the shrewdness of apes

so today i tried and failed to write about a couple different topics, heavily condensed here:

football - computers had Oklahoma ranked #1, they lost by 28 points and they were still ranked #1. the writers had them ranked #1, they lost (to Kansas State) and they moved them to #3. they then lost again, while Ohio State beat Kansas State, yet the final polls had Oklahoma #3 and Ohio State #4. the point: does anyone need more evidence as to the flaws of the system in place to decide a champion? voting to keep the current system is akin to letting an audience member conduct the orchestra. she may not know where the song is going but is she waves her arms around enough she might convince some people that she knows what she's doing.

the new mars probes - can anyone explain to me how the $1 billion being spent here is justified? when we've already sent probes to Mars that have taken soil samples and color pictures and found no signs of life? aren't we facing record deficits right now? aren't there social programs being underfunded? i love science, but who gives a fuck about Mars right now? let's cure cancer or something first. or maybe NASA thinks the cure for cancer is on Mars somewhere?

general/sports - something that bugs me greatly is when people spout "statistics" or "trends" and then use them to predict things for which they have no predictive value. this is especially prevalent in sports where people love to say things like "since he's 0-3 in the playoffs, Peyton Manning can't win the big game" and then have to back track when he leads his team to a 41-10 playoff victory. but it happens everywhere - there's a lot of talk comparing Howard Dean to George McGovern and predicting that he will fail as spectacularly in his bid for the presidency (predicting that Dean will win the Democratic nomination is reasonable, however, given the indicators that actually have predictive value such as polls, endorsements, etc.). this line of thinking gloms onto some very basic similarities and runs with them, which is fine for a 6 year-old but not so much for highly paid political pundits.