...where I do talk about politics...

Why don't random European girls kiss me?

Tie in Iowa County

Iowa County, a county in (unsurprisingly) Iowa, had as many blue votes as red votes.
Obama: 4,173
McCain: 4,173
"Other": 125

I thought this would be a rare event until I messed around with a few numbers. If you assume that voters are independent and equally likely to vote for one of two candidates, the chance of an 8,000 person county being equally divided is almost 1%. With fewer people in a county, the odds increase. Assuming 100 counties with fewer than 8,000 people, one expects at least one county in the country to evenly split the vote.

Those are some pretty big assumptions, though. The odds are very sensitive to how split the voters are, so if one candidate has odds of 51% and the other 49%, then the probability for such a county drops to around 0.1%. If you assume 52% odds for one candidate, then we're down to 0.001%. I used the handy binomial calculator from Vassar to crunch the numbers. Also, I do not think that county size and vote color are independent; I would guess that small counties tend to vote red.

A quick, non-exhaustive search shows there were a few other counties that came close:
KY's Bath County: 24
MN's Murray County: 25
MN's Aitkin County: 10
MO's Washington County: 9 (EDIT: added later)

I couldn't find systematic county data to look at, so I might have missed counties that were closer or even tied. The data above (having a few counties in the sub-25 range) suggests around a 20% chance of a tie during an election in which a democrat is slightly ahead.

American Elections

I cannot wait until I don't have to answer questions about American elections. Mostly I clarify confusion about why such a large percentage of Americans support John McCain. People are very confused when I explain that I would have voted for McCain in 2000 if I had the chance. I was under 18 at the time, and I'm still confused why 16 year-olds are not allowed to vote.

Wacko Political Views

I know this is all over the 'net, but I have deep respect for Colin Powell and his stance on the Republican party's current insinuations:

I'm also troubled by, not what Sen. McCain says, but what members of the party say, and it is permitted to be said such things as: "Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim." Well, the correct answer is: he is not a Muslim. He's a Christian. He's always been a Christian.

But the really right answer is: What if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is: No, that's not America. Is there something wrong with some 7-year-old, Muslim-American kid believing he or she can be President?

Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion: he's a Muslim, and he might be associated with terrorists. This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

During this interview, Powell also mentioned one of the most poignant photographs I've seen. The photo is from a high-quality, New Yorker slideshow.

(props to the New Yorker for being a classy magazine)