Well, I guess it’s time for that “purple America” map from Robert Vanderbei to start making the rounds again. Yglesias has the 2008 edition posted over at his site. The basic idea here is that for all the talk of red and blue America, the political differences between regions are actually quite small, and we’re really a united nation with a vigorous political discourse, tra la la la. Then we join hands and sing.

And, you know, fine. There’s an element of truth to this, and it’s certainly a nice thought. But also true: visualizing information by using a linear red/blue scale is about the worst way possible to make data legible to the human eye. First: our vision is logarithmic. When a photographer drags out his “50% gray” card for measuring lighting, it’s actually 18% gray. Judging by the triangular key in the corner of Vanderbei’s image, he’s just taking the percentage of vote totals and translating it flatly to 8 bit color — a 100% Republican district gets an RGB 24-bit value of (255,0,0).

The colors themselves are also a problem. As I’m sure you all remember keenly from this post I wrote in 2006, perceptual image codecs spend more bits on brightness than on color because the color-sensing cones in your eyes have a much lousier dynamic range than the light-sensing rods. We’re worse at distinguishing between levels of color than between levels of brightness. And since the percentage of the vote in any given spot on the map should always sum to 100, with negligible green (third party) contributions, the brightness will be relatively uniform (although admittedly not quite due to the perceptual differences between colors — monitor calibration and colorspace begin to enter the picture at this point, and things get just as hideously complex as you might imagine).

(I’ll add, somewhat tentatively, that my recollection from college is that the green cone is the most sensitive of the three types in your retina, making red/blue coding about the least distinguishable color continuum possible. The situation’s complicated by your rods’ preferential sensitivity to blue wavelengths, though, and the ratio of work done by rods and cones varies with ambient brightness. So I’ll resist the temptation to make strong claims on this score.)

So what does this all mean? Depending on how you look at it, not much. It’s not as if Vanderbei has done anything wrong. It’s just that the choices he made will tend to produce a map that, at a glance, implies homogeneity. If, on the other hand, we pull out the red channel, desaturate the blue channel and maximize the contrast of the resulting image (in effect normalizing the values to the full possible dynamic range), we get something very different-looking — but still perfectly accurate, and still non-logarithmic (with the caveat that it gives third-party votes to the Dems). Click the image for a full-sized, easier-to-see version.

Yglesias’s point that this isn’t a huge change between cycles still stands, of course, but the shifts are considerably easier to see this way (and easier still on that cool New York Times map that ran on their front page after the election).

It’s also easy to see that there really are very Republican and very Democratic sections of the country. I don’t want to overstate my case — obviously this conclusion can be drawn from the color map, too. Still, using a whole bunch of linearly-defined purple pixels is a clever way to latch onto a media cliche, but not necessarily the best way to visualize information. Things are more black and white than they may seem, and certainly less purple.

Before the global economy ended and the dollar recovered, there was a lot of talk about why our currency had begun performing so poorly relative to the Euro and the British Pound. Too often ignored in these discussions: how much suckier our currency is. You can hardly blame people for wanting it less.

For example: this is awesome; this is even awesomer. These, though? The best thing you can say for these designs is that the implied alternate history in which all US Presidents were zombies is kind of a funny idea.

I feel like I’m waking up. That probably sounds grandiose — that’s not what I mean. Yes, I’m excited about last night’s win and what it means for the country. I’m very ready to be rid of the stomach-sinking thought that my government is torturing people on my behalf. But the election’s primary effect on my state of mind has just been to make me feel embarrassingly maudlin every quarter-hour. It doesn’t really account for my present disorientation.

That sensation has more to do with how much stuff it feels like I’ve been doing. Some of it was about the election, but an embarrassing amount was Halloween-related. I enjoy that holiday to an extent that can only be described as idiotic, and I probably took on a bit too much this year. Still, the smoke chillers and corpsed skeleton are now safely stored for next year’s installment — an undefined project that I currently find incredibly daunting, and yet already know will have to involve animatronics.

But for now: a return to routine. A wait for the inauguration. Early bedtimes!

First, though, some photos. I managed to take exactly none during the Halloween party, but a bunch of other people did — you can find ‘em here, if you haven’t already. And here’s a shot of me and Emily:

I have to cherish whatever opportunities I can find to be the one in this relationship called “doctor”.

More topical: last night’s celebration on U Street. Wherever you were when you heard the news last night, I hope there was as much joy on hand as there was in DC.

Julian, reacting to Angela’s new piece in Salon about phonebanking for the McCain campaign, voices some concern over the candidates’ phonebank-from-home systems and their potential value to dirty tricksters.

I’m not as worried. As Julian notes, Angela had a hard time getting people on the phone at all, to say nothing of actually speaking to them. It’s hard to imagine an individual doing more damage to democracy this way than they could through more traditional means like printing up some misleading flyers or saying awfully cleverly awful things to people approaching their polling places.

I suppose you could argue that the anonymity of the phone might make the tactic more appealing. But remember: the campaign running the system will have a record of which volunteer called whom. Depending on the system, they may even keep recordings. Judging by the manic zeal with which I saw the chairperson of the Ashburn Obama office encouraged volunteers to find a recording of a fraudulent area robocall, I suspect that any villainous phonebankers would be caught pretty quickly.

I think that hobbyists capable of using technology to amplify their malfeasance remain the larger threat — it’s pretty easy to write a script that spreads orders of magnitude more misinformation per hour than a human being can. Which brings me, finally, to the thinly-veiled reason for this post: to link again to my recipe for robocalling. It’s just as easy now as it was two years ago — if anything, it’s probably cheaper.

One thing I will add, though: Thanks to Tim, I recently had a chance to chat with Chris Soghoian and, over beers outside at Townhouse, we found ourselves describing nearly identical blueprints for voter suppression (Chris’s was better in that his involved shady Russian ISPs — more bandwidth and more villainous menace than my podunk coffeeshop scenario/stolen wifi scenario). If the two of us both came up with the same plan, it’s a safe bet that some other geeks have, too. It seems likely that at least a few of them will have a go at it.

I’m not sure what to do about this, exactly. Resisting the urge to relax restrictions on institutional calls to mobile phones is probably a good start — not that it’ll stop crooks, but it will make the idea of getting a campaign-related call on your mobile a bit more discordant and surprising. It also seems like we could probably spend some government dollars every four years on a DTV-transition-style ad campaign hyping a unified federal election information website. And it might not be a bad idea to provide some Nudge-inspired opt-out election reminders via phone or email on election day. “Check this form on your tax return if you would prefer not to be reminded to vote on election day” — that sort of thing.

Whatever we do, it’ll be more a question of education than enforcement: catching malefactors is probably hopeless. People like this will continue to exist, and their powers will continue to grow. But if a voter is given two conflicting sources of information, hopefully they’ll at least be confused enough to seek a third.

INCIDENTALLY: Julian’s article about online dirty tricks offers a number of interesting possibilities. I’ll just add that the Kaminsky DNS bug would have been a totally awesome way of executing BOE-website-spoofing scams. I can’t find any up-to-date numbers on the deployment of the patch, but at this point it’s got to be complete enough that such an attack would be a very low-percentage play.