America still have a Legislative branch of government, and it still matters.
During the wild ride that was the 2020 election, I created a new way of visualizing election maps. I started by making a new electoral vote map to replace the one that gets shoved in our faces every four years, but it quickly became clear that my new style of map would be just as useful for showing the legislative branch.
Instead of showing a traditional map that massively distorts the apparent legislative power of large-area states and large-area congressional districts, I made each seat the same size. And because many House districts have completelyridiculousshapes, I displayed each district as the same shape – a hexagon, for easiest tessellation.
The result is two maps – one for the U.S. Senate and one for the U.S. House of Representatives – that show the distribution of political power in the U.S. legislature as it really is. From there, it’s easy to add the names and political parties of each representative to give a comprehensive picture of the legislature.
So how does it look now?
Take a look at the maps below, one for the Senate and one for the House of Representatives. Congresspeople are shown by name in the approximate location of the state they represent, color coded by party. Red means Republican, blue means Democratic, and light blue means Independent Senators who have joined the Democratic Caucus.
First the Senate:
The current United States Senate (click to open a larger version in a new tab)
and now the House:
The current United States House of Representatives (click to open a larger version in a new tab)
What will these maps look like after the election on November 5th? Stay tuned!
Every year I do a review of the commercials that air during the Super Bowl – but does it even matter this year?
Power couple
Every year, more people cut the cable and join streaming services. That doesn’t have to be the death of commercials as we know them (most services have a lower price tier with commercials just like on regular TV), but it does mean the advertising industry has to rethink how it gets its message out. So how did it go?
The coveted first spot on the Paramount Plus online broadcast went to Universal Studios, with a trailer for Wicked (the commercials might have been different on local TV or on Nickelodeon, I don’t know). The second spot was for I don’t even remember, which is a bad sign.
Congratulations to Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs (lol wrong photo but is there even any difference anymore?)
As soon as I saw the third commercial, a house ad for CBS, I knew that it did not go well. Super Bowl ads this year cost an average $7,000,000, which the most anyone has paid for 30 seconds of content since the Jets signed Aaron Rodgers (thanks to Jimmy Fallon’s writers via my friend Chris for this cheap joke). If CBS was airing an ad for themselves, then either they intentionally paid themselves $7,000,000 – or, more likely, they couldn’t sell the pricey third ad of the broadcast, and the ad industry is in deep trouble.
And so it continued, disappointing commercial after disappointing commercial.
Coming soon to theaters: MOVIE!, starring Glen Powell as Glen Powell
Then there was the DoorDash All the Ads commercial, which was supposed to promote engagement, like the McDonald’s record commercial did in the 80s. Except: was I supposed to remember all that? Did I know tell me I was supposed to remember all that? And most importantly, did I care that I was supposed to remember all that, no matter how much I would win? won or how much I would win because, you know, Super Bowl.
Then there was the political spot for RFK Junior. Hey, did you know he’s a Kennedy? That’s it, that’s the tweet. The ad is really going to confuse future historians someday – unless, oh G-d please no, he wins.
That just leaves the winners, the best of the worst.
3. Bud Light: Easy Night Out (The Genie)
And only because Post Malone wished for a T-Rex.
2. Wicked
This looks like a really cool movie. I can’t wait to see it. Do I really have to wait until Thanksgiving to see it? And if Universal is committing to it enough to spend $7,000,000 on a single ad nine months before the premiere, it better be good.
1. Twisters
The original Twister movie turns 28 in two months. Did we really need a sequel? If the trailer is anything to go by, hell yes we did. This looks like an amazing movie. And Glen Powell (you may remember him as John Young from Hidden Figures and Hangman from Top Gun: Maverick) is absolutely perfect casting for the Bill Paxton role.
And that’s it, until next year. Congratulations to the New England Patriots on winning the Super Bowl! I know it’s the Chiefs, but doesn’t it feel exactly the same?
2023 NFL Season MVP Lamar Jackson’s AI-generated prediction as a woman
Happy Super Bowl Sunday!
You probably have so many questions for this weekend. Who will win? What will be the best storylines? Who will have the best commercial? How many times will the CBS broadcast show Taylor Swift? What would each NFL team’s starting quarterback look like as a woman? Wait, what?
A new tool has emerged to answer these questions that are so stupid you never thought to ask: Artificial Intelligence (AI). And it’s really good. I’ll explain what I did, how it worked, and why you should care. Then I’ll start to reveal what each gender-swapped quarterback might look like. I could show them all to you now… or I could show them a few at a time and generate cheap new content for months. As a blogger, the choice is obvious.
But, it’s Super Bowl Sunday, so I will show what tonight’s two starting quarterbacks would look like. Read to the end to find out.
What I Did
I used the Gender Swap option of the Media.IO AI Face Editor. I downloaded the official headshots of each starting quarterback from nfl.com, uploaded them to the face editor, ran the filter, and downloaded the results.
I wanted to demonstrate the technology by showing a nightmare fuel example contrasted with a really convincing example – but they were all pretty convincing. The worst result I could get was for Indianapolis Colts quarterback Gardner Minshew, for reasons that will be obvious once you see the official NFL.com headshot of Gardner Minshew on the left below. The image on the right shows an AI-generated estimate of what Minshew would look like as a woman – and honestly, it’s not that bad.
OriginalAI-generated
The photo looks a bit strange, but it definitely looks like a real photo of a real woman. If this is the worst the technology could do, then it must work pretty well.
How It Works
What’s going on here? Nothing magical. It’s just a computer program designed to read faces. A human face, man or woman, has lots of features that can be measured. What’s the distance between your eyes? What angle does your the bridge of your nose make relative to the rest of your face? There are thousands of such measurements, some of which might never occur to you, and every face has different measurements. And the program underlying the AI Face Editor has seen billions of faces.
All it’s doing is looking at the facial features of these photos. When it sees a photo of me or Gardner Minshew or you (if you’re a woman, with all necessary changes), it makes those measurements and compares it to measurements on the billions of men’s faces it has seen before. It then reads through the many women’s faces that it has seen before. It then does a Lot of Math (that I won’t pretend to understand) to predict, based on billions of faces, what a woman’s face with equivalent features would look like.
All that the AI program is doing is making a prediction based on known data. It’s the next step in the evolution of big data – which is why I find it so fascinating.
Why You Should Care
You should care because it is so good. And it keeps getting better.
Gardner Minshew from 2021-era Face app AI lol
You might remember FaceApp, which was popular on Facebook for a few years after its release in 2017. It did… not as good. To the right (or above if you’re on a phone) is what FaceApp did with Gardner Minshew’s official nfl.com headshot.
This – THIS was nightmare fuel! *chef’s kiss*
In fact, my original plan for this post was to use FaceApp. But as soon as I used the Media.io AI gender swap filter, I saw how far the technology had come, and this became a very different post.
If this is how far the technology has come in the seven years since 2017, what will it look like in 2031?
And it’s not just face editing. Artificial Intelligence prediction tools are changing many areas of modern life – especially the best general purpose tool (for now), ChatGPT. But more on that one later.
This technology has the potential to make just as big a change to society as the Internet did starting in the 1990s. Is it going to change society for the better or for the worse? It’s up to us.
Today’s Game
But for tonight, enjoy the Big Game. Here, presented Street Fighter style, are the AI-generated gender swapped quarterbacks for each team: Patrick Mahomes of the Kansas City Chiefs and Brock Purdy of the San Francisco 49ers:
Who will win the game? Here is my official prediction:
Taylor Swift’s Publicist
*Caution: Any comments that try to make this about women’s sports or transgender people will be immediately yeeted into the sun
After 30 votes, unprecedented write-in votes because you begged me to consider honorable mention entries for the winnner – and the CLOSEST VOTE EVER – we have a winner in the Seventh Annual Best Sexy [Thing That Is Inherently Not Sexy] Halloween Costume Contest!
In my succexy earlier post, I explained the purpose of the contest and reviewed the winners of previous contests. On Halloween Eve, I revealed this year’s record 42 nominees, sent in by you! From there, I chose 15 finalists and invited you to vote for your favorites.
Here are the results, including the write-in vote recipients, in order of increasing votes cultimating in our 2023 WINNER!
Suggested by Anna Routly and advocated by Sharon Kalter
Sexy Non-Copyright-Infringing Superhero Italian Plumber
Suggested by Andrew Rivera and Kim Nies
Sexy Pumpkin Man
Suggested by Mike Lowe
Sexy Ronald Dion DeSantis, the “Governor” of “Florida”
Suggested by Tim Christopher
Sexy Venus Flytrap
Suggested by Matt Brashears
Sexy Zoidberg (write-in vote!)
Sexy Halloween costume you say? WHY NOT ZOIDBERG?
Suggested by David Dudich and advocated by Nichole Benson Lorrius
Tied for fourth place with two votes each:
Sexy Flying Squirrel (write-in vote!)
Suggested by David Dudich and advocated by Sharon Kalter and Nichole Benson Lorrius
Sexy Skeletor
Suggested by Mary Jo Richards
Tied for third place with three votes each:
Sexy Piñata
Suggested by Kim Nies
Sexy Roach
Sexy Roach
Sexy Waldo
Suggested by Anna Routly
In second place, with four votes:
Sexy Snail
Suggested by Dave Fishman
….and your 2023 Best Sexy [Thing That Is Inherently Not Sexy] Halloween Costume Contest WINNER, with five votes:
Sexy Hamburglar
Suggested by Theresa Moody
Congratulations(?) to Sexy Hamburglar, and congratulations(?) to Theresa for the winning suggestion!
The pantheon now consists of: Sexy Orca, Sexy Scrabble, Sexy Green Poo, Sexy Marcel Duchamp Art Gallery Urinal, Sexy Mr. Rogers, Sexy Tardigrade, and now, SEXY HAMBURGLAR!
Thanks to everyone for playing, and I can’t wait for the 2024 contest!
UPDATE: Last chance to vote! Voting closes at noon ET on Halloween Day!
Amazing response once again to this year’s Best Sexy [Thing That Is Inherently Not Sexy] Halloween Costume Contest!
We got a record 42 entries! All entries are shown below, but for the purposes of picking a winner, I whittled the full list down to 15 finalists. And here are the 15 finalists, in alphabetical order, with the name of the person or people who suggested each. So many great entries this year, and now it’s time for YOU to pick the winner!
Review the list below, then vote using the Sexy Ballot below. Whoever gets the most votes is our winner for 2023!
The voting deadline is tomrrrow, Halloween Day, at noon ET. Results will be announced here on the blog at 3 PM ET!
And here are this year’s finalists:
Sexy Beekeeper
Suggested by Margaret Kosmala and Erin Purcell
After so many Sexy Bee costumes for Halloween, why not see what life is like on the other side?
And who knows, if there are enough Sexy Bees at your Halloween gathering, you might be able to collect some honey!
Sexy Donald Trump
Suggested by John London
To be fair, lots of people think that Donald Trump is inherently sexy. I don’t see it, but whatever builds your wall.
Sexy Emu
Suggested by David Dudich
This one definitely wins for “best nightmare fuel.”
Sexy Hamburglar
Suggested by Theresa Moody
Unlike some of the non-copyright-infringing entries below, this one is actually called “Sexy Hamburglar” in the catalog. Did McDonalds agree to this? Is hamburgling sexy?
For all those times you want to take over the world, but you just can’t do it alone. Time to recruit new followers!
Sexy Non-Copyright-Infringing Superhero Italian Plumber
Suggested by Andrew Rivera and Kim Nies
Mama Mia! It’s a-me, the Non-Copyright-Infringing Superhero Italian Plumber!
Also available in Sexy Non-Copyright-Infringing Superhero Italian Plumber’s brother (really, see the full list of suggestions below).
Sexy Piñata
Suggested by Kim Nies
OH GOD NO. PLEASE DO NOT WEAR THIS COSTUME!
Sexy Pumpkin Man
Suggested by Mike Lowe
Dudes shouldn’t feel left out of the fall-themed Halloween costumes either! Decorate it any way you please!
Sexy Roach
Suggested by Jackie Bowman
Try not to get stepped on!
Sexy Ronald Dion DeSantis
Suggested by Tim Christopher
The “Governor” of “Florida” won’t let K-12 students have nicknames, so he doesn’t get to be called “Ron.” But he does get an AI-generated sparkly dress! Now he’s not allowed in schools or public venues.
Sexy Scooby-Doo
Suggested by Brandi Silver
The gang tries to solve the mystery of who could possibly find Scooby-Doo sexy!
Sexy Skeletor
Suggested by Mary Jo Richards
Until Next Halloween!
Sexy Snail
Suggested by Dave Fishman
This costume can really help you come out of your shell!
Sexy Venus Flytrap
Suggested by Matt Brashears
Looking to make a catch at this year’s Halloween party? Want to invite someone out for a bite to eat? This costume meets all your needs as a growing organism!
Sexy Waldo
Suggested by Anna Routly
AKA Sexy Wally in the United Kingdom
Upside: distitnctive and sexy costume
Downside: no one can find you
Vote Here
And now it’s time to vote for your favorite costume! Choose a radio button below to select your favorite costume, then click Submit. Results will be announced tomorrow – Halloween Day – at 3 PM ET!
[formidable id=2]
Honorably Sexy Mention
Although I could only choose 15 finalists, I carefully considered all 42 submissions. Here are the others:
