(Disclaimer: This is a short entry about the US presidential election, and although barely anybody I know cares about American politics, I'm pretty interested in it... so nyah.)
There are no end of pseudo-statistical methods of election outcome prediction, and most of them sound like nonsense. Nevertheless, occasionally you'll hear one that sounds like it may, by some freak confluence, actually be plausible.
One of them goes like this: in almost every Presidential election since television became popular, the tallest candidate has won. It's called the Presidential Height Index or PHI. (I said almost -- Ford lost to the diminutive Carter in 1976, and Bush beat the taller man Gore in 2000 -- for some value of 'beat'.) It could be a big coincidence, but the evidence says that height is a big voter turn-on. And when you bear in mind the composition of the American electorate, that doesn't even sound particularly implausible.
I bring this subject up because it gives me hope. The first debate aired last night and it's not until you see them side by side that you realise that Kerry's not just taller than Bush... he's so much taller that it's comical. So come on, PHI, don't fail us now.
(By the way, it's now October, so don't be surprised if there's a... uhh... surprise.)
There have, of course, been a number of bomb scares on flights to the US recently. Someone crying wolf perhaps, so that people take less notice of the warning about the plane which /actually/ has the bomb on?
Interesting enough, if the whole world could vote in the upcoming elections, there wouldn't be much doubt who's the next President of the USA, see http://betavote.com/
(ok, that site is probably not 100% accurate, considering that according to it Kerry is 51% in the lead in the USA, which is not what I heard about the latest polls in the US itself)