A quick Inkscape sketch from the other night:
Infographic: Mens’ Hats
What We Think They Say v.s. What They Actually Say
Click for larger image:
Inkscape vector art (Compressed svg)
Something for the ladies? Perhaps you’ll enjoy this old favorite: A Chart of the Pressures Facing an Essentially Straight Modern Woman.
Regarding Telecom Immunity
I believe in accountability. I believe that no crisis removes an American’s responsibility to uphold the Constitution. As a result, I feel duty-bound to oppose Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s bill granting American telecommunications companies retroactive immunity for any illegal wiretaps they may or may not have performed at the behest of the National Security Agency and the White House in the years following September 11, 2001.
Were the issue one of protecting companies acting in good faith, a cap on settlements would be proper. Granting immunity instead dismisses all present and future court cases, removing the public’s only avenue of discovery regarding the reality or extent of any illegal actions taken. Crisis does not justify barbarism.
Very little can be done by the public at this point. I’ve summarized my moral argument and sent it to lobbying group The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Stop the Spying campaign in the form of the photo below:
As a postscript, I regard Reid’s bill as another example of the spinelessness that caused me to leave the Democratic Party.
2008 Resolutions
- Catch up with at least one person/couple per month with whom I have not recently spoken.
- Escape from this cyclical Blue Collar hell.
- Learn to type right. Again. And make it stick.
- Enough with the drama queen bullshit.
- Find true love? Nah, better hold off on that one…
The First Space Toast Page of 2008
Bloody Comcastic
Because it isn’t enough to provide the shortest billing to payment due period of any company you do business with, Comcast gives you something more: the light euphoria of never knowing what precisely to ascribe to incompetence, policy or indifference.
Things That Just Seem Kind of Sleazy Now
- Facebook flirting
- Sites that spell out a word by including the domain suffix (e.g. http://fluf.fr)
- Neo-burlesque
- Car murals
- Anyone Oprah approves of
- The whole “my ad looks like it was shot for YouTube” thing
- The Reagan Presidency
- Weezer
- Every news channel but The Weather Channel
New Population Map Images
Work on the Population Map continues. Below are some test renders from last night. Click for high-resolution images.
The Animation:Master project file is 5.5MB in size, culled from about 7.5MB of data. Some of the random colors chosen by the script make neighboring states hard to distinguish, which will be corrected in jEdit with find/changes. The enormous Yukon/Koyukuk Census Area in Alaska, with an average of one person every 22.5 square miles, is so close to the ground plane that it’s causing the software to glitch. The fill lighting is perhaps a bit too strong while facing west, and the key a bit dingy overall.
Griping aside, this project is coming along well in my opinion.
Moleskin Notes
These were my original scribbles for the population map project. I try to work as much out on paper as I can before moving to the computer.
Fun With Data
I started work on a project a little while ago, and it’s probably past time I started blogging it. My intention was to produce a population map of the United States, county by county — essentially, a map of the country’s other topography.
Each cylinder represents one county or equivalent (e.g. an independent city, Louisian parish, or Alaskan census area). The circular area represents the land area, the height its population density, and the volume of each cylinder its population. The cylinders are instanced Animation:Master models generated by a script.
The population and land area data come from the U.S. Census Bureau web site. Location data is approximated from Census Burea .bna outline files made available on the Princeton web site by Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne of the 2004 Election “Purple Map” fame.
The first version of the script could build one state at a time. With 254 counties, the most of any state, this is Texas:
The second could produce an arbitrary number of states with random colors, but each had to be loaded by hand as soon as the script finished with the previous. This is New England, where I was born and raised:
The first version of the script that could construct the entire United States took over 14 hours to run and had several bugs, one of which limited it to 99 counties per state. This is its first output:
Right now, I have debugged the script, analyzed its output for missed counties, and am working at sanitizing the input data to avoid screwups. I hope to have a complete work in progress by the end of the weekend.