Is there anything that isn’t going to come to light during the course of this year’s US presidential election? Now it seems a person’s political leanings can be deduced from how tidy, or messy, their office or home is…

The bedrooms and offices of liberals, who are generally thought of as open, tend to be colorful and awash in books about travel, ethnicity, feminism and music, along with music CDs covering folk, classic and modern rock, as well as art supplies, movie tickets and travel memorabilia. Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to surround themselves with calendars, postage stamps, laundry baskets, irons and sewing materials in their personal spaces, according to the study. Their bedrooms and offices are well-lighted and decorated with sports paraphernalia and flags – especially American ones.

You’ve of course also heard about determining voting preferences based on mobile, versus landline, phone usage?

Sorry to keep referencing the upcoming US election (I generally try to keep politics out of proceedings here) but I thought this article that explores the connection between telephone usage preferences and voting intentions was worth a mention.

In a nutshell it seems Republican voters are more likely to use landlines, while Democrat voters tend to use mobile, or cell, phones more.

What’s interesting is the way age factors into the findings though, the data used in the study was taken only from people 30 or under.

But along the way, the Pew people found something different, and really fascinating: Young people who use landlines are more likely to be Republican than young people who use mobile phones. They discovered this when they pooled all the under-30s who been polled via landline and compared them to the under-30s who’d been reached on their mobiles.

Twitter is Down; I Blame the Democrats

Wonderful. What else can we blame the Democrats for while we are at it?

The outage has lasted at least an hour at this point, and has eerily coincided with the announcement from CNN and other major news outlets that John Edwards has pledged support for Barack Obama in the race for the Democratic nomination for president. While Twitter vacillates between weathering major political discussions and crashing during them, and since we can’t blame Ruby on Rails anymore, I think the Democrats make as good of a scapegoat as any.

For those wondering why they are greeted with an “Over Capacity” holding page when attempting to reach Twitter in the last few days, here is a more plausible explanation.