53 Inch Penis

OK, now that I've got your attention, I'd like to introduce you to one of my favorite bloggers. His name is Nate Silver, a name that may already be somewhat familiar to you if you followed the 2008 US presidential election, or if you just occasionally glanced at the blog links I have on the right side of my blog page. My page has had a link to Nate's blog ( fivethirtyeight.com ) for quite a while now, and I've been following Nate's work for even longer than that. As I confessed in one of my previous posts, I'm big-time baseball stats geek, and Nate has been a god to baseball stat geeks ever since he invented something called PECOTA ( WARNING - the link to the left is SUPER geeky! ).

In 2008, Nate gained a bit more mainstream fame when he started the political blog fivethirtyeight.com. 538 stands for the total number of electoral votes in a US presidential election, and the 538 blog was initially dedicated to predicting the results of the 2008 presidential election. Nate wound up predicting the presidential election winner correctly in 49 or the 50 states, was only a few votes off in predicting Obama's and McCain's electoral vote totals, and predicted Obama's and McCain's shares of the popular vote within 0.1 %.

He did this by using the same sort of statistical methods that made him a god to baseball geeks. He looked at almost every poll taken by almost every pollster, and used sophisticated statistical and probabilistic models to predict the most likely election outcomes in each state.

After the election was over, he decided to keep the blog going. The blog analyzes the political issues of the day using statistical tools. While that may seem a bit boring, it works because Nate also happens to be a fine writer ( He's written for a few baseball books. ). This brings us back to the title of this blog post. Check out this post from Nate, or more specifically, the few paragraphs below:

( Just some background before you start reading the excerpt from Nate's post below. The blog post was talking about crowd size estimates. On Sept 12th, the far-right held a protest against Obama in Washington. The initial estimates said about 70,000 people attended, but right-wing bloggers were soon claiming that 2 million people attended the protest. )

------------- Text below from fivethirtyeight.com ------------------------------------------------
But yesterday, someone told a real whopper. ABC News, citing the DC fire department, reported that between 60,000 and 70,000 people had attended the tea party rally at the Capitol. By the time this figure reached Michelle Malkin, however, it had been blown up to 2,000,000. There is a big difference, obviously, between 70,000 and 2,000,000. That's not a twofold or threefold exaggeration -- it's roughly a thirtyfold exaggeration.

The way this false estimate came into being is relatively simple: Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, lied, claiming that ABC News had reported numbers of between 1.0 and 1.5 million when they never did anything of the sort. A few tweets later, the numbers had been exaggerated still further to 2 million. Kibbe wasn't "in error", as Malkin gently puts it. He lied. He did the equivalent of telling people that his penis is 53 inches long.
---------------- Text above frofivethiryeight.com ------------------------------------------------

I've read a lot of political blogs in my day, but I've never read one that evoked the image of a 53 inch penis. Ya gotta love Nate Silver.

OK, maybe you don't need to love him, but I certainly do. We're talkin' big time man crush here. Considering how much I love politics and statistical analysis, the 538 site almost gets me horny. It really gets me wondering ...

If you've been reading my blog for a while, you already know how I feel about smart girls with glasses. You also might remember how I swoon for politically astute liberal women like Amanda Terkel.

Well, Nate Silver is a politically astute extremely intelligent liberal guy with glasses. I kinda wonder how I'd be reacting to Nate right now if I were a woman. It's kinda hard to say, but I've got a feeling that my blog would have a lot of posts like these.

Rich

P.S. OK, that was a rather random post, but don't worry, I'll have another up soon. I really have no choice to write another post soon. I like to pull up my blog page while I'm eating lunch at work ( because it had links to all my favorite blogs ), but if I pull up a blog page with the words "53 Inch Penis" at the top, I've got a feeling that Human Resources might want to have a chat with me soon.

P.P.S. I just realized that this is my 100th post. I can't believe I've already written than many.