Mind-Boggling Letters to the Editor on the Mosque

I decided I was up for some punishment, so I'm reading through some of the mind-bogglingly silly letters to the editor people are writing about that mosque in New York.

I see no reason not to leave everyone's name intact; perhaps they have friends who will Google them and set them straight after seeing this; I can hope, at least.

Furthermore, the politicians are afraid not to support the Muslim community in this endeavor for fear of losing their votes. Wake up America! We don't need to be putting Muslim interests above all else for fear of being politically incorrect.

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I certainly will not want to visit New York again if this mosque is allowed to be built.

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Gayle Barker

Powell, TN

Shameful display

Let's see if I understand this correctly: Americans are supposed to be more tolerant and understanding of Muslims and their religion of Islam.

This is coming from Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City who supports a mosque being built 250 yards from Ground Zero.

In my opinion, he should resign immediately. What an affront and shameful display of disloyalty to all the victims who died there in the name of Islam.

Shame on anyone who voted yes for this project.

How about some compassionate understanding from all Muslims who claim their religion does not promote violence?

RENATE OGLE

Orange Park

Thanks for Enabling Anti-Semites, Pam Geller

I was Googling through the torrent of articles about that whole mosque controversy, and I found this article in a paper from Uganda, and I read this:

Nine years after the 9/11 bombing in the US, a proposed mosque and an Islamic centre near the spot where terrorists killed over 2,000 people has caused outrage among Jewish extremists. They claim such a project would lay waste to what amounts to a “graveyard”.

Among "Jewish extremists", I thought? Sure, there are a few Jews who are outraged, but I would guess 99% or more of the outraged are Christians. But this f***ing anti-Semite, blaming the Jews again.

Then I remembered. It's technically true. At least a Jewish extremist, Pam Geller, basically made this controversy happen.

Thanks, Pam.

Census Bureau Has Congressional Apportionment Widget!

Okay, it's just a countdown clock until the date (Dec 31, 2010) by which the Census Bureau must return official state and national population counts, which is kind of lame.



I think it would have been much more interesting and informative if it also had functionality to explain to the American people exactly how the system of apportionment works. It does not require that much math to understand how it works (if you know what a square root is, you have everything you need), although it does admittedly require a significant amount of math to understand what makes the system of apportionment "good."

Initially, each state is assigned 1 representative, to ensure that no matter what, every state (but not the residents of Washington D.C.!) gets at least 1 representative in the House of Representatives; additionally, in order to work without getting into division by zero, the method sort of requires this.

After each state has a seat, the rest of the seats are distributed one by one according to which state currently has the highest "priority" to receive an additional seat.

The priority for an additional seat is calculated as follows: Let P be the population of the state, n be the number of seats currently allocated to it. Then the priority is P/(SQRT(n)*SQRT(n+1))