Electoral Math
| Nov 16 | A stroll through the referer logs |
| Nov 9 | census.gov is the coolest website ever |
| Nov 7 | Revolutions |
Apparently MSN search lists my home page in the top ten when searching for "queer eye theme song". If you came here looking for that I imagine you're looking for something like this article on the release of "All Things" as a single, or perhaps you want to pre-order the soundtrack off of Amazon.
I aims to please. Apparently our search tools don't.
There's a popular perception that America is reaching the point of having voluntary segregation -- that is, that black families are choosing to live in black neighborhoods rather than try to break down color barriers in traditionally segregated.
The numbers suggest that this is not the case. The U.S. Census Bureau has collects mountains of data on everyone in the country. For instance, this chart here illustrates the distribution of racial dissimilarity over time. You'll not that the curve for 2000 is substantially lower than the curve for 1980. I know what you're thinking, though -- we all know there are three types of lies, and this is one of them. I'm with you. Trends within the trends show that integration is not uniform across the country. The Rust Belt cities are integrating more slowly than those in the South and the West. Smaller cities are not integrating as quickly as larger cities, and to some extent they are experiencing re-segregation. Middle-class neighborhoods are more likely to be integrated then upper-class or lower-class neighborhoods. If you poke on the census housing patterns report you can find all of this information and more. How cool is that!?!
I don't have a grand point to make here, I just find this sort of information incredibly cool.
Why is everyone so down on this movie?
I'm down to having two nits worth picking. One, they spend way too much time in the real world blowing up Zion. Locke is a tool, and the machines trounced the humans. It was spectacular, yes, but I don't know that we needed 35 minutes worth of that spectacle. The other is that it was really serious -- I didn't fell like I had many chances to laugh with or at the movie. I didn't mind, but it would have been nice to have a moment here or there that weren't so heavy.
Best part III of a trilogy ever? It certainly beats the pants off of Return of the Jedi, even if you're pro-Ewok like me. I've never seen The Godfather: Part III, but I hear that Jedi beats it. Die Hard With a Vengance is pretty damn fun, but I don't know that it's in the same class. I suppose Return of the King might give it a run for its money. Still, I challenge you to find a third movie in any series that's this good.
Oh, and if you think I'm crazy, you're not alone. Reviews are ranging from "Just Bad" to "Entertaining but Still Bad". My guess is the reviewers were expecting another movie as sparse as the first Matrix, or they got annoyed on the occasional hamfisted imagery coupled by dialog to club the audience over the head with the same point. I can't really blame them for be frustrated with either of those misses, but it still works on its own (in fact, Revolutions works quite well as its own movie, if you think about it, way more so than Reloaded).
Yeesh. The Mariners hired Bill Bavasi as their new General Manager. [I find it ironic that google news pointed me to the Atlanta newspaper for this information.]
The good news is that Paul DePodesta, Mike Arbuckle, Tim Purpura, and Brad Kullman still haven't gotten enough ink to earn a GM's spot to their liking, so it still looks like the S-curve of geek adoption hasn't kicked in (the occasional wretched PR relations between the Red Sox front office and the Boston press probably didn't help). The bad news is his resume. Bavasi started in operations and grounds crew in 1974 (at age 24), and reached the top of his profession in 1993. Now, I have no idea what his lifestyle was like for the years in between, and it's possible that by the age of 30 or so he had a reached a comfortable lifestyle, but my guess is that I'm in for a big shock should I end up biting the bullet and changing careers one day.