Sunday Late Brains

[elfs]

A Visa Ad For This Election

Ferragamo loafers: $520
Dolce & Gabbana blazer: $1,700
Battistoni custom-made shirt: $700
Galliano trousers: $1800
Fooling American voters into believing your opponent is an elitist: PRICELESS

Portrait of the Candidates as a Pile of Words

A fascinating pair of picturs. (via Nurse Ratchet)

Comments

[gromm.livejournal.com]

It doesn't take much. 90% of the voters in red states think that people who live in the big cities that vote democrat are elitist without McCain saying a word. It's the culture there. He's just pandering to the audience is all.

[shaterri.livejournal.com]

There's something bogus in that word graph -- I'm willing to accept that McCain may spend more time talking about Obama than himself, but the word 'McCain' doesn't appear in either picture, and even a cursory perusal of both blogs suggests that it should appear with a frequency at least comparable to Obama's in both images. I think for some reason either the wordle.net software isn't recognizing McCain's name or there's a small sample size issue with just taking some front page of the blogs, which is fascinating in and of itself but completely invalidates the results of the Globe page.

[doodlesthegreat.livejournal.com]

On the contrary, it doesn't appear in Obama's blog because he's focusing on his own strengths and weaknesses instead of taking potshots at the other candidate. A direction McCain has decided not to take, because it would show just how weak he really is on most matters.

[shaterri.livejournal.com]

Ummm, no. I don't mean that conceptually McCain's name should be appearing in Obama's blog; I mean that if you actually go and look for yourself, via the links I provided, then it becomes obvious that McCain's name appears regularly in both blogs, and the fact that it appears in neither word graph suggests that something is wrong either in the way they were generated or in the way they're being labelled.

[xengar.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, I just tried to recreate their images by plugging the blogs in question into wordle.net myself, and Obama's comes out just about the same while McCain's is very different. McCain's name does show up in both word clouds, but it's relatively minor in the Obama one an still smaller than Obama's name in the McCain one.

Admittedly, the McCain blog doesn't have an easy to use RSS feed so the comparison isn't 100% direct, but it looks to me like the reporter found something interesting and then manipulated the facts to exaggerate the differences. I hate it when someone ruins a valid point like that.

[xengar.livejournal.com]

Trying a different method of inputting McCain's blog into wordle resulted in "John" "McCain" greatly outweighing everything but "Iraq," "Qaeda," and (oddly enough) "9:00."

I'm going to assume I did something wrong that time because everything else shrank into obscurity compared to those five.

[norincraft.livejournal.com]

That's an interesting graphic. Too bad they don't do it daily or weekly in an animated fashion.

As for the ad, we live in a country where if you say if you say is frequently enough, loudly enough and with enough emotion it is deemed true no matter how bizarre the message. The voice of reason simply gets drowned out.