Smithsonian.com

Image: Randall Munroe/XKCD

New Yorker reporter Ryan Lizza said this morning that after months of campaigning, the result of the 2012 election “was a huge victory yesterday for math.” Wired called 2012 “the nerdiest election in the history of the American Republic.” XKCD’s Randall Munroe published a comic this morning captioned: “To the surprise of pundits, numbers continue to be best system for determining which of two things is larger.”

Independently of President Barack Obama’s win last night, this year’s campaign was one in which numbers trumped gut. “2012 was about data and memes,” Wired wrote. “Your social media habits, browser history and mobile apps usage were goldmines for national politics.”

Part of this story is about the accuracy of pollsters and prognosticators. Wired:

Nate Silver of The New York Times completely reshaped [election] coverage. Silver steadied the nerves of liberals and rattled the teeth of conservatives, all through a proprietary model of poll aggregation and weighting. Silver, who called the 2008 election with stunning accuracy, sought to do for politics what sabermetrics did for baseball: Factor out as many subjective judgments as possible, to determine who would win the race.

But poll aggregation came under fire because it was predicting an Obama win. As Esquire writes, “Stephen Colbert had the line that defines this election: ‘Math has a liberal bias.’” Those numbers, though, turned out to be accurate. Even those not ready to anoint Silver, the number-crunching poll analyst whose blog is published by The New York Times, as a genius, saw in this election a victory for numbers. Slate wrote that Silver’s accuracy “means that polling works, assuming that its methodology is sound, and that it’s done repeatedly.”

The other part of the story is about the new role of data in political campaigns. The Obama campaign put a particular emphasis on this strategy, as Time reports:

From the beginning, campaign manager Jim Messina had promised a totally different, metric-driven kind of campaign in which politics was the goal but political instincts might not be the means. “We are going to measure every single thing in this campaign,” he said after taking the job. He hired an analytics department five times as large as that of the 2008 operation, with an official “chief scientist” for the Chicago headquarters named Rayid Ghani, who in a previous life crunched huge data sets to, among other things, maximize the efficiency of supermarket sales promotions.

Whether or not that’s what won the president re-election, political professionals tend to take seriously strategies associated with winning campaigns. In elections to come, campaign managers will, likely as not, put even more emphasis on data than they have in the past. If math and data were running in 2012 for a starring role in politics, they won.

More from Smithsonian.com:

How a Facebook Ad Increased Real World Election Turnout

Photo: Flickr user Motorito

We’re all thinking it. Author Gary Shteyngart is just brave enough to say it:

Help me talk about Mo Yan at parties w/o reading his work. “I think Mo Yan is ____” “The thing about Mo Yan is___” “You like Mo Yan? Try___”

— Gary Shteyngart (@Shteyngart) October 12, 2012

Some of the smartest people in the world were honored by the Nobel Committee this week and, uh, what did they do again?

Here, in Twitter-sized bites, are descriptions of the work that won the Nobel this week:

Medicine:

John Gurdon made a tadpole from a frog’s intestine cell, before anyone believed in stem cells.

Shinya Yamanaka figured out how to convince an adult cell to turn into any type of tissue cell. No embryonic cells needed!

Physics:

Serge Haroche & David Wineland study tiny quantum particles. Haroche: “I use atoms to study the photons and he uses photons to study atoms.”

(Bonus: Why didn’t the Higgs boson research win? Too soon.)

Chemistry:

Receptors move hormones and other chemicals across cell walls. Everyone assumed they existed. Robert Lefkowitz & Brian Kobilka proved it.

Literature:

Mo Yan is provocative: he has a novel called Big Breasts & Wide Hips. But not too provocative: China’s government thinks he’s alright.

Peace:

The committee went a little Oprah by honoring the EU: “You get a Nobel Prize and you get a Nobel Prize and you get a Nobel Prize!”

Can anyone out there do better? We’re open to suggestions — we’ve got parties to go to, too!

More from Smithsonian.com:

More Chocolate, More Nobels
The Nobel Prize With the Most Frequent Flier Miles

Oscar Pistorius. Photo: Flickr user Karva Javi

South Africa’s Oscar Pistorius was born without bones in both of his lower legs and is a double amputee. But he will run in this summer’s Olympics, the first amputee to compete in the games’ track meets.

Pistorius didn’t meet his country’s qualifying time for the games, but he’s on the team, anyway, running the 400 meter race and in the 4×400 relay. The Los Angeles Times reports:

Pistorius ran a personal-best 45.07 seconds last year and opened this year with a 45.20, both Olympic-qualifying times.

But South Africa’s Olympic-qualifying guidelines demanded he run 45.30 or better at one more international meet before last Saturday to seal a spot in the 400. He missed that time by less than a quarter of a second in his final qualifying race at the African Championships.

Watch him run:

More from Smithsonian.com:

Summer Olympics Look, a Poem

The Little-Known History of How the Modern Olympics Got Their Start

More than 18,000 acres burned in Waldo Canyon. Photo: NASA

The Waldo Canyon fire in Colorado was the most destructive in the state’s history.

In 12 days, it t burned 18,247 acres.

It ate through 346 homes, doing $110 million in damage.

On July 4, a NASA satellite took the image above. The red is vegetation, captured with visible and infrared light. The brightest red is unburned forest. The brown is the land that the fire burned.

The Denver Post reports:

The list of lost homes also reveals the vicissitudes of a wildfire. On some neighborhood streets, only one house was lost. On a stretch of Majestic Drive, 74 consecutive houses burned.

“I keep hearing words like ‘epic,’ ‘historic,’ ‘unprecedented.’ I don’t think that’s an exaggeration,” said Carole Walker, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Insurance Information Association. “2012 is the year everyone’s going to remember.”

More from Smithsonian.com:

Climate Change Means More Wildfires in the West

Devastating Colorado Wildfires Most Recent in Decades-Long Surge

Karl Marx. Source: Library of Congress

In London, starting today, the Socialist Workers’ Party will be hosting Marxism 2012, an annual event whose organizers say is growing in popularity with young people. It’s not just impressionable young people who are falling back in love with Marx, though, as the Guardian reports:

Sales of Das Kapital, Marx’s masterpiece of political economy, have soared ever since 2008, as have those of The Communist Manifesto and…Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy…Their sales rose as British workers bailed out the banks to keep the degraded system going and the snouts of the rich firmly in their troughs while the rest of us struggle in debt, job insecurity or worse. There’s even a Chinese theatre director called He Nian who capitalised on Das Kapital’s renaissance to create an all-singing, all-dancing musical.

One explanation: Younger people may not be as versed in the horrors of Stalinism as their elders. But also, this is a newer, gentler version of Marxism, explains Owen Jones, working class hero:

“Today not even the Trotskyist left call for armed revolution. The radical left would say that the break with capitalism could only be achieved by democracy and organisation of working people to establish and hold on to that just society against forces that would destroy it.”

Or, as the protest crowd likes to put it: “All We Want For Christmas Is Full Communism.”

More from Smithsonian.com:

Reds versus Whites
Once Upon a Time