Today involved pancakes, the massively co-ordinated garage sale of Bernal Heights, and preventing (and failing to prevent) small child injuries. Now I’m listening to Americans talking about being kids being made to read hefty classics which are thus ruined, like Moby Dick and Ivanhoe and Hemingway and … Ivanhoe? They make them read Ivanhoe here?
Yes, it’s Saturday, and you catch me racking myself over what to write about in this weeks’ column. I think I’d be more peppy if I hadn’t spent far too long last night browsing NationMaster and playing International Man of Goggling At Slightly Dodgy Statistics. Then I stumbled on Visualizing Economics and after spending a few minutes sniggering a bit too much at their plots which look like visualizations of random number generators, got far far too involved in their archive. I started with this depiction of share of world GDP of various countries from 1500-2000 (population over the same period is a nice complement).
For those of you with a matching love of statpron, and about to get overinvolved in US presidential politics (whether through your own choice or that of your dominant media), I heartily recommend Five Thirty Eight which takes a probabilistic approach to the election, running a simulation system 10,000 times and showing the number of times each split in electoral votes occurred in their dice rolls. The tone is slightly Obama-tilted ( with a 5% margin of snark provided by an ex-You Don’t Know Jack editor).
It is a beautifully quantum-multiverse view of the election — as though on the day I will absolutely confident that there will be thousands of universes out there where Alaska went for Obama, or where McCain lost Ohio but won the war: I just won’t know which one I’ll be navigating to. Oh the tiny fluctuations that lead to such endless points of divergence!