"Peggy Noonan is someone who is very, very skilled at making bullshit look like some elegant soufflé," Silver says. "She’s very good at rhetoric and argument, but it’s still not grounded in the truth—it all falls apart every four years, but I don’t think she’ll be out of a job any time soon."

—Ha ha, Nate Silver!!

Here's something for Nate Silver to work on, now that the election is over and he won the New York Times World Cup of Poker: What should we make of the fact (!) that 68% of Republicans believe that actual demons routinely "possess" humans here on Earth? How is that going to trend or lean or whatever, during the next election cycle, or after a bold demon marketing attack on America?

Public Policy Polling did a "lighthearted" Halloween survey last week (PDF), and the results should not make you too relaxed about the next four years, or the Thousand Year Reign of Satan, or anything really. When more than [...]

.@joenbc: If you think it's a toss-up, let's bet. If Obama wins, you donate $1,000 to the American Red Cross. If Romney wins, I do. Deal?

— Nate Silver (@fivethirtyeight) November 1, 2012

The Nate Silver Wars are still going—but it's embarrassing to even refer to it as a proper battle, since the weirdo pundits who think he's a LIBERAL MOUTHPIECE are too busy breathing through their own mouths to be understood. If you were busy "being without power" or "helping out your neighbors" or otherwise having a life and/or suffering in the hurricane, perhaps you missed the most hilarious intellectual breakdown of the election yet. [...]

The always-number-crunching Nate Silver has compiled a chart of fast-food items' relative unhealthiness to KFC's Double Down. The winner as far as pure gluttony goes: Wendy's Triple Baconator (pictured), a three-patty lots-of-bacon-and-cheeseburger that has 1,350 calories, 90 grams of fat, and 2.78 grams of sodium — the equivalent of two and a half Double Downs, if you want to get mathy about it. If only it came on a lattice of bacon instead of a bun. It would be so much more bloggable that way! Someone get on that, OK?

In order to become a wizard, you must first apprentice to a wizard, and the acolytes who followed Nate Silver's lead did very well in The Awl's first quadrennial electoral college pool. Out of 160 entries received, 9 of you predicted the map exactly. (That's right: we're calling Florida for Obama. I mean, it's Friday.) This means that 5.6% of this website's readers have documented psychic powers. You can't argue with that. It's math.

Of the people who predicted the map exactly, 78% overestimated Obama's popular vote total by several million votes, reflecting a wildly inflated expectation for voter turnout. The remaining 22% didn't guess Obama's popular vote at [...]

I'm a @fivethirtyeight admirer. But I had no idea that liberals thought the core function of the political press is to predict who wins.

— Chris Suellentrop (@suellentrop) November 7, 2012

There are so many things that are wrong with this statement, but mainly: the "liberals" (and, presumably, "everyone else"?) wanted a "political press" that wasn't lying to them. Because what was happening with predictions over the last week was that MANY PEOPLE WERE JUST LYING. Newt Gingrich said Romney would get "over 300" electoral votes. That's not about accuracy or misjudgment. That's just lying on the T.V. shows. Because the popular press, which is [...]

"According the model, a hurricane with wind speeds of about 100 miles per hour — making it a 'weak' Category 2 storm — might cause on the order of $35 billion in damage if it were to pass directly over Manhattan…. Although far from the most likely scenario, this may represent a reasonable-worst-case estimate of what could happen if Hurricane Irene took exactly the wrong turn at exactly the wrong time…. Keep in mind that New York’s annual gross domestic product is estimated to be about $1.4 trillion — about one-tenth of the nation’s gross domestic product — so if much of the city were to become dysfunctional for [...]

Your Geeky Boyfriend Nate Silver has some fun with a study that purports to show that stimulus funding was disbursed in a partisan manner. When Nate Silver calls you out for failing to identify the commonalities between apparent outliers in your dataset, you stay called out.

Drunk Nate Silver strolling around a casino, whispering "you're on a roll" in strangers' ears

— John Herrman (@jwherrman) November 8, 2012

This one could get fun.

• "I’d bet anything that if the president staked out such an Obama Plan, Buffett and a lot of other business leaders would endorse it."—Thomas Friedman
• "To his immense credit he took a big gamble on killing Osama Bin Laden."—Roger Cohen
• "I’ll bet he’s not a Charlie Stross reader; if he were, he’d know about the scene in The Jennifer Morgue involving a PowerPoint presentation that turns anyone who watches it into a murderous zombie."—Paul Krugman
• "The bet Punch Sulzberger made his whole career is that people wanted — and would pay for — great journalism."—Joe Nocera
• "If I had to bet which candidate was [...]

Attention sex-doers: Wednesday is your best chance at getting lucky, according to Your Geeky Boyfriend Nate Silver and the guy from that dating site who is so good at getting publicity.

In the wake of New Jersey's whole "Chris Christie: Too enormous to be governor?" controversy, Your Geeky Boyfriend Nate Silver runs down the nation's 50 chief executives and rates their fitness. Sample: "Bill Richardson (NM) — fat; possibly getting fatter." Clip and save!