A Few Things

  • Money Map. Yes, so we’re all sick and tired of red-/blue-/purple- state maps, but the Money Map (courtesy of the Fundrace Project) is interesting for the fact that it bases its colors on actual money given to the parties. Also, it’s massively customizable: you can see divisions by state, zip code, or county; and you can look at donations to Democrats vs. Republicans, to GW & the RNC, to Kerry & the DNC, to Edwards, Dean, Clark, Kucinich, Lieberman, and Sharpton. Neat.
  • Guns as White Tools. A recent study indicated that “[p]eople are more likely to misidentify tools as guns when they are first linked to African Americans.” What the study also showed, however, was that the same people understood their misidentification on some level; in one study, nearly all participants expressed low confidence in their own assessment in the cases in which they were wrong. Similarly, people given a second shot at the gun/tool choice corrected their mistakes, bringing misidentifications down from 15 to 2 percent.

    Misidentifications went both ways, however, with participants mis-labeling guns as tools when they were associated with white faces. (This error also went down with the second assessment, dropping from 11 to 3 percent.)

    (EurekAlert!/Ohio State University: “Whites more likely to misidentify tools as guns when linked to black faces” [October 18, 2004])

  • The Periodic Table of Comic Books. Yes, it does exist. Each element has its own page listing the comics in which it appeared, with links to pages from those comics.
  • Ooh, aah, etc. Some excellent, high-quality QuickTime panoramas thanks to Écliptique. (via MeFi)