2018 election preview: FiveThirtyEight.com

This is the part of The Show where I put in a plug for my intellectual hero, Nate Silver, and his project FiveThirtyEight.com. Silver came to prominence in the early 2000s as a baseball analyst, at the forefront of knowledge in sabermetrics, the quantitative analysis of baseball. He created a series of statistical models to evaluate professional baseball prospects by comparing their playing statistics to past players at the equivalent points in their careers.

As a result, Silver became well-known among baseball fans, but still virtually unknown among the general public. That changed in late 2007 when he saw an opportunity: baseball had long since embraced performance-based metrics, what passed for prediction in politics was still laughable. A famous study, quoted in Silver’s book, found that predictions issued on a famous TV roundtable show were worse than random – a coin flip was literally a better predictor of outcomes than a panel of “experts.”

Silver jumped at the opportunity to improve political prediction, first publishing anonymously on Daily Kos, then starting his own blog called FiveThirtyEight – named for the number of electoral votes up for grabs in a U.S. Presidential election. He issued regular predictions for the result of the 2008 U.S. Presidential election – and ultimately nailed it, correctly predicting the winner of 49 out of 50 states (missing only North Carolina). In 2012, he did himself one better, correctly predicting the winner of 50 out of 50 states.

Then, of course, 2016 happened. Silver’s model assigned Hillary Clinton a 70% chance of winning the Presidential election… and Donald Trump won. Silver was criticized and even laughed at, even though he had been appropriately cautious all the way through. If the weather forecast says there’s only a 30% chance of rain, and it rains, the prediction wasn’t wrong. That’s just the nature of probability – sometimes, unlikely events really do happen.

FiveThirtyEight.com is continuing to issue its reality-based predictions. Here is their latest prediction for the 2018 House of Representatives election:

FiveThirtyEight.com's latest prediction for the 2018 U.S. House election gives the Democrats an 80% chance of gaining control

Where Water Lives

Think of all the liquid fresh water on the Earth’s surface – all the lakes, rivers, streams, ponds, etc. More than one-fifth of all that fresh water is in one lake: Lake Baikal in Siberia.

Lake Baikal on Google Earth

It’s only the seventh-largest lake in the world by surface area, smaller that three of North America’s Great Lakes – but it’s more than a mile deep. It was formed by water filling a deep rift valley where the Eurasian Plate is slowly splitting in two. If you’d like to visit, it’s not as remote as it looks. It’s only a one-hour drive from the city of Irkutsk, which can be reached from most of the world by air with a stop in Moscow. I found a round-trip flight from Dulles to Irkutsk for less than $1,500 on the Russian national airline Aeroflot (whose name sounds somewhat unfortunate in English). Happy virtual travels! http://bit.ly/2qk8F2B
Think of all the liquid fresh water on the Earth’s surface – all the lakes, rivers, streams, ponds, etc. More than one-fifth of all that fresh water is in one lake: Lake Baikal in Siberia.

It’s only the seventh-largest lake in the world by surface area, smaller that three of North America’s Great Lakes – but it’s more than a mile deep. It was formed by water filling a deep rift valley where the Eurasian Plate is slowly splitting in two.

If you’d like to visit, it’s not as remote as it looks. It’s only a one-hour drive from the city of Irkutsk, which can be reached from most of the world by air with a stop in Moscow. I found a round-trip flight from Dulles to Irkutsk for less than $1,200 on the Russian national airline Aeroflot.

Happy virtual travels!

Kaepernupdate

It’s now been more than two weeks since Nike announced that the new face of their long-running “Just Do It” ad campaign would be former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who became controversial for protesting police brutality and racism, and who is no longer in the league.

Images for the new ad campaign have already started to appear in print and online:

The first image of the ad campaign. Transcription: Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.

When I wrote about this last Monday, I was reacting to the initial announcement, which I saw in a tweet by ESPN reporter Darren Rovell. When I first saw the tweet, I wondered what exactly he meant by “Nike had been paying Colin Kaepernick all along.” The extremely cynical explanation – that the entire protest was just a Nike ad campaign – has fortunately turned out to be incorrect. “All along” simply means that they continued to honor their endorsement deal with Kaepernick after his playing career ended (and thanks to Mac for pointing this out to me).

And I’m sure you’ve seen some of the dank maymays that have flooded the Internet since the campaign’s announcement:

Yes, I’m sure you’ve seen these images. Which was Nike’s plan all along.

A world of surprises

I’ve made a hobby of showing you some of the amazing places around our world, with a focus on the most obscure and unexpected, like the South Dakota – Montana border, and the Russian republic of Kalmykia. But of course all of the world’s most famous sights are there too, letting you play virtual tourist all over the world.

And here is one of the most famous of the famous: the Great Pyramid of Giza:

A photo of the Great Pyramid of Giza on top of a satellite image from Google Earth

But even such a famous sight holds surprises. Zoom out a little to see the surprising amount of development around the Great Pyramid, including superhighways and golf courses:

pyramid2

Bullwinkle’s Corner: Questions for Puerto Montt

Bullwinkle’s Corner:
An occasional series about poetry
Bullwinkle the moose and Rocket J. Squirrel read a book titled "Weather and What to Do about It"

Part 1: When Spring Comes

This is also part 3 of a series of posts about my terra ultima australis, the city of Puerto Montt, Chile

Part 1: A visit to the Deep South
Part 2: The other side of the South

Here’s another post from Bullwinkle’s Corner, an occasional series about poems that speak to me in some way. See the sidebar for the others.

Today’s entry is a song, which of course is a type of poem. And it’s a powerful one, about a real historical event: the Puerto Montt Massacre, in which police fired shots and tear gas into a crowd of protester/squatters, killing nine people. The singer-songwriter is Chilean folk singer Victor Jara (1932-1973), a Chilean folk singer, teacher, and political activist who was murdered in the early days of the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Of course, music is meant to be listened to, so here is an audio recording of Jara performing the song live in Valparaiso, Chile. After an introduction and some silence, the song starts at 0:34. The song is in Spanish, but if you don’t speak Spanish, a translation is below.

Two things are helpful to know in interpreting the lyrics. First, Puerto Montt i is like Seattle in that it is a temperate city on the Pacific coast with a cold polar current offshore – so it rains a lot. The Chilean expression equivalent to “Is the Pope Catholic?” is “¿Lluvia en Puerto Montt?” (Is it raining in Puerto Montt?).

Second, who is the “port monkey” in the chorus? It’s Interior Secretary Edmundo Pérez Zujovic, who gave the order to evict the settlers. (He probably didn’t order the police to shoot, but you can imagine his attitude towards the settlers might have contributed to the violence.)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqjfOxKFnB0&w=560&h=315]

Preguntas por Puerto Montt

Victor Jara

Muy bien, voy a preguntar
Por ti, por ti, por aquel
Por ti que quedaste solo
Y el que murió sin saber.

Muy bien, voy a preguntar
Por ti, por ti, por aquel
Por ti que quedaste solo
Y el que murió sin saber
Y el que murió sin saber

Murió sin saber por qué
Le acribillaban el pecho
Luchando por el derecho
De un suelo para vivir

Hay que ser mas infeliz
El que mando disparar
Sabiendo cómo evitar
Una matanza de vil
Puerto mono, Puerto Montt
Puerto mono, Puerto Montt
Puerto mono, Puerto Montt
Puerto mono, Puerto Montt

Usted debe responder
Señor Pérez Zujovic
Por qué al pueblo indefenso
Contestaron con fusil?

Señor Pérez su conciencia
La enterró en un ataúd
Y no limpiarán sus manos
Ni toda la lluvia del sur
Ni toda la lluvia del sur

Murió sin saber por qué
Le acribillaban el pecho
Luchando por el derecho
De un suelo para vivir

Hay que ser mas infeliz
El que mando disparar
Sabiendo cómo evitar
Una matanza de vil
Puerto mono, Puerto Montt
Puerto mono, Puerto Montt
Puerto mono, Puerto Montt
Puerto mono, Puerto Montt

Questions for Puerto Montt

Victor Jara

Very well, I will ask,
for you, for you, for him,
for you who stayed there alone,
for you who died without knowing.

Very well, I will ask,
for you, for you, for him,
for you who stayed there alone,
for you who died without knowing.
For you who died without knowing.

Died without knowing why
they shot him in the chest
for fighting for the right
of soil on which to live.

Oh, who could be more unhappy
than the man who shot them,
knowing how to avoid
such an evil massacre?
Port monkey, Puerto Montt!
Port monkey, Puerto Montt!
Port monkey, Puerto Montt!
Port monkey, Puerto Montt!

You must answer,
Mr. Pérez-Zujovic,
Why the defenseless people
were answered with the rifle?

Mr. Pérez-Zujovic, your conscience
is buried in a coffin,
and your hands will never be clean,
not even with all the southern rains.
Not even with all the southern rains.

Died without knowing why
they shot him in the chest
for fighting for the right
of soil on which to live.

Oh, who could be more unhappy
than the man who shot them,
knowing how to avoid
such an evil massacare?
Port monkey, Puerto Montt!
Port monkey, Puerto Montt!
Port monkey, Puerto Montt!
Port monkey, Puerto Montt!

Such a raw evocation of a tragedy – so angry yet so sensitive.