^ The locations were both in very poor, very black parts of Los Angeles.

Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com has a fantastic interview with the guy who contracted Zogby to do the polling. The guy is a right-wing nutjob who's been hellbent on destroying anything even remotely close to "liberal" since the early eighties.

This is a great portion of Nate Silver's interview:

NS: Thank you, have a good day.
JZ: Go fuck yourself.

Nate Silver had the best record of anyone during the primaries at predicting the outcomes, even when polling was off. He is pretty trustworthy. Also, he admits that he is an Obama supporter who tries not to be biased instead of pretending to be completely neutral.

>> ^uzema:
Wow I think a rainbow tie would be a little more "nonpartisan" if you catch my drift. But this guy is ridiculous, we take the bias out? and he calls fox news not that bad, seesh. Also 80+% chance Obama will win dang. Also we already have jetpacks I think you could probably buy a jetpack for under 10,000 but I don't really know.


He takes the bias out mathematically. This is way oversimplified, but let's say for example a certain poll has historically over-favored Republicans by 3 points and under-favored Democrats by 3 points when compared to the actual results. So when he sees this poll release data for today that says "Obama 49, McCain 47", he can adjust this, or "take the bias out" by changing the numbers to "Obama 52, McCain 44". That's all he means, but of course his methods are much more complex.

And about Fox News not being that bad, he's only referring to their polls, as in, sure, they have a Republican lean, but they're not ridiculously skewed. There are polls that lean much more strongly Republican than Fox's polls. And Obama's chances of winning have greatly improved to 96.7%: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com.

Also, yes, we already have jetpacks, but I believe the implication was that they would be affordable and commonplace by 2036 (or whatever year he said -- I don't remember).

>> ^SDGundamX: And of course no on 8. Pretty much only the religious fundies are going to vote yes on that one.


Oh, how I wish that were true: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_8_(2008)

Nate Silver of http://www.fivethirtyeight.com gives it a 45% chance of passing.

^Nate Silver has her at a 65% chance to win: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/ (scroll down and look on the right-hand side)

>> ^Raverman:
Powell speaks so well - it nails the situation.
It reminds me of this poll earlier in the year that said he was the favored pick for VP for BOTH candidates.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/06/
30/powell_is_favorite_in_online_vp_poll/
Given his public favor and rating, it will be interesting to see what influence his support will provide.


Polls say that a very small minority of people would even "somewhat consider" Powell's endorsement in their decision. Nate Silver (of http://www.fivethirtyeight.com and http://www.baseballprospectus.com) argued recently that the more important an election is, the less likely you are to let endorsements sway you since there are so many other ways to obtain information about the candidates. He puts forth an example: If your city held an election for Chief Dog Catcher, and your local paper endorsed one of the candidates, the endorsement would probably seal the election, because you have no other information to utilize.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Nathan, Nate, fluebox, Lee, Beardyman, Google, London, UK, music, office, presentation' to 'Nathan, Nate, flutebox, Lee, Beardyman, Google, London, UK, music, office, presentation' - edited by my15minutes

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Muscle Worship, Hunk Nate Christianson, muscleman, MuscleWorshipVODcom' to 'banned, redacted' - edited by rasch187

Hey Andy,

How's it coming? I would love to see your progress if you can send me something.

Thanks for your help!

Nate

In reply to this comment by MrConrads:
Oh no worries! I was planning on making my own in ill. I was just asking if that was the gereral look,layout,color etc that you were looking for. Then adding the red loops. Sorry for the miscommunication.

Andy

In reply to this comment by MycroftHomlz:
Eh. I was sort of hoping you would make you own octagons, cause those are a .gif and are not vectorized graphics so scaling them will not look good.

This might go in a publication by the way.

In reply to this comment by MrConrads:
Hey Nate,
I took a look at the picture you sent me and the others from the corospondence youve had with schmawy. Did you want me to basically start from those octagons? Am I just adding those red lines that are looping around them?

Andy

Hey Schmawy, Just checking in. How is the drawing coming?

Nate

Eh. I was sort of hoping you would make you own octagons, cause those are a .gif and are not vectorized graphics so scaling them will not look good.

This might go in a publication by the way.

In reply to this comment by MrConrads:
Hey Nate,
I took a look at the picture you sent me and the others from the corospondence youve had with schmawy. Did you want me to basically start from those octagons? Am I just adding those red lines that are looping around them?

Andy

Are you good at computer art? I need some help with Illustrator or Inkscape. I thought you might know something.

Nate

Nough said.

In reply to this comment by jonny:
What can I say - my friends and I talk to each other like that all the time. It's not meant as disrespectful. If I had wanted to be disrespectful or accusatory, I would have written something like, "wtf do you think you're doing?!" and discarded your post.

Seriously, I think this is a really small misunderstanding and not worth the time and energy we've given it. I'm sure we both have more enjoyable things to do than trying to explain ourselves to each other through this nuance poor medium.

In reply to this comment by MycroftHomlz:
Excuse me... Posting 'wtf dude' absolutely comes across as accusatory.

I am telling that you should have asked me first directly instead posting a link in fashion you did. It is common courtesy Johnny. My point is the results would have been the same and it would not have come across as it did to me.

Like I said, nothing in the video description, title or tags indicated anything specific about the video. Many videos have similar or the same titles and contain different content, something I have seen multiple times.

Nate

Excuse me... Posting 'wtf dude' absolutely comes across as accusatory.

I am telling that you should have asked me first directly instead posting a link in fashion you did. It is common courtesy Johnny. My point is the results would have been the same and it would not have come across as it did to me.

Like I said, nothing in the video description, title or tags indicated anything specific about the video. Many videos have similar or the same titles and contain different content, something I have seen multiple times.

Nate


In reply to this comment by jonny:
jeez, why so uptight? It's not like I sent it for discussion in sifttalk. I did ask you. I didn't assume anything. (edit: If I had, I would have discarded yours outright, and fixed the original myself.) You tagged a vid as dead, and then posted a potential fix for it as your own. It was close enough that you had used the same title originally. I wasn't suggesting you were trying to be sneaky about it or anything. Just wondering why you didn't fix the original to begin with. You expained why and then fixed the original. What's the problem?

In reply to this comment by MycroftHomlz:
To be frank, I am a little annoyed that you didn't ask me first and I feel you assumed the worst there. The outcome would have been the same, and I think it would have been more appropriate.

Nate

In reply to this comment by jonny:
What caught my eye was that you had used the same title originally. Anytime I see a "-1" at the end of video url, I check the original. When I saw that you had called it dead, it just seemed kinda fishy.

Google vids are basically impossible to identify once they've gone dead. It was indeed the same - I remember it being posted. Thanks for fixing the older one. And the tags!

In reply to this comment by MycroftHomlz:
Yeah I saw that. There are a couple parody videos out there like this some are not complete. I wasn't sure if it was the same one and nothing in the comments or tags indicated to me that it was the same video or version. And because it was dead I couldn't tell.

Based on your comment, I discarded my submission and fixed his embed code with my videos embed.

I do not think I see anything wrong with this.

In reply to this comment by jonny:
wtf dude?

To be frank, I am a little annoyed that you didn't ask me first and I feel you assumed the worst there. The outcome would have been the same, and I think it would have been more appropriate.

Nate

In reply to this comment by jonny:
What caught my eye was that you had used the same title originally. Anytime I see a "-1" at the end of video url, I check the original. When I saw that you had called it dead, it just seemed kinda fishy.

Google vids are basically impossible to identify once they've gone dead. It was indeed the same - I remember it being posted. Thanks for fixing the older one. And the tags!

In reply to this comment by MycroftHomlz:
Yeah I saw that. There are a couple parody videos out there like this some are not complete. I wasn't sure if it was the same one and nothing in the comments or tags indicated to me that it was the same video or version. And because it was dead I couldn't tell.

Based on your comment, I discarded my submission and fixed his embed code with my videos embed.

I do not think I see anything wrong with this.

In reply to this comment by jonny:
wtf dude?