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What if the 100-member Senate were designed to mirror the overall U.S. population — and were based on statistics rather than state lines?

Imagine a chamber in which senators were elected by different income brackets — with two senators representing the poorest 2 percent of the electorate, two senators representing the richest 2 percent and so on.

Based on Census Bureau data, five senators would represent Americans earning between $100,000 and $1 million individually per year, with a single senator working on behalf of the millionaires (technically, it would be two-tenths of a senator).

Eight senators would represent Americans with no income. Sixteen would represent Americans who make less than $10,000 a year, an amount well below the federal poverty line for families.

The bulk of the senators would work on behalf of the middle class, with 34 representing Americans making $30,000 to $80,000 per year.

Imagine trying to convince someone — Michael Bloomberg, perhaps? — to be the lonely senator representing the richest percentile. And what if the senators were apportioned according to jobs figures? This year, the unemployed would have gained two seats. Think of the deals that would be made to attract that bloc!

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What about a Senate in which voters cast ballots for candidates campaigning to win over a certain age group? Thirteen senators would vie for 18-to-24-year-olds, who strongly support measures such as the cap-and-trade climate bill and marriage rights for gays. Nearly all of these senators would be Democrats.

Americans over 65 would control 16 seats — and would be mostly Republicans interested in protecting Medicare and the broader status quo. The baby boomer bubble would be largely in the eldest category, though its stragglers would round out the segment of voters, probably split between the parties, that is edging up on retirement.

Thirty-six senators would serve 25-to-44-year-olds, and 35 senators 45-to-64-year-olds — and would be likely to push the very issues now on the table, including health care, entitlement viability and tax breaks for the middle class.

If we ask whether a fact about a person identifies that person, it turns out that the answer isn’t simply yes or no. If all I know about a person is their ZIP code, I don’t know who they are. If all I know is their date of birth, I don’t know who they are. If all I know is their gender, I don’t know who they are. But it turns out that if I know these three things about a person, I could probably deduce their identity! Each of the facts is partially identifying.

There is a mathematical quantity which allows us to measure how close a fact comes to revealing somebody’s identity uniquely. That quantity is called entropy, and it’s often measured in bits. Intuitively you can think of entropy being generalization of the number of different possibilities there are for a random variable: if there are two possibilities, there is 1 bit of entropy; if there are four possibilities, there are 2 bits of entropy, etc. Adding one more bit of entropy doubles the number of possibilities.

Because there are around 7 billion humans on the planet, the identity of a random, unknown person contains just under 33 bits of entropy (two to the power of 33 is 8 billion). When we learn a new fact about a person, that fact reduces the entropy of their identity by a certain amount. There is a formula to say how much:

ΔS = – log2 Pr(X=x)

I suppose I should say at this point that I’m a Tarantino fan. And the reason I’m a Tarantino fan is that he pays attention to everything; what people say, how they look, and why they’re doing what they’re doing. Watch Kill Bill 2 and look at the sofa in Bill’s hacienda toward the end. It’s perfect.

Then there are the cars. Bill drives a De Tomaso Mangusta. (Italian for Mongoose. The only animal feared by a Cobra.) He would. It’s the only car he could have driven: American, and yet not.

Daryl Hannah uses a Trans Am with an eagle on the bonnet. Whereas Uma Thurman, who has two eyes, has a Karmann Ghia. You just know that His Quentin-ness spent hours, maybe even days, agonising over these tiny details, but it’s precisely that which makes (most of) his films so much more watchable than the when-in-doubt-blow-it-up blockbusters.

Google has a number of sending limits in place to prevent abuse of our system, and to help fight spam. If one of your mail accounts reaches an abuse limit, the account will be temporarily unable to send mail.

Each Standard Edition account can currently send to 500 external recipients per day. Premier and Education Edition users can send to 2000 external recipients per day. The email addresses can be distributed among the To:, Cc:, and Bcc: fields. Administrators can contact all user accounts within the domain by adding everyone in the domain to an email list.

Here are a few additional tips:

• Create multiple user accounts to send mail. For example, ‘Admin1’ and ‘Admin2’ can each send 500 messages to reach 1000 unique recipients. (On the Premier or Education Edition, two accounts can reach 4000 recipients.)
• Stagger mass communications over the course of two days. For example, send messages to the allotted number of recipients on day one, wait for 24 hours, and send messages to another group of recipients on day two.
• In all editions of Google Apps, an individual message can be sent to a maximum of 500 external recipients at one time.