Visualizing the election results: now and then

After an busy week, in school and in politics, I return with some interesting figures of the breakdown of Tuesday's voting. The New York Times has an interactive electoral map that compares voting patterns this year with the previous four presidential elections. As you might expect, compared to 2004, the country swung heavily Democratic, even within states McCain won.



In this picture, blue areas represent counties that voted more Democratic than in 2004, whereas red areas are counties that went more Republican. You see a lot of blue, indicating a general increase in Democratic voting percentages across the country, except for parts of some southern states. Notably, you see a lot of blue in the Rocky Mountains, along the southern border, and among the northern plains states.

One might draw the conclusion from this map that the country has renounced conservatism and embraced liberal Democrats once more, underscoring Obama's mandate to change the country. Well, for some perspective, consider this year's election in comparison to 1992, when Bill Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush.


The 1996 map is similar.

Our heavily Democratic 2008 voting bloc was considerably more Republican than it was sixteen years ago. What do we glean from comparing these maps? The country remains much more conservative even now than it was in the 1990's. The Democratic shift is relative, and reflects just how strong Christian conservative turn out was in '00 and '04. With practical issues like the economy on voters minds, they worried less about abortion, but the gap in social issues remains sharp (sadly evidenced by the passage of gay marriage bans in several states).

Eight years of the Bush administration may have soured voters on George W. Bush, but it certainly didn't eliminate Republican support. What does this mean for Obama's presidency? Bipartisanship is key. Given that Democrats now control the executive and legislative branches, it will be interesting to see how they will get things done without alienating 46% of the country.

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For Your Consideration: Media recommendations

Book

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow. Mlodinow is a Caltech physicist and author of several popular science books, notably, Feynman's Rainbow and (with Steven Hawking) A Briefer History of Time. This new book explores probability in everyday life, emphasizing how humans misunderstand randomness. We (read: primates) are especially evolved to form patterns and associations, to build heuristics that confer us some ability to predict future events. In other words, we seek out non-randomness in the world, a quality that was helpful in a simpler time, before modern civilization, but one that can lead to bad probability judgments when applied to modern scenarios. I've only gotten a few chapters into this, but so far it's highly entertaining and informative.

Pastoralia by George Saunders, is a collections of short stories and a novella. As the book jacket notes, Saunders is an author in the tradition of Mark Twain, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut, sharply satirical and smart. The title story, "Pastoralia" is a swift and punchy, but utterly disturbing riff on the absurdity of modern America. After reading this, I'm going back to get all of his other work.

Magazine

SEED Magazine has been around for a couple years, along with its blog network Scienceblogs (Something else I would recommend as a great place to read about science/politics/culture/etc). I've been a subscriber and reader online for a good chunk of that time. Their motto, "Science is Culture," reflects the focus on the confluence of science and society, what really interests me about the magazine. Great art design too.

Podcast

The Naked Scientists is a podcast by several young Cambridge, England researchers, distributed by the BBC. It covers a wide swath of popular science stories, from public health to space exploration. Each episode includes a review of the week's science news, Q&A with listener email, interviews with prominent researchers, and a "kitchen science" experiment reminiscent of Mr. Wizard. Add in a bit of cheeky Brit humor, and you've got a great show. What makes it really entertaining, in my opinion, is the hosts' enthusiasm for the subject matter and interest in promoting public scientific literacy. The science is presented in an accessible way, but it's never dumbed down.

Philosophy Bites is a great little podcast by two British authors. Each week they interview a philosopher on a specific topic - such as, for example, evil, forgiveness, infinity, and human rights. This week's episode discusses the paradox of tragedy - that is, how we seemingly take pleasure from tragic literature and film, even though such things are filled with pain and suffering. Most of these discussions are 10-30 minute segments, so it's easy to stay engaged.

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One computer to rule them all

This piece from Wired reeks of that pop-science sensationalism that I often find hard to stomach, but it's a cool idea, and they have flashy graphics! Wired is like the US Weekly (OK, maybe more like People) of science/tech magazines; it focuses on science that's hot, in the Paris Hilton sort of way (Last minute edit: NO, Paris Hilton is not hot, this is referring to her common catchphrase "That's Hot," which she uses to indicate something that is cool or trendy or expensive. Fans of the movie Mean Girls may also relate to the term "Fetch," as in, that piece of clothing is soo fetch! Clearly, these terms can be applied to science-y things as well, as in, "that particle accelerator is hot!.") But they also simplify it to such an extreme as to state it as fact, thus seemingly removing the need for critical thought or consideration. If one were to only read Wired, and never examine more serious science journalism (or, maybe-just-maybe, actual science papers!), one would come to believe that researchers are curing cancer, are communicating with aliens, or are, in the case of the highlighted article, building computers equal to the human brain. Such computers, or computer, singular, the One Computer that is a conglomerate of all the world's data-calculation machines, interconnected by the world wide web, can already do more calculations than your brain. By 2040, this net of computers will have the combined processing power of all the human brains in the world. Wired's conclusion is simple: computers are totally becoming smarter than humans, which is awesome! It's so simple!

w00t!

The article makes a simple analogy between a neuron (a nerve cell, as you might have heard it called) in the brain, and a transistor on a computer chip. The One Computer has many many many more transistors, or switches, than a single brain has neurons. But neurons are only part of the brain's processing story. It's the connections between neurons, or synapses, that matter for information processing, learning, and as a collective, thought. The synapse analog in the global computer is the hyperlink - a connection between webpages. Compared to the human brain, with roughly 100 trillion synapses, the One Computer falls short at 57 trillion hyperlinks. This is already half, sure, and is increasing exponentially, but I don't think the basic analogy holds up. In the brain, synapses, these neuron-neuron connections, are constantly changing, strengthening, weakening, decaying, shifting, and splitting. Their chemical makeup is also in constant flux; synapses are some of the most molecularly complicated cell interfaces around. When you learn something new, taking in and processing sensory information, it doesn't just run through a circuit of static nodes, like transistors and links, but the very nature of the cells change, in infinitely minute ways. This change occurs continuously, from the time your brain develops in the womb, to when you die. THAT's a lot of information, all locked up in one three-pound mass.

In order to form the equivalent connection on the internet, there would have to be a more (much more) fluid interface between nodes/machines/pages. The difference between the brain and a big computer is information density. We're talking millions of molecules - receptors, enzymes, signaling proteins, etc, moving, recycling, pulsating with life within a single synapse. If a computer system can ever approximate that sort of complexity at each of its connections, and do it on a mere few watts of power, I'll be impressed. What this Wired article fails to point out is that while we are busy congratulating ourselves for technological innovation, we forget that that innovation is plagiarized from the natural world. Something that's only been "online" for a couple billion years.

Okay, okay, I get it, that's not a "hot" message. Continue reading "One computer to rule them all"!

Something to watch/TiVo/download from the internet

Airing on public television his fall.



Mario Batali and Gwyneth Paltrow travel and cook Spanish food. They are friends? It appears so, because, at one point, she calls him "Batals." They are totally BFFs. Willie Nelson music and Michael Stipe from R.E.M makes an appearance. Bizarre, sure, but this looks sort of interesting. It also features Mark Bittman, a food guy for the New York Times. Coincidentally, Bittman has a NYT blog called Bitten. Continue reading "Something to watch/TiVo/download from the internet"!

Media wallz

Sensory tables are often used in elementary schools to provide children, especially those with developmental disabilities like autism, something to play with and focus on. The're filled with things like small blocks, stones, sand, popcorn, buttons - great for providing tactile stimulation. That's nice, and I'd sure like to have one, but it's sort of a stone-age solution. The sensory table of the future will look a lot different. Echoing something out of Minority Report, this interactive media wall is now on sale at Neiman Marcus. Only 100,000 dollars! Check out the demonstration video, it's so cool. Here's another one from Youtube.



Oh, I want one. I'm used to the touch screen on my iPhone, but this thing recognizes some really complicated hand gestures. Imagine having one on every flat surface in your house.

If things pan out as they do in Minority Report, we'll be doing our computing like this, by 2052.

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Cells and Easter wrap up

On this day in which the American death count in Iraq passed 4,000, I offer a visual distraction. Check out this video from Harvard and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. It's a handsome depiction of some basic cellular processes.



In reality, the action of these molecules isn't so graceful; at that atomic level, movement is messy, frenetic, and quite random. An accurate depiction would have made for a seizure-inducing video, so we'll let that one slide. The specific physics don't really matter, just keep in mind that most of those processes are going on in your body trillions of times a second. There are a bunch of other videos on YouTube of course, but also here.

Yesterday was Easter Sunday. Not unlike any other Sunday for me; I watched Food Network over breakfast, went to lab, blogged about cereal. I also ventured to Best Buy to return a wireless-internet router, only to arrive at an empty parking lot. Best Buy gave their employees the day off to hunt eggs and eat chocolate bunnies, it would seem. This was irksome, sure, but luckily the adjacent Borders was open. I bought two books (that I have no time to read).

More disturbing was the "CNN Presents: The Mystery of Jesus" special I viewed when I got back. In an attempt to delve into the controversial history of the life of Jesus, CNN interviewed several religious scholars on his prophetic exploits. What is pretty certain are the main biographical elements like his place of birth, teaching, and crucifixion. What of the rest, such as the purported miracles and resurrection? Well CNN took a less than critical line on these events, concluding that "science can't account for them" but never questioning that they happened in the first place. (Just like science can't account for, ahem, the Easter Bunny?) The lone source material for all of this deep inquiry - the four gospels of the Bible. No mention of the myriad other accounts of Jesus' life, nor the contradictions implicit within the New Testament. To put a big disturbing cherry on top, CNN gets Liam Neeson to narrate. He might as well have been proselytizing the midi-chlorians.

Oh, I'd hate to end on such a cynical note. Here's another video (cell wars).

Continue reading "Cells and Easter wrap up"!