Face facts 
Daniel Davies is irreplaceable.
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Its time for the UK to face facts, agree that we have very little in common with Europe and a lot in common with the USA, and join the United States. Not only would this be good for Britain, the addition of 60 million voters, substantially all of whom are politically to the left of John Kerry, would presumably solve a few problems for you lot too.
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Read the whole thing. Further proof that the best writers are now in the blogosphere, not in the newspaper pages.
Upstarts upend everything
Jay Rosen, reflecting on BloggerCon III:
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The people of Moore’s law are not necessarily optimistic about events in the world, but it’s so normal to them they don’t realize how optimistic is their casual assumption that platforms change, and new, more powerful, progressively smarter ones will get built. We’ll be able to do way more. |
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That kind of overturn hasn’t happened in mainstream journalism for at least 30 years, and almost no one in mainstream journalism is ready for it to happen now. But in the tech community, even the kids in college have lived through a couple of revolutions. It’s no big deal… |
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There can be new terms, as described in the New York Times Magazine cover story on political blogging: |
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A pizza-stained paper plate sat between Moulitsas and Atrios. Together, they have more readers than The Philadelphia Inquirer. |
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More readers who are deeply engaged and in fact help produce a site like Daily Kos. The people in the tech industry are used to this happening. Upstarts upend everything. Journalists don’t even know that it’s happening, or what that pizza-stained plate means for them.
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More maps for understanding
To add to the Vanderbei purple America map, Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi and Mark Newman of the University of Michigan have produced fascinating cartograms of the US election results.
As they explain:
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We can correct for this [the fact that there are a lot of large, low population states in “red” America] by making use of a cartogram, a map in which the sizes of states have been rescaled according to their population. That is, states are drawn with a size proportional not to their sheer topographic acreage — which has little to do with politics — 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. Thus, on such a map, 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.
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They have produced both a state-level cartogram and a county-level cartogram. Essential viewing, particularly for those depressed by the uncorrected electoral map.