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The month of October slipped by. No new oklo posts. Like seemingly everyone else, I’ve been in a state of continual distraction regarding the election. Instead of writing posts about planets, spare moments are spent scanning the news.

Sometimes, if you’re waking up in the middle of the night, there’s perspective in the knowledge that one can build a fully to-scale model of the Earth-Sun system by taking a grain of sand and holding it two arms lengths away from a dime. A real time simulation can then be put into effect by moving the sand grain through 6.92 degrees per week.

I do have a post nearly done in draft form, but my colleague, Prof. Jonathan Fortney, eliminated any chance that I’ll get it finished and posted before Nov. 5th, by introducing me to fivethirtyeight.com. Over there, you can get the latest polling data with a 10,000-trial Monte-Carlo sheen: