Ah, so this is what they mean by "overwhelming response": about two hundred thousand hits per day. Wonkette has made a penis joke about our work; clearly this is the pinnacle of my ten years on the web, and the only way I could be happier was if somebody were to forward me a link to our site. (Since writing that, Mark has told me that actually happened to him.)
Seriously: I am trying to answer all letters (except nastygrams); bear with me. Unfortunately, we really don't have time to implement the suggestions people are making for alternative ways of coloring the cartogram, resizing by something other than population (tax contributions are the favorite suggestion, followed by votes in the electoral college), etc. If you want to try, the code is available from Michael's homepage, and I'd be happy to send you our data. Michael's homepage is also your source for super-high-resolution postscript figures.
Probably nobody else cares, but I find it interesting that we've been able to generate this much response with such a small initial push of publicity. Mark told our mutual friends Julie and Cris; I told Kris, my two most conservative friends from graduate school, and Henry Farrell. The rest is (appropriately enough) pure diffusion; from which I conclude that Crooked Timber has a very high diffusivity indeed. (I still like Henry's description of the cartogram --- "butterflies exploding" --- best, though Wonkette's "Mmm... bulbous" has its own charm.)
Posted at November 11, 2004 14:42 | permanent link