07 August 2008

Weather and political polls

From a Philadelphia TV weather man, Glenn "Hurricane" Schwartz, upon observing that the low and high temperature for Philadelphia today (70 and 85, respectively) were the "normal" temperatures for the day:
"Exactly normal! It's not normal to be exactly normal!"
which, of course, is true. That's how distributions work.

The weather people on television try a lot less to explain why the weather did what it did than the political people; John and Zeno have talked about this "roller-coaster polling". I suspect this is because once the weather has happened we don't care why it happened that way, while the whole point of polls is to use them to forecast the upcoming election.

No comments: