Sunday, September 7, 2008

All Your Data Are Belong To 538

If you are a massive election stats dork--and I know you are out there--or you are even just curious about how really bright and numerically-obsessed folks view the upcoming Presidential battle, I recommend you run over to 538. It's named after the number of votes in the Electoral College, and run by Nate Silver, who is managing partner of Baseball Prospectus, which means he does to numbers what the late Steve Howe did to lines of cocaine. Apparently, Silver could not be contained by the meager world of digits that baseball provides; he decided to apply his skillz to a far more boring contest, politics. Your mind will be exploded by data and pie charts and numbers and thinking and truth (NOTE: It is more interesting that the chart you see here, but I wanted to show how balls-out the data is). 538 was in some fancy publication that probably had the words "New York" in its title a while back, and my bright engineer pal Bill brought 538 up the other night; now get over there and start learning about the reality of everything. Bring clean pants, it will be like that time you went to Burning Man by accident with those girls who tasted like copper and you didn't have any spare clean pants.

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