From: Peter Seibel
Subject: Bit of election night Lisp fun
Date: 
Message-ID: <m3pt2u3jl4.fsf@javamonkey.com>
Nothing earth shattering but last night, watching election returns at
my friends' house, we wondered why there wasn't a program on the web
that let you play around with different scenarios of candidates
winning different states and see the outcome in the Electoral
College[1]. One of the guys there claimed to have looked on the web
for such a thing with no success.

So I borrowed my friend's Powerbook and connected to Franz's online
REPL (since I didn't want to actually install any software on his
machine) and despite the handicaps of having no ability to edit
anything other than the line I was currently entering, typing on a
Qwerty keybord (I use Dvorak normally), and net lag, I was able to
whip up a little app to let us run our own projections. The biggest
pain was entering the data of electoral college votes per state, but
even that was made fairly painless given LOOP and READ. Then it was
just a matter of writing functions to move states between the *bush*
and *kerry* lists and compute the electoral college totals.

-Peter

[1] P.S. Note for no USAian readers: don't ask.

-- 
Peter Seibel                                      ·····@javamonkey.com

         Lisp is the red pill. -- John Fraser, comp.lang.lisp
From: Mikael Brockman
Subject: Re: Bit of election night Lisp fun
Date: 
Message-ID: <87actywsu8.fsf@igloo.phubuh.org>
Peter Seibel <·····@javamonkey.com> writes:

> Nothing earth shattering but last night, watching election returns at
> my friends' house, we wondered why there wasn't a program on the web
> that let you play around with different scenarios of candidates
> winning different states and see the outcome in the Electoral
> College[1]. One of the guys there claimed to have looked on the web
> for such a thing with no success.

http://www.november2004.com/ has such a thing.
From: Peter Seibel
Subject: Re: Bit of election night Lisp fun
Date: 
Message-ID: <m3fz3qzd0s.fsf@javamonkey.com>
Mikael Brockman <······@phubuh.org> writes:

> Peter Seibel <·····@javamonkey.com> writes:
>
>> Nothing earth shattering but last night, watching election returns at
>> my friends' house, we wondered why there wasn't a program on the web
>> that let you play around with different scenarios of candidates
>> winning different states and see the outcome in the Electoral
>> College[1]. One of the guys there claimed to have looked on the web
>> for such a thing with no success.
>
> http://www.november2004.com/ has such a thing.

Ah. Well, too late now.

-Peter

-- 
Peter Seibel                                      ·····@javamonkey.com

         Lisp is the red pill. -- John Fraser, comp.lang.lisp
From: Thomas A. Russ
Subject: Re: Bit of election night Lisp fun
Date: 
Message-ID: <ymi4qk58poy.fsf@sevak.isi.edu>
Peter Seibel <·····@javamonkey.com> writes:

> 
> One of the guys there claimed to have looked on the web
> for such a thing with no success.

IIRC the web site of the LA Times had an interactive map that did just
what your friend was looking for.

Nevertheless, it was a great story about quickly creating a Lisp
application to do what you wanted.

-- 
Thomas A. Russ,  USC/Information Sciences Institute
comp.lang.lisp / 2004 / nov