So if you haven’t seen this yet, watch it. This is apparently a huge insult in Baghdad. Watch old Bush bobbin and duckin and weavin. Shit’s hilarious.

So once again our Government has decided to get it’s hands into sports. This week Congressman Joe Barton, R-Texas, convened a BCS hearing. Stating that he wanted to figure out if the BCS (Bowl Championship Series) was an illegal business. Funny thing is, he had not said anything until his beloved Texas Longhorns did not make the Big 12 Title game and therefor had no real shot of playing in the National Title game (UF vs OK). Sounds like an abuse of power to me. Since this has came up three other members of Congress have stepped forward, calling the Justice Department to investigate the BCS. Representatives, Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.) and Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) are introducing a resolution rejecting the often criticized bowl system as an illegal restriction on trade because only the largest universities compete in most of the major bowl games. The resolution would require Justice’s antitrust division to investigate whether the system violates federal law. Again let us look at the people behind this move, Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii)… Hawaii has had some good seasons as of late, even undefeated seasons. They however have not made the national title game, while 1 loss teams have. Thing is, Hawaii rarely plays any ranked schools, so based on their strength of schedule they shouldn’t make the title game. If it just went directly to the undefeated teams, our big schools would stop scheduling other big schools and all we would have is blowouts all year…. no fun. Same thing can be said for Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) whose home team, Boise State has also went undefeated without reaching the national title game. Same story there, they don’t play enough good teams to deserve to play for the title. Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.) watched his Georgia Bulldogs not make the title game last year and is now taking this opportunity to cry about it.

Look, I agree that the system may be flawed with all of these computer rankings and this ridiculous equation that makes the BCS tick, but I also think that our Justice Department is better served looking out for our interests elsewhere. Remember last time that Congress got involved… Last years Baseball Steroids fiasco… nothing came of that either. Plus at least with that everyone knew that Steroids are illegal to take no matter what. Here they are talking about a system agreed upon by everyone in 1998. College Football will fix this in due time, Congress needs to stick to fixing our economy and that little 7 year war that we have been involved in. I am personally ashamed of these Congressmen for abusing their power like this.

So, 13 years after he was found “Not Guilty” for the murder of his wife and Ron Goldman, Orenthal James Simpson is finally going to jail. As I sit here waiting to here what his exact sentence is I remember where I was 13 years ago. I think it was the Summer of 1995, I was 11 and living in Colorado. I remember even then not being able to believe the fact that he had gotten away with murder in front of a national audience. I think some will call this poetic justice or karma. Call it what you will, this fool had it coming to him. You get away with murder and then you put your neck out there again to steal some of YOUR OWN memorabilia, I have wondered… couldn’t he have just signed some more of his worthless junk?

So I now write this as the sentence is being handed down.

O.J. Simpson at the age of 61 years old, will be spending at least the next 8 to 10 years in a Nevada State Prison. His actual sentence was about a total of 33 years. 

I’m sure that Juice will end up appealing this somehow but there is no way that he will get off this time.

Way to go Juice.

Election results by state

Most of us are, by now, familiar with the maps the TV channels and web sites use to show the results of the presidential election:

The states are colored red or blue to indicate whether a majority of their voters voted for the Republican candidate, John McCain, or the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, respectively. Looking at this map it gives the impression that the Republicans won the election handily, since there is rather more red on the map than there is blue. In fact, however, the reverse is true – the Democrats won by a substantial margin. The explanation for this apparent paradox, as pointed out by many people, is that the map fails to take account of the population distribution. It fails to allow for the fact that the population of the red states is on average significantly lower than that of the blue ones. The blue may be small in area, but they represent a large number of voters, which is what matters in an election.

We can correct for this by making use of a cartogram, a map in which the sizes of states are rescaled according to their population. That is, states are drawn with size proportional not to their acreage but to the number of their inhabitants, states with more people appearing larger than states with fewer, regardless of their actual area on the ground. On such a map, for example, the state of Rhode Island, with its 1.1 million inhabitants, would appear about twice the size of Wyoming, which has half a million, even though Wyoming has 60 times the acreage of Rhode Island.

Here are the 2008 presidential election results on a population cartogram of this type:

As you can see, the states have been stretched and squashed, some of them substantially, to give them the appropriate sizes, though it’s done in such a way as to preserve the general appearance of the map, so far as that’s possible. On this map there is now clearly more blue than red.

The presidential election, however, is not actually decided on the basis of the number of people who vote for each candidate but on the basis of the electoral college. Under the US electoral system, each state in the union contributes a certain number of electors to the electoral college, who vote according to the majority in their state. The candidate receiving a majority of the votes in the electoral college wins the election. The electors are apportioned roughly according to states’ populations, as measured by the census, but with a small but deliberate bias in favor of smaller states.

We can represent the effects of the electoral college by scaling the sizes of states to be proportional to their number of electoral votes, which gives a map that looks like this:

This cartogram looks similar to the one above it, but it’s not identical. Wyoming, for instance, has approximately doubled in size, precisely because of the bias in favor of small states.

The areas of red and blue on the cartogram are now proportional to the actual numbers of electoral votes won by each candidate. Thus this map shows at a glance both which states went to which candidate and which candidate won more electoral college votes – something that you cannot tell easily from the normal election-night red and blue map.

Election results by county

But we can go further. We can do the same thing also with the county-level election results and the images are even more striking. Here is a map of US counties, again colored red and blue to indicate Republican and Democratic majorities respectively:

Now the effects we saw at the state level are even more pronounced: the red areas appear overwhelmingly in the majority, an appearance again at odds with the actual results of the election. Again, we can make a more helpful respresentation by using a cartogram. Here is what the cartogram looks like for the county-level election returns:

However, this map is still somewhat misleading because we have colored every county either red or blue, as if every voter voted the same way. This is of course not realistic: all counties contain both Republican and Democratic supporters and in using just the two colors on our map we lose any information about the balance between them. There is no way to tell whether a particular county went strongly for one candidate or the other or whether it was relatively evenly split.

One way to improve the map and reveal more nuance in the vote is to use not just two colors, red and blue, but to use red, blue, and shades of purple in between to indicate percentages of votes. Here is what the normal map looks like if you do this:

And here’s what the cartogram looks like:

and there you have it - KNOWLEDGE SON!

thanks to http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2008/ for this info.

The election has finally ended! As I’m sure all of you know by now, Barack Obama is the President Elect! Hopefully everyone got out and voted today. Time for Change SNC readers!

OBAMA WINS - OBAMA WINS - OBAMA WINS!!

watch this, it is worth your time.
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According to the Denver Backbeat:
The Obama campaign just announced that singer-songwriter Ben Harper will play “a few songs” at a rally in Civic Center Park on Saturday, to encourage people to vote for Barack Obama. Opening odds that someone shouts out “Burn One Down” at a highly inappropriate time: 1:5.

(Obama won’t be there Saturday, but he will be in that park for a rally on Sunday).

Harper will perform at noon. The rally will run from 9 a.m. till 1 p.m., after which everyone will go home, pop in Fight For Your Mind, smoke a bowl and forget everything that was said. God Bless America.

Ben Harper is the shit and i am stoked to be in town the day he is set to play an Obama Rally even if I am not able to attend. Gothic Theatre tomorrow night in Denver.

“bullshit is the booze they feed us”

I know, I know, we have been getting pretty political here lately, but this…..I mean shit, it is too good to pass up and not share with our squad (aka you guys reading this). I promise this will be the last political post for a while, unless we stumble across some photos of sarah palin naked….I mean we would be contractually obligated to share that with our valuable readers.

Can you imagine if Palin became president? you can now, just check out this website.

Palin as President

Seriously, check it out, you won’t be dissapointed.

It is interesting to me why more major news networks are not interested in covering issues like this one. As the US presidential campaign enters its final weeks, both the Republican and Democratic candidates are hitting the swing states.

But misconceptions and rumours abound and many voters have their facts about the candidates all wrong. Some believe that Democrat Barack Obama is a Muslim, for instance.

Casey Kauffman talked to some Republican supporters after a rally by Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, in Ohio.

This is really absurd - almost seems fake, the sad thing is it definitely isn’t.