Archive for October 2008

How to Read a Histogram

Oct 20th, 2008 | By | Category: Stats

Nate Silver, the wonky head of the mathematically rigorous election projection site FiveThirtyEight.com, has a computer model that uses all of the available polling, weighted for accuracy, demographics and the rest, to run through ten thousand possible elections every day. Each one of these simulated elections pops out an electoral vote total for Obama. What’s […]



Economic Apocalypse Data for 10/10/2008

Oct 10th, 2008 | By | Category: Economics

Ladies and gentlemen, I want metrics. In the spirit of objectively tracking the downfall of the global economy, I’ve decided to begin a semi-regular post conglomerating data on the (non-)functioning of the financial system. If I’m going to panic, I want evidence backing it up. Rather than focusing on the stock market (equity), like most […]



Credit Default Swaps: $60 Trillion of Bullshit

Oct 7th, 2008 | By | Category: Economics

The illusion of risk-free, effortless gain is unraveling. So much of the growth of the past few decades has been concentrated in this bullshit, these lies we’ve told ourselves while clutching onto our ever growing private retirement accounts. It’s done.