Sarah lying down outside

Sarah lying down outside
Originally uploaded by halobrien

Our dog hardly ever does this. Who are you, impostor, and what have you done with my dog?

Kitchen, new fridge

Kitchen, new fridge
Originally uploaded by halobrien

Reverse angle, showing new fridge placement, and void where old fridge was.

Kitchen, with site of former refrigerator

Kitchen, with site of former refrigerator
Originally uploaded by halobrien

Election prediction round-up

With one week to go before the event, here's the state of play in the election as of today, according to simulators and markets. Comparisons are to my previous roundup, on October 8th:

Princeton Election Consortium: Obama 363 electoral votes, McCain 175 (Formerly Obama 353 electoral votes, McCain 185, so Obama +10)

FiveThirtyEight.com: Obama 348 electoral votes, McCain 190 (Formerly Obama 347 electoral votes, McCain 191, so Obama +1)

Electoral-Vote.com: Obama 364 electoral votes, McCain 157, Ties 17 (Formerly Obama 349 electoral votes, McCain 174, Ties 15, so Obama +15)

Iowa Electronic Markets: Dem .86, Rep .14 (Formerly Dem .81, Rep .19, so Obama +.05) (one way to think of that is as percentages, but it represents the price of contracts out of a $1.00)

Intrade does both:
* Obama 364 electoral votes, McCain 174 (Formerly Obama 338, McCain 200, so Obama +26)
* Obama .88, McCain .12 in the contracts (Formerly Obama .71, McCain .29, so Obama +.17)

*^*^*

At this point, the changes are flat enough the question becomes, Are the polls accurate? (The one exception has been Intrade going from being a laggard to joining the consensus.)

Everyone else has noticed this, too:

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, today: "Stop me if you've heard this one before."

Sam Wang of Princeton on 22 October:"In which I write of paint continuing to dry. There's just so many posts like this a guy can write. Today, Obama is still crushing McCain. Still. Crushing. McCain."

Perhaps the greatest irony: The numbers stopped drifting after the second debate, in McCain's much favored Town Hall format. The electorate saw him in that format, found him wanting, and haven't seen anything to persuade them otherwise since.

Thus, be careful what you ask for.

Lamb

I was reading Charles Lamb (as you do), specifically the essay, "DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND READING." Snickering at the sideswipes:

"Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment."

Then came this passage, about the bindings of books:

"In some respects the better a book is, the less it demands from binding. Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and all that class of perpetually self-reproductive volumes--Great Nature's Stereotypes--we see them individually perish with less regret, because we know the copies of them to be "eterne." But where a book is at once both good and rare--where the individual is almost the species, and when that perishes,

We know not where is that Promethean torch
That can its light relumine--

such a book, for instance, as the Life of the Duke of Newcastle, by his Duchess--no casket is rich enough, no casing sufficiently durable, to honour and keep safe such a jewel."

So you know what I had to do, right?

$13.00 later at ABEBooks, and a copy of the Duchess' book is on its way to me. Everyman's Library, from 1915.