Throughout the election year thus far, a key term has been "change." Change of administration, policies and power, and more recently, change of religion.

A survey conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reveals that 40 percent of Americans will opt for a different faith than the one they grew up with. More than a quarter of American adults have left the faith of their upbringing in favor of some alternative (including no religion at all). As far as Protestantism itself is concerned, 44 percent have switched religious affiliation or have abandoned religious tradition altogether.

For the most part, Catholicism hasn't seen as significant of a drop as Protestantism, due to the demographic of immigrants from largely Catholic nations.

The group of "unaffiliated" Americans is faring the best, as it gains more people than it loses. About a quarter of Americans aged 18 to 29 are not affiliated with any religion. It is important to note, however, that not necessarily everyone in this group is unreligious.

It's official. The college pamphlets are starting to trickle in.

I've begun to get countless pages from colleges, all telling me how "We're not like most schools" and how many dialects I can expect to hear on my way to class (about 5 minutes of walking on average, by the way). For the most part I've been able to discard them to the recycling pile. But all that changed today.

The letter in question looked like any other letter: tacky stationery (80% recycled fiber), meaningless barcode under my address, and login information for a website where I basically give them permission to blitzkrieg me with even more crap via my email inbox. But then some bold text in the upper right corner caught my eye. It read: "FREE Whittier Lacrosse Hat! Be one of the first 100 to reply!"

Now call me American, but I love free crap. I don't even know what a Lacrosse hat is, but I want one now. I'm nothing if I'm not supportive of the great industry that is collegiate bribery. Updates will follow as needed.

There's a saying among Ohioans that if you don't like the weather, wait five minutes.

That much has been demonstrated with tremendous accuracy today, although my weather widget is now holding steady at 3 degrees. In the past half hour or so, the temperature has dropped from 9 degrees to where it currently stands, and it's still four degrees above the expected low for tonight.

I bring this up because I know I am not alone in this fight that all midwesterners endure each winter. We all live with that one thermostat Nazi who refuses to let it go above 64 degrees, no matter how cold it gets. Whereas most people put on their coats when they go out, I usually don't need my coat until I get home. The only advantage to this is that we don't really get cabin fever. We get cabin colds instead.

Lately I've had to keep my mind off of the cold by resorting to watching old Meet The Press and Wired Science podcasts, along with other programs I can only get on iTunes since we don't have cable (we don't have high-speed internet either, but the neighbors across the street are especially obliging with whatever trickle of wireless signal blows this way). I can say from personal experience that Tim Russert's three chins do not complement Chris Hardwick's fuzzy haircut, not in the very least. But being inside isn't a particularly huge problem for me, because I'm an indoor person. But I still like to have that option of going outside on those rare occasions when that desire presents itself.

Fortunately, though, this is Ohio, after all. The climate here is just so ridiculously arbitrary, and any atheist would be hard-pressed to explain how anything but an omniscient deity could even keep up with it. It's like a person being subjected to an involuntary sex change every five minutes. Just call us the Alexis Arquette of the midwest.

Finally, Crunching Numbers has received its much-needed facelift, and it now touts a layout that actually resembles its title.

You're probably wondering why this reconfiguration was even needed. (If you aren't, you have my permission to skip down to the comments link, where you will leave comments telling me how wonderful the layout looks.) One huge problem that existed in the previous theme (called Copyblogger, if any WP users are interested) was that it didn't render correctly in IE 6. Since most Windows users who visit my site use IE 6, that was obviously a problem. This layout is much simpler, relying more on old-school HTML tricks, and some CSS for the finer details. Now everyone can view my correct opinions in all their hyper-text glory.

Another issue was the fact that the previous theme had absolutely nothing to do with, well, crunching numbers. It was awfully generic, and one could just tell that it was just a pre-packaged, tacky theme straight out of the box (or ZIP archive, if you prefer). This theme matches the blog much better, most notably because of the numeric navigation links (go ahead, roll your mouse over those JavaScripted bad boys).

And to give credit where it's due, many thanks to Steph for designing the banner/navigation at the top

Let me know what you think of the new layout in the comments!