The Very Sorry Song

Partially,  I suppose I was never expecting a voluntary admission. An involuntary admission, yes, compelled under oath when subpoenaed for Johan Bruyneel's arbitration hearing, sometime this year. And it's entirely possible that what's happened over the last two nights was prompted by a desire to get out in front of that.

It's also possible that there's some genuine regret in there, too.

The big news, of course, is Lance Armstrong admitting using banned drugs in his campaign to win the Tour de France an unprecedented seven times in a row. One one hand the news doesn't exactly surprise, since it merely confirms what we already knew from last August's USADA decision. But it's one thing to see the facts, and another entirely to see the man himself own up to them.

For myself, I don't feel as if I needed to hear an apology. And I didn't hear exactly what I wanted to hear, although to be fair, that wasn't the right venue for what I wanted to hear anyway. As I've said before, what needs to come out is exactly how it was done. He needs to supply names and detailed information to the relevant authorities, so that it can be made completely clear how he was able to evade the testing protocols for so long and so well. I think it's telling that so many of his former teammates ran afoul of drug tests after leaving his team. That's why I'm looking forward to the Bruyneel hearings, since that's where the rest of the story is liable to break: how his teams were able to subvert the testing process. That's the mojo that former Postal/Discovery riders failed to bring along to their next teams, and it showed. And that was never Lance's department.

For what it's worth, I really do think that he rode clean those last two years, 2009 and 2010. It was clear that he wasn't the same rider he was, before his first retirement. I'd chalked it up to age and being out of the saddle for three years, but lack of "juice" might have had something to do with it, too. And I think he's genuinely sorry, at least to this extent: he had to explain it to his kids. If you have kids of your own, you'll understand. There are few humiliations quite as excruciating as having to explain a failing to your own child. I can only imagine how it must have stung to explain having lived a lie for decades.

On the subject of apologies ... I owe one, to the extent that I touted the legend. I bought it, hook, line, and sinker. Later on, I began to look at it more critically, but at first I was a true believer. I failed to follow my training, and examine all the evidence. I do regret that.

All that said, I still love the sport. It's a magnificent display of human fortitude. There's nothing else quite like it. And it's all the better now, with better, more accurate tests far more diligently applied, both in and out of competition. That's the one silver lining in the storm clouds, that what we learn in the months to come will strengthen the hand of the referees against the cheaters. That will give those of us who watch an assurance that what we're seeing is real, not artificial.

It'll take time. It won't all happen at once. But the sport will be cleaner and stronger for it. And if Lance Armstrong has a road to redemption, it must lie along that path, exposing the dark secrets long hidden. Only time will tell if he has the courage to walk it.

Video Del Fuego, Part LVIII

Last time, I mentioned the progress SpaceX had made, not only in the first private spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station, but in their drive to become the first private company to fly astronauts to and from Earth orbit. All that said, the Falcon 9 is still an expendable rocket, meaning that they have to drop the spent stages into the ocean when they're finished with them. That's changing, though; Elon Musk's goal is for the Falcon 9 to become fully reusable.

They're getting a little closer to that goal.

This rig is a prototype for what will eventually become a fully reusable Falcon 9 first stage. After that, they intend to make the second stage reusable as well.

The importance of this is hard to over-estimate. Space travel is expensive only because it's so expensive to reach low Earth orbit. In terms of energy, once you're in Earth orbit, you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar System. If we can make that leg of the trip fairly economical, there's no limit to what we can do.

Besides, that looks like one hell of a ride.

Thirteen for '13

I don't do New Year's Resolutions. I haven't in quite some time. I've found that making up an enormous To-Do list of improvements all at once tends to set me up for failure. It's much better to make those improvements as I notice that they're needed, no matter what the calendar says. That said, the beginning of the year is a good time to take stock, and try to figure out where we're headed.

With that in mind, here are thirteen predictions and observations. Not all of them are for 2013. But they're all things that I expect, and fairly soon.

One: Soon, our cars will more or less drive themselves. It's already happening on a small scale. Where it gets interesting is when it starts to happen on a larger scale. What will happen, when thousands, even millions of self-driving cars hit the roads for morning rush hour? The obvious answer is that the car computers should be talking to each other, so that they can collectively de-conflict one another's routing. Centralized routing would work, in principle. But it would be dependent on a centralized processing system, and network, and the associated infrastructure. It would be far more efficient, and far more robust, if each vehicle were to be in contact with the few dozen or so in its immediate vicinity. That would be enough to co-ordinate lane changes, mergers, and getting on and off a freeway. That information would then automatically cascade up and down the roadway, because each car would be in contact with a different dozen or so, meaning that as traffic becomes congested, a car that's just now leaving the owner's driveway knows to plot a different path to the office that day. Best of all, there's no one point of failure that can be exploited or attacked. It's going to take some time to debug the system until it works properly, but I'm confident something like this will be in place before I retire.

Two: What's more, those cars will probably be electric. An important threshold was crossed last year that you might have missed if you weren't paying attention. The Motor Trend Car of the Year for 2012? The Tesla S, an electric sedan. Hybrids have won a permanent place in the automotive market now, where they were a novelty only five years ago. All-electic cars will soon follow suit. The big problem has always been the batteries: how to get enough of them, how to hold enough power for a decent range. The technology has gotten steadily better, though, and as more of them are recognized as simply being good cars to own, public acceptance will come. Because although gasoline is a convenient energy-storage medium, no one really loves it. An economical, reliable electric car with decent range will be welcomed, once it's available.

Three: Which leads us to the third point, going all-electric offers a significant set of challenges. I've written at length about this before, so I won't belabor the point again. But there are some encouraging signs out there. The Navy has been quiet about progress on the Polywell project, but what has been released seems to indicate that things are going about as well as they expected. To wit: the results match the theory, and the Navy has continued to supply funding so that the work can continue. There are good things happening in superconductivity research as well, although nothing that would make the headlines. Also, solar panels are getting cheaper all the time. Again, this isn't anything that I expect to break this year, but all the pieces are coming together. We'll have the tools we need, by the time we desperately need them.

Four: We will find an Earth-like extrasolar planet, and soon. At least we will, given a sufficiently generous definition of Earth-like. I'm going to define the term as a rocky planet, within a habitable zone, with mass and surface gravity within plus or minus 10% of our own. Within my professional lifetime so far, we've come from not even being sure that binary stars could even have planets, to finding planets in the star system next door. The techniques get better by the year. Instruments get more sensitive, capable of peering farther and farther into the cosmos, and also of finding smaller and smaller things nearby. We now think that the Milky Way Galaxy holds at least 100 million planets. Given that we also think that the Milky Way holds between 100 and 400 million stars, we now think that planets are at least as numerous as stars. I've written about the Drake Equation before, and I see little reason to revise ... much. I'm starting to wonder if the fraction Fp might be much closer to 1 than it is to my old guess of 0.5. If so ... then we might be able to find a pen pal out there, after all. (Since, by my estimates, N goes from 1.4 to 2.8 if Fp goes from 0.5 to 1.)

Five: 3-D Printing, coming to a corner mall near you! Again, this isn't something I expect for 2013, but I do expect distributed manufacturing to be part of the Next Big Thing. Consider: a shoe company that doesn't have to have factories, or warehouses, or any of that stuff, because the stores themselves have a 3-D printer that makes the shoes as the customers order them. They don't have to ship shoes, they ship raw materials and design patterns. They could undercut Nike and Reebok by 50%, and still make higher profits. Just about any retailer that deals in a line of relatively simple products could take advantage of this technology to radically streamline their logistical chain. To say nothing of the corner auto parts store, who can make weird parts to order, when the customer needs it. Need a water pump for a '53 Studebaker? Sure, pal, but it'll take us an hour or two to print one up...

Six: Two words: Google Glasses. Augmented Reality is coming, with all the benefits and horrors that will entail. But this is really only the next step on the road we've walked as a species ever since we started using fire, a quarter of a million years ago. We shape our tools, then our tools shape us, in an endless recursion.

Seven: Last year, we saw humans plumb the depths of the oceans, and the upper limits of the skies. The most awesome thing about this is that these efforts weren't sponsored by governments, but by private citizens. Don't misunderstand me, I'm no anti-government fanatic, but I think it's just incredible, and a beautiful thing, that the technology of exploration is becoming so democratized. And this isn't the end, not by a long shot. Last year, we saw a privately-financed spacecraft rendezvous with the space station, and begin routine cargo deliveries. This year, the deliveries continue. Next year, or the year after? Seats, man. We're that much closer to being able to buy a ticket. And how great is that?

Eight: I think it's worth mentioning that Elon Musk is responsible for two of the items on this list: the Tesla S sedan, and the Dragon spacecraft. Pay attention to this man. He's building a big chunk of the future.

Nine: The Great Gatsby is coming to the big screen. I'm conflicted ... On the one hand, did we ever need a Gatsby movie? But on the other, if done right (and this one looks like it might be), it could be great. (No pun intended.)

Ten: The Dallas Cowboys won't get any better until they get a new General Manager. Being that the current GM, Jerry Jones, is probably not going to be fired by the owner (also Jerry Jones), the odds of that are the same as the number of R's in "Fat Chance".

Eleven: And yes, it's going to suck to have to face RGIII twice a year for the next ten to fifteen years.

Twelve: The fallout from the Lance Armstrong scandal has been impressive, but the story's not over yet. His former boss, Johan Bruyneel, was also charged in the same matter, but has elected to go forward with arbitration. His case will be heard sometime this year. It will be very interesting to see how that turns out. Lance got all the publicity, but Bruyneel was central to the whole thing. He was the one who knew how to dupe the testers. We know who, what, when, where and why, but we don't yet know how. And that will be a crucial fact to have, going forward.

Thirteen: It's way too early to start handicapping 2016, but let's start throwing some names out there anyway. Hillary Clinton has the inside lane to the candidacy, if she should want another run at it. I don't see a challenger of sufficient stature to make a real contest of it, unless Joe Biden should want a go at it as well. On the Republican side, a lot of the big guns that sat out last time will probably start testing the waters over the next year and a half. We'll also see some newcomers throw down for it, as well. The "It's His Turn" rule says that the nomination is Santorum's to lose, but the fierce desperation of having lost two in a row does seem to change the rules. And of course, a great deal depends on what goes down over the next two years. It'll be interesting to watch them begin jockeying for position.

Happy New Year, everyone!

The World Will NOT End Next Week

I've talked about this once before, but it bears repeating: the world will NOT end next week. December 21st will come and go, like all the other December 21sts have, and while something unusual or noteworthy might happen, most of us will be around for the 22nd.

Some people will try to tell you about the "freakish" accuracy of the Mayan calendar. And yes, while the Mayan calendar was very accurate, such accuracy isn't actually all that unusual. You see, calendars serve two important purposes for the cultures that use them. They tell you when you need to plant, and when you need to harvest. Cultures who screw that up tend to exit the History Highway via the "Mass Starvation" off-ramp, and no one ever hears from them again. So, of course every culture we have physical artifacts for had pretty accurate calendars. It's rather like being surprised that everyone at a Drive-In Theater arrived in cars.

But you need not take my word for it. Observe:



All that said, next Friday is a perfect day for a sing-along:

RIP, Dave Brubeck

If your music collection doesn't include any jazz, it's incomplete. I get that it's not everyone's cup of tea, but it's one of the handful of genuinely American art forms. Modern American music, by any recognizable definition of the term, rests on a foundation that consists of country music, blues, and jazz. I bring this up because we lost one of the greats of jazz music this last week. Dave Brubeck passed away this last Wednesday at the age of 91. It's hard to overstate his impact on American music in the latter 20th Century.

I was about to say that the Dave Brubeck Quartet has finally been re-united in the hereafter, but that's not entirely correct. While it's true that Paul Desmond and Joe Morello have both passed on, Eugene Wright is still with us. It's worth mentioning that Brubeck cancelled several concerts, and even a television appearance, when stage managers of the late 1950s and early 1960s resisted the idea of an integrated quartet appearing together onstage.

To get some notion of how long a shadow he's cast, here's the Quartet performing Take Five in 1966:



And here's Al Jarreau performing Take Five in 1976:



And George Benson in 1986:



And Grover Washington, Jr. in 1992:



And Axis Mundi, in 2007:


Now to be fair, Paul Desmond wrote Take Five. And it was never intended as a stand-alone hit, it was meant to be a lead-in for a Joe Morello drum solo. (During which the other band members could, you know...) But fifty, nearly sixty years later, musicians still find it a rewarding piece to play, and audiences still love it.

The good news, insofar as there is any, is that his sons are carrying on the legacy.



That's Dan Brubeck on drums, and Chris Brubeck on saxophone, in the Brubeck Brothers Quartet. Performers come and go, but the show must go on.

Weird Worlds

The planet Mercury. At high noon, it's hot enough that lead would run like water. Just about the hottest place in the Solar System, excepting only the Sun itself. And just about the last place you'd go to look for ice cubes.

Except, of course, that you could keep a stash of them there. You'd just need to find the right place.

It's been a year for some really weird astronomy news. This week's highlight was confirmation of something long suspected. Like our own Moon, Mercury has polar craters that never, ever see sunlight. Even though the noontime sun is blisteringly hot, the eternal shadow of the polar craters gets cold, and stays cold. Vacuum is a very good thermal insulator. Radar data seemed to indicate it was a possibility, and that possibility was confirmed this week by the MESSENGER orbiter.

Not that this will ever have much practical use. Mercury is a horrible place to go for an ice run. In terms of energy, it's far easier to fling something into interstellar space than to put it into orbit around Mercury. But it illustrates nicely something Sir Arthur Clarke used to say: not only is the Universe stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine.

Going a little farther afield, earlier in the year we had some interesting news from Mars. Last month, the rover Curiosity found some shiny things in the Martian soil. What kind of shiny things, you ask? Well, we don't know yet. Possibly a fairly mundane mineral, possibly something metallic. It will take some time to sift through the results. And even if there is gold in them thar hills, it'll be some time yet before we'll be able to go out and get it.

Mind you, people are working on ways to do just that. Take Elon Musk, for example. While his immediate goals are slightly more modest -- haul cargo to the Space Station, and later on, crew -- his ultimate goal is far more ambitious. What he really wants is to plant a colony on Mars. While it's an ambitious goal, and beyond our current abilities, it's something we'll eventually be able to do. Recent studies have revealed that Mars' atmosphere, while thin, is dense enough to provide enough protection from radiation that we could live on the surface. The radiation environment was really the last unknown. Everything else that a settlement needs is there: water, oxygen, carbon, metals. It'll be hard at first, but it's an important insurance policy for the species.

Going farther afield still, we can start looking at planets around other stars. It's hard to believe now, but only twenty years ago, we were still debating whether or not they were even possible. One of the projects I considered working on for my dissertation, way back when, was a numerical study on the theoretical stability of orbits in a binary star system. I had a gut feeling that if a planet were close enough to one or the other of the stars, the orbit would be stable enough that the companion star wouldn't perturb it and fling it off into deep space. As we've discovered time and again over the last twenty years, my hunch was right. And just last month, it was announced that we discovered a planet circling one of our nearest stellar neighbors, Alpha Centauri B. The planet, called Alpha Centauri Bb, is about our size. The similarities end there. Its year is just over three days long. It's 25 times closer to Alpha Centauri B than we are to our own Sun. While Earth pokes along at 30 kilometers per second, this planet screams across the sky almost five times faster. And, as you could imagine, it's hot. Noontime on Mercury is hot enough to melt lead. Noontime there is hot enough to melt steel. Needless to say, building a lander would be ... a challenge.

But a flyby would be relatively easy. Relatively, I say; it'd still be damn hard. We've given some thought to how to get the job done, though. The first serious proposal for an interstellar probe was the Daedalus project, a design study run by (who else?) the British Interplanetary Society. The idea is being updated and refined under Project Icarus, named for the son of Daedalus, and run by the BIS and the Tau Zero Foundation. They began the design study in 2009, and expect to be finished with that phase in 2014. Not that they expect to have a currently-realizable design by then. We've got a long way to go before we have that capability. But they expect to be able to figure out what we need to do to get there from here.

It's a marvelous time to be alive. I know people who'd rather live in the past. Not me. This is my time: here, at the beginning, with untold wonders spread out before us, waiting to be uncovered. There's no place I'd rather be.

Video Del Fuego, Part LVII

I have to say, I'm a big fan of deep-fried turkey. But you have to be careful if you do it. Really careful. Boiling hot oil and open flames are things that demand the utmost respect and careful attention, and even if you do everything right, stupid things can still happen. Case in point:



And speaking of turkeys...



Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Video Del Fuego, Part LVI

Now that the election's over, I have more time for the finer things in life. One of them is Orbiter. It's a freeware spaceflight simulator that I've talked about from time to time.

You can do just about anything with it. Want to re-live highlights from spaceflight history? Want to try out one of the designs that almost made it? Or do you want to try something that might be just beyond the horizon? It's your choice. Plus, Orbiter can be as hard or as easy as you want it to be. Some scenarios, you can just sit back and enjoy the ride. None of those involve the XR-2. The Ravenstar is definitely a pilot's airplane. I've flown it to orbit, but I've never managed to land the SOB in one piece.

But here's a guy who has:



And, as a bonus, an Apollo 11 re-do:



If you like flight sims, and you don't mind a bit of a learning curve, Orbiter is well worth a look.

Election 2012: Post-Mortem

I'm not entirely sure what to make of what happened yesterday and last night. I'm going to need a little help.



Dammit. I've already said that.

Anyway, now that it's too late to vote, early or often, let's see if we can't figure out what went down.

1) Intrade FTW! Once again, the betting market established the mark to beat, with one notable exception. Based on their guidance as of Friday, I predicted Virginia would go blue, but Florida would go red. That was a coin-flip, one that I just flat out called wrong. But with the exception of Florida, nothing happened last night that came as a surprise. At least, nothing voting-related.

2) Morning Crow: I'm not sure if he's said anything about it yet, but Nate Silver's site FiveThirtyEight also did pretty well last night. His final EV total came to 313, and I'm not entirely sure how he got that number ... but I'm guessing it was a weighted average of 303 and 332, the former being the total if Romney wins Florida, the latter if Obama wins that state. We just don't know which one it is yet, and may not for some time. But beyond Mr. Silver's acumen, polls in general have done really well this year. If you were going by FiveThirtyEight or Pollster last night, you wouldn't have seen many surprises either. The people who dissed the math nerds are eating a heaping helping of crow this day.

3) Not All Polls Are Created Equal: The guys who set up the Unskewed Polls website were convinced, utterly convinced, that the polling data was lying to them. So they fiddled with the data, using some weighted averaging of their own. Except ... the polls weren't lying. They were a very accurate picture of what was happening on the ground. Their final, definitive prediction ... well, it's just sad. Then, when you add pundits who take said prediction seriously...

4) The Epic Meltdown: Some things must be seen to be believed.



Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time on live television, paradigm shifting without a clutch! One can almost feel sorry for people like Karl Rove. They've bought in so thoroughly, so deeply, into the mental model they've created of the world around them that they've forgotten that the map is not the territory. Now, here's an interesting question, one that we can answer by stages in 2014 and 2016: will the smarter consumers of conservative media begin to ask the hard questions? Some will, because some already have: Andrew Sullivan being one, and David Frum being another. Some of the leaders will tire of losing. They'll stop paying attention to the outlets who merely tell the listeners and viewers what they think they want to hear.

5) The Twilight Of An Era: The Goldwater-Reagan era of modern conservatism is now well and truly over. It's too early to tell what will take its place, but the Reagan coalition has hit the reef, hard, and is taking on water. It won't last much longer.

6) Handicapping the 2016 Field: I've said before that "It's His Turn" is powerful mojo within the Republican party, which puts Rick Santorum in the pole position for 2016. Except that that's not always true. The exceptions are illustrative. Only three times in the last sixty years has "It's His Turn" failed. It failed in 1952, when Eisenhower won the nomination. It failed in 1964, when Goldwater won. And it failed in 2000, when George W. Bush won. The 1964 case is a bit of an outlier, since the GOP had a bit of a civil war that year between the hard-line conservatives and the moderates. That, in my view, was the beginning of the Goldwater-Reagan era. But let's look at 1952 and 2000: both occurred after multi-term Democratic administrations. In 1952, a 21-year-old casting his first ballot did not have a Republican President in his or her living memory. The Republicans were desperate for a win. Ordinarily they'd never give the nomination to a neophyte who'd never even voted before ... but this neophyte was the victorious savior of Europe. Not everyone liked Ike, but even most of those who didn't respected him. Then, in 2000, you had Clinton's two terms, and he was still fairly popular even at the end. The Republicans wanted a winner. I kind of expect this to repeat for 2016. Except, that I also kind of expect the kind of scrum that broke out in 1964.  We'll have to see how the 2014 mid-terms shake out. It'll be interesting, if nothing else.

7) And How'd Those SuperPACs Work Out For You? Six billion dollars were shoveled down the bottomless maw of the Media Beast, to no noticeable effect. The people who expected Mitt Romney to surf a tsunami of SuperPAC cash to the White House have been bitterly disappointed. The Air Game has squared off against the Ground Game, and lost decisively. Now, it may not always work that way, but at the end of the day it's the ballots at the polling place that count. Ads won't get those feet to the booth. The good word of someone you know and trust will. It'll be interesting to see how politicians react, once they digest how utterly useless SuperPACs seemed to be this time around.

8) The People Have Spoken! But what the roaring purple Hell have they said? They re-elected a Democrat to the White House. They also re-elected a Democratic majority to the Senate ... but returned a Republican majority to the House. I think John Boehner might have been right this afternoon, when he basically said that the American people expect them to hug it out and make this $&!@ work. If they wanted Obama to drive on with full force, they'd have given him a majority with which to do it, which they didn't. But, by returning him to the Presidency, they've basically said that they want to keep the Affordable Care Act in place. And they've said that they trust his vision better than Romney's, but they don't want him going crazy with it. Eh, it ain't the worst of results. And, they've also approved same-sex marriage in several states, and a major liberalization of drug laws in a few others. Like I said, I'm really not sure what to make of all this. TNC has a round-up, and I kind of agree with his assessment. The templates are shifting, and I don't entirely know what that means. It'll be interesting to find out.

9) Best Live-Blog Line Ever: Speaking of TNC, he had a beaut -- "9:55 To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their bloggers..."

10) Eight-Year Bloggiversary! Or near enough as makes no difference. I started this thing in the aftermath of the 2004 election, when I thought that someone ought to start talking the Democrats down off of the ledges. There were some pretty unhelpful things being said, back when. Things have gotten better.

And, that's a wrap. Election 2012 is now in the books. When historians write their thoughts of our times, I think one of the things they'll say of 2008 and 2012 is that while a majority of Americans were ready to elect an African-American President, a sizable minority were not yet ready to be governed by one. But they'll also write that we muddled through it, somehow. Because we're Americans, and that's just how we roll.

Election 2012: Joe Scarborough Fails Statistics Forever

On August 6th of this year, the Mars Science Laboratory touched down in Gale Crater. It was a feat of celestial navigation that's hardly had any equal. Not only because it was able to hit such a small target after flying three hundred fifty million miles, but because of this:

Entry into Mars' atmosphere had been timed with such exquisite precision that the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was in position to take a picture of Curiosity floating down under its parachute. Modern guidance and navigation techniques are sufficiently precise that even after a flight of ten months and hundreds of millions of miles, one spaceship can look over its shoulder and snap a photo of another. Part of the mathematical tool kit that makes it all possible is Bayesian analysis, a statistical method for reducing unknown sources of error. The same kind of analysis can be performed on any data, including statistical data, and Nate Silver does this with polling data over at FiveThirtyEight ... and, for what it's worth, it's a mathematical tool kit that Joe Scarborough has gone on public record describing as "a joke."

Mind you, I enjoy his program greatly, and my wife watches it every morning. But Joe, if you don't understand what Bayesian analysis is or how it works, could you kindly shut the Hell up about it?

We're down to the last four days, my friends. It's the two-minute warning. Either man could win at this point, obviously, but the probabilities are beginning to narrow down. Nate Silver's analogy of Barack Obama being ahead by a field goal is an apt one. If he can get a first down, he can run out the clock. About all Romney can hope for is for him to fumble, or throw a pick-six. And it's important to note that either of those two things could happen. It's all coming down to a handful of states, and even a handful of counties within those states. With fewer than a hundred hours to go, every second counts.

And now, over to the part of the program that Joe hates: the numbers. As usual, my data sources are Intrade, FiveThirtyEight, and Pollster. Incidentally, I'll answer a question, in case you're curious: why those three? I like Intrade, because it captures that whole "wisdom of crowds" thing. And it was freakishly accurate last time. Until it gets something important horribly wrong, it's in the mix. And I like FiveThirtyEight, because it uses techniques I learned during my time as a GN&C weenie in graduate school. Pollster, on the other hand, uses a more traditional "poll of polls" approach. If three different methods reach more or less the same answer, then it's probably a pretty dependable answer. Anyway, for the last time this season, here they are, current as of Friday afternoon.

From Intrade:

Barack Obama (D): 66.9%, 290 EV (+3.1%, +14 EV)
Mitt Romney (R): 33.1%, 244 EV (-3.2%, -14 EV)

From FiveThirtyEight:

Barack Obama (D): 81.1%, 303.3 EV (+6.7%, +7.9 EV)
Mitt Romney (R): 18.9%, 234.7 EV (-6.7%, -7.9 EV)

From Pollster:

Strong D: 237 EV (+/- 0)
Lean D: 44 EV (+4)
Tossup: 66 (+11)
Lean R: 0 (-15)
Strong R: 191 (+/- 0)

There's no good news here for a Republican. The closest thing to good news for Romney is that he's got a firm floor of 191. That hasn't budged in months. But his "lean" support has bounced into and out of the "toss-up" column all along. Now, I think that a fair bit of that will end up in his court. But from that firm floor of 191, he needs all of the toss-ups, plus at least 13 from Obama's "leaning" column. And I don't think he's going to get all of the toss-ups. Some of those are going to bounce Obama's way, and that's all gravy anyway, since if all his "strong" and "lean" support proves out, that's all he needs.

What Mitt Romney Must Do: He's got to get every last one of his people to the polls. Every. Last. One. And even that might not be enough. But that's what it comes down to, now. His campaign has to execute, and get their people in to vote.

What Barack Obama Must Do: See above, except that he's working from a slightly better position. As I said earlier, all he needs is a first down and he can run out the clock. His main enemy now isn't Romney, it's Complacency. He can still snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, if he works at it. Execution, and a strong ground game, those are the keys.

And The Winner Is... Unemployment is down. The housing market is entering a real recovery. Gas prices are stable. Incumbent Presidents almost never lose unless the economy is totally dead, the international situation has gone south, or both. While the economy isn't what anyone would call good, it's better now than it has been, and that's good enough for the advantages of incumbency to work their magic. So, I'm going to make my semi-official prediction: Barack Obama wins re-election, with 303 votes in the Electoral College. The popular vote will probably be 51-49, or something very close to it. It's a closer race than last time, and Mitt Romney has run a pretty good race for someone who has always come across as a collaboration between the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab and Disney's Animatronics. But this was always Obama's race to lose, and in that first debate, he sure gave it the old college try. If you can still find someone willing to take the bet, I'd take 2-1 odds, and I'd take 300 for the over-under in the Electoral College.

It's too late now to vote early. But, it's never too late to vote often! I'll check in Tuesday night, and see how things turn out.