If you're a baseball fan and haven't read Michael Lewis's Moneyball, shame on you. It's a great, quick read, and will change the way you look at the game forever. It follows the story of Oakland A's GM Billy Beane and his meteoric rise from a failure as a major league player to one of the top GMs in the game, all because he relied on complex statistical analysis rather than doing things the way they had always been done.
One of the coolest new websites in the political arena is fivethirtyeight.com (538 being the number of electors at stake in our wonderful country's horrifically goofy Electoral College). The genius behind the blog is Nate Silver, an economist and statistician that works for Baseball Prospectus. In the tradition of Bill James, he created an algorithm for predicting the success of baseball teams and players based on past performance. You can read about him in this Newsweek article.
With regards to politics, he did a phenomenal job of predicting the results of the Democratic primary contests by relying on demographic and census data, and weighting polls based on their historical accuracy. Anyway, if you have a close eye on the 2008 elections like I do, fivethirtyeight.com is a great site to keep bookmarked as we near Election Day. And bonus, Mr. Silver is an Obama guy like me. :)
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OK, I'm off to check this out...but first I have to shower, and then I've promised to put Devlin's Incredible Growing Creature into a bowl of warm water so it can get really big. That was his prize at the library this morning: a green dragonfly that will spend the next week on my counter getting really, really big and slimy. Kill me.
Fascinating site! Thanks for sharing.
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