Well, I guess it’s time for that “purple America” map from Robert Vanderbei to start making the rounds again. Yglesias has the 2008 edition posted over at his site. The basic idea here is that for all the talk of red and blue America, the political differences between regions are actually quite small, and we’re really a united nation with a vigorous political discourse, tra la la la. Then we join hands and sing.

And, you know, fine. There’s an element of truth to this, and it’s certainly a nice thought. But also true: visualizing information by using a linear red/blue scale is about the worst way possible to make data legible to the human eye. First: our vision is logarithmic. When a photographer drags out his “50% gray” card for measuring lighting, it’s actually 18% gray. Judging by the triangular key in the corner of Vanderbei’s image, he’s just taking the percentage of vote totals and translating it flatly to 8 bit color — a 100% Republican district gets an RGB 24-bit value of (255,0,0).

The colors themselves are also a problem. As I’m sure you all remember keenly from this post I wrote in 2006, perceptual image codecs spend more bits on brightness than on color because the color-sensing cones in your eyes have a much lousier dynamic range than the light-sensing rods. We’re worse at distinguishing between levels of color than between levels of brightness. And since the percentage of the vote in any given spot on the map should always sum to 100, with negligible green (third party) contributions, the brightness will be relatively uniform (although admittedly not quite due to the perceptual differences between colors — monitor calibration and colorspace begin to enter the picture at this point, and things get just as hideously complex as you might imagine).

(I’ll add, somewhat tentatively, that my recollection from college is that the green cone is the most sensitive of the three types in your retina, making red/blue coding about the least distinguishable color continuum possible. The situation’s complicated by your rods’ preferential sensitivity to blue wavelengths, though, and the ratio of work done by rods and cones varies with ambient brightness. So I’ll resist the temptation to make strong claims on this score.)

So what does this all mean? Depending on how you look at it, not much. It’s not as if Vanderbei has done anything wrong. It’s just that the choices he made will tend to produce a map that, at a glance, implies homogeneity. If, on the other hand, we pull out the red channel, desaturate the blue channel and maximize the contrast of the resulting image (in effect normalizing the values to the full possible dynamic range), we get something very different-looking — but still perfectly accurate, and still non-logarithmic (with the caveat that it gives third-party votes to the Dems). Click the image for a full-sized, easier-to-see version.

Yglesias’s point that this isn’t a huge change between cycles still stands, of course, but the shifts are considerably easier to see this way (and easier still on that cool New York Times map that ran on their front page after the election).

It’s also easy to see that there really are very Republican and very Democratic sections of the country. I don’t want to overstate my case — obviously this conclusion can be drawn from the color map, too. Still, using a whole bunch of linearly-defined purple pixels is a clever way to latch onto a media cliche, but not necessarily the best way to visualize information. Things are more black and white than they may seem, and certainly less purple.

I apologize; I’m totally fascinated by this Ashley Todd business. I can’t stop.

The latest development appears to be her claim that she was in some sort of psychogenic fugue state when she scratched the B in her face:

Unfortunately I am unable to speculate as to the veracity of such a claim; the DSM-IV doesn’t say anything one way or the other about sufferers’ tendency to send out Twitters containing pre-fugue exposition.

Hey, look! An exciting article about energy storage technology! Graphene ultracapacitors, son! As the piece notes, these new doodads offer “double the capacity of existing ultracapacitors”, and “higher power capability” than batteries!

The article then goes on to discuss how off-peak power storage is a major problem facing renewable energy sources. Which is true! But of course ultracapacitors have absolutely nothing to do with solving that problem. Graphene-based ultracaps may be twice as good as existing ultracaps (although that leaves them lagging behind the still-maybe-not-imaginary EEStor offering). But a 2x improvement still leaves ultracaps capable of storing only about a fifth as much energy as a boring ol’ chemical battery. That “higher power capability” refers to the speed with which they can deliver or take a charge, not how much energy they can hold. For some applications that’s a crucially important attribute. Just not, y’know, the ones the article talks about.

As usual a misleading press release from a university (in this case: hook ‘em ultracapacitors!) has been gleefully adapted by a credulous reporter. Somewhere along the line a claim that this may solve our energy problems and/or cure cancer will invariably be added. The poor professors and grad students being given the credit for saving our society will have their quotes — in which they honestly explain the legitimately impressive but not immediately world-changing work they’ve done! — placed in a context that they must find deeply embarrassing.

My suggestion: get your tech news from MIT Technology Review and Ars. And if something sounds amazing, go find the associated Slashdot thread and read it. You’ll usually find at least a few surprisingly informative comments from engineers with expertise relevant to the alleged breakthrough.

Ryan and I have been going back and forth in his comments about the likelihood of carsharing services going electric. I think it’s unlikely because they’d have to spend too much time charging; he thinks they’re a good candidate for early rollout of the charging infrastructure necessary for such a switch. Most recently he said:

In practice, this could be achieved incrementally. Tweak business models over a ten year period through which you slowly switch from gas engines to plug-in hybrids to all electric, over which period, presumably, battery technology slowly improves. Needn’t be done all at once.

I think this is a point that’s worth making here and at some length: “presum[ing that] battery technology improves” is setting yourself up for failure.

In truth, there have only been a few noteworthy improvements in battery tech during Ryan and my lifetimes: longer-lived NiCd and NiMH batteries; some improvement in alkaline batteries; and the popularization of lithium batteries. But look closer and you’ll realize that most of these aren’t actually battery innovations, per se: they’re benefits of the microprocessor revolution. Cheap, smart charging circuitry allowed us to avoid memory effects; to balance load across cells; and to monitor lithium cells’ temperature and voltage as they charge so that they don’t catch fire (well… usually), thereby finally making lithium a viable option for consumer electronics. Those are all important developments, but at this point we’ve wrung about as much as we can out of charging our batteries more cleverly.

None of this has done much to improve the fundamental energy storage densities of the underlying chemistries. These have been known for a long time now, and nothing is going to change them — nor are there any more promising elements like lithium waiting to be tamed (well, none that aren’t radioactive, anyway). The glacial pace of improvement in battery technology really can’t be overemphasized. The lead-acid battery was developed in 1859, for pete’s sake. It’s really heavy relative to the energy it stores, can produce explosive fumes if overcharged, and sometimes requires the addition of distilled water. Yet it’s still the best battery technology we have for supplying the high current necessary to turn over an engine. A century and a half and we haven’t come up with anything better!

It may seem like batteries have improved dramatically — consider the lifespan of an iPod Nano versus a portable cassette player. But this is misleading. In fact it’s a byproduct of more energy-efficient technologies. Which isn’t to dismiss energy effiency! But electric motors are already extremely efficient. And when it comes to vehicles, we’re unfortunately dealing with hard physical limits related to how much energy it takes to move a car. So long as we’re committed to EVs being able to perform like and drive safely near gasoline-powered cars, we will find ourselves with less room for improvement than people would like to think.

I don’t mean to be a downer, but it’s difficult to overstate what a serious problem this is, or for how long it’s been one. Hydrocarbons are an unbelievably efficient way to store energy when compared to electrochemical cells, and I seriously doubt anything will change that. Hopefully I’ll be proven wrong. But smart people have been working on the battery problem for decades and decades, propelled by the lure of the financial bonanza that a breakthrough would represent. And while they’ve made impressive improvements, none come anywhere close to competing with gasoline’s energy density. We’re still an order of magnitude away.

Now of course there are always fuel cells. And nanotech’s vast surface areas may deliver unexpected breakthroughs. But a bet that counts on a better battery is still a very, very bad wager.

… or, “Kwisatz Haderacetylcholinergic Drug Alternatives”

This Rember drug that’s showing promising efficacy against Alzheimer’s is really pretty exciting. For a long time I’ve had blind faith that my generation wouldn’t have to face Alzheimer’s, at least not the way folks currently do. I was hopeful that the solution would arrive in time for our parents, too — now it looks like it might.

The story behind the drug is interesting. Naturally, Derek Lowe is the place to go for an informed perspective on the matter. He (and Wired) both note that Rember is actually a very old drug: Methylene Blue, which has been used for everything from malaria to psychiatric disorders to intestinal surgery. It’s got a long history and seems to be quite safe.

But it is very, very blue. And that leads to some side effects. From the Wikipedia article:

Methylene blue was used at the end of the century as a successful treatment for malaria. It disappeared as an anti-malarial during the wars in Asia, as U.S. soldiers disliked its two inevitable, fully reversible side effects: green urine and blue sclera.

Blue sclera — as in the used-to-be-whites of your eyes. So yes: grandma might remain mentally sharp, but she’s going to look like she just wandered off the set of Dune. Awesome.

Presumably the drug can be used synergistically with the Juice of Saphoo.

I guess the apparently counterintuitive idea that pork is among the most efficient meats to produce doesn’t strike me as all that strange. Obviously larger animals take more time to reach full size, wasting more energy on metabolic upkeep. But equally obviously there’s a certain amount of overhead associated with being a mammal that may not scale constantly with the total amount of food that the animal provides. Consider the relationship between volume and surface area — same idea.

On the other hand, the pig is generally considered the smartest animal in the barnyard. So if you’re looking for a reason to be uneasy about pork consumption, there you go: if you suspect that sentience works on a sliding scale, and if you believe that the moral outrageousness of a given act of violence against an animal is weighted by the animal’s level of consciousness, then your pig-slaughter is far more ethically objectionable than ordering a serving of chicken tenders. This strikes me as a much better source of liberal guilt than the difference in carbon footprint between types of meat.

In other blog news: the New Yorker has made a cartoon and it’s not funny. People are… surprised? Anyway, Ezra has the smart take. For now I think we’ll just have to cross our fingers that the New Yorker’s much-vaunted influence upon the middle-American swing voter zeitgeist has been overstated.

I’m not at all confident about which of his aliases I should be using, but I am quite sure that son1′s series of posts explaining the location of his work — right at the intersection of genetics and computer science — is pretty fascinating. I’m jealous, frankly: taking a problem and unraveling it into tasks that can be algorithmically accomplished is incredibly satisfying; I can only imagine how interesting it must be when the problem is something as complex and challenging as studying genes.

So go! Read! part 1, part 2, part 2a, part 3 and part 4.

Friday night was the first time in a good long while that I got to expound angrily (/drunkenly) on the subject of free will. But here! Look! I come home and Slashdot is linking to a writeup of an experiment that reconfirms and extends my all-time favorite neuroscience result (PDF). Apparently April is mechanism month.

Anyway, you should check out one or the other of those links if you aren’t already familiar with Libet’s famous work. It’s creepy, clever and morbid — a combination that I aspire to myself.

MORE, AND A REQUEST: Man, it really has been a while. But Tim has some interesting things to say here, and I left a long comment in response, which gave me occasion to remember that I had written this, and in general if you would like to shoot the shit about consciousness I’d love to take you up on it. I had kind of thrown up my hands a few years ago and decided to learn about electronics instead, but I think I’d like to be able to begin speaking meaningfully about this again.

My first question: what should I be reading? The last time I seriously checked into these issues I was thinking about buying Christof Koch’s book, but I ended up getting distracted/discouraged by its price tag and length. Has anything with a similar level of sophistication and noteworthiness come out since then, or is it time to grit my teeth and see what Prof. Koch has to say?

From Derek Lowe’s blog:

The actual mechanism of the placebo effect is a field of great interest and potentially great importance.

That’s right: someday soon scientists may be working to develop a pill that can mimic the placebo effect.

Personally, I find this immensely cheering. I think I love this universe the most when it’s operating at maximum ridiculousness.

(In descending order.)

1. White
2. Orange
3. Pink
4. Yellow*
5. Purple*
6. Green

Note that the odds of me eating myself sick when presented with candy hearts approaches unity for all colors.

* Ranked position is within margin of error.