Adorkable Alert: Nate Silver, Oscar prognosticator

During the media coverage of the last election, there was a lot to make me want to start banging my head against the wall. One of the few pleasures, however, was the off-chance of seeing statistics guru Nate Silver appear on screen.

If you're not familiar with Silver (only those inclined to nerd crushes probably are familiar with him) he became a media fixture last year as the creator of FiveThirtyEight.com, a site that applied Silver's expertise in baseball statistics towards electoral polls. Not only did Silver have a tendency to be pretty accurate, but whenever Silver appeared on a news show the anchors would usually become slightly less stupid about statistics.

The reasons why I find him adorkable should be obvious. He may be cute in glasses but the occasional odd expressions he shows in his TV appearances definitely put him on the awkward side of cute. Plus there's the whole thing about being one of the few people on TV who understand of the difference between "percent" and "percentage points" (which totally can inspire screams of frustration in me). Silver may not be gay, but that doesn't reduce the sexiness of being one of the few people on TV who can see the story in a bunch of numbers.

Even better, Silver is now applying his stats wizardry to the "Gay Super Bowl"...

See what I mean about the odd expressions

Silver is back in the limelight this week after applying his statistics mojo to predict the Oscars. Looking at the other movie awards and how often Oscar agrees with them, Silver predicts a bad year for Milk with Danny Boyle and Slumdog Millionaire taking the Best Director/Best Picture combo (though Milk is the only film that has a chance of breaking that up, according to Silver) and Mickey Rourke beating Sean Penn (mostly due to Penn having won an Oscar).

While I'm not thrilled with Silver's estimates giving Milk a 1% chance at the Best Picture statue, his methodology is an interesting way of mixing two of my interests: probabilities and the Oscars. I admit I haven't kept up with Silver's predictions (or their accuracy) since election day, but this gives me something new to keep track of on Oscar night. Hopefully these predictions will get him back on the cable news, too.