WhimsyLand

I've been following the political prediction markets for a while.  The most interesting of these are the ones where the trades are in real money:  Iowa Electronic Markets (which has a better track record of prediction), and the Ireland-based Intrade.com.  Both organizations are bourses that let you buy futures contracts on political events.  For example, at Intrade, you can bet that Barack Obama will win the Democratic Party nomination for president.  Right now, one contract will cost you $29.10 and if he succeeds, you will cash in $100.  The cost of a contract goes up and down and you can trade every day if you like, buying and selling contracts as you would soybeans, light crude or pork bellies.  So who is actually going to pay you?  Someone who has sold a contract.  If you sell a contract for Hillary winning the presidency, for example, you will receive $29.  If she actually does win the presidency, you will be out $100.  Like any futures contract, you can track the price day to day, as it changes in response to events.  Bad weather in the Midwest?  Corn futures go up.  Obama takes flack for recent statements?  Obama futures go down.  Right now, Clinton's Democratic nominee for president contract is at $47.60 (if you buy a contract and she wins, you will be given $100).  Obama is at $37.10, Edwards at $6.20 and John Kerry at 10 cents.  Curiously, Al Gore's contract is at a respectable $4.90, which is pretty interesting considering he has vowed not to run.  Analysts follow the real-money contract action and assume, as they do on Wall Street, that Everybody is smarter than Anybody.  Rudy Giuliani's Republican presidential nominee capture will cost you $39.50, followed closely by Fred Thompson at $28.20, and Mitt Romney at $18.50.  The odds change a bit when you look at the contracts for actual presidential winners:  Clinton sits at $29, followed by Giuliani at $21 and Obama at $19 and change.  Curiously, the despicable fork-tongued Fred Thomson resides in fourth position at $15. What's interesting about these markets is that (certainly, in the case of the Iowa Electronic Markets) they serve as predictors of the actual outcomes of political events, and have had considerable predictive power in the past.

As you can tell, I am finally between projects.  I'm trying to sort out the curious history of Herr Wittgenstein in odd moments when I'm not cleaning up the 1,000 square feet that is Set Software Services.  We just got a smallish job from a good customer to test Linux drivers, which led Dima to conclude that we needed a new badass PC with an Athlon 6000, tons of memory and removable drive drawers so that we could install and test against Fedora Core, Mandrake, Ubuntu, SuSE, and all the other possible Linux distributions.  Dima loves having a half-dozen machines within the reach of his rolling ergonomic desk-chair.  I figure we have something like 25 PCs at this point, not counting the dozen or so other platforms (PPC, MIPS, and miscellaneous) that sit on desktops waiting for progress on some project or other.  That's not counting the 6 servers, uninterruptible power supplies, dozens of monitors (LCD, CRT and touchscreen), lab gear (oscilloscopes, flash burners, Dremel tools, soldering stations), or the bazillion cables for every possible application (audio/video, USB, Ethernet).  We've got this Really Big Project starting in a couple of weeks, and I'm trying to figure out which projects I can mothball (by which, I mean packaging up everything in a big plastic under-the-bed Tupperware-like container and stack it up in the storage area).  The problem is the moment you pull the DuctTape off the table holding the USB hub and put away all the touch-sensitive frames, and stack everything into a plastic container, the client calls and asks for just one more test and you have to drag everything out again.  Of course, it could be worse, clients could not be calling, so who am I to complain? 

I think I missed reporting on the recent Time.  More on that when I finish building Dima's new PC tomorrow.  UPS just showed up with a motherboard, DVD drive, SATA hard disk, video adapter, memory and enclosure.  Looks like my early morning is spoken for.