Yekrats.com: Scotto’s Seafud Shanty

Folks, I’m cautiously optimistic about Senator Obama’s chances coming up at the November 4 election. If you’re out there reading this, I ask you to get out and vote. (And if you also support Obama, I ask you to vote early, if you can in your state.)

During the past few weeks, I’ve racked up a few hours doing phone-banking for the Obama campaign, because the thought of a McCain/Palin presidency is almost unfathomable for me. If you press me for details outside of this blog, I’ll gladly share a few.

I did see where the Big Ten Poll puts Obama with a substantial lead in Indiana today, as well as all of the Big-Ten states. (Although I possibly regard it as an outlier.)

However, if you want the top-notch super-duper MUTHUH OF ALL POLLING SITES, then I suggest you pay a visit to http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/. The proprietor of the site (Nate Silver) is a statistician who created an algorithm to predict baseball games to a high degree of accuracy by plugging in the stats into his computerized election simulation program, which he calls “the model”. It’s funny because he anthropomorphizes the model, speculating what it thinks, and sometimes wonders why it’s giving the answers it does.

So, this past year, he’s reprogrammed the baseball simulation and done the same with the political stats (the polls) and predicted the primaries, and presumably the national election, to a high degree of accuracy.  In the primaries, for example, he correctly predicted that Indiana would be too close to call. He takes the percentage chance of winning each state, and then runs 10000 simulations of the country voting every day to guess what the outcome will be. Right now he has Senator Obama winning in 93.5% of the simulations. He also rates the different polls as to their past accuracy and their sample size, to give us non-statisticians some idea which polls are bunk and which are good, and why. (For example, he openly mocks the right-leaning Drudge Report who front-paged a poll showing a 51%-49% narrow Obama lead in a Nickalodeon Kids’ poll.)

This past week, I’ve been playing Mr. Mom as my wife gets a much-deserved vacation. She’s been gone for a little less than a week, but gets back tonight. I’m glad she takes little vacations like this, because it puts things in perspective, and gives me new appreciation for everything my wife does around this place!

As George Bush might say, “It’s HARD WORK!” I do indeed love my kids, don’t get me wrong. I also start out the day with great aspirations, before I know it, it’s after 3:00 and the kids are home, and then it’s crazy time: shuttling kids to evening events, making dinner, cleaning, organizing homework, showers, and bed!

I keep dreading a situation like the last scene in the Cat in the Hat, where the Cat (plus Thing 1 and Thing 2) completely trashes the place, but then the Cat has a special machine to put everything away quickly. (As the Cat, I forgot to find one of those machines last time I was at the store.)

So, I’m newly appreciative of my dear wife, and I’m looking forward to seeing her again this evening!