I loved Andrew's Operating Systems book in college, but unless I'm misunderstanding his methodology, his use of statistics here is poor.

I'm *horrible* with statistics, but one thing I know is that if you do a poll that has a +/- 3% margin of error, and the score is, say, 49% Kerry, 48% Bush, then you can't call that poll "barely Bush." The poll is, in reality, a dead heat, and NO realistic prediction or projection can be made from it, because the spread is within the MoE.

I understand that what he's trying to do is provide a lot of different pictures of how the vote looks using different algorithms, different polls, etc., and a map with 10 or 12 states that are "too close to call" doesn't look very interesting... But the way he's splitting hairs with these poll results, he might as well investigate further into a 49% - 49% poll and see whether it's really 49.3% - 49.1%, just so he can color one of the states "barely Bush" or "barely Kerry."

I guess the biggest problem I have is that anyone who casually glances at this site might be misled into thinking there's some sophisticated statistical jiggery-pokery that's allowing Tanenbaum to make projections that are somehow more accurate, so he can color in more white states either reddish or blueish... And that's just not the case.

Or, to put it another way, statistics don't lie, but disgruntled Computer Science professors do.