November 04, 2004


Todd comes up with one more:

This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it—that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.
That would be Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, published in November of 1972. Thanks, Todd. Now I will try really, really hard to keep politics more or less out of this space (and in the real world instead) for the near future.
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And finally, Dan Kennedy succintly addresses my chief election-related annoyance: land doesn't vote. In other words, big swaths of rural land occupied by tens of thousands of Montanans take up lots more space per capita than do small islands full of millions of New Yorkers, for example. That fact makes colored maps (as opposed to cartograms) bad ways to look at data such as political preference that is at all correlated with population density. Edward Tufte describes this pretty well in his books, too, but paper is harder to link to. Here is a particularly stark example of said maps [more permanent copy here].
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So this space is irritated by the election results, but at least there's this.
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