The Staton Jones Report

Maps can convey all sorts of useful information, which explains why most Americans are utterly unfamiliar with them. Of course, that rule of thumb goes out the window when someone comes up with a map that's essentially inaccurate.

For example, any one with a standard 50-state map of the US can see that Texas is twice the size of Alaska. Wrong. Not only is Texas the second largest State, but the fact is that Alaska could split into two smaller States making Texas the third largest State.

Similarly, the map of the continental U.S. in the upper left, promotes the false impression that the vast majority of the United States is dominated by Republicans (shown in Red). This is, again, inaccurate, so expect to see this map a lot over the next four years. Don't expect to see much of this map, however:

This map shows the continental U.S., colored Republican Red and Democrat Blue, but with the surface area of each region scaled by population density. It's the work of M. T. Gastner, C. R. Shalizi, and M. E. J. Newman of the University of Michigan, and it summarized here. There is free software to draw your own maps and everything.

Heil Bush.