The State of California is a Carcinogen

I haven’t posted anything in a while because I’ve been incredibly busy for an unemployed person.  Anyway, since I don’t want all (six) of you who regularly follow this blog to think I’ve abandoned it, I’ll post this little gem of a story.

When I was at my last place of employment we had one of those hideously boring mandatory meetings about our health insurance plan.  I hated these meetings, because, in addition to making me want to stab myself in the eyeball with my pen just to have something to do, they took away time I was supposed to be merrily billing our clients.  I always had to make up the time–that day–or I would get a nastygram from the senior partner.

Anyway, at this particular meeting, I was pondering the unanswered question of how Princess Leia could remember her mother if Padme died in childbirth when something the insurance rep said snapped me out of my reverie.  She was talking about supplemental insurance policies we could purchase, and she had just mentioned supplemental cancer insurance.  She explained that in order to be eligible for the supplemental cancer insurance policy, you have to have a risk factor for developing cancer.

“But that’s not a problem for anyone in this room,” she said, “because you all live in California.”

That’s right.  According to major insurance companies, the mere act of living in the State of California is a risk factor for developing cancer. Kind of takes the shine off, doesn’t it?

Lies, D—ed Lies, and Statistics

I’m not generally a political person, but one of my pet peeves is when people, either intentionally or unintentionally, draw conclusions from statistics that the numbers simply won’t support. Lately the seeming obsession in the media with national polls in the U.S. presidential race has been driving me up a wall. This poll says McCain is up by 10 points. That poll says Obama is up by 1 point. Apart from the obvious problem of wildly divergent results, what no one seems to realize is that national polls are absolutely meaningless in a U.S. presidential election.

That’s because the president is elected by the Electoral College, not by national popular vote. Each state is allotted a certain number of electoral votes, and who gets those votes is (usually) determined by who wins the popular vote within each state. A national poll, while it may indicate who is ahead in the popular vote, provides absolutely no information at all as to the number of electoral votes a particular candidate is likely to receive.

The only way to get even remotely useful numbers is to poll state by state, determining who is ahead in each state and then assigning each state’s alloted number of electoral votes accordingly. That’s what this site does. Given how pervasive this stuff is and how easy it is to manipulate, I’m beginning to think statistics should be a required course for everyone in school, or may just for freak-out-prone journalists.