The Kind-Hearted Smart Aleck

I've always been curious on the actual impact and success of the strategy known as "icing the kicker" in football, if it has one at all. Well, thanks to research, I have some answers. One Tobias Moskowitz put together some numbers on this very thing and released them in his book Scorecasting , where he compared field goal kickers' success rates in the final couple minutes of a game when they were iced and when they weren't. To me at least, the results aren't very surprising. When the kick transpired between the 1:01 and 1:59 point in the 4th quarter of a game, iced kickers made 74.2% of their kicks, compared to 77.6% who weren't iced - a difference of 3.4%. When the kick took place between the 1:00 and 0:31 mark, iced kickers converted on 74.3% of their attempts, while the kickers who weren't iced converted on 74.6% of them - a difference of 0.3%. When the kick happened between the 0:30 and 0:16 point, iced kickers made 76.0% of their field goa...

I think most people would agree that the electoral college is not the optimal way of electing a president. Most seem to feel the optimal way of going about this is through the popular vote. I don't think that's ideal either, however.  Over the past few days, I've read and heard multiple people throw out the idea of basing the electoral college on percentages. For example - at this current time, Obama has received 59% of the vote in California, while Romney has received 39%. The state is worth 55 electoral votes, so Obama would receive 32.5 (.59 x 55) and Romney would receive 21.5 (.39 x 55). The most recent person who shared this idea with me contended that Mitt Romney would have won the election if this had been the electoral college format. After going through the numbers, however, I can say that's not the case. The final electoral vote numbers would have been much closer, but President Obama would still have been elected to a second term in the Oval Office. At th...