With the last hours of 2012 slipping away, it's time to wrap up the Book Log (expect another 4 or 5 posts for that before the day is out) and, for the first time ever, name a Blogalicious Person of the Year. And for 2012, that person is Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com.

This honor isn't as much for his election forecasts - which were accurate and well-reasoned, to be sure - but for how his work underscored what should be obvious: political punditry is a nearly useless practice. You didn't have to look far to find examples, from the online pipe dreams of Dick Morris and the ironically named Unskewed Polls to Karl Rove's adventures in math on election night. It was a sight to behold, as a entire class of otherwise educated people demonstrated that they had no working understanding of math.

(Note that I don't mean to exclude left-leaning pundits here. They bloviate just as much as their conservative counterparts, but had the numbers on their side this time around and thus weren't as obviously trapped in their ideological bubble.)

My hope is that Nate's ability to show how a rational approach to poll data can inform the average person will get everyone to take two steps away from their partisan watering hole of choice and actually try to understand how the candidates, their positions and the polls all interact. That looks unlikely, but it's my hope for 2013.

I did not write about the BU men's hockey team at all last season, for fear of jinxing what turned out to be an historic run. Over the course of the season, they set a new mark for wins and won every title that they played for, from the season-opening Icebreaker to the national championship. They entered this season with high expectations and the top spot in the Hockey East preseason coaches' poll.

And it's all gone downhill from there. In a way, a letdown was inevitable, as 40 percent of last year's scoring came from players who have since moved on. But the quality of the incoming class, coupled with a season of solid goaltending during the title run, combined to mask the problems that are now apparent. Inexperience, lack of fundamentals, a sophomore slump in net, the reasons behind the team's collapse are myriad. After tonight's loss to RPI, the team's record stands at 4-9-3. They are currently in 9th place in Hockey East, meaning if the season ended today the Icedogs season would end today.

(There is a bit of a comparison here to the BU football team, which made the NCAA tournament in 2003 and 2004, after which all of the best players graduated and the team cratered, winning 5 games over the next three seasons before being shut down. Not that the hockey team is in danger of being shuttered, just that there's a similarity.)

Anyway, this got me thinking. What's the mark for futility for a college hockey team in the season following a national title win? Looking at total wins, the worst five follow-up seasons to a national title are:

1993-4 Maine, 6-29-1
1954-5 RPI, 9-11-2
1972-3 BU, 11-17-1
1963-4 North Dakota, 12-11-2
1989-90 Harvard, 13-14-1

The Maine season is a bit of an outlier, as they had to forfeit 21 games that season for using an ineligible player. If we were to go by their original performance, you'd sub in the 1964-5 Michigan team that went 13-12-1 as the fifth-worst season.

In terms of winning percentage, we have:

1993-94 Maine, .180
1972-3 BU, .396
1976-7 Minnesota, .440
1954-5 RPI, .454
1989-90 Harvard, .482

Interestingly, every other championship team went at least .500 the year after they won the title (and Maine would have if they had a better grasp of NCAA compliance). So the rule is that teams generally play well the season after winning a national title, which makes a fair bit of sense.

Where does that put the current crop of Terriers? In terms of total wins, they'd have to put forth an impressively bad performance to not win seven games this season. You'd like to think they'll win at least 10. Twelve? Well...

For winning percentage, they are currently at .344, so if they keep doing what they're doing, they will succeed in putting together the worst (non-forfeit) post-title season in NCAA history. Surpassing a record they already hold. Faaaaaaaantastic.

I'll admit I wasn't paying a lot of attention to when they formally named the government bailout TARP (for Troubled Assets Relief Program), but the name now has me thinking. If we'd taken the $700 billion and bought actual tarps - like this one - we could make one big tarp that would be 358,700,642,791,551 square miles in area. That much tarp could cover the Earth, which has a surface area of 196,935,000 square miles, 1,821,416 times. Or a little less when you consider you're wrapping a sphere with a huge square tarp. There's bound to be some waste.

As much as I'd like to avoid a depression, there's part of me that wishes we'd bought the big ass tarp.

(It should go without saying that someone should check my math.)

UPDATE! I went back and checked my own math, and found that I'd gotten it horrifically wrong. What I wound up calculating was the area for a tarp that would have 1 billion of those tarps per side, rather than one big tarp made up of a billion of these smaller tarps.

So I went back and did the math on making a tarp out of a billion of these tarps (actually about 50,000 fewer, in order to keep it a square). Said tarp would have a side of 3, 162, 200 feet, which results in an area of... 358,681.21 square miles. That would cover Texas with room to spare, which I'm sure would please a few people.