Posted by Tom Moertel
Tue, 24 Jan 2006 03:39:00 GMT
When I let the dog out this evening, it didn’t take long for her to start barking. Figuring she had cornered the neighbor’s cat, I went outside and called her. Naturally, she ignored my order to come back into the house.
Angrily, I marched up to her, underneath the crabapple tree, and took her by the collar. I made sure to bend low and look her in the eyes, just to let her know that I was not happy about having to walk in the wet grass to fetch her. When I stood up to lead her back to the house, my head reached into the lower branches of the crabapple tree.
And then I saw it, inches from my face, looking right back at me.
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Posted in photography, interesting stuff
Tags animals, opossums
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Sat, 29 Oct 2005 00:29:00 GMT
Author xC0000005
on Kuro5hin.org has been keeping
bees and writing about it in his diary. Today he also posted
a fascinating story about it,
Lessons from the Hive.
Check it out.
If you like the story, you will want to read his diary
entries. In them he
tells how he acquired his honeybee colony and then watched it struggle, grow,
produce, decline, and fail, ultimately to be replaced a few days ago
by a swarming colony that happened upon his failing colony’s hive – a
great stroke of luck.
It’s interesting stuff.
Posted in interesting stuff
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Wed, 22 Dec 2004 17:00:00 GMT
Per our family tradition, my wife and I design and print our own Christmas cards. We print them on my 2650-pound, 10×15-inch Chandler & Price Craftsman platen press, which was manufactured in 1939. (See image below.) Presses like these are generally considered to be obsolete. They must be oiled by hand before each operating shift, print only one color at a time, do not meet current OSHA specs, and use the finicky letterpress process to put ink on paper. (Almost all printing these days is done on presses that use the offset process.)
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Posted in interesting stuff, fun stuff
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Tue, 02 Nov 2004 17:00:00 GMT
The Presidential-race polling data on www.electoral-vote.com are great, and the site’s plots do help visualize the country-wide race. But I want to see all the historical data for all of the states at a glance. To this end, I have taken the data from the site (as of the morning of November 2, 2004) and created this all-inclusive summary plot that shows the state-by-state polling results from September 1, 2004 through November 2, 2004:
Some things to observe:
- Battleground states are polled frequently; others, hardly at all
- Wisconsin’s polling data suggest that Bush once had the state but lost it
See anything else interesting?
If you want to see the code I used to generate the plot, read on.
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Posted in statistics, interesting stuff
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Wed, 29 Sep 2004 16:00:00 GMT
I spent the previous week vacationing in the Outer Banks. During the ten-hour drive back home, a friend and I were discussing the topic of the season – the U.S. presidential race. In particular, we both lamented the lack of diversity among the “electable” candidates. Are Bush and Kerry the best leaders that our nation can produce? I hope not. Why, then, are we stuck with them when it comes time to cast a vote?
The problem with plurality voting
One reason is that the U.S.’s current system of electing officials – the plurality method, in which each voter casts a single vote for a most-preferred candidate – effectively squelches third-party candidates and their ideas, leaving only the increasingly similar, mainstream Democratic and Republican candidates as viable choices. The rub is that any voter who votes for a third-party candidate doesn’t have a say in the race between the mainstream candidates. Because most voters who favor a third-party candidate are also strongly opposed to one of the mainstream candidates, they are faced with a dilemma: to vote for their true first choice (the third-party candidate) or to vote for “the lesser of evils” between the mainstream candidates as a defensive strategy in the all-to-likely event that the third-party candidate cannot win. Neither option gives the voter a fair representation of his or her preferences.
Alternatives to plurality voting
What’s needed is a way for voters to express their true preferences. ElectionMethods.org is a web site that describes voting methods that allow for just that. [The content of the ElectionMethods site has disappeared since I posted this article. —Ed.]
One such method is Approval Voting, a simple extension to plurality voting. Instead of voting for one candidate (the most preferred or the lesser of evils), each voter can vote for all of the candidates of which they approve. Thus our hypothetical voter from above can vote for both the third-party candidate and the lesser-of-evils mainstream candidate. The winner is determined the same as before: Whomever receives the most votes wins.
Approval voting eliminates most of the problems with plurality voting, and yet it is almost entirely compatible with the existing voting infrastructure within the United States. The same ballots and voting machines in use today can be used for approval voting. Only the counting rules need be changed. Further, approval voting is easy for voters to understand: Just select the candidates that meet your approval. For these reasons, approval voting is a realistic option for election reform.
But, what if we’re willing to rethink our voting infrastructure from the ground up? Can we capture voters’ preferences even more accurately than with approval voting? Condorcet voting (sometimes referred to as Ranked Pairs voting, after the name of one popular variant) appears to be the best approximation of the voting ideal. Each voter ranks the candidates in order of preference. The winner is determined by decomposing the rankings into candidate-vs-candidate pairwise preferences whose strengths are determined by the count of voters that support each preference. Finally, the candidates are ranked according to the pairwise preferences (with stronger preferences overruling weaker preferences). The winning candidate is the topmost ranked.
What’s fascinating about Condorcet voting is that it can accurately capture the real-world possibility that subsets of the “majority” can have conflicting opinions. For example, candidate A may be preferred to B, and B to C, and yet C to A. Such a set of preferences is said to contain a cyclical ambiguity.
There are a number of (competing) methods for resolving cyclical ambiguities. Most of them are iterative and either “lock in” preferences, strongest first, or eliminate preferences, weakest first, until an unambiguous set of preferences remains. Which method is the best (all are very good) is still an area of active research. This is one reason why Condorcet voting seems an unlikely vehicle for near-term election reform.
Put Condorcet voting to work for you
Nevertheless, we can take advantage of Condorcet voting for our own purposes. Need to decide upon a restaurant for a group dinner? Select a vacation spot for an annual family retreat? Elect committee members at work? If so, take a look at Andrew Myers’s handy Condorcet Internet Voting Service. Or download a Python implementation of Condorcet voting (and a bunch of other voting methods, all GPL licensed) and put the code to use.
Explore and have fun
Election methods is an interesting realm for exploration, and there are plenty of interesting opportunities for the programming hobbyist. How can your applications take advantage of modern election methods? What about your web site? Dig in, and have fun!
Posted in interesting stuff
Tags condorcet, elections, voting
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