Nate Silver, the rock star statistician behind the New York Times FiveThirtyEight blog, became an unwilling player in the heated political rhetoric ahead of the Nov 6. Presidential election. Silver covers politics and other news from the viewpoint of a statistician: putting the rhetoric and the political consultant’s alchemy aside to look at the numbers. Despite a breathless narrative about the tight race between Romney and Obama, Silver never gave the Republican Presidential candidate a better than 40% chance at winning the election, based on its analysis of state- and national tracking polls. On the eve of the election, he said Romney’s chance