If the state polls are right, then Mr. Obama will win the Electoral College. If you can't acknowledge that after a day when Mr. Obama leads 19 out of 20 swing-state polls, then you should abandon the pretense that your goal is to inform rather than entertain the public.

You get steely nerves playing poker.

Every day, three times per second, we produce the equivalent of the amount of data that the Library of Congress has in it's entire print collection, right? But most of it is like cat videos on YouTube or thirteen-year-olds exchanging text messages about the next 'Twilight' movie.

Plenty of pundits have really high IQs, but they don't have any discipline in how they look at the world, and so it leads to a lot of bullshit, basically.

The public is even more pessimistic about the economy than even the most bearish economists are.

People attach too much importance to intangibles like heart, desire and clutch hitting.

Finding patterns is easy in any kind of data-rich environment; that's what mediocre gamblers do. The key is in determining whether the patterns represent signal or noise