I was reading my housemate’s blog about recent crime that has happened in our neighborhood. I thought it would be an interesting task to somehow catalog the crime that is happening around us in some sort of spatial context (its my geographical mode of thought). Last night I realized that one of my free mapping programs has a way to get all of the USGS aerial photography of the USA taken 1988. I was able to export an image of what I thought to be the “U Street Corridor” and import it into Flash to make the image a little bit more interactive. I am very pleased with the results. I was able to eyeball quite a bit of brownfield development and I outlined the areas that have since been developed. Ideally, I’d like to get people’s accounts of where they’ve had criminal run-ins and put little red X’s in the places where events have happened and have them show up on the map with a number and have all the numbers listed. I know this is nearly an impossible task because there is such a long history to the area, but within my circle of friends and people my housemates know on the street, I might be able to make a visually convincing argument for more police patrols in our area. So the Daily Render for Wednesday, September 8th, 2004 is the “U Street Corridor Animation.” If you have a moment or two play around with it. Its my first successful attempt at getting an image to zoom nicely, and I plan on implementing this code into future geospatial flash animations. As for the “Lenz Project,” its on hold while I copy all of my backed up MP3’s on to my recently reformatted external hard drive.

Lastly, I had a fun conversation with my mom last night about people that are “politically undecided.” We both laughed at the suggestion that anyone who is undecided right now doesn’t follow politics at all. I proffered the notion they must be idiots. A mean thought, but I think it all boils down to how much I hate polls. Simply put, I don’t believe in polls, or at least most of the methodology used. I feel polls use spatial autocorrelation improperly. Its hard to explain, but it boils down to how random, how large the sampling population is, and what data aggregation methods are employed and I don’t feel polls do this well. And plus the polls mention undecided voters, and who is an undecided voter? I know plenty of apathetic voters, but these undecided voters must be living with pikas in hobbit holes far above tree line with no television, radio, or computer and only the vague notion that there is something for them to do every four years.