After a busy day, I'm spending the night in Albany, Oregon getting ready to drive over Santiam Pass tomorrow afternoon, returning to Redmond in order to count inventory on Wednesday morning at a location just down the street from where my hotel will be tomorrow evening, I was delighted to learn in my perusal of my usual RSS connections the following snippet:
We hope you’ll gain insight and pleasure from our approach
to the news and that you’ll visit us from time to time. We hope to
demonstrate the value of data journalism as a practical and sustainable
proposition.
It’s time for us to start making the news a little nerdier.
It's quite appropriate to have March Madness kick off with the dean of prognosticators once again amongst us: Nate Silver and his colleagues at the newly reintroduced FiveThirtyEight.com. I've missed his rare combination of attention to detail and witticisms reminiscent of Pogo, The Daily Show, and Colbert Report, only subtler.
It's unfortunate that his honest, objective analysis will be displayed again this election season, this time though chronicling the probable losses of the Democratic Party in November in the same way that the GOP found it self being analyzed two years ago. If there is any moral to this clarity, it's that objective review without having subjective crap heaped on top of it is the best way to learn and to move on, and in no other field is this kind of clearsighted vision more necessary (and less likely to be found) than in politics.
I was tempted to choose my selections for the field of 67 exclusively based on his site's recommendations...but will probably opt not to just because having reached the lofty position of 170th several years ago in the New York Times and not breaking the top 8,000 since, I find kibitzing and trash talking from the sidelines to be just as satisfying, if not more so because my limitations are not so apparent when they aren't finalized in an entry somewhere.
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