Census Releases (Hurrah!)

INFO VISUALIZATION: There have been a few new releases from the census recently.







There are plenty of new pretty maps here. This one struck me as especially interesting, simply because it shows the continuing trend of urbanization. (Blue areas have lost people between 2000 and 2003, red areas have gained.) Another interesting map is the distribution of population of the U.S. by state. Slightly over one out of ten Americans is a Californian... yikes.



Also, check out the election statistics page. It has some interesting info, like that a higher percentage of women vote then men -- I had no idea.

At or about 70%

The 2000 presidential election voting rates in the District of Columbia, North Dakota, Wisconsin, Maine and Minnesota, highest in the nation.



61%

Percentage of eligible women voters who voted in the 2000 presidential election. That is higher than the 58 percent of men who voted.

The Science Vote

DATA: Reason magazine has a piece asking various people who they are voting for. Reason magazine basically has a libertarian slant, which is wrongheaded in my view, but I share a lot of my views on government and social liberties with them -- which is more than I can say for those good for nothing Republicans.



Anyway, my real interest here is Steven Pinker, whom I adore beyond measure. I've seen him speak here at the UW about The Blank Slate, and never have I been more impressed with someone's ability to communicate a point so clearly. This guy is one of the best minds out there today. Needless to say he's not voting for Bush.

2004 vote: Kerry. The reason is reason: Bush uses too little of it. In the war on terror, his administration stints on loose-nuke surveillance while confiscating nail clippers and issuing color-coded duct tape advisories. His restrictions on stem cell research are incoherent, his dismissal of possible climate change inexcusable.



2000 vote: Gore, with misgivings.



Most embarrassing vote: I left Canada shortly after turning 18 and became a U.S. citizen only recently, so I haven’t voted enough to be too embarrassed yet.



Favorite president: James Madison, for articulating the basis for democracy in terms of the nature of human nature.

Also of interest is John Rennie's comments. (He's the editor-in-chief of Scientific American.)

2004 vote: John Kerry. Anybody who has seen Scientific American’s editorials during the last few years knows we’re deeply unhappy with the de facto anti-scientism of the current administration. Science shouldn’t trump all else in setting policy, but it would be a nice change of pace for a White House to put science ahead of ideology again. Of course, I’m keeping my expectations low.



2000 vote: Remember that guy? The one that everybody said claimed to have invented the Internet, except he hadn’t said that at all? He seemed good.



Most embarrassing vote: Back in college in 1980, flushed with youthful sanctimony, I voted for John Anderson. The voting booth is a bad place to be an idealist. But at least when I threw my vote away on a third-party candidate, it was irrelevant.



Favorite president: John Quincy Adams showed that it was possible for the son of a president to rise to that same office in a highly disputed election without being remembered as a dangerous embarrassment.

Two things I love about his comments.



1) Anti-scientism! What a great word!



2) "The voting booth is a bad place to be an idealist."



3) "Favorite president: ..." Diss!



Wait, that was 3. Oh well...



Here are some other highlights:



* A surprisingly high number of Libertarians are voting for Kerry. It goes to show they share as much with Democrats (max social freedom) as they do with Republicans (max economic freedom).



* Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller) removes all doubt and confirms that he is undecided/stupid.



* Some guy named Dave Kopel voted for Nader in 2000 and is voting for Bush in 2004. Insanity!

Is More Information Better for Decision-Making?

INFO SCIENCE: An interesting upcoming lecture for those in Seattle:

Tuesday, October 26th, The Information School's Center for Human-Information Interaction at the University of Washington will be hosting:



Speaker: Dr. Debra Friedman, Director of Special Projects, Development and Alumni Relations, and Affiliate Associate Professor, Evans School of Public Affairs, University of Washington.



Title: Is More Information Better for Decision-Making?



An abiding assumption in decision theory is that additional information allows individuals to make better choices. This is often applied in the social policy realm. Well-intentioned public and non-profit officials commonly attempt to provide more information to the public to shape decisions such as school choice, public transportation usage, and the like. Recent discussions of the human capacity for assimilating information and analysis of the costs of gathering information have cast doubt on this assumption.



Date: Tuesday, October 26th, 3:30pm-5:00pm



The lecture will take place at The Information School, University of Washington, Mary Gates Hall, Room 420. Directions.



Please see our website for details about the Center.



Best wishes



Center for Human-Information Interaction

Sounds interesting!

Unrealpolitik

DATA: Election anxiety? Maybe you need to make your own game plan and see how it plays out on November 2nd. Slate has a list of several sim-election games available. Their favorite is Political Machine from Ubi.







As for me, the election is officially over. I voted yesterday and am sending in my ballot in a few hours. (Executive summary: Dems, Monorails, No Gambling, Traffic Improvement, and a bunch of judges i know nothing about.) Now starts the nail biting...

Dear Google

INFO TECHNOLOGY: Some random thoughts for Google:



1) Gmail: I want a program that I can install on my local machine that will be the default mail client. When I click on a mailto link, it'll open up a new browser window that will automatically pull up the Gmail compose screen with the addressee specified. This could be a killer app that gives you a huge benefit over Yahoo and Hotmail. And honestly I'm sick of Outlook trying to make me go through the goddamn wizard every time I click on a mailto.



2) Google Desktop: this is cool, but it's not cool enough yet. I want to be able to search not just my Internet Explorer history, but my Firefox history too. And why did you make it search my Outlook emails but not my Gmail emails? You are Gmail, remember?



Also, why can't I click on the folder of a found file rather then just the file itself? Browsers are already equipped to do local file browsing, so this seems like a no-brainier. And why isn't G.D. cataloging the tags of my mp3s and images, etc.? Lastly, it'd be really cool if I could put G.D. on all of my home computers and then have a search for a local file show me the results aggregated.



Overall, it's a great idea... But it's a bit simple at the moment to be really that useful. I'm still waiting for that killer app that links Google to my local machine, and still not quite seeing it.



Update: I just went to submit feedback to the Google Desktop program and found this message:

We're working hard on adding new features and capabilities to Google Desktop Search, and we want to know what you think. If the feature you'd like us to add is included in the list below, you can vote for it by selecting it and clicking 'Submit.' If not, select 'Other' and send us a brief description.



Index .pdfs

Index audio files

Support Mozilla Firefox

Partial word searches

Search folder names

Support more chat programs

More than 10 results per page

Add Desktop Search button to Google Toolbar

Update: Thanks for the tips everyone! I'll be trying out the plug-ins later today.

Winglee on Slashdot

SCIENCE: A new propulsion scheme being researched at the UW caught the eye of the Slashdot juggernaut today:

paltemalte writes "A new means of propelling spacecraft being developed at the University of Washington could dramatically cut the time needed for astronauts to travel to and from Mars and could make humans a permanent fixture in space. In fact, with magnetized-beam plasma propulsion, or mag-beam, quick trips to distant parts of the solar system could become routine, said Robert Winglee, a UW Earth and space sciences professor who is leading the project."

Just looked up the word juggernaut to make sure I was using it correctly...

1. Something, such as a belief or institution, that elicits blind and destructive devotion or to which people are ruthlessly sacrificed.

2. An overwhelming, advancing force that crushes or seems to crush everything in its path: “It doesn't assume that people need necessarily remain passive when confronted by what appears to be the juggernaut of history” (Christopher Lehmann-Haupt).

... I had no idea how right I was. But I digress.



I took an intro Earth and Space Science class from Professor Winglee in my first year at the UW. He was really cool -- he used lots of examples from Star Trek and had a crazy Australian accent to boot. Towards the end we had a home-made rocket competition and tried different types of propulsion -- lots of fun. And he gave me 4.0 which is always nice.

Same Mistakes from Sony, New Decade

INFO TECHNOLOGY:I just watched a video of the new Play Station Portable disc loading mechanism and I can't believe how fragile it looks. They honestly expect this thing to survive in a teenagers backpack? The bottom of a locker? On the bedroom floor?







Honestly, parents who actually get this thing for their kid are going to be the same parents who get a camcorder for their kids -- god knows it's going to cost the same, and from this it looks like it'll be just as fragile.



And from a usability standpoint, the way the person in the video is holding the psp to eject the disk is completely awkward. I can see the manual now, "to eject a disk, hold psp by the left corner with your right hand. Hold the psp angled 90 degrees away from your body. Swing your left hand around the back of the psp and press the eject button. Fiddle with the disc until you figure out how to actually remove it without busting the loading tray." What a nightmare!



Sony just makes the same mistakes over and over again. (They should have avoided these issues after a decade of servicing broken minidisk players.) Comparatively, I've stepped on my GBA, it's been rained on, and it rustles around in my bag for days at a time. It's never missed a beat. I'll stick with GBA or GB-DS, thankyouverymuch.



(This entry is a comment I left on this Engadget post)

Instapundit == Ass Hat

ASSEMBLEME: I've been meaning to update my link list to the right for a while now -- adding new blogs I love and getting rid of ones I never visit anymore -- but I'm again going to have to put it off for a bit.



However, I had to get rid of my link to Instapundit right away, simply because that guy is out of his gourd lately. I used to read him to try to get some balance to my political blog reading, but I'm switching over to Andrew Sullivan. In a political climate that has made lefties get lefter and righties get righer, Sullivan is one of the few pundits that actually has moved to the center. So he's my daily read now. Although I change pundits like I change socks. (I used to hate Michael Moore, you know.)



And hey, he used to be quite a looker, and that always helps.

"F*** You and F*** You, Republicans" Money

DATA: Slate has a great article on the politics of money.

In September, the research firm Prince & Associates surveyed 400 people worth more than $1 million for Elite Traveler magazine. The rich folk favored Bush by a 58-42 margin. Not too surprising. But when you break out the numbers, they tell a different story. The petit bourgeoisie millionaires were passionately for Bush: Those worth between $1 million and $10 million favored Bush by a 63-37 margin. But the haute millionaires, those worth more than $10 million, favored Kerry 59-41.



[...]



On Wall Street, veterans speak of "f***-you money": the nice round figure a guy needs to set himself up for life, buy (and decorate) multiple residences, create trust funds for kids, and still have enough cash to buy expensive toys and pursue new business ventures. At a certain point—somewhere north of $10 million—wealth may become "f*** you and f*** you, Republicans" money. This is the kind of cash that George Soros, Warren Buffett, Peter Lewis, and the 200 business leaders who endorsed Kerry possess.

Politics, Politics, Politics

VISUAL COMMUNICATION: The New York Times schools Kerry Edwards on their mediocre logo.







Click on the graphic above for the full version, or you can check out the associated article.

Logos can be powerful, and they're all about subliminal messages. Perhaps because of my Texas roots, I have a weakness for the big and the bold, and the main 2004 Bush-Cheney logo, basically a holdover from the 2000 presidential race, fulfills my expectations. It's brash and snazzy: a field of powerful, militaristic navy blue punctuated with the four letters of his surname spelled out in white in what appears to be Folio Extra-Bold Italic letters. (Even the name of the font sounds forceful, doesn't it?)