Nate Silver Tells An Internet Commenter When He's Going To Die

At one point, a commenter asked Silver — who made his bones with a highly accurate election prediction model — when he was going to die.

Silver's response was top-notch:

"I'd guess that the median Deadspin commenter is a 34-year-old white male with middle-to-high income but also above-average alcohol consumption. So we're taking about a remaining live expectancy of 47 years, give or take. My best guess is that you'll die in 2060, perhaps just a few days before Sasha Obama wins her second term."

Silver'd.

ESPN signed Silver away from the New York Times a few weeks ago. He will bring his entire "538" blog with him, and run it semi-autonomously. It sounds like Bill Simmons' Grantland is the model.

Another neat nugget from the Deadspin Q&A, he's hiring:

"And yes — we are taking resumes. (There's no formal process for this yet, but it's not too hard to find my email.) We've already gotten interest from some great quant-friendly journalists. What's a little bit tougher to find is people who are journalism-friendly quants, if that makes sense — people who might be employed in (say) tech or finance or consulting right now but who can express themselves pretty well and who might be interested in a change of careers."

Cool!