In a major campaign strategy breakthrough, Tancredo finally figures out a way to bring 'the children' into his xenophobic lunacy:

A Tom Tancredo campaign office in Council Bluffs, IA provides this running tally of sex crimes committed against children by illegal aliens since 9/11. (Via Tancredo Watch; TW also explains why we all ought to support Tancredo's presidential candidacy: "The longer he's in the presidential race, the less likely he will be to declare for re-election in Colorado's Sixth Congressional District.")

Friday time-suck: a different kind of world clock.

The Spirit of Now: a world clock keeping a running tally of things like births, deaths, HIV infections, CO2 emissions, etc. The numbers are not quite real-time, but are continuously updating from various international official sources. Unexpectedly transfixing.

Checking the mood of the internet.

Via Mind Hacks, I found We Feel Fine, a site that collects feelings (statements from bloggers about how they're feeling) from the internet and catalogues them. I've only fooled around with the interface a little, but there are many options for looking at the data in interesting ways -- by location, weather, gender, age, type of feeling, and so on.

The methodology: The data collection engine searches blogs for sentences containing 'I feel' or 'I am feeling,' locates the full sentence and saves it. Then it checks the sentence for any of its 5,000 'feelings,' adjectives and adverbs entered in by the developers. If there's a match, the engine looks in the blog's profile to find out the location, age, and gender of the 'feeler;' it also uses the location data to look up current weather conditions. According to the site, the engine acquires between 15,000 and 20,000 feelings each day.

These basic, raw feelings create the first view of the data, but there are several others which model various statistics about the feelings. As of now, the mood here in Boulder is pretty good, to which I add the following statement: I feel zestful. I wonder if that's in their 5,000 pre-approved feelings?

Men are from California, women are from New York?

Via Feministing, I discover this map from National Geographic indicating where single men outnumber single women (blue dots) and vice versa (red dots). (Click on the map for a larger version.) Some explanations that have been offered so far:

1. Sexuality -- Gay couples are counted here as unmarried, and areas that are welcoming to gay culture ought to attract similar numbers of gay men and women. But San Francisco, for example, features a big blue dot, indicating more men than women. Insofar as this has to do with the high concentration of gay men there, where are the gay women who would counterbalance this? Maybe lesbians are less reviled by their original communities, so are less likely to relocate to friendlier towns?
2. Age -- Cities to which older couples retire should have a (relatively) high concentration of unmarried women, because there are more widows that widowers, because women tend to live longer. This is probably why Miami is a big red dot. But what about Phoenix, the new Miami for active retirement? Perhaps the mortality gender gap is less pronounced because of the emphasis on 'active' retirement there, or perhaps it hasn't been trendy as a retirement spot long enough to see the effects of age in gender distribution.
3. Career choices -- If men are more willing to relocate for employment than women, and more likely to work in the tech industry, we should expect to see more men in technology growth areas hungry for employees. Denver and the entire West Coast fall into this category. This alone would also account for many of the red dots to the east, but some have hypothesized that many college-educated women are moving east for their careers, and are also likely to postpone marriage.
4. Immigration -- Areas receiving lots of immigrants should have blue dots, because single men immigrate much more often than single women. This seems to be more or less accurate.
5. Lifestyle choices -- Are men more likely to move west in search of fun, sun, tech jobs and California girls? Conversely, are women somehow motivated to move away from same?

Off the top of my head, I'm inclined to think that #3 is probably the biggest driver of the general disparity here, with particular cities bucking the trend for various reasons (Miami due to mean population age, for example).