Reince’s plan, Carrico’s folly
Here’s an article by Steve Coll on gerrymandering in the New Yorker. The subject is not dying away – quite the opposite. Some of you thoug...
What’s your favorite chart of 2012?
Nerds around the blogosphere seem to be collecting their favorite charts of the year. Obviously, I can’t pick my own. But to recall the Woody Allen joke…
…I can pick my second-favorite. Here it is (click to see the whole thing).
Randall Munroe (XKCD) departs from his usual hand-scrawled style to depict the political history of the United States in one very large chart. Waves of partisan and ideological realignment wash through the dominant parties. We’re in the Fifth (or Sixth) Partisan Age of the United States. Today’s right-leaning party, the Republican Party, is at an extreme of polarization. As is almost always the case, ideologically the left is a diverse mess. This demonstrates the eternal nature of Will Rogers’ joke: “I don’t belong to an organized political party. I’m a Democrat.”
Or if you want a funnier XKCD, there is always this, which speaks to much of the pundit class in 2012.
List yours in comments. It doesn’t have to be political!
Topics:
By far, my favorite chart of 2012 is the map of all states sized according to the number of their electoral college votes and colored by who won them. A work of political fine art. True nerds here will prefer something more complex, I’m sure.
(Needed — and dismal — is a map of the United States relating the minimum number of states by sufficient senators with filibuster rule to block any law, to the population of those states compared to the rest of the states. A visual version of “Jersey” votes for Senate action — my California senators are woefully deprived of the influence our population should give them. Wyoming on the other hand —–
Minimum population for a filibuster: You mean like this?
Yes, and thanks.
Now I’d like to see it with sufficient but only “red” states, and then with sufficient but only “blue” states.
That would be easy for a reader to do with the tools provided here.
I could probably come up with a whole top ten list from XKCD alone, but I’d go with Visual Field with the chart of the partisan makeup of Congress that you picked and Lakes and Oceans as close second choices.
I loved all the interactive maps this election season. But I think the majority minority cities map is my favorite. https://www.google.com/search?q=majority+minority+cities+map+2012&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&client=safari&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&authuser=0&ei=0z3UUMq5H8ukqwHCkYGYBQ&biw=768&bih=928&sei=3T3UUJfcBsqQqgHz6IHABg#biv=i|6;d|RJLGP9NfS8YbNM:
I like to call this one Distributed Jesusland.
With all due respect to the tech wizards, I think this simple chart explains exactly why Obama won:
http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/politics/fieldoffices.png
–bks
No it doesn’t. Republicans think they can just go to OFA school and win next time. In reality, they have a whole different set of problems. Their old infrastructure was perfectly adequate to turn out their base, because of asymmetrical enthusiasm.
But you can’t turn out base voters that don’t exist.
Instead of a chart, I must go with my favorite Venn diagram of all time … http://www.hanselman.com/blog/content/binary/WindowsLiveWriter/111c782b4740_B250/slide_3512_49971_large.jpg_3.gif
I’m an aficionado of Venn diagrams. I wouldn’t call this the best chart of 2012, but I think it’s the ugliest:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v488/n7410/fig_tab/nature11241_F4.html
–bks
I clicked through the headline to make sure “Congress” was on your list or else to put in a good word for it. It’s magical.
Let’s see if this works:
If it doesn’t…..
http://incompetech.com/Images/caring.png
Persistent map of genetic biodiversity.
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/21/a-biodiversity-map-version-2-0/?smid=tw-nytimesscience&seid=auto
Dr Wang, read someone’s hypothesis that the current dysfunctional republican house is actually a result of gerrymandering to make safe seats. Is there a map showing all the anti-democratic districts?
Antidemocratic gerrymandering seems to be concentrated in seven states: VA, WI, PA, MI, OH, NC, IN. More soon.
Well…the theory is that gerrymandering makes the GOP incumbent immune to a challenge from the left….they can only be challenged from the right, by a more extreme right wing candidate ie tea party candidate. Thus the recent Plan B disaster.
Is this a validation of Chris Mooney’s Republican Brain hypothesis?
This. After so many years.
https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/pub/CMSPublic/Hig12028TWiki/fig3.png
That’s the invariant mass of 2 photons. The bump there is a boson (could be Higgs).
For probability and statistic nerds, here is the p-value.
https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/pub/CMSPublic/Hig12028TWiki/fig2.png
This is a good place to discuss the “look elsewhere effect”. In 2011, we saw a ~3 sigma bump, but we didn’t know a-priori where a bump would be, so we had to calculate the probability of a background fluctuation *anywhere* in the allowed spectrum.
The p-values reflect that.
This is called the “look elsewhere effect”.
my favourite physics chart
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRO59_NiYXfxfaRce6dOb-u0c5WeEr2ITGGPjAAwI3-aChUNpXBRg
That chart is obsolete; we now know that the sides are convex, at least in the recent past, and it’s pretty unlikely that they go inward at any point (let alone meet). Still a good format, but the content needs to be updated.
Here are some excellent charts, courtesy of the Human InTrade: http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012-chart-of-the-year-nominees.html
waste some time with this set of fantastic infographics
http://blog.visual.ly/20-great-infographics-of-2012/