Here's a little project I've been working on for a week or so.

As a Canadian who's interested in American politics, I see a lot of American maps, but they have no direct personal meaning for me. Other than about a dozen or so states I recognize, most are just a jumble of roughly rectangular blocks scattered willy-nilly. So I decided to write some code to make new American maps that appear (to a non-American, at least), to be just as plausible. These maps are generated using purely physical laws, with no political or historical information at all.

http://quark.physics.uwo.ca/~sdevet/StatesSpring/

This is the same code, but with a coloring scheme that assigns states to the Democrats or the Republicans based purely on population density data (no political data is involved).

http://quark.physics.uwo.ca/~sdevet/RedBlue/

In both codes, you can click (and hold) the mouse to make the states dance around. You can try to get a configuration you prefer but beware - jerrymandering is harder than it looks.

This is still a work in progress - New England has fewer states than it should, the mid-west has more, and they're all a little too evenly spaced. Also, the west coast is voting Republican more than it should...

It works on most computers, but not all, I've noticed. Maybe it's an OpenGL thing?

Here are the .png files used:
http://quark.physics.uwo.ca/~sdevet/StatesSpring/Outline1.png

http://quark.physics.uwo.ca/~sdevet/StatesSpring/Outline2.png

http://quark.physics.uwo.ca/~sdevet/StatesSpring/USdensity2.png

http://quark.physics.uwo.ca/~sdevet/StatesSpring/MapPic.png