The Election, Explained
Right now, Five Thirty-Eight
gives McCain’s win percentage as 3.3%. Or, to put it in gamer terms,
he has to roll a natural 20, and then he has to roll 5 or 6
on 1d6 (or 3 on 1d3).
As for Palin, from her interview and debate performances, she reminds
me of nothing so much as a verbose
Eliza:
you ask her a question, her internal
regexp
parser picks out a few keywords, and she spits out a string of
preprogrammed phrases, with possibly a few pattern substitutions.
Of course, the original Eliza was designed to be terse so as to hide
the simplicity of the algorithm. Palin goes on for minutes, making her
more of a cross between Eliza and
Dissociated Press.
Heh, I thought of Eliza back when Palin babbled on Katy Couric. Either that, or speaking in tongues. (Idly, I wonder if she does do glossalalia back home in church, and if generating that stream of random politico-babble calls on the same neural mechanisms).
Nit: I always disliked “1d3”. There’s no 3-sided platonic solid. < /gamer-dork >
Only if you’re on the approved list of people cleared to ask Caribou Barbie questions. Considering her inability to articulate a complete, coherent thought even in those situations I can only conclude her bloviating is designed to impress the ever-shrinking “base”.
Of course. I meant “you” in an abstract sort of way.
Somewhere, I have a d3 made by putting two of each number 1 through 3 on a d6. I remember having to keep an eye on it, because other players would reach for it when they needed a d6.
I have a d3 like that, with dots instead of numerals; Joe Sanjour once reached for it every time during an entire day of gaming until we figured it out. Low numbers were good in that game for keeping your troops alive while they moved about, but sucked in combat.
For that matter, I’ve lost games I had sewed up, providing that someone didn’t get the 3 in 100 chance draw or roll. A couple weeks ago I had lost because someone drew just the right card out of a deck with effectively 14 cards left, and only one chance to draw, which isn’t quite as bad, but other sites than 538 have McCain having a 12% chance. It’s not over until it’s over.