Candidate Votes vs. IQ

Here’s an interesting chart put together by the people over at The American Assembler.

  State Avg. IQ 2000
1 Connecticut 113 Gore
2 Massachusetts 111 Gore
3 New Jersey 111 Gore
4 New York 109 Gore
5 Rhode Island 107 Gore
6 Hawaii 106 Gore
7 Maryland 105 Gore
8 New Hampshire 105 Bush
9 Illinois 104 Gore
10 Delaware 103 Gore
11 Minnesota 102 Gore
12 Vermont 102 Gore
13 Washington 102 Gore
14 California 101 Gore
15 Pennsylvania 101 Gore
16 Maine 100 Gore
17 Virginia 100 Bush
18 Wisconsin 100 Gore
19 Colorado 99 Bush
20 Iowa 99 Gore
21 Michigan 99 Gore
22 Nevada 99 Bush
23 Ohio 99 Bush
24 Oregon 99 Gore
25 Alaska 98 Bush
26 Florida 98 Bush
27 Missouri 98 Bush
28 Kansas 96 Bush
29 Nebraska 95 Bush
30 Arizona 94 Bush
31 Indiana 94 Bush
32 Tennessee 94 Bush
33 North Carolina 93 Bush
34 West Virginia 93 Bush
35 Arkansas 92 Bush
36 Georgia 92 Bush
37 Kentucky 92 Bush
38 New Mexico 92 Gore
39 North Dakota 92 Bush
40 Texas 92 Bush
41 Alabama 90 Bush
42 Louisiana 90 Bush
43 Montana 90 Bush
44 Oklahoma 90 Bush
45 South Dakota 90 Bush
46 South Carolina 89 Bush
47 Wyoming 89 Bush
48 Idaho 87 Bush
49 Utah 87 Bush
50 Mississippi 85 Bush

??Via: Michael Hanscom??

Timberwolves Game

Joe and I are going to the Timberwolves/Kings game on Saturday. It’ll be fun times. Section 222, Row P, Seats 4 and 5.

Nosebleed area. But they were only $32 or something.

Update: Sold the ticket to spend the evening with the girlfriend.

How To: Avoid Greenpeace

It’s springtime which means that Greenpeace is out in full force. If you are like me and desperately want to avoid them, read up.

Here’s some strategies for avoiding being stopped by those crazy petitioners:

Talk on your cell phone.
You don’t actually have to be talking to somebody on the her end, just act busy enough so they feel guilty stopping you.
Look Hot.
I mean if you’re beautiful and can make people forget what they were saying…
Travel in large groups.
Make sure to all look away from the Greenpeace member and laugh or something such that they understand you don’t want to talk to them.
Eye contact.
Look at them like you are about to stop and talk to them. Open things up with “How are you doing?” or something like that. Of course they’ll respond, at which point you’ll be just walking past them. And then it’s too late for them to start their “Do you have a moment for Greenpeace?” spiel.
Be an asshole.
Just ignore them completely.
Politely decline.
A quick “No thanks.” Make up a good excuse like you’re late for class (which you usually are) or that you have an important midterm.

This list is not exhaustive and I’m open for suggestions on how I can better avoid the plague that strikes the U of M every spring and fall.

Friends

This site was taking too long to load (each page is dynamically generated by the server), so I moved the “Friends” listing from the left column of the front page to the “About” page.

Hopefully everything will be a little bit more responsive (the front page takes about 1/2 as much time to load now).

Regressive Party

Everybody’s favorite Maddox takes an interesting stance on abortion and the political system in one of his latest posts:

Looking for a safe stance on abortion? Me neither.

I’m tired of political candidates pussy-footing delicately around the issue of abortion. Every time I turn on the TV, there’s always some group of hippies protesting “for choice” or “for life.” Each group pisses the other off, and no candidate will take a strong enough stance on the issue of abortion, so I’ve decided to form a political party of my own:

The Regressive Party

I have a different stance on abortion: I’m against abortion, but for killing babies. That way everyone loses, and I win. I’m neither pro choice, nor pro life; I’m pro you-shutting-the-hell-up.

??Via: Maddox??

Personally I’m pro-choice but abortion is a woman thing and I don’t really shouldn’t have any say in the whole affair.

Worst Rock Band Ever


That article that I posted about earlier this week about the worst bands of 2003 got me to thinking . . . which band is the worst band in the history of rock and roll? Being a stats and numbers and research geek, I’ve developed a system for who qualifies and process for then honing the qualifiers down into a sheer hard ball of ultimate badness. It’ll probably take a week’s worth of posts to type it all out here with explanations and what have you, so watch this space to see the worst of the worst pulled from under their rock and beaten to death with sticks.
??Via: The Worst Rock Band Ever??

The article goes on to list out a bunch of bands that suck and has head-to-head competitions in a NCAA Bracket style. The worst rock band ever turns out to be Motley Crue.

zipdecode

Ben Fry made this neat thing called zipdecode that visually ‘decodes’ zip codes as you type them. It’s pretty neat because it shows you the logic that the post office had when assigning zip codes to different geographic locations. If nothing else, it’s something you could waste a couple minutes with. And it might be handy if you want to lookup where someplace is.