2010 Redistricting

I've been playing around with US population numbers to predict the changes in the number of congressional districts states will have after the 2010 Census. Here's what I predict:

Gain 4: Texas
Gain 2: Arizona
Gain 1: California, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, Utah
Lose 1: Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, Pennsylvania
Lose 2: Ohio

This led to me wondering, what if every election year, they redistributed the Electoral College votes to better reflect each states population. During the 2000 election, the Electoral College votes were still based on the 1990 Census. If redistricting had taken place before the election, Bush would have received 7 more electoral votes. Based on 2004 population numbers, Bush would have gained 2.

It's a Meteor

BBC

I was talking to Tom the other day about meteorites. The Earth gets hit by small meteorites everyday, most of which burn up in the atmosphere. I was curious as to how often we got hit by meteorites that at least caused some localized damage. While, this article doesn't answer that question, it shows that it does happen.

We're Going to be Underwater

Flood Maps

Some guy set-up a Google Map showing which areas of the world would flood if sea levels rose 1 to 14 meters. It's quite interesting to look over.

Some things I noticed:
Seattle becomes an island at +9 meters
Around +12 meters, Yuba City becomes a coastal city
Nearly everything south of Baton Rogue is underwater at +11 meters
Parts of Richmond flood at just +1 meter
At +14 meters the Netherlands is left with three incongruous parts and two large islands
Uppsala starts to flood at +8 meters
Shanghai becomes an island at +4 meters
Bangladesh is screwed

Monetary Unions

Wikipedia

The Euro is often touted as something unique in history, but its not the monetary union that makes it unique. Since 1945, two sizable monetary unions have existed in Africa. Even in Europe, such unions have not been unique. In 1865, the Latin Monetary Union was established. Since, at that time, most countries used gold and silver coinage, the union simply standardized the amount of gold and silver that could be used to make coins to make them interchangeable. This union included all of southern Europe and Venezuela. Even the US used the same standard, but never joined the union. The union eventually collapsed because the rising value of metals and WWI.

Following is a ranking of the all current monetary unions (official and de facto) in order of how many countries are involved. I am not including territories on this list.
Euro - 18
CFA Franc BCEAO - 8
US dollar - 7
CFA Franc BEAC - 6
East Caribbean dollar - 6
South African rand - 4
Australian dollar - 4
New Zealand dollar - 3
Swiss franc - 2

This means that among the 194 widely recognized countries, there are only 145 currencies. With the continued expansion of the Euro and other monetary unions, the number of currencies will drop to 119 in the near future.

Presidential Decoy

Washington Post

While doing research for my previous post, I found this article about how 3rd party candidates influence our votes that I thought was interesting.

Was Perot A Spoiler Candidate?

Since I have little better to do, I've been trying to figure out if Perot actually cost Bush Sr. the 1992 election. So first things first, if Perot had dropped out of the election, how many of his voters would have to vote for Bush to give him the win? Doing some quick math, I found that 66% of Perot voters would have to vote for Bush to allow him to win. So now I have to find if more or less than 66% of Perot voters preferred Bush to Clinton.

To determine this next step, I compared the 1992 and 1996 election. Assuming that there were no changes in preferences, what affect did the decline in votes for Perot have? To get the 1996 result, 67% of Perot voters would have to have voted for Clinton. Closer inspection of this number showed some flaws though. In several states, Dole received fewer votes than Bush despite the 33% of former Perot votes he should have gained, meaning that Clinton gained former Bush voters. Also, such a split would have given Clinton an implausible lead in the 1992 election if Perot had dropped out.

My next idea was to do some complicated and questionable mathematics to determine the split in Perot's lost votes that best fit the 1996 election result. This showed that only 47% of former Perot voters chose Clinton in 1996. Still, that's enough in favor for Clinton to have kept Bush from winning in 1992. However, this split only explains the 1996 election. Perot voters may have split differently in 1992.

Trying to find other studies of the 1992 election, I found two things: First, polls asking for Perot voters second preference generally showed them evenly split between Bush and Clinton. Second, polls before the election generally showed large changes in support for Clinton and Perot, but Bush support remained fairly constant.

So my conclusion, it is unlikely that Perot acted as a spoiler candidate. He probably cost Bush a few states, but not enough to change the result.