Mossy Cottage Knits

Fun with Statistics!

As I suspected it would be, the polling has been a fun, rollicking ride mostly ‘cuz since the last time I used Vizu, they’ve added a map of where votes are coming from. See?

I was tickled to see votes from Alaska and Hawaii creep in over the weekend, but now I have a nagging secret wish to get a balloon-thingy in the 14 12 states I’m missing: Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Kentucky (thank you, Ann!), Indiana, West Virginia, Oklahoma (thank you, Ellen!), Wyoming, Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska. (I believe the lone vote in Montana is The Cuzz! Hi, Cuzz!)

But the one-vote-from-each-state thing is just pure greed on my part because, if I smallen the map, look! voters from not just Canada, but the far reaches of Canada and then, look, even more!: India, Australia, United Kingdom, Sweden! Awe.Some.

As if a new map weren't enough, I found myself playing around with the voting data and Excel's charting function. Here, your vanilla, workaday auto-generated chart:

What the chart would look like if Pixar got ahold of it:

Aha! Take the same chart, tart it up with percentages, labels, gridlines and obscure formulas and you get less Pixar, more MIT!

Now this looks important!

The Zen approach...

Color! And dangerous-looking pointy things!

Oh, no! El Diablo is nom-nom-nomming Dork! Fortunately, the two bungee cords attached to El Diablo to will snap him back just in time.

Which is a long-winded and heavily illustrated way of saying “Bode” won. Sort of. Because, see, here’s the thing: The obviously right name for the car is "Clifford." You know it; I know it; my sister knows it. I was even imagining this:

But I just don’t like the name Clifford. If I had a child, I would name him Clifford only if I wanted him to get pantsed regularly at school (no insult intended to the Cliffords out there). So I was torn.

Which is the even longer-winded way of saying, in the end, I went with a completely different name: "Ramius." "Captain Ramius", or even "Captain Marko Alexandrovich Ramius," for formal occasions. Because he’s red and he was hard to find. Source, anyone? (That source being one of my Numero Uno Favorites Evah.)

By way of a side-note, this image…

…completely freaked me out. Where are the lines?!! Where are the boundaries?!! Where are the states?!! Could it be that our political divisions are just made up? That Americans aren’t really Americans, Canadians aren’t really Canadians, Mexicans aren’t really Mexicans? That we just live more north or more south of each other in a boundariless blob? That’s heresy!

Ah, much better… Order has been restored.

Captain Ramius and I thank everyone for voting and commenting!!

Posted by Ryan at July 12, 2010 02:33 PM