Antony Green

Maybe I've posted about this before, I'm not sure. Anyway, this dude rocks.

Its difficult to explain (well, not really - its the same urge that makes me watch sports statistics so closely), but I quite enjoy election coverage, and have watched many, many campaigns on ABC over the years, both federal and state (Qld) elections. Antony Green has, I think, been there for all of them, and is always a mine of statistical information. His ability was brought into focus for me when I was in the US for the 2000 presidential election and witnessed the ridiculous see-sawing on election night over the result, in particular by Fox, of the Florida ballot. I realise that its in no way a fair comparison, given the dramatically different electoral systems among other things, but I could not at the time help but compare this to a Qld state election where Green "called" the result at about 6:30pm on election day, and with, as I recall, something like 12% of the vote counted.

I also have a hankering for statistics, I guess. Having bombed out in first-year maths at uni, albeit not in stats (damned partial differential equations), its pretty unlikely, but one of my dream jobs would this sort of bulk numbers statistics stuff, in a field like politics or, even better, sport.