The New York Times is running out of topics now that the world is perfect and there has been a return of the king blah blah blah, because why else are we still going on about precocious Nate Silver, that sports stats guy turned media darling after his website, FiveThirtyEight, started predicting a heavy Obama victory? You would assume Silver's fame would be the election equivalent of Michael Phelps: a couple of victory laps around talk shows, maybe a guest-stint on SNL, and then back to the daily grind of being a merman/really good at math.

But Silver is stubbornly refusing to go away, or the media is refusing to let him go, despite the fact that his website is now reduced to speculating on whether Norm Coleman or Al Franken is going to win the Minnesota seat.

But now the media is paraphrasing Seinfeld and asking: So what's the deal with Nate Silver?

“When we took him to preschool one time, we dropped him off, and he announced, ‘Today, I’m a numbers machine,’ and started counting,” Brian Silver said. “When we picked him up two and a half hours later, he was ‘Two thousand one hundred and twenty-two, two thousand one hundred and twenty-three…’ ”

By kindergarten, he could multiply two-digit numbers in his head. By 11, he was conducting multivariate analysis to figure out if the size of a baseball stadium affects attendance (it doesn’t). By age 13, he was using statistics to manage a fantasy baseball team. When his parents refused to buy him computer games, he taught himself the Basic programming language and created his own.

Cute! And sounds like someone you'd diagnose today with a mild case of Asperger Syndrome. But it is illuminating that Silver, to some people, is as much an American icon for his contributions to the election as Phelps was to swimming. That he may be the newest form of celebrity: an attractive, brilliant, 30-something whose fame resembles the type of earlier Internet wunderkinds like Mark Zuckerberg, but whose interests lay outside of social networking or money-making.

The only question is, do we still need him around after the election? Unlike Sarah Palin, it's doubtful Silver would be offered a talk show deal, or any TV spots other than an occasional MSNBC expert or something. And no one is more aware of the shooting star than Silver himself:

One thing Mr. Silver cannot predict: what happens now. He suspects that Nov. 4 was the height of his popularity, and that producers will not be phoning as frequently any time soon. Publishers have been calling about a book, and he will continue with FiveThirtyEight, using it to predict Congressional votes during the Obama administration — if anyone cares.

Sad truth about real politics: Besides Nate Silver, not many people do. Although if these profiles keep continuing, hell, maybe magazine companies will start hiring him as a consultant to predict which titles are going to fail next.

[Photo via Seattle Times]