How Tall Am I? (And What Will Tomorrow Bring?)

A mathematician and a statistician are arguing about who's taller.

The mathematician gets out a tape measure and has the statistician stand on one end. He pulls it out, reads off the statistician's height, and announces he's exactly two pi feet tall.

He offers the tape to the statistician. The statistician waves it off, and then asks the next 50 passers by how tall the mathematician is. This, the statistician explains, is better because it provides both a mean and a variance.

StrategyPage's Prediction Market is a site, which I learned about from the ever-interesting David Aitken, that uses economic games to predict the future.

Impressive track record, too.

There are other web-based predictors out there, too. While neither this site nor this one provide any data about past successes, I can't imagine how they could be wrong.