I have been nose to grindstone lately.

First, I have a non-political topic today (to those sighing with relief and amazement that "X-Zach is finally moving on to a non-political topic," I say: "Not so fast, I will hit politics later on in this entry.")

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When I complained to my brother that this thread is not searchable, he mentioned that I could make it visible to search engines by changing a setting on my preferences…and once it’s visible, Jed’s nifty way to use Google to search within a url (which he also showed me), will work…but after he showed me, I promptly forgot.

Here's the exciting and altogether useless news: if you take the right three words from one of my entries, this very thread will pop up as the first, (yes folks, that's *first*) result on Google. I want a Scooby Snack! I want a Blue Ribbon! The key is finding an arcane and unrelated set of words like "stowe lomborg hampshire" -- and a specific entry of this humble little thread pops up as the first result. If you use the more common words that appear herein, then this blog would probably be #2,499,637 of 2,500,000 search results. For those worried about my sanity, I spent less than five minutes finding those three words that result in the Scooby Snack ranking.

Of course the amazing thing here is not this thread, but rather, Google, a company that can effectively look at what, a few billion web pages, find this little arcane blog in a dark and lightly-traveled corner of the internet (that thing that is comprised of a series of tubes), and place a link to it at the top of a results page, all in a fraction of a second.

I know, I know, it was okay to be amazed by this kind of thing in 1998, but being amazed by it now makes me look like everyone's favorite senator from Alaska. But that's okay. You can fling your virtual rotten vegetables and jeers at me, because I still admit to being amazed when I see a 747 take off, or when I can store 500 digital pictures in a camera that fits in my pocket, or when I get eight lawyers on three continents on a conference call, all at the same time. It must be magic!

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I have lots to say on politics, but I suspect I have said most of it before, so let me just stick one aspect of it: betting on the primaries.

I think the well-established betting markets with real trading volume and real dollars at stake (like InTrade) reflect a lot of hype and nonsense when the elections are many months away…and at such times, these markets aren't necessary useful except for a few people to make a lot of money and a few people to lose a lot of money. For example, several months ago, you could have bought McCain (to win the republican nomination) for a song and made about 10 times your money.

However, as we get close to the election day for a given state, markets like InTrade are remarkably good at the ranking the top few vote-getting candidates (but not always--I recall that InTrade was giving Obama something like a 56% chance of winning California the day before we voted).

So I find it interesting that the InTrade markets lit up yesterday, with huge price swings and high volume, with Obama moving decisively ahead in Texas, Vermont, and Rhode Island, with Hillary favored only in Ohio of the March 4 states. Sometimes these political futures markets react to private polling data, sometimes it's public polling data, sometimes it's true insider information, sometimes it's actual scandal, sometimes it's soon-to-break scandal, and sometimes it's all of that plus more. Some folks, including some readers of this blog, think that the InTrade markets are all wrong right now, and the Clinton “Boss Tweed” machine is about to kick into very high gear and crush everything in its path, most notably, the Junior Senator from Illinois.

Finally, there's no such thing as illegal insider trading in the political futures markets. For example, if you were a John Edwards aide who knew Edwards was going to announce his departure from the race the next day, you might call a few of your friends and say, "You want to make a quick buck? Short Edwards, trust me, news coming tomorrow." You can debate the morality of that play, but not the legality. Unless, of course, you signed a legally enforceable confidentiality agreement with the campaign...but even then, you could presumably trade on the information as long as you didn't disclose it to anyone. In fact, I think it's in part because of the lack of rules against insider trading that the political futures markets have such good predictive power.