Yeah, bored.

In a comment, copy and paste the following along with your answers!


1. name:
2. birthday:
3. place of residence:
4. what makes you happy:
5. what are you listening to now/have listened to last:
6. do you read my lj:
7. if you do, what is particularly good/bad about it:
8. an interesting fact about you:
9. are you in love/have a crush at the moment:
10. favourite place to be:
11. favourite lyric/quote:
12. best time of the year:
13: a recent picture of yourself:

RECOMMEND
1. a film:
2. a book:
3. a song:
4. a comic book:
5. a short story:
6. a TV program:

PLUS
1. one thing you like about me:
2. two things you like about yourself:
3. put this in your LJ so I can tell you what I think of you

More political geekery

FiveThirtyEight.com is a site devoted to statistical analysis of the various elections, primarily the presidential race, but also those for the Senate. It was started by Nate Silver, though he's added some other people since then. Silver made his name doing baseball analysis for Baseball Prospectus. His work there was good, and so is his
political work.

Silver uses a different method than Pollster.com. After weighting all of the various surveys by a number of criteria, he also uses state demographics and a couple of other items to create a simulation of the election. He then runs the simulation 10,000 times, and the results are what he goes by. It's an interesting technique, and it's the same basic premise as a lot of the stuff at Prospectus, including the Playoff Odds Report and Silver's system for projecting future player performance, PECOTA. In fairness, PECOTA hasn't proven to be much more effective than alternatives, such as Dan Szymborski's ZiPS, or even Marcel the Monkey. (Marcel is nothing but a weighted average of the player's last three seasons; beating Marcel is the real goal of any projection system, and they have mixed success.) It's a methodology that I've never seen in political analysis before. It's worth a look.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/

The "I've had a little too much" wine review

Robert Mondavi 2006 "Private Selection" Cabernet Sauvigion.

This is good shit.

It took four or six glasses to decide this.

For the record

I'm FREAKING DRUNK!!!!

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee~!!!!!!