Europe, books, maps and snails-MOAR linkspam

[matgb]

A nice little mix of stuff in this lot, though the politics averse amongst you should be warned that with elections next week there's a fair bit on that, though not much of it is serious.

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  A quick guide to the British voting system for the EU elections | Nosemonkey's EUtopia
  There are elections next week across the UK. In

Comments

[baseballchica03]

I pretty much agree with this. Most of us writing our own personal blogs and journals are copying the old small press pamphleteers and chain letter writers. We're just doing it with better technology. Most of the established newspapers grew out of various small presses-the biggest blogs online now have copied this model, bringing in lots of individuals to create a more coherent whole.

My mom and I were cleaning out the basement the one day, and we came across all of these old notebooks she had in high school in the 1960s. She used to write "lost episodes" of Star Trek and some original fic, then she would pass them around to her friends, who would write notes about them. I said to her, "Mom! You wrote fanfic! And you had a prehistoric blog!"

[matgb]

Brilliant.

It also proves the point very effectively. There's nothing new, there's just better ways of doing it.

[eldar]

That voting system... can I have some of whatever the guy who invented it was on at the time?

[matgb]

To be honest, as a method of working out how many seats a party should get if there's a threshold, it's one of the best and mathematically sound, which is why it's used as much as it is within list systems.

And I've no problem with lists for specific purposes, especially internal elections. But for legislatures it's not ideal.

OTOH, I can now add another person to my 'famous Belgians' list.