“I can’t help myself in the grocery store. The eggs and the apples call to me, ‘Juggle us, juggle us!’ I don’t go to the hardware store for parts, but to find things to juggle. My hands go wild with motion. In the stores my kids act like they don’t know me. My wife hid my machete. She talked of leaving me when I looked at axes the other day. The first thing I think of when I pick up a tool, ball bat or fruit is balance, space and spin. My cats avoid me at all cost.”
— Tony Maurer, in Juggler's World magazinesec2pdf: getting started
I often say that I’m not a programmer, I’m a problem-solver who occasionally writes code to eliminate annoyances. One recent annoyance was what passes for “state of the art” in creating star maps for the Traveller RPG.
Um, "what he said"
Dean Esmay answers John Perry Barlow. Personally, I gave up about halfway through the original, bored to tears by Barlow’s frankly one-dimensional characterization of the people he’s trying to “understand”.
The first one's free
Just got back from lunch at Patxi’s, and discovered that Connie had never heard of such a thing as “Chicago-style deep-dish pizza”. Of course, I had to share the leftovers.
There was much rejoicing from her office.
Yours for honest political cartography
The red-blue map is deceptive. The shades-of-purple map is actively counterproductive. The area-adjusted-for-population (“cartogram”) shades-of-purple map is simply absurd.
- Human beings are good at comparing shades of gray.
- Human beings are poor at comparing shades of color.
- Common forms of color-blindness render "shades of purple" indistinguishable.
- Human beings are good at comparing lengths.
- Human beings are poor at comparing areas.
- Human beings are even worse at comparing volumes, so don't even think of going there.
What to do? Produce two maps: one in which percentage of support for Bush is represented from 0% (white) to 100% (black), and another in which the same is done for Kerry. When the data becomes available, do this at the precinct level.
If you really feel the urge to adjust for population, then on both maps, project each county/precinct up by the number of residents who voted for that candidate, and publish the results as a true 3-D map (QuickTime VR, VRML, whatever) that can be rotated and zoomed. Resist the urge to project the opposition candidate’s areas down; comparing the length of lines going in different directions isn’t a good idea either.
Update: Source of and links to a bunch of deceptive El-04 maps here.
Update: this one is much closer to useful than the rest, although the perspective makes it difficult to fairly compare populations (give me a 3-D walkthrough!). Thanks, Bill.
A fond farewell to Election 2004
Bad Haiku Edition:
Hatred and contempt,
empty suits, money, and Moore,
still can't rock the vote.
And they're calling us dumb?
Love the cover of today’s UK Daily Mirror (“Britain’s brightest tabloid newspaper”), with its wonderful headline “How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?”, subtitled “U.S. Election disaster”.
Scroll down a bit to see how intelligent and sophisticated their target audience is:
"Oi! I'm a mum...and I'm calling my baby Tallulah Lilac"
"Zara's palace love-in"
"Bridget Jones's Diet"
"Posh drops the pout"
"Harry Potty"
"Astro diet: use your stars to lose weight"
"Revenge of the bunny boiler"
"The night Richard offered sex with Judy for £3,500"
Fat Albert. The Movie.
No, really. I can say no more.
I can't top this headline
Man tries to convert lions to Jesus, gets bitten
And I absolutely love the picture.
