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It’s Nobel Prize week! This week is to science fans what March Madness is to college basketball fans – the most exciting time of the year, when exciting results roll in seemingly faster than you can keep up with them.

The news began today with the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, then continues with Physics tomorrow (Tuesday), Chemistry on Wednesday, and the big one – Peace – on Friday, before ending with the slight anticlimax of Economics next Monday.

I’ll discuss each of the prizes on this blog, giving a quick summary of the results and my take on the research. It always takes me a couple days to learn enough to really make sense of the results, so don’t think of these posts as hot takes on breaking news. Rather, they’ll be summaries of some particularly exciting science results and reflections on what science means in modern society. As always, opinions are strictly my own.

Stay tuned for my take on each prize in the order it was announced. Up first: Physiology or Medicine on Wednesday.

It’s no secret: the world has gone completely insane.

And in this time of universal insanity, it’s good to remember the words spoken by the wise in the insane times of the past.

I’ve made a conscious choice to come down on the side of calm, conciliatory, and curious. I want to talk to the legendary “other side” and figure out what they believe, and why. I think it’s important to engage with the proverbial “other side” and to keep the discussion civil and positive. I don’t know whether that’s the right choice, but that’s the choice I have made.

But at the same time, it’s important to remember the words spoken by the wise in the insane times of the past, so I present the most famous line from the famous American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879). Writing in the first issue of his anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator – in an article titled “To The Public,” January 1, 1831, he wrote:

I am aware, that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity?

I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hand of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present.

I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch —

AND I WILL BE HEARD.

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:

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 $1,500 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!

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:

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.