1. I <3 the modern world: blogging from the front porch, passing out candy to trick-or-treaters. FWIW, Starburst "GummiBursts" are pretty good. Shannon chose our Halloween candy well. We also have bite-size Snickers, 3 Musketeers, and Milky Way bars. My prior is that due the complex array of subsidies in agriculture, junk food is much cheaper than it would be in an unregulated market.

2. I'm a big fan of Robin Hanson's blogging at Overcoming Bias, and I think there's an excellent opportunity to learn a lot about bias by studying college sports and, in particular, sports coverage. An announcer just said something about USC being the "best one-loss team in the country," and my question is "by what standard?" Judging from the quality of the loss, they aren't even the best one-loss team in their own conference (Oregon lost to unbeaten Boise State and USC lost to 3-5 Washington, but they're about to settle this on the field). Since there's so much randomness in sports, team superiority isn't transitive. Houston beat Oklahoma State and UTEP beat Houston, but I'm pretty sure UTEP isn't better than Oklahoma State.

I trust rankings like Matt Ryan's Gus Rankings and Sagarin/ELO-CHESS a lot more because while they aren't perfect, they rank teams according to their on-the-field performance rather than their brand name, and they consider an entire season worth of information rather than one game. According to the Week 8 Gus rankings, Iowa is #1. No argument there, the Northern Iowa game notwithstanding. The Gus Rankings also suggest that Oregon is the best one-loss team in the country--and that Oregon is better than Boise State based on the quality of the teams they've vanquished. USC is #13 and the sixth-best one-loss team in the country, with two-loss Virginia Tech and two-loss Ohio State ahead of them.

Obviously, there's no perfect way to do this, but if I had a vote in the polls I would use the Gus rankings or something similar to cast my ballot.