James’s Blog

This looks like a scary picture of housing prices. From the NYT:

Someone made a roller coaster animation of the graph.

I’m wondering how were the historical prices in Europe and in Asia, and whether this recent increase happened only in the U.S.

As usual, the New York Times has the best election maps, in glorious Flash format, that squeeze an overload of information into one little page on screen. This House map begins by morphing a US geographical map into boxes representing all the House seats. Hovering over a box shows all the seats in that particular state; clicking the box shows the race results. The House results analysis map is even more amazing: All 435 seats are mapped on a US map, with the margins of victory from this year and 2004 mapped on horizontal bars. Hovering over a seat highlights how much the margin of victory for that seat has changed in this election cycle. Clicking different areas of the page allows us to look at different groupings of the seats: by geographical regions, states, districts that went Democratic in 2004, income, racial makeup, etc. The Senate result map has similar ways of generating county by county information. Kudos to the Flash people at NYT that came up with this amazingly creative concept in Flash. It took me a while to even figure out how the page works, and I shudder at the amount of programming it took to make such a page.

Speaking of Flash pages, the state of the affair is that you need to click on it once before anything will work. (It appears to affect Internet Explorer and Opera. I suppose that one can avoid the problem by switching to Firefox, but why should I?) I don’t care about all the patent lawsuits; please just fix the problem, soon.