Stuff below the fold

Lying on surveys: from Freakonomics.

DUBNER: Quite possibly and we’re also getting a lot of answers that don’t reflect reality.  Think about it, what every poll relies on is one stranger telling the truth to another stranger about the future. So there are many ways in which that answer can go wrong. Nate Silver runs the blog FiveThirtyEight.com.  He takes all of these different political polls and analyzes them and weights them depending on how good a poll they are. He says it can be hard even to figure out whether a given person will vote at all.
Nate SILVER: “You can ask Americans and say, ‘are you going to vote?’  But people lie about that, just like they lie about always washing their hands or using condoms or never running a red light or anything else.”

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Freakonomics also has a list of their freakiest links:

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Mrs. Gay Caswell notes someone in lower Canada noticed that the pornographers are exploiting kids on the Res, a problem she has been fighting for years.

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Another day, another possible cyclone.

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Look to the sky: The Orionids are coming.

stargazers can expect a treat starting Wednesday night from the Orionid meteor shower - leftover bits of the famed Halley's Comet that enter and burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere.

 

PAGASA hinted fireballs may be seen during the meteor shower since the Orionids are very fast. The Orionids may be active from Oct. 17 to 25 and will likely peak Oct. 21 to 22, it added.

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The Philippines gets it's second saint:   Pedro Calungsod

 

He was one of the boy catechists who went along with some Spanish Jesuit missionaries to... evangelize the Chamorros. On April 2, 1672, Calungsod was martyred with Fr. Diego Luis de San Vitores when they were attacked after a baptism

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The moon origin: still exploring the story.

In a slew of studies published Wednesday, planetary scientists provided new evidence supporting the long-standing — but imperfect — theory that the Earth and moon formed after the proto-Earth collided with another huge planetary body, sometimes referred to as Theia.
Some of that evidence comes from super-precise measurements of the zinc in lunar rock samples collected by Apollo astronauts. These findings, reported in the journal Nature, support the idea that the moon's birth had to have resulted from "a big event with lots of energy," strong enough to vaporize rock, said study leader Frederic Moynier, a geochemist at Washington University.

more here.
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Riddles on a billboard at TORN:

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