Fixed Alaska

For years my software broke when trying to deal with Alaska because its longitudes straddle the -180/180 split. My simplistic cartesian software couldn't handle this. Also it was probably horribly warped by using a naive mercator style projection. But no more! Now I use the proj4 geographic projection library to optionally warp a state to an azimuthal equal area projection centered over the state so that there is relatively little distortion anywhere within it. This also normalizes the coordinates to all fit in a simple x,y bounding box. So, I now have 20 districts for the Alaska state Senate and 40 districts for the state House and they look pretty good: http://bdistricting.com/2010/AK_Senate/ http://bdistricting.com/2010/AK_House/