(Don’t forget to hit play!)
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I am running WAY late this morning because when Brandy got up and left for her morning class, somehow the door wasn’t fully latched or something. When I came out almost an hour later, the front door was open and the dog was not at home. So Amy and I started searching the neighborhood. I found Roscoe calmly walking (and greeting another dog that was being walked) along the way back on a route we often walk him… to the neighborhood grocery store and back. He found the door open, and just decided to do it on his own. Anyway, that was much excitement, but everybody is fine. Although there was a half hour or so that was very worrying. And now I need to run to work.
Based on the “Last Updated” time on CNN’s election results site, my best estimate for when Missouri was called by CNN is 21:09 UTC yesterday. So consider this to me an update covering the time immediately prior to 21:15 UTC yesterday. Missouri is called for McCain. This is the last outstanding state. This makes the results (assuming no faithless electors) Obama 365, McCain 173… which has been what it would look like it would be for quite a bit now, but now it is official. (Well, not really, not until the electoral college votes… but all states have been called by CNN now.) So, how did I do? Well, every single state that I did not say was a too close to call swing state, I got right. But lets be a little more critical than that. If you look at my last regular daily update on November 3rd, the “Current Status” where everybody got their leans had Obama 338, McCain 200. What did I miss? I thought McCain would win North Carolina, Indiana and all of Nebraska. Obama of course ended up winning North Carolina, Indiana and Nebraska’s 2nd District. Of these, I had considered both North Carolina and Indiana as too close to call and that they could easily go either way. So not too upset about that. On Nebraska I had decided early on not to look at the possibility of Nebraska splitting unless the state itself looked somewhat close. That seems like an error now. However, I’m not sure what else I would have done, as I did not see regular polling on the separate Nebraska districts anyway. BUT… there was one more error…. after my last daily update on the 3rd, I continued to log polls as they came in on election day itself, before the real polls started closing. I logged one change early in the day that flipped Missouri to just barely on the Obama side of the line instead of just barely on the McCain side of the line. So my actual final “everybody gets their leans” prediction was Obama 349, McCain 189 which was actually closer to the actual final result than my final prediction on the 3rd, but only because a couple of the states I got wrong canceled each other out. (Missouri and Indiana both have 11 electoral votes, so when I got them both wrong the total remained the same.) So, in the end, out of 50 states and DC, I ended up predicting correctly on all except North Carolina, Indiana, Missouri and the 2nd district of Nebraska. And my electoral college total was only off by 16. And with the exception of that pesky single electoral vote from Nebraska, all of the states which I “missed” were states that I had actually described as being too close to call. All and all, I think those are pretty good results. So I am happy with that. I’ll do one more update when I combine the wiki pages for the historical predictions through the race with the pages reflecting actual results and get everything all cleaned up to sit there forever for random people googling about the 2008 race. And then I’ll finally be done with this! :-) Edit 21 Nov 04:06 UTC: Fixed Typo in Obama’s actual electoral college vote total (365 instead of 265). Thanks to the reader who pointed this out. Just checked CNN… I think I also did a few hours ago, but I can’t really be sure… and they finally called Missouri for McCain. I’ll have my next to final update of my charts when I get home in an hour or so. (My final update will be cleaning up the electoral college stuff to put it in a final archival state.) Edit: The Missouri results on CNN say they were last updated at 00:09 UTC today, so I’ll use that as the time the state was called unless one of my readers can point me at a better time, or I find one myself.
In any case, it seems the movie was very very loosely based on an Isaac Asimov short story in the sense that it shares some very high level elements, but isn’t really like the original story all that much at all. It was a fun little action movie I guess. You needed a lot of the “suspension of disbelief” juice in your system of course, but as long as you don’t think all that much and just enjoy the ride, it is fine and dandy. I was fully expecting a sequel setup in the last few moments of the movie, but I didn’t get it. Which is probably OK, because I doubt it did well enough for them to want to make a sequel. It was fine though. One thing to watch out for… there is a character who helps in some key moments in the film who is named Major BOWMAN. There is a clear reason he is named Bowman. They didn’t make it quite as obvious as they could have… I would have really appreciated it if they did. But it still was glaringly obvious to me and I laughed.
Ivan sends over a story about the place where he, I and several others spent some time while we were in college. I note we were a bit slow on the pickup though. Victim, suspect in Shadyside homicide identified
Fun. Our university, by the way, has not rented space in this building in many many years now.
I stopped checking every fifteen minutes many days ago. I even stopped checking every few hours. But I was still checking at least once a day, and at 03:00 UTC today I noted that CNN finally, many days after other news organizations did so, reversed their earlier call, and moved Nebraska’s Second Congressional District into Obama’s column. So we now have: McCain Best Case: Obama 365, McCain 173 The one remaining state, Missouri, is still officially too close to call. However most analysis I’ve seen shows it is highly unlikely that Obama will take the state, so of the remaining scenarios, it looks like the “McCain Best Case” is the one likely to happen. Official results in Missouri are due on Tuesday. It is likely to be close enough that Obama COULD ask for a recount. But he is pretty unlikely to actually bother, as it won’t make a difference to the final outcome… other than to potentially put him over the 375 electoral vote line that some people use to define a landslide. |
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Sam and Ivan talk about:
