I just read Gaming the Vote by best selling author William Poundstone, who gives an account of different voting systems.

In conclusion, Range Voting sounds like the best solution for single seat candidacies, in almost all circumstances.

Is that all?

Well, there was a lot more in there. He started by describing recent votes that were obviously wrong for some reason or another, like Nader acting as a spoiler in the 2000 presidential elections, or the Louisiana race between Duke, Edwards and Roemer. Then he talks about historical figures, and how these things originated. He uses the contemporary races as examples of how these voting systems work or do not work. Finally he ends by reviewing the modern day debate over which one is best, with Range Voting apparently being a just rediscovered excellent choice.

So… one way to look at this is that all I really needed to know was that Range Voting was probably the best solution for most cases. Because, really, all the talk about modern elections was filler: human faces to make the reading easier. Certainly the entire historical section could have been erased.

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I just read the critically acclaimed Blankets by Craig Thompson. It’s a graphic novel about love.

My personal take on it is that people gave it awards and stuff because it shows that a graphic novel can be “literature”, by which I mean that it doesn’t have a happy ending, therefore it’s the getting there or gestalt of it that matters. I didn’t think it was great. It was good, but not as good as the crystals of plot that Watchmen was, or as entertaining and memorable as Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: a family tragicomic.

I would describe what happens in it, but that wouldn’t describe it. As it is literature, and as it is a graphic novel, it is about choices of wording and unexpected juxtapositions of word and text, and the intelligible results thereof.

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So…

I mentioned to my parents the other day that I’ve grown tired of the books that journalists write (especially Pulitzer Prize winning journalists).

A writing style grows very differently in a newspaper. It’s intended to hook and impress and (at best) elicit emotion. In books I find that annoying. Who cares about the people, what car he drives… Who cares about the “human interest”. Tell me what the idea is, and why I should care.

I also told my parents that that might be the result in part of having a very slow computer for the past few years, so that I was frustrated at inconsequential news because it wasted my time with stupidity & with slow load times. Or it could be my personality. I’ve often thought that I am a conservative person, in things besides my politics.

But maybe it’s just the sign of the times. People today are inundated with so much information that it seems inevitable that we will somehow find ways to slim down our intake to make it easier to digest.

What if we took all our educational materials, and taught the issues instead of the history? I think that’s because we need history to make us remember that there’s been right and wrong answers before. Entire societies based on other ways of belief.

I don’t at all feel sorry that Gaming the Vote had all this extraneous information, because I feel like it contributed to my universal framework of information.

In case you got to this point, I’m leaving this message: no, there is no conclusion to this. I am on the phone and need to get up early tomorrow. Dinner must be made.