The 2003-2013 electoral map divided Missoula into nine convenient House districts.

As my mother clearly remembers, two weeks ago I used my column in the Missoula Independent to make light of the electoral prospects of one Gary Marbut, Missoula gun activist and candidate to represent the newly-drawn Montana House District 94. Marbut could not possibly win, I reasoned, since his opponent Kimberley Dudik beat him 67% to 33% in 2012. That was in HD 99, though. When the Montana Districting and Apportionment Committee redrew the lines last year, Dudik’s district lost the westside and downtown Missoula and picked up half of Frenchtown. The consequences of that redistricting are clear: Dudik won her 2014 contest against Marbut by a mere 29 votes, 50.43% to 49.57%. How we draw the lines matters. It might matter more than how we vote. I wrote about it in this week’s column in the Independent, and you should probably read it. Gerrymandering is boring, but it’s also one of the most important issues facing contemporary American democracy. Don’t worry: we’ll be back tomorrow with links to videos of people falling off of things.

A hipster or possibly mathematician

The Polish Hammer sent me this rad explanation of a recently published paper on the mathematical forces behind synchronized nonconformity. Contrary to Business Week, the paper does not prove that hipsters all look the same. The hipsters in mathematician Jonathan Touboul’s model look the same because he set it up as a binary: a field of othello tiles that can flip between two looks, punk and normcore. Some of the tiles are conformist—meaning they flip to adopt the same look as the majority of tiles around them—and others are hipster, meaning they flip to adopt the opposite look from the tiles around them. The Washington Post explains it better than I do, but the upshot is that when Touboul introduced a one-turn delay in information about surrounding tiles, the hipsters began to simultaneously adopt the same look in waves.

Continue reading