Writing as Magic

A magician’s job is to fool you. But the secret of magic is that you are the one who does the actual work. The magician appears to do things and your mind, conditioned by millions of years of evolution, completes the trick. So a ball is not really passed from hand to another but your mind makes it pass. The lady isn’t actually sawn in half but your mind makes her seem to get sawn in half.

Writing works the same way. I put words on the screen but they are a skeleton of an idea. The real work is done by the reader, who fills the spaces between those words with his own imagination and thought. I write seven simples words: the old man sat in a chair. And your mind fills in his appearance, the shape of the chair, whether it is a table, whether he was wearing hat (he was). You do the work.

As such, I am usually a little too close to the trick to be fooled. I write fiction that I hope people like. I string together words that I hope will create tension or horror or amusement or joy. But it’s hard for me to know. I know the ball isn’t really the other hand. I know the lady hasn’t really been sawn in half. So I rarely feel those emotions myself. I know the effect I’m looking for. But I can’t really tell if the slight of hand has worked.

On rare occasions, however, the slight of hand works on me. The ending of the The Water Lily Pond is one of those rare occasions. I’m about to do another full edit in preparation for making it available in paperback. But the ending is the one thing I know won’t change at all.

Watch this space.

(With apologies to Stephen King, he wrote about similar concepts in “On Writing”.)

Super Bowl LI

I have written before about the misery of being an Atlanta sports fan. 150 combined years of baseball, basketball and football have brought exactly one title to the city I grew up in. With the Cleveland Cavaliers finally having won a title, Atlanta can arguably be called the most miserable sports city in America.

I’ve written many times about the Braves, but rarely about the Falcons. My relationship with the Falcons has often gone back and forth. They were my first NFL love, the team I followed when I first became aware of professional football. I did this right about the time they became good for the first time in history. Before 1978, they were a hapless team, mostly know for poor Dave Hampton, who became the Falcons’ first ever 1000 yard rusher … only to be tackled for a loss on his final play and end the season with 995 yards. But in 1980, right when I started watching, they had a great season. With Steve Bartkowski and William Andrews and Jeff Van Note, they went 12-4, won their division and took a big lead against the Cowboys in the first playoff game … which they proceeded to blow. One of my first clear memories of football is crying at the end of that game (I was eight).

Over the years, the Falcons would occasionally flirt with contention but mostly be a doormat. In 1986, they won their first four games of the season and a song called “Falcons, you can win it all!” appeared on the radio (a very poor knockoff of the Bears’ Super Bowl Shuffle). I remember my dad commenting on how starved the city was for a winner that a 4-0 start had the town Super Bowl crazy. Of course, the Falcons fell apart, finished the season 7-8-1 and their coach was fired.

I latched onto two other teams, great teams that were entering fallow periods. I came to love the Packers because my grandparents lived in Wisconsin. And I cam to love the Steelers because they could beat the hated Cowboys. And while I dearly love those teams (and Super Bowl XLV was almost a dream come true), the Falcons were still my first team.

The Falcons would have personalities over the years — the colorful but ineffective Glanville, Billy “White Shoes” Johnson, Neon Deion, Bad Moon Rison. But very little success came to them. Then, in 1998, they stunned everyone by winning their division for the first time in 16 years, upsetting a powerful Minnesota team and going to the Super Bowl. Of course, Eugene Robinson then had one of the strangest weeks in history, getting the Bart Starr Award, then getting busted for soliciting a prostitute, then getting burned by Elway on the way to a devastating Super Bowl loss. And the success did not continue. Chris Chandler couldn’t stay healthy. Jamal Anderson blew out his knee. Dan Reeves left.

Things began to change in 2002, when Arthur Blank took over the franchise from the Smith family. Blank immediately cut ticket prices, deciding correctly that huge enthusiastic crowds were a critical ingredient to success. The team then drafted Mike Vick, who became an electrifying player. They won the wild card in 2002, went to the conference title game two years later and the city suddenly had a real team.

Of course, then Bobby Petrino left after one year. And Vick turned out to like torturing dogs in his spare time. By the end of 2007, the Falcons had reached the nadir, a terrible hapless team that was not worthy of one of the better owners in sports.

Magically, however, it turned around. They drafted Matt Ryan and became a great team. Before 2009, the Falcons had never had back-to-back winning seasons. They then had five in a row. They were consistently one of the best teams in the game, getting within a pass of the Super Bowl in 2012. And now, after a few down years, they’ve come back with the best offense in football, an 11-5 division-winning season and a second trip to the Super Bowl.

I must say … this is my favorite Falcons team. More than the Bartkowski-Andrews team of my childhood. More than the Chandler-Anderson team of grad school. More than the Vick teams or the 2012 team. They’re just so much fun to watch. Matt Ryan, finally given some protection, has shown everyone what a great quarterback he’s always been and walked off with the first MVP in Falcons’ history. They have two fun running backs, the incredible Julio Jones, a great pass rush and a spirit that you can’t help but find infectious.

The Falcons are facing the Patriots today in the Super Bowl and I must admit that my hopes for a title are very muted. The Patriots are a machine, arguably the greatest team in NFL history. They are about as good as the Falcons offensively and better defensively. A Falcons win wouldn’t be a huge upset, but the decades of heartbreak have taught me not to get my hopes up. Still, win or lose, this is the best year I’ve seen from them.

Rise Up!

Update: Aaaand … another chapter is added to the long long suffering of Atlanta fans.

The Doomsday Clock

So a piece of news that floated out today was that the Doomsday Clock was advanced to 2.5 minutes until midnight:

We are creeping closer to the apocalypse, according to a panel of scientists and scholars.

The Chicago-based Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has moved the “Doomsday Clock,” a symbolic countdown to the end of the world, to two and a half minutes to midnight.

It marks the first time since 1953 — after hydrogen bomb tests in the US and then Soviet Union — that humanity has been this close to global disaster.

The group cited US President Donald Trump’s “disturbing comments” about the use of nuclear weapons and views on climate change among other factors, including cyberthreats and the rise in nationalism, that have contributed to the darkened forecast.

“The board’s decision to move the clock less than a full minute reflects a simple reality: As this statement is issued, Donald Trump has been the US president only a matter of days,” the organization said in a statement.

I’ve trying to sugarcoat this but there is simply is no way to do so. So I’ll just be blunt: any clock that thinks the world is closer to doomsday now than we were in the past is a clock that is badly in need of repair.

According to the BAS, we are in greater danger than we have been since 1953. Let’s look over that 64-year span and take a year almost at random: 1962. In October of 1962, we had the Cuban Missile Crisis. The world teetered on the brink of nuclear war. At that time, one side was run by a drunken mass murderer and the other was run by a novice President taking enough medication to stock a drug store. And yet the Doomsday Clock was left at seven minutes to midnight at a time when we were almost literally seven minutes away from Armageddon.

Oh, it gets better. In 1962, the United States was on the brink of starting its long bloody involvement in Vietnam. There were active civil wars going on in Laos, Sudan, the Congo, Yemen, Guatemala, Burma, Malaysia and Nicaragua as well as Communist insurgencies in other countries. By contrast, today is literally the most peaceful era in human history with fewer national and domestic armed conflicts than we’ve ever had as well as less violent crime. Blood and tears may dominate the news. But for most of human history, they dominated everyone’s life. It’s not just 1962 that was more dangerous. It’s almost every year up until the present.

The BAS says that their clock has advanced, at least in part, because of concerns about the environment (which muddies the original purpose of the clock). But is the environment worse now than it was when half the planet was starving, cars were belching lead into the air and our rivers were so polluted they could literally catch fire? By every standard that can be measured — with the exception of greenhouse gases — our planet is better off now than it was 50 years ago. Or 40 years ago. Or 30 years ago. Smog is down, sulphur dioxide is down, species are rebounding to the point of being taken off the endangered list, the ozone layer is healing, etc., etc. And even global warming isn’t hopeless, Trump or no Trump. Greenhouse gas emissions in the United States have fallen in recent years. Greenhouse intensity — that is emissions per economic dollar — is plunging.

I don’t mean to downplay the challenges we face. We still have enough nuclear weapons to ignite a cataclysmic holocaust. And global warming is a very real challenge. Nor do I mean to downplay the concerns about a Trump Administration, many of which I share. But to pretend that the world is closer to annihilation that it was during the last century is an idea that is simply not supported by the facts at hand. All it does is make the Doomsday Clock even more irrelevant.

(More from Tom Nichols.)

The Rise of the ACC

So another College Football Season is almost done. Time to revisit my Bowl Championship System:

A few years ago, I invented my own Bowl Championship Points system in response to the Bowl Championship Cup. You can read all about it here, including my now hilarious prediction that the 2013 national title game would be a close matchup. The basic idea is that the Championship Cup was silly, as evidenced by ESPN abandoning it. It decides which conference “won” the bowl season by straight win percentage with three or more bowls. So it is almost always won by a mid-major conference that wins three or four bowls. The Mountain West has claimed five of them, usually on the back of a 4-2 or 3-1 record.

My system awards points to conferences that play in a lot of bowls and a lot of BCS bowls. As such, it is possible for a mid-major to win, but they have to have a great year. The Mountain West won in 2010-2011, when they won four bowls including a BCS game. But it will usually go to a major conference.

Here are the winners of the Bowl Championship Points system for the time I’ve been keeping it.

1998-1999: Big Ten (12 points, 5-0, 2 BCS wins)
1999-2000: Big Ten (10 points, 5-2, 2 BCS wins)
2000-2001: Big East (8 points, 4-1, 1 BCS win)
2001-2002: SEC (9 points, 5-3, 2 BCS wins)
2002-2003: Big Ten (9 points, 5-2, 1 BCS win)
2003-2004: ACC/SEC (9 points each)
2004-2005: Big 12 (6 points, 4-3, 1 BCS win)
2005-2006: Big 12 (8 points, 5-3, 1 BCS win)
2006-2007: Big East/SEC (11 points each)
2007-2008: SEC (14 points, 7-2, 2 BCS wins)
2008-2009: SEC/Pac 12 (11 points each)
2009-2010: SEC (10 points, 6-4, 2 BCS wins)
2010-2011: Mountain West (8 points, 4-1, 1 BCS win)
2011-2012: Big 12 (11 points, 6-2, 1 BCS Win)
2012-2013: SEC (10 points, 6-3, 1 BCS win)
2013-2014: SEC (11 points, 7-3, 0 BCS wins)
2014-2015: Big 10/Pac 12 (10 points)
2015-2016: SEC (19 points, 9-2, 3 CFP wins)

You can contrast that against the Bowl Cup, which has been awarded five times to the Mountain West Conference and three times to Conference USA based on their performance in such venues as the Zaxby’s Heart of Dallas Bowl. I’m happy when the mid-majors do well, but winning three or four second tier bowls just isn’t the same as winning six bowls, two CFP bowls and a national title.

I also keep track of “doubles”, when a conference wins both the Bowl Challenge Cup and my system. That’s been done by the Big 10 (1998, 1999, 2002), the ACC (2003), the Big 12 (2005), the Big East (2006), the Pac 10 (2008), the Mountain West (2010) and the SEC (2013, 2015).

For years, I said that the SEC’s dominance was waning, based on the points system, from its 2008 peak. And to the extent that the SEC did dominate, it was a result of being one of the only conferences that played defense, not “SEC speed”. In 2014, I saw the Pac 12 rising and predicted we were moving toward two super-conferences — the SEC and the Pac 12 — dominating the college football scene. But then the Big Ten, with two of their top teams returning, moved into the picture, with more parity overall. Last year, however, the SEC dominated, shattering the record for the best Bowl performance.

This year, however, we’re seeing something unexpected: the ACC has essentially already won the “double” with an 8-3 record, two CFP wins already and a chance at a national title. The SEC could finish a close second if Auburn wins tonight and Bama wins the title. However, if Clemson wins the title, the conference will have had the second most dominating performance in the last two decades. I don’t think anyone saw that coming.

The B1G has been a disappointment, with a 3-7 record. Michigan and Penn State played well, but Ohio State was humiliated in their playoff game. Of the four B1G teams ranked in the top ten, only Wisconsin won and that was against MAC champ #15 Western Michigan. The MAC, incidentally, just broke their own record for most futile bowl season by going 0-6 (they went 0-5 in 2008-9). That makes Wisconsin’s win a bit less impressive as well. I think it’s fair to say the B1G was a tad over-rated, which always seems to happen when Ohio State and Michigan are both having good years, inducing a circularity in the press’s ranking logic. Still … the B1G has long put their status as a doormat behind them.

Looking back over the last few years, I’m surprised at how much parity has asserted itself. I truly believed we were moving toward a system where two conferences would dominate, but the B1G came back in a big way and the ACC is having a great year this year. I don’t why there’s so much parity in college football right now, but it’s a good thing. Makes it much more fun.

The SEC continues to dominate the all-time rankings, of course. Here are the conferences through tonight’s Rose Bowl:

SEC: 102-65, 21 BCS/CFP wins, 160 points, 9.5 titles
Pac 12: 62-57, 16 BCS/CFP wins, 83 points, 1.5 titles*
Big 12: 69-72, 11 BCS/CFP wins, 77 points, 2 titles
American: 54-46, 10 BCS/CFP wins, 72 points, 1 title**
ACC: 70-77, 9 BCS/CFP wins, 72 points, 2 titles
Big 10: 63-81, 18 BCS/CFP wins, 63 points, 2 title
Mountain West: 46-38, 4 BCS/CFP wins, 58 points
Conference USA: 47-50, 44 points
WAC (defunct): 23-29, 2 BCS/CFP wins, 19 points
Sun Belt: 18-20, 16 points
Independents: 14-18, 10 points
MAC: 27-45, 9 points

(*Screw the NCAA. I’m counting USC as a champion.)
(**This counts previous games from the Big East and Miami’s title.)

The Playoff System Is Already “Fixed”

Ah yes, another year, another playoff controversy for college football. The Lords of Football issued their edict today, picking Ohio State, Clemson, Alabama and Washington for the college football playoffs. Those are the four top-ranked teams, so it’s not exactly a surprise. But it has left Big 12 champ Oklahoma and B1G champion Penn State out in the cold. There was particular controversy over the exclusion of Penn State, which beat Ohio State earlier this year and took the title in the toughest conference in the nation.

I’m not interested in arguments over whether Penn State is better than Washington or Ohio State. These arguments tend to be circular and pointless. On any given Saturday, any team can beat any other (as three of the four playoff teams found out this year). With 11-12 games a year, you can’t really claim to get that kind of fine-grained detail on the quality of college football teams.

But I do want to address one argument in particular.

One of the solutions proposed for this mess is that the playoff system should be expanded to eight teams. That way, Oklahoma, Penn State, Michigan and, say, Western Michigan, could all get a shot. While this idea has merit — I’ve long advocated an 8-team playoffs — it ignores one fundamental thing:

We already have a playoff round of eight.

We do. Really. It’s called the conference championships. Four of the major conferences — the B1G, the Pac 12, the SEC and the ACC — played conference title games yesterday. All features ranked teams and, in my opinion, all four winners should advance to the the semi-finals.

“But Mike!” you might say, “You’re just saying that because you’re a Penn State fan!” Well, no not really. I have advocated this for a long time:

Here’s how you do a playoff properly. You take eight conference champs — six from the major conference and then two from the other conference (or Notre Dame, if they are rated high enough). You play them off in the Rose, Fiesta, Orange and Sugar Bowls on January 1 maintaing traditional slots rather than seeding (i.e, Rose Bowl is Pac-10 vs. Big 10 no matter what the rankings). You have two more games on January 8, one more on January 15. Net result — one week and two games more than we have now. No controversy but a legitimate champion.

There are two dangers of restricting a college football playoff to conference champions. The first is that it potentially cuts out independents like Notre Dame or BYU. But you could always make an exception for an unbeaten independent (as happened with Notre Dame a few years back).

The other problem is what happens if a a top-ranked team is upset in the conference title game by a lower-ranked or even unranked team. But I also addressed this. The answer is they go to the championship anyway. I advocated this because, among other things, it would stop teams from scheduling cupcakes out of conference and encourage them to schedule real teams, knowing that an out-of-conference loss won’t hurt their title hopes.

The really real way you would improve this, however, is to restrict the BCS to conference champions — with the Big Six conferences guaranteed entries and the remaining slots distributed among mid-major conferences and independents. That way, there is no advantage in beating the shit out of four wussy non-conference teams and no disadvantage to playing tough non-conference teams. If Penn State loses to Georgia, Notre Dame and Texas A&M, it doesn’t hurt their BCS chances as long as they win their conference.

Sticking with conference champions and only conference champions has another big advantage: a lack of ambiguity. Places in the playoffs system would be determined on the field not in a computer or a smoke-filled room. It would suck for a team like Ohio State, who were one blocked field goal away from being the B1G champion and thrashed Oklahoma out of conference. It would also have sucked for Alabama, who wouldn’t have gotten a crack at the 2011 National title because of an overtime field goal. But … that’s how playoffs work. You don’t get second chances.

(Or you could. In an eight-team system, you could give those last two spots to highly-ranked teams that failed to win their conference or to undefeated independents. But we don’t have an eight-team system now … unless you count the conference title games.)

Yesterday, we had what was effectively a playoff round of eight. Four top-ranked teams — Penn State, Washington, Clemson and Alabama — won their conference games over ranked opponents, decisively in Washington and Alabama’s cases. Those should be your playoff teams. And yes, if Florida or Colorado or Virginia Tech had won, I’d be advocating for them (although I would probably put Oklahoma, another conference champ, above them). You shouldn’t be able to win a national title if you can’t win you conference.

Election Post-Mortem

I have many scattered thoughts on last night’s tumultuous election. Apologies if this is a bit incoherent. I didn’t get a lot of sleep.

I will not back down from my assessment of Trump as terrible candidate and poor human being. Now that he’s elected, I’m willing to give him a chance but I strongly suspect this will end poorly. But before we pull the plug on the American experiment, let’s consider a few points:

  • Elections are not really about “movements” and rarely about history. They are about candidates and parties. Trump will be the winner, but he will likely end up with fewer votes than McCain or Romney did when they lost. So the idea that he is bringing in new “Trump Republicans” or riding some wave of racial resentment is a bit much. The key difference here was that the Democrat turnout was terrible. Clinton drew ten million fewer votes than Obama did in 2008, six million fewer than in 2012. She lost this in the rust belt, not in the South. Clinton’s electoral history now includes winning a gifted Senate seat by 10 points in a state Gore won by 25, losing a gifted Presidential nomination to a half-term Senator with a funny name and almost losing a second to a 73-year-old socialist. Trump was a bad candidate, but Clinton was just as bad. The Democratic turnout tells you that. And the refusal of Democrats to understand this is a big reason they are full of despair today.
  • This was a cry against the establishment and, for all her pretenses, Clinton was absolutely the establishment: in Washington for 25 years, in politics for 40, feted by Wall Street interests, supported by the media and the political experts, extremely wealthy, a supporter of every war since Vietnam and advocating traditional Washington policies (such as a no-fly zone in Syria of all places). You can claim it’s sexism but remember: Jeb Bush lost for the same reasons. With all the establishment at his back and all the money in the world, he was even more soundly thrashed. Because as it turns out, Americans aren’t that fond of political dynasties. I believe that America is perfectly willing to elect a woman. They just weren’t interested in electing this woman.
  • I have no idea how Trump will govern and, frankly, neither does he. The best case scenario is that he’s a figurehead and Pence/Ryan really run the country. The worst case is that he’s serious about ending free trade, abandoning our alliances and making global warming worse. The early tell will be his cabinet appointments. If it’s a bunch of Trump sycophants (and early indications are that it will be), this could be a long four years. While I’m willing to give him a chance, I am very pessimistic and the danger of a real calamity — a World War or a Depression (or both) — is very real. For the first time in my life, I wonder if my kids will have it better than I did.
  • I know a lot of Democrats are depressed right now. And a lot of minorities are outright scared. I guess it’s easy to just write off half the nation as evil racist sexist monsters. But that would be a mistake. The same country that just elected Trump elected Obama. Twice. Instead of retreating even further into epistemic closure, find out why people really voted for Trump. It wasn’t because they hate black people. And it wasn’t because they hate women. Don’t close off. Don’t isolate. Don’t cut off your family members or friends who voted against you. Argue. Persuade.
  • You think Trump voters can’t be reasoned with? Garbage. Much of the Republican base has moved left on gay marriage and marijuana in just the last decade. Trump openly supported gays during the primary. Some of the loudest voices against mass incarceration are on the Right (although Trump may silence them for the time being). A lot of eyes have been opened to racism and sexism in our society, particularly in the last year or two. Trust me. I spend a lot of time on conservative blogs. Your voices are being heard and making a difference. It’s just an awfully awfully big hill to climb.
  • And don’t despair. There’s nothing Trump wants to do that hasn’t been done before. This country has long and ugly histories of protectionism, religious persecution, racial bias, anti-immigrant hysteria and environmental carelessness. We muddled through. The difference is that these policies were pursued by people who actually believed in them and were way more competent than Donald J. Trump. And if you think the country is going backward, look how far forward it has come. Gay marriage is legal and the GOP basically doesn’t care. Legal marijuana is spreading and the GOP is whistling in the dark. Our society … our society outside of politics … is more open and dynamic than it has ever been. 60 million votes can not turn back that tide.
  • Trust me, your conservative friends are not happy about this either. Trump is not a conservative, he’s a dim-bulb populist. At its best, conservatism is about restraint of government power and respect for existing institutions. My conservatism, such as it is, is the conservatism of Milton Friedman. Trump is against free trade, against small government, against civil liberties and for a massive powerful state. With him in charge, there is no conservative party anymore. Oh, the conservatives will try to cling to him. But in the end, they will be sacrificed on the populist altar.
  • We have, for the last decade or more, lived in an Culture of Outrage. We are constantly hearing about how some celebrity, some politician or even some random internet person has said something so ridiculously OUTRAGEOUS that they must be shunned from public life (and yes, conservative are just as eager to indulge in outrage culture as liberals). This anger is sometimes legit. But it has become so ubiquitous, so random and often so out of proportion that the public has become inured to it. As a result, Trump’s long string of outrageous statements stopped mattering. People stopped caring.
  • One question may be why the public ignored a very legitimate complaint about Trump — his terrible behavior with women. A big part of the problem was that the Democrats were, quite possibly, in the worst position to make a big deal out of it. The party that spent decades overlooking Ted Kennedy’s behavior and Chris Dodd’s behavior and Bill Clinton’s behavior, the party that saw Joe Biden’s tendency to get handsy with women as endearing had absolutely no leg to stand on with Republicans and independents. Trump bringing Bill Clinton’s accusers to the fore — derided as a stunt — actually worked. Because it reminded many voters that the Democrats rarely give a damn when their own politicians do everything Trump was accused of. Until you start calling out your own political allies, sexual harassment and abuse by politicians will be tolerated. That was as true this year as it was in 1998.
  • Just a random prediction here: Hillary Clinton will not be “locked up”. Ever. Almost all of the investigations into her behavior will be dropped. There’s no point in it now for Trump.
  • Finally, we should never let politics rule our lives. It has an important place. But regardless of which particular power-hungry idiot is sitting in the Oval Office, we must do what we always do: go to work, raise our kids, teach our students, try to get a little exercise, be kind to each other. We are better than our leaders and more powerful. They rule based on our good will. And if Trump (or anyone else) starts acting the tyrant, we must all fight against him. We must especially fight against him if that tyranny is indeed directed against Muslims or Latinos or whatever other group Trump has decided is the Enemy. If there is one silver lining to this awful election, it is this: maybe, going forward, we can remember our scared power to tell the government to get stuffed, to tell leaders to get bent, to stand up against the power of the state. And maybe we’ll give it a little less power to be abused in the first place.
  • Now is not the time to despair, whether you are a liberal or a conservative. And if you’re a Trump supporter, now is not the time for complacency. Now is the time for all of us to bend our shoulders to the wheel and push harder then ever. A lot of power was just given to Donald Trump. And only the combined and unrelenting pressure from all of us will keep him from abusing it.

    On Polls

    Election season is upon us which means that poll-watching season is upon us. Back in 2012, I wrote a long post about the analysis of the polls. Specifically, I focused on the 2000 election in which Bush led the polls going in, Real Clear Politics projected a Bush landslide and … it ended in a massive recount and a popular-electoral split. I identified the factors that I thought contributed to this:

    In the end, I think it was all of the above: they overestimated Nader’s support, the polls shifted late and RCP had a bit of a bias. But I also think RCP was simply ahead of its time. In 2000, we simply did not have the relentless national and state level polls we have now. And we did not have the kind of information that can tease out the subtle biases and nuances that Nate Silver can.

    Of course, I wrote that on the eve of the 2012 election, where Obama significantly outperformed his polls, easily winning an election that, up until the last minute, looked close.

    The election is now three days away which means that everyone is obsessed with polls. But this year, a split has developed. Sam Wang is projecting a 98% chance of a Clinton win with Clinton pulling in about 312 electoral votes. HuffPo projects a 99% chance of Clinton winning the popular vote. Nate Silver, however, is his usual conservative self, currently giving Clinton only a 64% chance of winning. So who should we side with?

    To me, it’s obvious. I would definitely take Silver on this.

    Put aside everything you know about the candidates, the election and the polls. If someone offered you a 50-to-1 or a 100-to-1 bet on any major party candidate winning the election, would you take it? I certainly would. I would have bet $10 on Mondale in 1984 if it was a potential $1000 payoff. And he lost by 20 points.

    It seems a huge stretch to give 98 or 99% odds to Clinton, considering:

  • Clinton has never touched 50% in the poll aggregates.
  • There are still large numbers of undecideds and third party supporters who will doubtless vote for one of the two candidates (and Trump’s recent surge has come from fleeing Johnson voters).
  • We have fewer live interview polls now than we did in 2012.
  • As Nate Silver noted, the average difference between final polls and the election has been about two points.
  • Basically, I think Wang and HuffPo are not accounting enough for the possibility that the polls are significantly off. In the last 40 years, we’ve had one Presidential election (1980) where the polls were off by a whopping seven points. That’s enough for Trump to win easily (or for Clinton to win in a landslide).

    Moreover, Wang’s and HuffPo’s results seem in contradiction to each other. If Clinton really did have a 98% chance of winning, wouldn’t you think she’d get more than 312 electoral votes? That’s the kind of certainty I would expect with a pending landslide of 400 or 500 electoral votes. A 42-electoral vote margin of errors is *really* small. All you would need is for the polling to be wrong in two big states for Trump to eek out a win (note: there are more than two big battleground states).

    This brings me to another point. Pollsters and Democrats have been talking about Clinton’s “firewall” of supposedly safe states that guarantee a win in the electoral college. But that firewall is a fantasy. When Clinton dipped in the polls in September, suddenly numerous blue states like Pennsylvania and Michigan were in play. And, in fact, Silver projects a bigger chance that Trump wins in an electoral-popular split than Clinton because many of his states are safer. The talk about a “firewall” is the result of people becoming drunk on state-level polling. We have 50 states in this country. Statistically, at least one should buck a 98% polling certainty. There are only twenty states that Real Clear Politics rates as “leans” or “tossup”. Statistically, at least a couple of those should buck the polling.

    Here’s another way of thinking about it. There have been 56 elections in American history. If Clinton really were a 98% or 99% favorite, a Trump would be the biggest upset in American electoral history. I find that claim to be absurd. Bigger than Dewey and Truman? Bigger than Polk’s election? Bigger than Kennedy’s? Bigger than Reagan turning a close race into a blowout?

    I should point out that having long tails of probability also means there is a greater chance of a Clinton landslide. That’s possible, I guess. But, admitting to my priors here, I find a Trump upset more likely than a Clinton landslide. Clinton is deeply unpopular with large parts of the country. She’s not popular with young people. Here in State College, Clinton signs and stickers are few and far between. This was not the case in 2008 and 2012, both of which were won handily by Obama. I really don’t see a Clinton landslide materializing, although I’ll cop to it if I’m wrong about that.

    Prediction is hard, especially about the future. I think a basic humility requires us to be open to the idea that we could be badly wrong. And 1-2% is way too small a value to assign to that. I think Clinton has the edge right now. But I would put her odds at more like 2-1 or 4-1. And I will not be shocked if Trump pulls this out.

    Because it may be a cliche. But there’s only poll that counts: the one taken on Tuesday.

    Update: One of my Twitter correspondents makes a good case that the variations in the polls are less reflective of changes in candidate support than in supporter enthusiasm. In the end, the election will come down to turnout — i.e., how likely the “likely” part of “likely voters” is.

    Quick Review: Stranger Things

    So I’d been resisting the temptation to watch Netflix’s smash hit of the summer, Stranger Things, since everyone I knew was watching it. But I was going to cave eventually. And with a lot of code to run and a lack of interest in this year’s movies, I finally caved. If you want to know whether I liked it or not … I’ll just tell you that I binge-watched it in two days.

    The series is very good. I’m curious to see how it will watch a second time without a binge, but I found it to be moving, tense and thrilling.

    The series has become most famous for its 80’s nostalgia and I will admit that this aspect of the series is done very well. It’s not just that it has oblique references to 80’s pop culture; it’s that it feels like the 80’s. The music, the title sequence, the color palette, the set decoration, the homages to films like E.T. and Alien. Sans the CGI, this could easily have been something made by Spielberg or Cameron (after you watch it, you can check out this video which goes through some of the more direct 80’s homages).

    But 80’s nostalgia will only get you so far, as Hollywood is finding out right now. What really makes the series good is that it’s just … good. It lays its foundations down in strong characters who are well-written and well-acted. Ryder and Harbour are particularly good but all the actors do well. It has a decent and intriguing plot*. And it shrouds this all in metric tons of atmosphere. I give it a strong recommendation, even to people who are not necessarily fans of sci-fi or horror. I was hooked by middle of the first episode.

    This year has been awful for movies. Almost every big blockbuster has been a disappointment. But television — particularly shows produced by the “other studios” like HBO and Netflix — has been getting steadily better and better. And Stranger Things is definitely one of those good shows. I’m looking forward to Season 2.

    (*The plot bothered me because for the last few weeks I’ve been sketching out a similar plot for a new story. The story — working title Oddish — takes place in a college town not a million miles different from State College. It focuses on residents of the town who find things happening that are not scary or alarming (at least at first) but just odd. I don’t want to give away too much since it may never be written or may go in a different direction. But any writer will understand why I was both elated and saddened to see that Stranger Things shares a lot of elements with Oddish.

    Oh well. Maybe I’ll turn my attention back to Dreams in the Long Dark.)

    Pokemon Go

    Until a month ago, I had never played Pokemon in any way, shape or form. It was a little after my time. I knew of it and could maybe identify one or two of the creatures from simple cultural osmosis. But the nostalgia value the franchise had for me was basically nil.

    So I am somewhat surprised to find that I’ve become a pretty consistent player of this summer’s answer to the Macarena: Pokemon Go. In early July, everyone was talking about it so I decided to give it a whirl. I had just given up on two games I’d been playing for a couple of years, so needed something to fill the boredom*. And Abby was into Pokemon anyway because her best friend is into it, so it seemed like a reasonable lark. And so here I am, a month later, with about 70 of the silly creatures in my phone, past level 20 and going for daily “pokewalks” or “pokerides” with my daughter.

    That, to me, is the key to Pokemon‘s success: the social aspect. The game itself is kind of fun. It’s nice to walk around collecting little monsters. The gym aspect, where you fight other pokemons, is OK, if a bit a clunky. There’s a little thrill in finding pokestops and collecting items. The game is well designed to be addictive. But in the end, that’s all swamped by the social aspect: playing with my daughter and occasionally running into other players.

    It’s just fun to walk around with Abby playing the game, occasionally catching a monster or attacking a gym together, but mainly hanging out and talking. We’ve gone walking all over our area and discovered new paths. We’ve hung out on campus. I’ve ridden a bike for the first time in thirty years. And even when we aren’t playing together, there’s a thrill in showing her what I caught today. Hell, even my wife now approves of the game (although she’s a bit dubious about us occasionally running out of the house to find a rare Pokemon in our area).

    (It’s also occasionally allowed me to share some of my obsessions with Abby. Recently, during a tough fight at a Pokemon gym, I shouted, “I WILL kill him!” which led to a discussion of Dune, another of my little fixations.)

    On Facebook, I gave my initial review that the game was OK, but playing it with my daughter was awesome. I stand by that. I expect the popularity to fade a bit as the novelty does. In fact, it already feels like I’m seeing fewer people out playing it (although now that the students are back in town, that should change). But the game has significantly expanded the scope of gaming, becoming the first really popular app where interacting with the real world is part of the game. I suspect more will follow. Some will suck. Some will be good. But it’s a good future to be tumbling into.

    (*The game I quit was Boom Beach, which is made by the Clash of Clans folks and quite similar. It’s fun but I’d built everything and was to the point where simply maintaing my rank — at one point, I was one of the top 250 players in the US, which is even less impressive than it sounds — would have consumed hours of my time every day. I simply didn’t see the point of running that kind of treadmill indefinitely, so I let it go.)

    2050, Part II

    In Part 1, I looked at the predictions Robert A. Heinlein made in 1950 for what would happen over the course of the 20th century. Back in 2000, I wrote out my own predictions for the first half of the 21st century. I thought, 16 years in, I’d take a look at how I was doing.

    Overall, it’s not so bad. but the unifying theme is that I wasn’t bold enough. Nothing I predicted was as interesting as what Heinlein predicted. So while I did “better” in terms of batting average, I did way worse in terms of slugging. My predictions are right, to steal a phrase from P.J. O’Rourke, in the same sense that a fortune cookie saying, “You will soon be finished with dinner” is right.

    Continue reading 2050, Part II

    Why Mourn?

    The year has been a terrible one for celebrity deaths: Alan Rickman, David Bowie, Merle Haggard, now Prince. The last one hit particularly hard with me. Prince was the music of my difficult and lonely teenage years. I admired him. I loved his music. I thought and think he was a musical genius on par with the historic greats. And it’s been cathartic and touching to see the tributes springing up all over the world and know that I wasn’t alone in thinking that; that millions of people did get how great he was.

    Every time the world mourns a celebrity, however, people ask why we do so. After all, it’s not like we knew them personally. Why shed tears — even metaphorical ones — over a stranger?

    This tweet explains it better in 140 characters than I will in many more words.

    In one of Stephen King’s non-fiction books, he describes writing as an act of telepathy. When you write a piece of fiction, you are using words to put what’s in your head into the reader’s head. If I write, “There was a room with table” you get an image in your head. And, if I’m a good writer, you get something close to the image I had in my head when I wrote those words.

    This act of telepathy applies to more than just writers. Artists, musicians, actors … all of them perform acts of telepathy. It’s a bit more subtle since they work in a visual or auditory medium. But it’s the same principle: trying to evoke images or feelings or ideas through an act of telepathy.

    We let artists into our head. We have, indirectly, a very intimate relationship with them. People will talk of books or songs or movies that spoke to them. And that’s true in a very literal sense. And if an artist is particularly brilliant, they will sometimes reveal things about us we didn’t know or put us in touch with feelings or ideas we were unfamiliar with. And we share this intimacy with everyone else who has felt spoken to.

    So no I don’t think there’s anything wrong with mourning an artist or an actor who has died. Because sometimes we really are very close to them in a way that truly matters.

    Long Form Review: The Force Awakens

    So it’s been four months. I’m finally going to post my long-form review of Stars Wars: The Force Awakens. I wrote a lot of this back in December but didn’t post it because … well, because I didn’t trust it. I was so excited to have a new Star Wars movie, least of all a good one, that I needed to take some time for my impressions to set. I just bought in on blu-ray and watched it again with Abby. And my impression is largely unchanged.

    It’s a good movie. It’s a very good movie. It’s not quite as good as Star Wars or The Empire Strikes Back, which I rate as rare 10’s on IMDB. But it’s better than Return of the Jedi and Revenge of the Sith, which I rate as 8’s or 9’s, depending on my mood. Right now, I have it rated an 8, but it’s a strong 8 and could become a 9 in the future, depending on how Episodes VIII and IX shake out.

    Spoiler warning for the movie that everyone saw four month ago:

    Continue reading Long Form Review: The Force Awakens

    Oscar Update

    A few years ago, I wrote a series of posts going through the Oscars year-by-year to compare the Best Picture selectees to the films preferred by either IMDB users or the consensus of history as the best picture of the year.

    Part I went from 1928 to 1952 and covered the very shaky early years of the Academy.

    Part II covered 1952 to 1978, from the days when the Academy went out of their way to snub Hitchcock to the 1970’s, when they did a very good job.

    Part III covered 1978 to 2012, which has been a shaky period for the Academy as they struggle to adapt to the broader palette of films that has opened up. Occasionally, they make a good choice, but then they scuttle back to safe fare like The King’s Speech.

    Part IV summed up and ranked the worst Oscar picks in history. I concluded that the Academy had done an OK job, mostly, but was slowly becoming irrelevant.

    That was a fun series of posts to write and even now, I like to go through it occasionally. A few updates are in order though:

    In the post, I stopped tapping films as “Consensus Picks” in 2001, saying that not enough time had passed. It’s been three years, so I’ll bring that up to 2005.

    Year: 2002
    Academy Pick: Chicago
    IMDB Rating: 7.2 (41 out of 132, minimum 25000 votes)
    IMDB pick as Best Picture: The Two Towers
    Consensus Best Picture: City of God
    Comment: You can check the original post for my comments on Lord of the Rings. City of God continues to be held in high esteem, deservedly so. Chicago, however, keeps sinking. I rated this as one of their worst picks, even given IMDB’s bias against musicals.

    Year: 2003
    Academy Pick: Return of the King
    IMDB Rating: 8.9 (1st of 111, minimum 25000 votes)
    IMDB pick as Best Picture: Return of the King
    Consensus Best Picture: Return of the King
    Comment: A number of good pictures are creeping up in the IMDB ratings but I think most people would conclude that LOTR was the best movie of 2003.

    Year: 2004
    Academy Pick: Million Dollar Baby
    IMDB Rating: 8.1 (7 of 143, minimum 25000 votes)
    IMDB pick as Best Picture: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
    Consensus Best Picture: Still unclear. Sunshine might be it. But I suspect The Incredibles will be history’s favorite.

    Year: 2005
    Academy Pick: Crash
    IMDB Rating: 7.9 (18 of 143 for 2004, minimum 25000 votes)
    IMDB pick as Best Picture: Batman Begins
    Consensus Best Picture: Still unclear.
    Comment: I thought maybe I’d exclude this year as being too recent, but … 2006 has Pan’s Labyrinth and 2008 has The Dark Knight. So I’m coming to think it was weak year.Crash remains well-regarded by IMDB but its reputation is terrible.

    Not much has changed for the other years. The Departed, Like Stars on Earth, the Dark Knight, Inglorious Basterds, Inception, The Intouchables and The Dark Knight Rises still rule their respective years.

    For the years since, with the threshold raised to 50k votes:

    Year: 2013
    Academy Pick: 12 Years A Slave
    IMDB Rating: 8.1 (3 of 127, minimum 50000 votes)
    IMDB pick as Best Picture: The Wolf of Wall Street

    Year: 2014
    Academy Pick: Birdman
    IMDB Rating: 7.8 (17 of 96, minimum 50000 votes)
    IMDB pick as Best Picture: Interstellar
    Comment: There’s a lot of fanboyism in recent IMDB ratings, so I might discount Interstellar, a movie I really like, and pick Whiplash, which is the #2 IMDB-rated film and might have been my pick for the best movie of the year. I know it’s only been a year, but Birdman’s ranking is terrible for a recent Best Picture. I liked it but I think it was a poor pick. Hollywood loves movies about Hollywood and acting. Three of the recent Best Pictures were about Hollywood. But give it five years and I think Birdman will start showing up on lists of bad Academy picks. Still, it could have been worse. They could have gone with The Imitation Game.

    Year: 2015
    Academy Pick: TBA. Right now, The Revenant is the favorite.
    IMDB Rating: 8.2 (4 of 58, minimum 50000 votes)
    IMDB pick as Best Picture: Baahubali: The Beginning. But that’s Bollywood again. The top-rated American IMDB film is The Force Awakens, but that’s fanboyism. Inside Out is #3. We’ll go with that for now.

    So has anything changed in the last three years? I don’t think so. The Academy has still shown that are vulnerable to Oscar bait. They are nominating more action movies like Mad Max but they clearly aren’t going to be giving out the top prize for those movies. They’ve made at least one pick — Birdman — that may soon join the ranks of poor Oscar picks. And they continue to ignore alternative fare like Straight Outta Compton or Ex Machina.

    So … if you like award ceremonies or you like the horse race or you like glamor, by all means watch the Academy Awards this weekend. But don’t watch it because you want to know what the best movie was. There are so many more resources available now, of which IMDB is just one.

    Astronomy, Sports, Mathematical Malpractice, Whatever Else Pops Into My Head