NEW YORK—Describing how his face wrinkled almost instantaneously as his body shed muscle mass and his hair thinned out and turned gray, sources confirmed that statistician Nate Silver aged 40 years Wednesday after accidentally using an experimental new polling projection model on himself. According to witnesses, the FiveThirtyEight founder had been fine-tuning the powerful new method of forecasting state-by-state election outcomes when he inadvertently triggered the model while working on its poll-weighting formula, causing his body to become hunched and frail and his hearing to rapidly deteriorate. As he continued to absorb the full effects of the model’s predictive power, reports stated that Silver shrank several inches in height and his skin became covered in liver spots and varicose veins, his eyes eventually clouding over with cataracts while his weakening frame bore the full brunt of the algorithm’s calculation of likely electoral college results. At press time, a desperate Silver was reportedly trying to reverse the effects of the projection model by injecting himself with an unstable new youth voter sample.

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