A Galaxy Not So Far Away?

Prediction #1:
The same people who claim that NASA faked the moon landings are about to claim that Opportunity's recent picture proves that both Mars rovers are really on Tatooine.

Your Candidate For Pennies on the Dollar

Forget the polls. The only electoral prognosticator worth heeding is the Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM), a real money futures exchange set up by Iowa's Tippie College of Business in which you can buy shares in future events.

The way that IEM works is that you can invest up to $500 on a number of future events (like elections), in which you buy shares of certain outcomes. If your outcome comes to pass, you make money. If not, you lose your shirt.

An example to explain the IEM:
Lots of pundits speculate whether the Federal Reserve Board will raise, lower, or sustain its key rates; however, IEM is the only place (that I know of) where you can essentially wager on the outcome. According to this graph, the current share price of the Fed keeping rates the same during its May meeting is trading north of $.90. If you bought shares at $.90, and the Fed kept the rate the same, you'd be paid out $1.00 for every share you owned.

Now, it turns out that the IEM is generally a better Presidential Election predictor than the polls, so it's a good idea to keep track of how well the market is treating a candidate's chances.

Right now, futures in John Kerry are surging him into, in a virtual tie with Bush. (Actually, the market has him winning in a landslide, but that will be clearer after Kerry wins the Democratic nod.)

A Kerry share assumes that he'll win the Democratic nod and go on to defeat Bush. Shares in this outcome were available for $.03 at the start of January, and have leapt to ~$.45, a dead heat with the President, at the time of this writing.

Eager to keep their audiences attention, some writers may imply that other democratic nominees still have a chance, but the IEM says otherwise. Dean went from $.34 to virtually nil, a fate shared by Clark. (Strangely, the market still gives Edwards a $.25 chance.)

So ...where will Kerry's shares be trading on the Monday before Election Day?

Soil? More Like Piles of Dust

NASA geologists call it a stroke of luck that the Mars Opportunity Rover landed in a 9 ft deep crater with what looks like exposed bedrock. As it was targeted for a broad plateau, odds seemed high that it would find a less feature-rich environment.

Though the crater landing was quite fortunate, I wonder if Opportunity will be able to escape this crater. The soil dynamics of the crater are already causing the rover to slip, and the Martian soil compresses at the slightest pressure.

If it can't escape the crater, the tinfoil hat crowd will have a field day speculating what elaborate Martian culture must linger just beyond the lip of Opportunity's home.

3 Notes as My Blood Pressure Returns to Normal

Having just returned from Stanford's 80-77 win over rival Arizona, a college basketball game for the ages, I've got a few observations to share.


1) I really wish that Americans didn't feel obligated to trot out the national anthem before every sporting event. Why must each sporting event be an endorsement of national patriotism?

Although it's hearsay, I understand that other countries don't have this pregame musical obligation. I seem to recall an NPR piece saying that the British only play their national tune before national matches.


2) As partisan as team sports are -- zero-sum games where one tribe's victory is nothing more than another tribe's defeat -- this particular game reinforced, first-hand, those qualities that give spectator sports a transcendent air.

Stanford scored 7 points in the final 45 seconds of the game, achieving an improbable victory on a last-second shot from a Rudy-esque player, Nick Robinson.

Besides sports, what else in life is cause to leap in the air, exultant, embracing strangers?

For more along this line, I highly recommend Nick Hornby's ode to spectator sports and the London Arsenal, Fever Pitch. Hornby reminds us that it's perfectly all right to be partisan and parochial, as the victories and defeats of sport are either sweeter or more bitter than those we know in our pale, ordinary lives.


3) Cloaked in the half-anonymity of the internet, crazy people seem to stake out territory. Though online stock message boards may ultimately provide more fertile ground for encouraging the mostly mad, ESPN's message boards seem largely populated with nitwits who long for their radically biased rants to live online in print.

For example, enjoy these veritable pleas for help (bearing in mind that Stanford barely won the hard-fought game).

The flip-side of spectator team sports is that they provide a marvelous outlet for those in society who are locked in a completely partisan view. In the eyes of these quasi-troglodytes, proximity overcomes partiality -- it's their team or else.

They are quite unable to lend a less-biased eye on the proceedings of their lives and they try hard to ruin spectator sports for those of us who don't share their vitriol.

Sensitive Eyes

Easily upset?

Terri Carlin must be, because she's just filed a multi-million dollar class action suit against Janet et al. over the Super Bowl Breast Baring.

If there's one thing I like more than easily offended yokels, it's litigious easily offended yokels.

Medical Advances Make For Difficult Decisions

As frequently noted in our human-interest-story-oriented media, rapid advances in post-natal surgery give more and more severely conjoined twins a chance at life that would have been impossible just a few years ago.

Poignant stories of lives in the balance emerge as these children go under the surgeon's knife ...none more poignant than Rebeca Martinez, who undergoes surgery today.

Although Rebeca is not the first baby to be diagnosed with craniopagus parasiticus -- in which a parasitic, living twin grows from the body of an infant -- all other cases have died before birth.

Today, so that Rebeca might live, her twin (whose brain is only partially developed, yet its mouth moves as Rebeca is breast-fed) must be removed from Rebeca's body and thereby killed.

What Not to Do With Your Spare Time In Germany

Bored and in Germany? Don't teach your dog how to do a Nazi salute. It's potentially illegal.

Where's George?

Which question will undo President Bush's reelection campaign:

Where is the Iraq banned weapons arsenal?
...or
Where was George W. Bush in 1972?

What Do You Think About During a Layover in Phoenix?

Two thoughts as I wrap up this business trip:

1) Eating in a sports bar in the Phoenix airport is the modern day equivalent of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks. All these lonely souls are just passing through.

2) One of the benefits of moving to New York City (as Steph and I will in Autumn 2005) will be that reading the New York Times in public won’t make me self-conscious anymore. (I know it’s the paper of record ...I just always feel awkward reading a paper named after a city on a far-away coast.)

Restaurant and Retail Chains as Far as the Eye Can See

Other than my frequent connections through DFW, this week's business trip to Dallas represents my first visit to these parts.

Based on my first 24 hours here, it seems to me that Dallas is not a city. It's an area.

Without meaningful geography to define their scope, places like Dallas just sprall and sprall.