up the reason he's so high on Obama in this quote, "To put it into plain English: If state polls are accurate on the whole, then Obama will win." The bold is his. So basically, he (and Silver) are banking heavily on the state polls being accurate, which they have been in the past (for the most part), and that's why Obama is such a heavy favorite in their eyes. When you break it down state-by-state, it's really hard to find a likely path for Romney to the requisite number of votes in the electoral college, even though in national polls it's a virtually tied race. (There is an apparent disconnect between the state polls and the national polls, which both Silver and Wang try to reconcile. Neither one believes it's all that likely that Obama will win the presidency while losing the popular vote, rather they seem to think the most probable explanation is that the national polls are undervaluing Obama a bit, as state polls have traditionally been more accurate.)
As you might expect, many Romney supporters don't believe the analyses of people like Silver and Wang, and they have done their best to discredit them, which is very hard to do, because they're doing mostly basic and transparent mathematical modeling based almost entirely on data collected by other people (namely the pollsters). There's nothing particularly shady or nefarious or partisan to their work. This hardly means their models are beyond reproach, but it does mean attacking them for being left-leaning and partisan doesn't really make much sense. What's really going on is: a) Lots of "pundits" have a vested interested in Romney doing well or in the race being a tossup, so they want to create this illusion, even if it's not reality, and b) Lots of "pundits" don't understand basic math, so they don't want to give any credence to mathematically based arguments, because it will make their own reasoning less credible (the "shut up, nerd" argument). As somebody who does understand basic math I can say that the sentiment behind b) is unfortunately quite prominent is many parts of our society. But so it goes...
Anyway, we will get the bottom of everything on Tuesday, hopefully, and hopefully it will be an Obama victory, if only to shut up all the mathophobes of the world, as it's almost a certainty that if Romney wins they will claim this essentially invalidates the work of all election modelers predicting an Obama victory, even though it doesn't. I mean, Silver is giving Romney about the same chance at winning the presidency as the chance of rolling a 1 on a die.* Does rolling a 1 seem so inconceivable? And if a roll does come up 1, does it mean that anybody who said the roll had a much better chance of coming up something other than 1 was wrong? Of course not, but that's how it will be spun. Look, I don't know anybody who can see the future (except the cyclops in the movie Krull, and they could only see their own deaths), improbable things happen sometimes, let's all just hope, nay, pray that Romney winning isn't one of them.
Well, that's it. Until next time...
*Wang's odds for Romney are more like rolling double 1s with ten-sided dice, which obviously, is much less likely, but still well within the realm of possibility.
By Wednesday evening the city was pretty much running again, and Halloween celebrations went on as normal. We took Lil' S trick-or-treating, by which I mean we put him in a zip up giraffe outfit and pushed him around the neighborhood with some friends (I asked some of the kids we encountered if they knew what he was, and they guessed a cow, which was pretty funny.) Our friends have a two-year old, and she was good for about three houses before she got tired, so it was a pretty brief excursion, which is fine. There were a lot of kids out in our neighborhood, but we didn't get any trick-or-treaters at our place (my parents, who were in town visiting, we on candy-passing-out duty, in case). We live on a very busy street, and although there's a big sidewalk, there's no real incentive for parents to take their youngsters up to the main street when there are plenty of houses to hit up on the less-trafficked side streets. So now we have a giant bowl of candy that I've been dipping into a little bit each night. I've been eating it according to my Official Mixed Bag Candy Power Ranking which is as follows.
Tier 1: Like
Twix
Snickers
Tier 2: Kinda like
Kit Kat
Reese's Peanut Butter Cups (a little overrated)
Nestle Crunch (a little underrated)
Tier 3: Like only in a pinch
Milky Way (would be ranked higher if not for the existence of Snickers, whenever I eat a Milky Way I think, "Where are the peanuts?", it's such a let down)
Almond Joy
Peanut M&Ms
Tier 4: Don't really like but will eat anyway, because they're there and I hate wasting things
Regular M&Ms
I haven't gotten to Tier 3 yet, I've been mainly working on Tier 1, but I've worked in some Tier 2 as well. S, to her credit, hasn't been touching it at all.
So, let's talk about the election. It's on Tuesday (as if you didn't know). Finally! I think the entire nation is feeling a bit like Abigael Evans right now.
[Hysterical!]
Nate Silver is now giving Obama an 83% chance at winning, and he's actually a bit bearish compared to Sam Wang who puts the president's reelection as a near certainty (between 98%-100%). Wang sums up the reason he's so high on Obama in this quote, "To put it into plain English: If state polls are accurate on the whole, then Obama will win." The bold is his. So basically, he (and Silver) are banking heavily on the state polls being accurate, which they have been in the past (for the most part), and that's why Obama is such a heavy favorite in their eyes. When you break it down state-by-state, it's really hard to find a likely path for Romney to the requisite number of votes in the electoral college, even though in national polls it's a virtually tied race. (There is an apparent disconnect between the state polls and the national polls, which both Silver and Wang try to reconcile. Neither one believes it's all that likely that Obama will win the presidency while losing the popular vote, rather they seem to think the most probable explanation is that the national polls are undervaluing Obama a bit, as state polls have traditionally been more accurate.)
As you might expect, many Romney supporters don't believe the analyses of people like Silver and Wang, and they have done their best to discredit them, which is very hard to do, because they're doing mostly basic and transparent mathematical modeling based almost entirely on data collected by other people (namely the pollsters). There's nothing particularly shady or nefarious or partisan to their work. This hardly means their models are beyond reproach, but it does mean attacking them for being left-leaning and partisan doesn't really make much sense. What's really going on is: a) Lots of "pundits" have a vested interested in Romney doing well or in the race being a tossup, so they want to create this illusion, even if it's not reality, and b) Lots of "pundits" don't understand basic math, so they don't want to give any credence to mathematically based arguments, because it will make their own reasoning less credible (the "shut up, nerd" argument). As somebody who does understand basic math I can say that the sentiment behind b) is unfortunately quite prominent is many parts of our society. But so it goes...
[I loved this movie as a kid, which is why I shall never watch it again.]
Anyway, we will get the bottom of everything on Tuesday, hopefully, and hopefully it will be an Obama victory, if only to shut up all the mathophobes of the world, as it's almost a certainty that if Romney wins they will claim this essentially invalidates the work of all election modelers predicting an Obama victory, even though it doesn't. I mean, Silver is giving Romney about the same chance at winning the presidency as the chance of rolling a 1 on a die.* Does rolling a 1 seem so inconceivable? And if a roll does come up 1, does it mean that anybody who said the roll had a much better chance of coming up something other than 1 was wrong? Of course not, but that's how it will be spun. Look, I don't know anybody who can see the future (except the cyclops in the movie Krull, and they could only see their own deaths), improbable things happen sometimes, let's all just hope, nay, pray that Romney winning isn't one of them.
Well, that's it. Until next time...
*Wang's odds for Romney are more like rolling double 1s with ten-sided dice, which obviously, is much less likely, but still well within the realm of possibility.
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