A Gauge of the Electoral College Totals

I’ve been look­ing for some­thing that will enable me to see, at a glance, just how the com­plex­ion of the US Elec­tion is turn­ing. Is it really, despite what one hears, pre­dom­i­nantly Red or Blue? Because the num­ber of del­e­gates in the Elec­toral Col­lege is in no way related to the size of the states (in land area, that is), sim­ply look­ing at a colour-coded map gives you a skewed view of who’s actu­ally ahead, at least at a glance. Rel­a­tively small New York is dwarfed by Mon­tana, even though it has over 10 times the delegates.

The polls only tell you the pop­u­lar vote, and as we all know by now, that is only a par­tial indi­ca­tor of how the Elec­toral Col­lege will go. With so many states ‘in play’ as the news media puts it, pay­ing atten­tion to the Elec­toral Col­lege totals makes more sense.

I was deter­mined to find a view of the Elec­toral Col­lege totals, by state poll, effec­tively giv­ing you an fairly effi­cient and under­stand­able view of the cur­rent pre­dic­tions. I found it at vote2008.thetakeaway.org, and here is what it looks like:

You can mouse over areas to get a poll-by-poll pre­dic­tion, but the impor­tant point is that you can see at a glance, the like­li­hood of one can­di­date win­ning over another.

There’s a smaller ver­sion (with­out the inter­ac­tiv­ity, but it is dynam­i­cally updated) as well:

This is an inter­est­ing con­ver­gence of my inter­ests! (pol­i­tics and infor­ma­tion design, that is).

Off the Wall

“What was that?”

“I don’t know. I was just heat­ing up the saucepan.”

“OMIGOD! The TV is com­ing off the wall!”

“What the heck…Is there an earth­quake or something?”

“Nope, it just started to come off.”

We called a TV Hang­ing com­pany. Yes, there is such a thing. They came at the end of the day on Fri­day, and took the TV com­pletely off the wall, since it was hang­ing on by 1 or 2 of the 3 screws, and said they’d return to re-hang it for $200 when they could find a slot to book us. We traded emails and set an appoint­ment for the 17^th (ear­li­est pos­si­ble date). At least it didn’t fall.

In the mean­time, my office, which we can­ni­bal­ized in order to get a desk sturdy enough to sup­port the TV, looks like a tor­nado hit it. Printer is on the floor, papers and other junk (being stored in the desk) are every­where. I’m start­ing to clean it up, but in the mean­time, the first thing you see when you enter our condo is a huge mess. Lovely.