Monday, August 20, 2007

This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius



The Washington Post website has a useful database, where you can check up on all your Senators and Representatives and see who voted how on which issues. The link to this one, HR 3222, Making Appropriations for the Department of Defense for the Fiscal Year Ending September 20, 2008, and for Other Purposes, arrived in my e-mail inbox a few hours ago.

Not only can you see how many Republicans and how many Democrats voted for or against a bill, but you can sort them by state or gender, both possibly useful information, and by boomer status, which doesn't strike me as useful so much as interesting.

And yes it's true, you can even sort by astrological sign. Congress as internet dating site. Fitting, somehow.

You can skip all the stuff in the middle if you want, but I did like the end of the video.

4 comments:

Steve Bates said...

Re the video: Ouch!

I'm amazed how many (in)famous people in the House, both D and R, did not vote on the "Protect America Act". I'm particularly surprised that the loud-mouthed, um, outspoken Tom Tancredo and... shock... Ron Paul did not vote.

Thanks for the link. I can see this as a good complement to the Thomas site.

hipparchia said...

ouch is right. my neck still hurts from watching that. i think i bit my tongue too.

i refer to the wapo database quite a bit. it's a great complement for thomas.

august said...

I'm sure somebody (not me) could come up with all kinds of cool ways to show statistically significant false correlations (Gemini: most likely to vote for pork projects in Oaklahoma!)

hipparchia said...

hehe!

i did actually look at doing something like that last night, august, because lies, damn lies, and statistics are just plain fun. plus, i've had some advanced training in all of it.

i've got a lot of half-written posts lying around and i really need to clean out that attic first before i can wander off into bad math.