Nate Silver Predicts the Oscars

Yes, it's Oscar weekend and NYT numbercruncher Nate Silver has turned his attention to the Academy Awards based on statistics of the overall awards season.

Silver predicts Argo in a landslide, with Steven Spielberg having a slight edge over Ang Lee as Best Director. Affleck, of course, was snubbed.

He gives the Best Actor trophy to Daniel Day-Lewis, the Best Actress trophy to Jennifer Lawrence, Best Supporting Actor to Tommy Lee Jones, and Best Supporting Actress to Anne Hathaway, whom he calls "as safe a bet to win for 'Les Misérables' as Mitt Romney was to win Utah."

See how he came up with his numbers here.

Do you agree with Silver's picks? Why or why not?

News: Robbie Rogers, Nate Silver, Meteor, Joan Rivers

Nate Silver and Politico reporter Ken Vogel got into a Twitter war over the use of "clarification" versus "correction."

The New York Times found wide support for recently out soccer player Robbie Rogers: "Rogers was similarly embraced throughout the soccer community. Numerous players took to social media to support him, including Eddie Pope, a former United States defender, who wrote on Twitter, 'Brave men like you will make it so that one day there is no need for an announcement.' Benny Feilhaber, who played with Rogers on the 2008 United States Olympic team, wrote to Rogers on Twitter that he was 'proud to call you my friend.'"

"Are gay-centered churches relevant anymore?"

Tyler, The Creator and Frank Ocean team up for "Brimmer."

Andrew Keegan and his face are all over the place.

Richard Socarides on why the Justice Department will likely take a strong stand for marriage equality before the Supreme Court starts hearing cases: "If it doesn't, the Court will wonder why [President Obama] is reluctant to back up his policy ideas with legal arguments to match. It will likely send a message that the President questions whether the country is ready for gay marriage, and send a signal that a more cautious approach by the Court is acceptable to the White House."

The post-meteor clean-up begins in Russia: "Gov. Mikhail Yurevich on Saturday said that damage from the high-altitude explosion -believed to have been as powerful as 20 Hiroshima bombs — is estimated at 1 billion rubles ($33 million). He promised to have all the broken windows replaced within a week. But that is a long wait in a frigid region. The midday temperature in Chelyabinsk was 10 F..."

Joan Rivers tells Jimmy Fallon that Abraham Lincoln was gay.

Four gay men stranded with 4,000 others on the Carnival cruise adrift in the Gulf of Mexico have made it back home to Dallas.

Blue Ivy looks a lot like mother Beyonce.

Anti-gay Boy Scout protesters sure know how to exploit children.

I literally gasped: Texas and Maine lawmakers want to include gun training in high school curricula.

Meanwhile, in Washington State, authorities say two-fifth grade kids brought a knife and a gun to school to kill one of their classmates.

Remember Pepsi AM?

Hoping to counter Indiana school teacher Diana Medley's anti-gay hate, a coalition of parents, students and activists are telling LGBT teens "You Have a Purpose."

Sarah Michelle Gellar, a gay favorite since her Buffy days, will co-star alongside Robin Williams on a new CBS sitcom.

Dogs can distinguish their species from other critters. "For the study, a team of French researchers put nine pet dogs in front of two side-by-side computer screens that showed images of faces. In each pair of pictures, one showed a dog's face (various breeds and cross-breeds were featured) and the other showed non-dog animals, including cows, horses, cats, birds and humans... Over the course of dozens of trials, the dogs showed a preference for the dog faces, and they seemed to lump all dogs into the same category, regardless of whether they were looking at a Chihuahua or a mastiff, the researchers said."

From The Guardian: "The number of gay and bisexual men contracting HIV rose over the past 20 years because of an increase in numbers having unprotected sex, researchers have found. The number of UK men who have sex with men and having intercourse without a condom rose by 26% between 1990 and 2010, the study by the Health Protection Agency (HPA) and University College London showed."

News: Rob Gronkowski, Immigration, NASA, Asylum

Nate Silver makes his prediction for the Super Bowl.

His team may not be competing in the Super Bowl, but Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski found himself partying shirtless in New Orleans.

NASA says an approaching asteroid will be the largest object to ever come this close to Earth, but the mega rock won't zip by until later this month.

Harry Reid says immigration reform should include same-sex families: "If we have gay folks in this country who have children, or they come from some other place they should be protected just like any other child."

Ricky Martin lands in Oz.

Buzzfeed: The Dying Political Tradition Of Avoiding The Gay Question.

Britney Spears will not be playing Vegas.

Louisville, Kentucky, expands anti-discrimination protections for city employees.

Inventor of the Etch A Sketch dead at 86.

Iowa Senator Matt McCoy wants to reduce the penalty for HIV-positive people who don't purposely pass the virus to their sex partners. "...someone convicted of intentional or attempted transmission of the virus could be sentenced to a maximum of five years in prison and face a $750 to $7,500 fine. That would put HIV in the same criminal category as transmitting any other communicable disease, such as Hepatitis C."

Report: Gay UK asylum seekers frequently required to prove sexuality: "(Lecture) will detail the extraordinary methods to which individuals are resorting – including filming themselves having sex – to justify requests for refuge."

Nate Silver Questioned About Gay Identity on Reddit

As I mentioned on Monday, Nate Silver did an AMA (Ask Me Anything) interview on Reddit yesterday.

Reddit user snsiegel asked Silver:

In a recent profile, you stated you wished not to be known as a "gay statistician" but as a statistician who happens to be gay. Isn't that a bit naive in today's political and social climate? Don’t you think that whether you like it or not, people will treat you differently because you are gay and that your identity as a gay man cannot be limited to your private sexuality? As someone so ubiquitous now in the public sphere, should you be addressing issues in your writing that are related to gay rights as much as baseball?

Replied Silver:

It's a complicated issue that maybe doesn't lend itself so well to the reddit treatment.

My quick-and-dirty view is that people are too quick to affiliate themselves with identity groups of all kinds, as opposed to carving out their own path in life.

Obviously, there is also the issue of how one is perceived by others. Living in New York in 2013 provides one with much a much greater ability to exercise his independence than living in Uganda — or for that matter living in New York forty years ago. So perhaps there's a bit of a "you didn't build that" quality in terms of taking for granted some of the freedoms that I have now.

And/but/also, one of the broader lessons in the history of how gay people have been treated is that perhaps we should empower people to make their own choices and live their own lives, and that we should be somewhat distrustful about the whims and tastes and legal constraints imposed by society.

There were many more questions. You can read them on Reddit, or as a transcript in the NYT.

Ask Nate Silver Anything

Via FiveThirtyEight:

Nate will be answering readers’ questions live at 2 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday in an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit. You can submit questions to Nate’s post here (the post will go up around noon on Tuesday).

Nate Silver: 'Sexually Gay But Ethnically Straight'

OUT Editor Aaron Hicklin delivers an engaging profile of Nate Silver, whom the magazine has named its 'Person of the Year'. Over drinks, Silver goes in depth with Hicklin about his critics, about how he became so good at being a stats geek (perspiration), what his plans are for the future, and his sexuality:

“To my friends, I’m kind of sexually gay but ethnically straight,” explains Silver, who came out to his parents after spending a year in London studying economics—“I don’t know how I got any work done”—and considers gay conformity as perfidious as straight conformity. He supports marriage equality, but worries that growing acceptance of gays will dent our capacity to question broader injustice.

“For me, I think the most important distinguishing characteristic is that I’m independent-minded,” he says. “I’m sure that being gay encouraged the independent-mindedness, but that same independent-mindedness makes me a little bit skeptical of parts of gay culture, I suppose.”

He recalls a series of flagpoles in Boystown in Chicago memorializing various gay Americans. “There was one little plaque for Keith Haring, and it was, like, ‘Keith Haring, gay American artist, 1962 to 1981,’ or whatever [actually 1958 to 1990], and I was like, Why isn’t he just an American artist? I don’t want to be Nate Silver, gay statistician, any more than I want to be known as a white, half-Jewish statistician who lives in New York.”

Nate Silver: Person of the Year [out]

Incidentally, Silver spoke out about his sexuality for the first time earlier this year, so, though technically out, he made our big list of the '50 Most Powerful Coming Outs' because he decided to talk about it.