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being

Time line.

• 1am: Wake to sound of neighbor banging on his door for 10 minutes before his room mate lets him in. Neighbor proceeds to yell at room mate for about 15 minutes
• shortly after, I’m able to fall asleep, annoyed, but not so bad in the grand scheme of things.
• sleep…
• 4am: Wake bolt upright in bed to the sound of pounding music directly above my bedroom, in my neighbors bedroom. Wonder out loud “what the fuck?”
• 4:15am: consider arson, but am in unconscious zombie land, and time slips away.
• 4:45am: realize I’m still awake, return to thoughts of violence
• 4:50am: think of calling the cops, but remember that they won’t do anything besides ring the door bell unless you say someones being murdered, or you’ve been shot, decide that lying to cops isn’t a good idea in the grand scheme of things.
• between 5am and 6am: zone between sleep and awake and half asleep, mostly angry
• Comprehend, from my days as an RA in college that trying to quell a drunk or high neighbor at 5-6am is not usually that productive.
• 7am, somehow fall asleep, possibly out of sheer exhaustion.
• wake up at 830, realize that I’m going to be late for my 9am meeting with the VP of Technology and the VP of Communications
• This is where I find my rage, that I should have had the night before, instead of paitence and hope it would quiet down
• 905am as I am walking out the door, receive a personal phone call from the VP of Technology asking where I am…

Today is not only a day where I was late for a 9am meeting, but its going to be capped with two holiday parties, that i was really hoping to be present and functional for.

But I suspect around 8pm I’m going to crash pretty hard, and thats going to suck.
A lot.

But at least its time to really have a conversation with my neighbor, and the landlord.

being, philly, voices in my head neighbors, sleep, timeline

Now we’re on Word Press 2.7.

Just letting everyone know. weeee

Uncategorized

humor

things that beep cars

I guess I should write something verbose and annoyingly liberal about the victory for sanity last Tuesday… But that will have to wait till i have some energy to do so … that and everyone else on the planet seems to be covering it very well (see, kos, AmericaBlog, etc… etc… etc…)

I’d like to share though, what I’ve been waiting for all week after the election.
The maps.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2008/

This guy, at University of Michican has for the last two elections been making maps based on electorial votes and population density, and cross referencing them against the real “popular” vote numbers. Red vs Blue shows a very ‘black and white’ view of the country, and its very difficult to show how many people really voted for that guy, or the other. The large geographic sizes of some states in comparison to others throws off their perceived value, when seen just in a visual.

Its a little better when you get the chance to see a table of numbers, but then you lose the value and power of a map.

His response is perfect.

The states are colored red or blue to indicate whether a majority of their voters voted for the Republican candidate, John McCain, or the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, respectively. Looking at this map it gives the impression that the Republicans won the election handily, since there is rather more red on the map than there is blue. In fact, however, the reverse is true – the Democrats won by a substantial margin. The explanation for this apparent paradox, as pointed out by many people, is that the map fails to take account of the population distribution. It fails to allow for the fact that the population of the red states is on average significantly lower than that of the blue ones. The blue may be small in area, but they represent a large number of voters, which is what matters in an election.

We can correct for this by making use of a cartogram, a map in which the sizes of states are rescaled according to their population. That is, states are drawn with size proportional not to their acreage but to the number of their inhabitants, states with more people appearing larger than states with fewer, regardless of their actual area on the ground. On such a map, for example, the state of Rhode Island, with its 1.1 million inhabitants, would appear about twice the size of Wyoming, which has half a million, even though Wyoming has 60 times the acreage of Rhode Island.

Here are the 2008 presidential election results on a population cartogram of this type:

The result of this cartogram shows the value of each state in a measurement of how large their population is, yet keeping their position relative to each other.
This gives us a much better idea of how many people voted for each person running for office, while also looking at where they live.

Take a closer look at his maps, as there are a lot of other views he shows, including the popular vote color map, which ranges from red to blue showing how truly purple our nation is.

Its a much more useful view of how our nation is, politicaly, and how the population effects the out come of the election.

ELECTION, Uncategorized maps election red blue

I guess this proves how dumb she really is…

ELECTION, humor palin election prank

humor, things that beep maps electorial snl humor technology screens interface

Just some numbers… you can do the math.

geo-political