Presidential Predictions

I wouldn't be a good blogger with out wildly guessing at the outcome of the election right? In 2004 there was no blog, but fair to say I guessed really really wrong. I thought that "momentum" in the polls was going to some how push Kerry over the top in the intervening hours between the last poll and election day. But look at the graph showing the aggregate race four years ago:


You can see that last minute surge that gave me hope, but looking at the big picture it was futile. Much of what is called "momentum" in polling (and the stock market) is really just a random, statistical walk one way or the other. Polling that happened yesterday does not affect polling done today! So, lets look at where things are right now nationally including the McCain "momentum" that he has been talking about all month:


On the state by state level, it looks even worse for McCain. If you assume that McCain wins all of the states labeled "toss up" and wins all the "lean democratic" states (less than +8 for Obama) on the pollster.com web page, you get this:




McCain is still losing! He would have to flip either VA (+8.1) or PA (+10.7) or NH (+11) to win. This is the more likely outcome:



The only ones on that list I am not sure about are Missouri, where it will be very very close, and North Carolina and Florida where turn-out will be key. If it is a big Obama win, you can add: Indiana, Georgia, North Dakota, Montana, and even McCain's home state of Arizona to places where it will be close.

One thing about these maps is that we will probably know very early on election night if McCain has any chance. If Obama wins any set of two big east cost states from within Florida, Virginia, or Pennsylvania, it will be numerically over right away. If Obama wins North Carolina, it will be effectively over.

The rest of the night will be looking at house and senate races, along with Prop 8 in CA. I am hopeful about Bachman loosing to Tinklenberg but not betting on it. Incumbents are hard to beat even if they are as crazy awful as Bachman. And Franken's odds are now not looking good either after a breif surge of support. The best hope both Tinklenberg and Franken have is that Obama's coat tails will be large enough to pull them over the top on election day!

Kittens!

Okay, okay, time to tell the big secret! No, we aren't adopting a cat from the humane society. We may, however, be fostering some orphan kittens if the shelter needs our help! I had training today for the U of MN's Orphan Kitten Program, which works with local shelters to send kittens home with vet students to be bottle fed until they're old enough to be adopted out of the shelter. Orphan kittens take lots of work (bottle feeding 12 times a day when they're really young!), but can be very rewarding too. I figured it's a good compromise for now, when we're not in the best position to adopt a cat, but I have a lighter course load and a little extra time on my hands. This year's kittens have pretty much all been born, so I probably won't have any fosters until early next spring. Watch the blog for pictures if/when we get a litter!

Another clue

Hmm...

What's this...?

More details to come!

Afton CX

Wow what a great race, and another one in the books! This was race number 4 for me and by far the best race and best performance to date. Out of 60 racers I finished 34th which puts me in the 57th percentile for this race. For comparison, last week I finished way back in the 79th percentile!

It was also a great race because of the huge fan section cheering along! It was a great family afternoon with a bike ride in between.

The circuit this time was a true cyclocross course with long grass stretches, several barriers (that were really tall!), a wicked hill to run up (with a skull on a stick at the bottom as warning), mud, dirt, gravel, and pavement! Personally, I found out that I really do love the run ups. The photo on the right here is the hill on the first lap, and I am the one in black at the end of the pack. But I think I passed eight of those nine people during this run up! So I finally found something I am good at in cyclocross. Running! Hmmm...

The best moment for me came on the last lap when I was chasing two riders and finally caught one near the top of the hill. I wasn't sure I had the energy to pass him, but decided that I had to try so I charged up the last quarter of the hill past him, and left him behind. I tried to catch the rider in front of him too, but there wasn't enough course left so I rode into the finish line easy and alone.

This race was very well documented and I got lots of cool photos of L. and I jumping, running, and looking tired along with some great shots of the family too. I am glad the race was Saturday and not today, that would have been miserable!

Economic update

It has been a while since I wrote anything down about the economy because frankly it is a huge bummer, but I have still been watching with interest what is going on. Here is where I think we are this week:

The world has avoided a "systemic financial meltdown" after unprecedented coordinated action. The world was at the brink, but has backed off. Governments put all the chips on the table saying, "we will exist." The downside to that bet was literally the collapse of nations - but luckily they won. Even Iceland looks like it will survive. They even used the Swedish model!

The TED spread which measures how much risk banks see in other banks rose to 4.63% - 30% higher than the black Monday crash of 1987 - but has since subsided to 2.66%. It has historically been between .5-1.5% so things are not good but they are not going to explode either.

So it seems that we are past a phase I of this crisis, the banking phase. Now on onto phase II, the global recession.

As everyone has noticed, the stock market has gone insane. It is not that it has just gone down, it has going up and down violently almost every day, and sometimes even during the day there are massive swings. This is measured by the VIX Volatility index that is at an all time high since it started in 1990. And if you look at this month, even the Volatility index has been volatile! So the basic assumption that the market is driven by value has taken a leave for the foreseeable future.

The reason I started this post was because of this Bloomberg article showing the value of the Baltic Dry Index, an index that measures international freight. It has plunged 90% since May making it a bigger drop than the .com boom, or the housing bubble. Shippers can't get credit for cargo, so they are not moving goods. This is what will really drive Phase II of this crisis I believe, as developing and emerging markets (Brazil, China, etc) get slaughtered by what will be an already severe rescission in the powerful G8 nations, as their currency gets drained of value as investors flee towards the dollar.

So some "predictions." Right now everyone is apocalyptic but so far things have not been as bad as 1973-76 when the market declined 45% and then recovered over 26 months as shown here:


Right now markets have declined 41% over 13 months. If you want to correlate 1974 to today, that means the DOW hits a low of 7,750 next October, and finally recovers at the very start of 2011. That seemed like crazy talk a month ago, but now seems optimistic!

Now the pessimistic side. John Authers put forward a disturbing concept today though that is worth watching. Basically, he says that after Japan's financial crisis of the 1990s their interest rate was effectively 0% through out the 90s and is still very low today. So smart investors would borrow Japanese Yen and pump that money into the stock market to turn a free profit. This is called the "Yen Carry Trade" and it has gone bust along with everything else. But what Authers is suggesting is that we have been in a Yen Carry Trade bubble for the past 10 or 15 years that is now busting.

If that is true, that would be deeply shocking and fundamentally change the understanding of the economic landscape going back to the late 1980s. It would also mean the DOW should fall to around where it really broke off from the Japanese Nikkei stock market, which has floundered for decades.

That was in 1995, at 3,900...



And Rubbini is sounding more like he believes that even when the rescission is over it might recover "recover" in an "L" shape like Japan experienced in the 1990s as shown above. To this day 18 years later, the Nikkei has never recovered. He stresses the "might" here though. As of right now he is still thinking in "U" shapes a-la 1974.

So like I said, a bummer. The only thing I can hope for is that in the past decade, the top 1% has gained wealth in huge disproportion to the rest of us, so perhaps this downturn will disproportionally affect them too. One can hope.

EDIT: This is interesting. Draw a line using the basic trajectory of the stock market before it took off in 1995 and you get this:



So if the Dow had kept a steady climb since 1995 it would have been at about 7,500, or about 10% lower than the market is right now...

Big Ring Flyers CX

Race number 3 in the books! I finished the "C" race 38th out of 48th, which if you adjust for the number of racers, was actually my worst finish of the year. I also got results from last week's race and finished that 72nd out of 98 which is about right. L. had a crazy race this weekend, and rode through the finish in 1st place quite alone!

All three races have been so different, and this one was no exception. It was very grassy and flat, and since they got last minute news that they couldn't run the race through the woods they added some mad mazes that riders had to bike through. No run-up or hills to speak of. I started the race back quite a bit, and really wasn't feeling it. I just sort of bumbled along for a lap keeping in line, and it wasn't until I was into lap 2 did I realize that I was in the middle of the race and had better get moving! I did well after that, but by then I think I had dug myself into a hole and couldn't catch up. Oh well, it was still lots of fun and next weekend is at Afton Alps that is described as "something for everyone" with run-ups, possible mud, some fast flat, and other craziness (I hope). It is turning into "spectator weekend" so come on out!

I had a great practice tonight, and there is another tomorrow, so I should be primed for this weekend. Here my new park, that I think I like more. It is much larger so you can get some good long runs at speed which has been more like the races I have been in.


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Still alive!

Apologies for the lack of vet-school-related blogging recently. We had our first round of exams of third year, and rather than starting gradually, they came in one big burst (three in-class exams and four take-home exams within 5 days!). Just like classes, the exams are making me feel a little bit more doctor-ish as they feel more clinical than previous years. You know- instead of "Name all the hormones produced in the adrenal glands", we get questions like, "How do you treat acute vomiting in the dog?". Much more practical!

We also have gotten our hands dirty in lab, learning how to repair a fractured tibia, reattach a tibial tuberosity avulsion, and perform an extracapsular repair to fix a rupture cranial cruciate ligament (or a torn ACL in human-medicine-ese). We also got to practice placing urinary catheters, performing a chest tap, and honing our skills on the all-important physical exam. Everything we get to practice makes me feel one step closer to being a doctor, and makes the hours that we spend in class feel a little less tedious and little more relevant.

As soon as our exams were over last week, I headed out to Reno for the AHVMA annual convention with four other classmates. We stayed at a house near Lake Tahoe (and saw SNOW- and a bear!). We never did get to see Lake Tahoe itself (except when we were flying over it on our way home), but our morning drive through the mountains was lovely. We didn't see much of Reno aside from the casino where the convention was being held, but since a classmate from California called Nevada "the ugliest state in the country', I don't feel like we missed much.

The conference itself was wonderful, and it was really fun to meet up with people that I met last year. The entire first day was devoted to pet foods (both commercial and homemade), which is a big interest of mine. It's always great to hear vets who don't uniformly decry the feeding of homemade and raw foods, but instead have an informed and intelligent discussion about the pros and cons of alternative diets. Dr. Susan Wynn (the animal herbal medicine guru) is now working on her nutrition residency, and she gave a great talk about formulating diets for three common diseases (kidney failure, obesity, and food allergies). All we ever hear in school is that these pets should be on prescription commercial diets- it's good to know that there are resources for those pet owners who would like to have more control over what their sick pets are eating.

The second day was a little more varied, and I attended a lot of herbal medicine talks. Traditional Chinese Medicine is still a hard concept to grasp for me, but I'm starting to appreciate how TCM practitioners approach cases and come up with diagnoses. There were a lot of talks about essential oils, and there was even a vendor for animal aromatherapy oils. The clinic I work at uses a lot of lavender to help keep animals calm, and I've seen essential oil diffusers in the teaching hospital at school, so it's definitely becoming a popular concept. And why not- it's evidence-based medicine!

As usual, everyone was super friendly and excited to see students at the conference. AHVMA is great for rekindling the feelings that we do great things for people and animals as vets. Sometimes it's easy to get depressed with all the cancers, kidney failures, neglect, and trauma that we deal with, so it's nice to be reminded about all the good we do too.

We got back from Reno on Monday, had another exam Tuesday morning, and life has gotten back to its normal swing since then. Chris and I are realizing that we haven't thought about wedding plans since we visited Valley Grove last month- yikes! Time to get cracking... maybe after all the election distractions are over?

Until then- Yes We Carve!