With the election tomorrow, Mike Bostock and Shan Carter for the New York Times map the 512 possible paths to the White House. Select state wins, and the paths update accordingly. For example, select an Obama win in Florida, and it doesn’t look good for Romney.

If Mr. Romney loses Florida, he has only one way to victory: through all the other battleground states. He has led most polls there, however, and is the favorite. If Mr. Romney wins Florida, he has 75 paths open to him.

The interaction feels game-like.

In something of an homage to the Genealogy of Pop & Rock Music by Reebee Garofalo, designer Larry Gormley visualized 100 years of film.

This graphic chronicles the history of feature films from the origins in the 1910s until the present day. More than 2000 of the most important feature-length films are mapped into 20 genres spanning 100 years. Films selected to be included have: won important awards such as the best picture Academy Award; achieved critical acclaim according to recognized film critics; are considered to be key genre films by experts; and/or attained box office success.

Available in print for 34 bones.

For the Made by Humans exhibit at the Hyundai Vision Hall in South Korea, Universal Everything turns basic movements into a visual spectacle. Pretty. From the Creators Project:

As the founder and creative director of Universal Everything, Matt Pyke leads a creative mission to create gorgeous visual spectacles on screen that, while they will never be attained in physical reality, reinterpret the nuances of natural human motion.

His effectiveness with capturing movements and transforming them into sweeping animated forms allows him to show us shapes we have never seen before while preserving the individual human element in all his creations.

[via Fast Company]

Political analyst and statistician Nate Silver has gotten some flack lately for consistently projecting a 70-plus percent chance of a Barack Obama win this election. But as Jeff Leek explains, the criticism doesn’t spawn from Silver being wrong. Rather, it comes from the critics’ misunderstanding of statistics. Leek provides a quick lesson on how Silver makes his predications and how the methods apply to other things, like the weather.

Now, this might seem like a goofy way to come up with a “percent chance” with simulated elections and all. But it turns out it is actually a pretty important thing to know and relevant to those of us on the East Coast right now. It turns out weather forecasts (and projected hurricane paths) are based on the same sort of thing — simulated versions of the weather are run and the “percent chance of rain” is the fraction of times it rains in a particular place.

So Romney may still win and Obama may lose — and Silver may still get a lot of it right. But regardless, the approach taken by Silver is not based on politics, it is based on statistics.

Don’t fear the black box.

The New York Times provides a detailed look at the Sandy aftermath, across states and locally. With millions of people losing power in a short amount of time, the outages map and chart is the most dramatic.

More than six million customers lost power Monday as Hurricane Sandy felled trees, downed power lines and flooded substations. The storm led to power failures in at least 17 states, including more than a million customers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey and about 660,000 in New York City.

Electionary, the new iPad app from TargetPoint Consulting, lets you browse national election data, from 1976 through 2008.

Electionary is an election resource center that grants users access to over 30 years of county, state, and national election data. Electionary transforms election results into an easy to understand, interactive, and visual format. Users are able to see detailed election results and voter turnout percentages from across the country. Users can compare election results side-by-side and see how one county or state has changed over time or see how two counties or states are different.

There were a few spots interaction-wise when it didn’t do what I was expecting, such as pinch or double tap to zoom, or when I switched years, the map would re-center on the selected state or county instead of staying where I had panned. But if you’re interested in historical elections data, Electionary ain’t bad, and I can only imagine there’ll be un update after elections night.

The New York Times has an updated version of their hurricane tracker up with map, satellite, and radar views. Stay safe, east coasters.

See also the live wind map by Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas, which has proven useful a couple of times this year.

Some days you take a whiff it’s easy: “Yep. Definitely had asparagus last night.” Other times though, it’s not so clear. This urine wheel by Ullrich Pinder from 1506, provides possible diagnoses based on color, smell, and taste. [via kottke]

By designer Stephen Wildish, a taxonomy of arse. No comment necessary.

In the Atlas of Design, published by the North American Cartographic Information Society, Timothy Wallace and Daniel Huffman argue for beautiful maps that are a joy to examine.

Design and aesthetics matter, because form is not secondary to function; form is integral to function. A map cannot function if it remains unread. To truly engage map users requires that we present them with something worth looking at. Something that they will want to spend time studying. Something that acknowledges the human need for beauty. Something that causes the user to think about the map in terms beyond whether or not it simply “works.”

Yep.