Coolest Map Ever

A friend of mine was recently telling me that the electoral maps are looking awfully red, despite the closeness of the race between the Democratic (blue) and Republican (red) campaigns. Well, here's an incredible Web page by a University of Michigan physics professor showing several renderings of maps that compensate for the population-geography disparity - they're called cartograms. They show the voting results (blue and red) of states proportionally to their respective populations and electoral vote totals.

These maps are from the 2004 presidential election. Scroll down the page and he links to another site with cartograms of all other types.

Really awesome, huh? and isn't the purple map totally rad? Our country is a lot more all mixed together than we might imagine, despite the political discourse we witness on television.