Medal projections: Nate Silver likes Canada AND curling

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight numbers-crunching fame is at it again. Silver made his name in baseball sabermetrics, then took his calculator to the '08 U.S. presidential election (49/50 states correctly called isn't bad at all) and last year's Oscars, landing himself on several top-geek lists along the way. Now he's in the Vancouver 2010 medals projection business:

What I've done is to compile the projected medal winners in the 86 Winter Olympic disciplines from five six nine sources that forecasted individual winners; these are the Associated Press, USA Today, Sports Illustrated, McClatchy-Tribune, Examiner.com, Canwest, and (for some events only) ESPN.com and betting odds at Ladbrokes and bwin. Nothing terribly fancy here: I've taken a simple mean of the number of medals that each country was expected to win in each discipline, as averaged across the nine sources.

He's also a curling fan, which along with his latest medal projections has to warm a few Canadian cockles. As of the latest numbers - as of this writing, anyway; the figures are being updated daily - here's how Silver's got it working out:

Canada 32.4 medals (13.5 gold)
Germany 31.4 (9.6)
USA 30.4 (11.6)
Norway 20.4 (6.9)
Austria 18.6 (5.1)