the red/blue map


ok was chatting w/ friend and she thought I should blog this:

the problem with the US Map distribution of “red. vs. blue” votes is that it doesn’t take into account population. CBS has a nice “tower” looking 3-d map, but it’s still sub-par. In linguistics we had a language diversity map that skewed the real estate of the US according to language diversity. So native american languages are *very* diverse on the pacific coast, making it a big fat state, whereas nevada, wyoming didn’t have a lot of diversity, squishing them into a little sliver. Basically it’s acknowledging that vast amounts of space on a map make it seem proportionally larger and thus more important to the viewer. So if we’re talking electoral votes, we shoudl take californai and make it huge, and new jersey, make it huge, etc. and utah teeny weeny, you get my drift.