Peter Sagal Sexiest Man

Another inside joke, this time for fans of Adam Felber's Fanatical Apathy and the National Public Radio news quiz show "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me".

FA commentor Aaron reported a bit of spam mail with the subject line "Peter Sagal Sexiest Man". Peter Sagal is the host of WWDTM, and I suggested that a "Peter Sagal Sexiest Man" T-shirt would make a good membership premium for those who contribute to their local NPR station in support of WWDTM. So here's my design. The front...
...and the back, featuring the complete text of the spam e-mail:
Even without the T-shirt as a membership premium, you should still support your local NPR station. And for a good time, you should listen to Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me every week!

Fanatical Apathy: Seattle

Courtesy of fellow Fanatical Apathy commentor (and owner of the very cool Jackson Street Books) SeattleDan, I bring you this photo of three members of the Fanatical Apathy: Seattle chapter! From left to right: Ann, SeattleTammy (who manages the Seattle Mystery Bookshop), SeattleDan.

Luck organs

Adam Felber at Fanatical Apathy just wrote a post suggesting that if "Intelligent Design" is a serious argument, then one must recognize that the "design" of human beings - with their fragile knees and spines and appendices, big heads and small birth canals - falls a little short of most definitions of "intelligent".

I've written in the past about what I call "biological practical jokes", situations in human physiology that are so perversely ironic that they could be held as evidence of malicious intent on the part of any purported "designer." (I do not believe in a "malicious designer", by the way.)

There is another aspect of human life that I have always wondered about. We humans are prone to defects and aberrations: bad eyesight, bad teeth, poor ability to regulate blood sugar, etc. In the dim dark ancient days of, say, three hundred years or more ago, I cannot imagine that many people with crappy eyesight, a mouthful of rotting teeeth, or lying on the ground in a diabetic coma had much opportunity to reproduce. Not that some of them didn't manage to get laid, but I imagine people with good eyes and decent teeth and an ability to eat whatever whenever without worrying about dying probably did a lot better in that arena.

But then we humans compensated for our frailties with technology. Bad eyesight? Here's some glasses / contact lenses / radial keratonomy / laser surgery to correct your vision. Bad teeth? Go to the doctor to have them pulled / filled / resurfaced / straightened / replaced - and here's some toothpaste and dental floss and instructions on how to use them. Can't control blood sugar? Here's some insulin and a list of dietary recommendations, and maybe some medication to keep you in balance.

So we go around with our defects compensated for (but not corrected or eliminated) by technology, and we go on happily copulating and squeezing out little ones who carry our genes. And that's all well and good, as long as the plug doesn't get pulled on technology.

But there are some other things in human physiology that make you scratch your head. In a pre-technological (or at least pre-surgical) society damage to them would have almost certainly resulted in death. Things like the appendix, whose proper biological function is uncertain and possibly nonexistent, but whose malfunction can result in death; or the spleen, which does perform a known biological function but is not absolutely necessary to life, yet is so susceptible to damage through injury or disease that it is frequently removed as a result because its malfunction is a threat to life.

So why do we have an appendix or a spleen? Let's ignore (or dismiss) any arguments about the "mysterious ways" of an intelligent designer and look at it purely from an evolutionary point of view. Why do we humans still cart around genes for these fragile, dangerous things that we could probably just as easily do without?

I propose that these organs are a biological indicator of difficult-to-measure factor: luck.

Granted, there's a lot of luck involved in evolution overall. Only organisms that are strong enough, or clever enough, or sneaky enough, or persistent enough, or lucky enough get to pass on their genes to the next generation. If you were the sort of kid who tended to wander into the middle of busy street, odds are you never made it to adolescence with a fully functioning reproductive system. Or maybe you did, but you got banged up a little. Maybe a lot. And maybe you had to make a trip or two to the hospital for a little life-saving emergency surgery.

Once upon a time there wouldn't have been that sort of emergency surgery available for pre-adolescents who got gored by a Woolly Rhinoceros or an Irish Deer and had their appendices or spleens ruptured. They would have died, slowly and painfully, and their genes would have died with them. Meanwhile their companions, who were quick enough or clever enough or lucky enough to avoid getting gored in the first place, would have gotten the opportunity to grow to sexual maturity and pass on their genes to a new generation - including the genes for their spleens and appendices.

It's not a strong argument for why we carry around vestigial or semi-vestigial organs that amount to little packets of unstable explosives stored here and there in our bodies. It doesn't explain why those individuals born without an appendix or a spleen don't have a strong reproductive advantage over those of us born with all our organs intact. Still, it is an interesting avenue of thought to explore: the possibility that the presence of organs that are non-essential in their function, fragile and easily damaged, and lethal in their damaged state may actually be an aspect of natural selection for a characteristic as intangible as "luck."

There ain't no Blue States, there ain't no Red States

In one of my previous incarnations I was a statistician of sorts. More precisely, I was one of two Statistical Process Control Coordinators for a major Compact Disc manufacturer. What Statistical Process Control is, and why it is at once beautiful, powerful, effective, and woefully ignored, is a story for another time.

It was during this time that I became acquainted with Edward R. Tufte's book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. This book is also beautiful, powerful, and effective. Humans are animals who depend primarily on our sense of sight, and we would do well to understand how information can best be presented by visual means. More people should be familiar with this book.

By now most people in the U.S. have seen maps of the Red State/Blue State division that developed during the 2004 U.S. Presidential election. Most people can tell you whether they live in a Red or Blue State, and many arguments have sprung up over why Blue States are intellectually superior to Red States, or why Red States are morally superior to Blue States.

The U.S. Electoral system is based on (in almost all states) a winner-take-all approach: whichever candidate gets the most votes in a given state gets all of that state's Electoral votes. The Electoral votes for each state are equal to the number of Senators and Representatives that state has in the U.S. Congress. The number of Representatives will vary based on a state population census taken every 10 years, but the number of Senators is fixed at two for each state. The Electoral system therefore gives a statistical advantage to less-populous states, in that their Electoral strength will be out of proportion to their actual share of the total population - which is one of the reasons why a candidate can win the Electoral vote even when the other candidate wins the popular vote. (See here for a good example of the disproportionality: California has a voting-age population 66 times greater than Wyoming, but has an Electoral strength only 18 times greater. Each Electoral vote in Wyoming represents 123,333 voters, while each Electoral vote in California represents 443,636 voters.)

But more importantly from a visual representation of data point of view, there is a lack of geographical proportion on the map of the United States. Larger states are not necessarily more heavily populated. Utah is more than twice the size of Pennsylvania, but does not have twice the population. But on Election night, Utah was colored solid red, and Pennsylvania was solid blue. The visual message was: big state red, small state blue. Red bigger than blue.

For someone looking at the Red State/Blue State map of the U.S., the visual message is: What a blowout. There are a lot more Red States than Blue States. How can anyone think this election was close? But the reality is, it was close. And the divisions between Red and Blue are a lot blurrier than most people realize.

Robert J. Vanderbei of Princeton University has created the "Purple Map" of the U.S. popular vote, a map that gives a county-by-county breakdown of the U.S. color-coded along a continuous scale from all-red (100% Bush) to all-blue (100% Kerry). Unsurprisingly, most counties come out as some shade of purple, and much of the Red/Blue distinction starts to fade.

While the Purple map of the popular vote helps to dispel the Red/Blue illusion of the winner-take-all approach (which is, however, reality when it comes to how the Electoral votes are counted), it does not address the geographical illusion. A large, sparsely-populated county will have a disproportionately greater visual impact than a more densely-populated county that is somewhat smaller.

Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman of the University of Michigan built on Robert Vanderbei's work and presented the popular vote data on a map called a "population cartogram", which allocates area based on population. Their analysis is worth taking a look. Go on. Look here. I promise we'll wait for you.

On a county-by-county level, a county with a large population will appear larger on a population cartogram than a county with a smaller population, regardless of the actual geographical size of each county. When the county-level "Purple Map" is combined with the county-level population cartogram, a much more visually meaningful representation of the popular vote results. Now the map resembles the side of a volcano, with islands of cool blue rock surrounded by flows of hot lava. An analysis of the blue rocks and red flows will yield far more insight into voting patterns than do the Red State/Blue State maps.

Thanks to Vanderbei, Gastner, Shalizi, Newman, and others, we can see beyond the Red and the Blue and watch as much of the perceived disunity throughout the country fades to purple.

Also thanks to President Bongo and Jerry, two commentors over at Adam Felber's Fanatical Apathy, for showing the way to these maps.

Adam Felber is a very funny guy

If you're not reading Adam Felber's Fanatical Apathy, you're missing out on one of the most wickedly funny sites on the Internet. Check out "GROUP ACTIVITY: HEADLINES FROM THE 2ND TERM" and join in the fun!

Over

Dammit.

The politics of fear beat the politics of hope. Idiots brainwashed by right-wing radio shows have demonstrated that they are a force to be reckoned with. America has traveled further down a path from which it might never be able to turn.

Things are bad, and they will get worse. And the supporters of Bush will share fully in the blame. Four years from now, will they still be able to maintain their delusion of blamelessness and infallibility?

But it truly is a time for healing. So let's just hope that the poor, sick, deluded idiots who voted for Bush get the healing they need. Too late, the damage is done, to the country and the world. Kiss checks and balances goodbye. Hello, government without restraint!

Adam Felber ran a mocking presidential pseudo-campaign of his own, and he, like Kerry, issued a concession speech today - and it's the speech Kerry should have given. Check it out here.