This experiment has been running for quite some time already. About 3% of background radiation comes from non-medical human sources. A fraction of that is from nuclear testing.
"The natural gas work culminated in 1973 with the explosion of three 33-kiloton bombs thousands of feet underground in Rio Blanco, Colorado. The key problem was that the gas this produced had measurable amounts of radioactivity. Not surprisingly, that created political problems for the method, even though the scientists involved in the experiments claimed the radiation would not be detrimental to public health."
...
From one of the scientists on the project (quoted in TFA):
"For excavation, we put a lot of time and effort and money into developing nuclear explosives which had minimal fissionable material so that you could carry out a 100-kiloton cratering explosion and release the radioactivity equivalent to a 20-ton explosive of fissionable material."
Radiation is a problem, but over 2000 nuclear test have been carried out, and we haven't all dropped dead. A few more explosions that have specifically designed to minimize fallout won't kill us either.
North Korea has long had missiles that should be capable of hitting Japan. I don't think they've shot them over Japan before, but they're based on proven designs (they're based on Scud missiles), so it would be surprising if they didn't have that range.
In other words, this launch was not a success because it didn't prove any new capability. Moreover, the missile didn't seem to have the intended range (they can already hit Japan, they want this missile to go farther). If it landed off the coat of California, that would be another story.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nodong-1http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nodong-2
LED light bulbs do exist (they're a bunch of small LEDs, not one jumbo one -- I don't know if that's feasible).
I think you hit on the problem in your post though, power. 220V (or 120V) AC certainly has enough watts, but it's not in a usable form for LEDs. They require direct current (DC) at a much lower voltage. So you need some power conversion electronics to make them work. Then, to make them work efficiently, you need more electronics to regulate the current through them. For a standard electronics project, you just use a resistor, but then you're wasting power (to the tune of P=R*I^2). Off the shelf components that regulate the power more efficiently exist, but it adds expense.
Fluorescent lights need some electronics to work too, but I don't think they're as complicated (and are thus, cheaper). Cost is a big factor here, because old incandescent light bulbs don't cost much to purchase.
The scale of the project really is something. Neutrinos interact with other matter very infrequently -- something on the order of 60 billion neutrinos pass through you each second, and you probably never noticed. They need such a large volume so that they can see a reasonable number of interactions. It's crazy stuff.
Uh, how was I invoking the megahertz myth? I didn't say that they needed the same clock speed as the Atom. But it is a fact that they need a higher clock speed, than they generally have now, to have competitive performance. In fact, by suggesting that an ARM cpu at 1Ghz might compete with an Atom at 1.6GHz, I was doing the exact opposite of spreading the megahertz myth.
Atoms can run more than one thread at once (either by being dual core, or through hyperthreading), so having multiple cores would help the ARM processors.
As for the rest of your post... you accuse me of using buzzwords? I don't see anything worth responding to there.
Anyhow, the geeks around here have spoken with modpoints... I'll take my 5 geek points back thank you very much!
ARM was for Desktops, could be again
on
Ubuntu Ports To ARM
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Yeah, most current ARM cpus aren't much good for general computers (your run of the mill desktop or laptop). But don't forget that ARM was originally designed for use in Desktops, and derivatives of that design were for sale until a few months ago.
An ARM CPU could be great for a netbook or low power desktop -- the machines that currently use Intel's Atom. Multi-core ARM CPUs running >1GHz are on the way (or maybe they're already here, I haven't been keeping track), and they might easily have enough power (and power efficiency) for that task. Perhaps they'll be better suited than Atom.
The thing stopping non x86 platforms has always been software. FOSS avoids that problem -- if you have the source code then the program is only a compile away. Of course, Linux has long run on ARM CPUs, but open source programs weren't good enough substitues for what people wanted, so it didn't matter. Now, we may finally be approaching the point where people are willing to ditch their Windows, at least for simple tasks like the ones you'd do on netbook. Such an influential Linux distribution supporting ARM CPUs might finially make the platform viable.
Hell, perhaps a company planning an ARM based netbook asked Canonical to do this, and they saw the opportunity. This could be interesting.
I'm a first year graduate student in physics, and about 1/3 of my class have iPhones. We're definitely low-income -- Teaching Assistant pay is ~$14k/year.
Usually when the phrase "low income" comes up, people think poor people in the inner city or whatnot. Here, I bet low income mostly means students and the likes. I think owning an iPhone is silly on our pay, but at least we have decent future income potential (better than most low income people), so it may not really be beyond our means.
The first mechanically propelled vehicles were military ones, made by governments. Troop trains, steam ships, and so forth. There were very few of them and they were very expensive.
That's a nice theory, but that doesn't make it true. Look at the history of the development of the steamship, railroad, or car. Most of the early development was by people looking to make a buck or simply to tinker, and development was not payed for by the military (although financing often came from government officials, because being rich often meant having a government position). Of course, that's not to say that the military was never involved, but they often became involved at a later stage once the technology had proved itself to some extent. See:
Since it doesn't seem to be, that would seem to indicate that perhaps there is no evolutionary advantage to either side. With no advantage, there is no pressure for humanity to tend in one direction or the other. That could yield a pattern closer to what we are seeing now.
Or it could be that it's a mixed strategy equilibrium in which case it makes sense for a certain percentage of people to be monogamous and the rest not to be.
Would one non-monogamous guy be at an advantage in an otherwise monogamous society? Possibly -- he'd be able to father more children that way. Would one monogamous guy be at an advantage in an otherwise non-monogamous society? Possibly -- since everyone else doesn't really stick around to take care of their kids, his children would be better cared for and thus more likely to survive.
If those two statements are true, you'd expect some sort of mixed strategy equilibrium.
See:
Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (the book -- I haven't read the article of the same name).
For trips less than 250 miles, it's just not worth the hassle of getting to a major rail hub, parking your car (or taking transit and transfering), waiting to board the train, arriving at your destination with no ground transport and having to rent a car, etc.. It's easier to just jump in your car and drive there. Cheaper, too.
You just made a whole lot of assumptions (one, that you're not close to a train station -- why does it have to be a major hub?, that you need to get there by car, and that you need to rent a car on the other end because there is no other ground transport). Under those circumstances, you're right, it probably doesn't make sense. But those are not the circumstances many people live in.
A couple of other points.
If you drive, then that's all you can do (or at least all you should do). If you take a train, then you can read, work, watch movies, etc. Amtrak provides power outlets for every seat so that you can use your laptop. If you factor in the value of your time, taking the train can make a lot more sense.
As for capacity -- there are already railroad right-of-ways for almost anywhere you want to go (go look at some old rail maps -- there used to be trains running almost everywhere). They may be old, or abandoned, but it's not like you'd have to run new tracks through someone's yard.
Finally, as for security, how is this different from thousands of other places where lots of people congregate? Sure, trains have more kinetic energy than most things, but if you go to a city and spit in any direction you cant help but hit some soft target. Trains are nothing special. Hell, it's probably easier to keep a train line safe than it is to prevent a bombing in a city -- since tracks are so linear, just mount some cameras along them if you're paranoid.
I think high speed rail makes a lot of sense for trips than can be done in, say, 4 hours or less. That's the type of range where you can often beat flying (no waiting to get through security and whatnot). If you absolutely need to keep price to a minimum when traveling, than cars probably win. But if gas prices remain high, your time is worth more than $10 an hour, and the service isn't too expensive, then high speed rail could be cheaper if you take opportunity costs in to account.
The result was austere books with almost no examples, guide for intuition or pictures. Philip Davis of Brown University described them in an article in SIAM News as "mathematics with all its juices extracted; bare bones, skeletonic, anorexic stuff; Twiggy dressed in the tunic of Euclid." Michael Atiyah of the University of Edinburgh says: "They're not designed to be read. They're designed to set out a the is for how mathematics ought to be done."
Any they thought other books were dry? I guess books like this may have some use for hard core math types, but they sound like horrible books for almost anyone else. Examples, pictures, and the likes are very important for learning. Designing books not to be read seems like silly exercise.
An important question that the article does not address is why science education is important (the article is about science education in college, but it's an important question in general). Despite periodic complaints about how there aren't enough engineers, chemists, or what ever the flavor of the moment is, that's not really a problem. Many of us believe that some science training makes better citizens (better ability to reason, better knowledge of why things happen, etc.). Another reason is laid out by David Goodstein, a physicist at CalTech, in an article titled The Big Crunch (which focuses on a different issue for science -- how the number of researchers, amount of funding, etc. is no longer growing exponentially).
I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result....(skipping a lot)
the mining and sorting operation I've described must be discarded and replaced by genuine education in science, not just for the scientific elite, but for all the citizens who must form that broad political consensus [that basic research should be funded by the government]....(skipping a fair amount again)
The frontiers of science have moved far from the experience of ordinary persons. Unfortunately, we have never developed a way to bring people along as informed tourists of the vast terrain we have conquered, without training them to become professional explorers. If it turns out to be impossible to do that, the people may decide that the technological trinkets we send back from the frontier are not enough to justify supporting the cost of the expedition. If that happens, science will not merely stop expanding, it will die.
Sorry for butchering his article so much -- the whole thing is a good read.
DARPA relies on a filtering mechanism that employs academics. Academics are not open to new ideas that may upset their world view. Uh, you are aware that DARPA funded research in to telepathy? They are no strangers to crackpot ("world view upsetting") ideas. Hell, I even seem to recall/. articles about it.
3) T-Rays give off less radiation than X-rays, due to the much larger wavelength. It's not that they give of less radiation, it's that the radiation is non-ionizing (meaning that no photon has enough power to knock a electron free from its atoms -- that's what allows x-rays and UV to do damage). Because of how quantum mechanics works, you can blast away with as many of these photons as you like (aka, as much radiation and power as you want) and it will still be non-ionizing. It's cool stuff.
IANAAS, but it appears that if the gas can float up to near the Thermosphere, then it can get fairly hot. Also, hydrogen is the lightest gas out there, so it moves the fastest. Escape velocity is ~11,000 m/s. Using T=2,500 and integrating over the Maxwell Boltzmann distribution, I calculate that something over 10% of hydrogen atoms would have speeds exceeding escape velocity (hydrogen is usual diatomic, but I'd guess that it gets ionized up there). In short, you may be significantly underestimating the chance of thermal escape.
Maybe that's not the way to do it. Can anyone more knowledgeable in this area chime in?
The effect of the Electoral College is that candidates only have to worry about swing states when campaigning. Otherwise, a candidate would have to campaign across the whole nation...
KY, WY, and MT are you examples? The last time WY went for a Democrat was in 1976 (8 elections ago!) MT and KY went for Democrats in 2 of those 8 elections. No candidate is going to sink much time in to any of those three states (with the possible exception of KY). It's going to be all about the big swing states like PA, OH and FL.
The Electoral College voting system and a popular voting system set different priorities, and the BOTH have their drawbacks. You should consider both sides.
Will any other cable companies be allowed in Ohio under this agreement? RTFA:
In addition to AT&T Ohio and Time Warner Cable, eight other companies have applied for authorization. They are: Armstrong Utilities Inc., Ayersville Telephone Co., Block Communications Inc., Cincinnati Bell Extended Territories LLC, Comcast of Illinois/Ohio/Oregon LLC, Glandorf Telephone Co., Middle Point Home Telephone Co., and Wabash Mutual Telephone Co. So they're not there yet, but they'll probably get approval too.
AT&T is not a cable company last time I checked. They were one at one point (IIRC their cable business merged with comcast or somesuch). You'll probably point out that most of the companies seeking approval are not cable companies. Who cares what sort of cable they run to your house as long as you get video service?
I don't know the details of how things work in Ohio, but this may not be a 100% bad thing. In some areas local control results in only one cable company being allowed in a municipality. Removing local control eliminates the possibility of this monopoly -- according to TFA both Time Warner and AT&T are now allowed to do business in all areas of the state.
Slashdot Mirror
This experiment has been running for quite some time already. About 3% of background radiation comes from non-medical human sources. A fraction of that is from nuclear testing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_radiation
PS Good luck opting out of the study!
I'm sorry, I don't understand bad analogies that don't involve cars.
From TFA:
...
"The natural gas work culminated in 1973 with the explosion of three 33-kiloton bombs thousands of feet underground in Rio Blanco, Colorado. The key problem was that the gas this produced had measurable amounts of radioactivity. Not surprisingly, that created political problems for the method, even though the scientists involved in the experiments claimed the radiation would not be detrimental to public health."
From one of the scientists on the project (quoted in TFA):
"For excavation, we put a lot of time and effort and money into developing nuclear explosives which had minimal fissionable material so that you could carry out a 100-kiloton cratering explosion and release the radioactivity equivalent to a 20-ton explosive of fissionable material."
Radiation is a problem, but over 2000 nuclear test have been carried out, and we haven't all dropped dead. A few more explosions that have specifically designed to minimize fallout won't kill us either.
North Korea has long had missiles that should be capable of hitting Japan. I don't think they've shot them over Japan before, but they're based on proven designs (they're based on Scud missiles), so it would be surprising if they didn't have that range. In other words, this launch was not a success because it didn't prove any new capability. Moreover, the missile didn't seem to have the intended range (they can already hit Japan, they want this missile to go farther). If it landed off the coat of California, that would be another story. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nodong-1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nodong-2
PCA isn't terribly complicated if you use a library to take care of the matrix stuff. I rolled my own code in Ruby and it takes a bit under 40 lines (search for 'PCA'). Use the Ruby interface to the GNU Scientific Library and it's plenty fast.
LED light bulbs do exist (they're a bunch of small LEDs, not one jumbo one -- I don't know if that's feasible).
I think you hit on the problem in your post though, power. 220V (or 120V) AC certainly has enough watts, but it's not in a usable form for LEDs. They require direct current (DC) at a much lower voltage. So you need some power conversion electronics to make them work. Then, to make them work efficiently, you need more electronics to regulate the current through them. For a standard electronics project, you just use a resistor, but then you're wasting power (to the tune of P=R*I^2). Off the shelf components that regulate the power more efficiently exist, but it adds expense.
Fluorescent lights need some electronics to work too, but I don't think they're as complicated (and are thus, cheaper). Cost is a big factor here, because old incandescent light bulbs don't cost much to purchase.
This is a huge project with a long list of collaborating organizations http://www.icecube.wisc.edu/collaboration/collaborators.php. I know there's a large number of Ice Cube folks here at U Wisconsin-Madison.
The scale of the project really is something. Neutrinos interact with other matter very infrequently -- something on the order of 60 billion neutrinos pass through you each second, and you probably never noticed. They need such a large volume so that they can see a reasonable number of interactions. It's crazy stuff.
Buzzword combined with the MHz myth
Uh, how was I invoking the megahertz myth? I didn't say that they needed the same clock speed as the Atom. But it is a fact that they need a higher clock speed, than they generally have now, to have competitive performance. In fact, by suggesting that an ARM cpu at 1Ghz might compete with an Atom at 1.6GHz, I was doing the exact opposite of spreading the megahertz myth.
Atoms can run more than one thread at once (either by being dual core, or through hyperthreading), so having multiple cores would help the ARM processors.
As for the rest of your post... you accuse me of using buzzwords? I don't see anything worth responding to there.
Anyhow, the geeks around here have spoken with modpoints... I'll take my 5 geek points back thank you very much!
Yeah, most current ARM cpus aren't much good for general computers (your run of the mill desktop or laptop). But don't forget that ARM was originally designed for use in Desktops, and derivatives of that design were for sale until a few months ago.
An ARM CPU could be great for a netbook or low power desktop -- the machines that currently use Intel's Atom. Multi-core ARM CPUs running >1GHz are on the way (or maybe they're already here, I haven't been keeping track), and they might easily have enough power (and power efficiency) for that task. Perhaps they'll be better suited than Atom.
The thing stopping non x86 platforms has always been software. FOSS avoids that problem -- if you have the source code then the program is only a compile away. Of course, Linux has long run on ARM CPUs, but open source programs weren't good enough substitues for what people wanted, so it didn't matter. Now, we may finally be approaching the point where people are willing to ditch their Windows, at least for simple tasks like the ones you'd do on netbook. Such an influential Linux distribution supporting ARM CPUs might finially make the platform viable.
Hell, perhaps a company planning an ARM based netbook asked Canonical to do this, and they saw the opportunity. This could be interesting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#History
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iyonix_PC
Yes, they seperate the bad stuff out. From TFA:
The intense heat of the plasma gasifies municipal waste, converting it into "syngas", which is then cleaned to remove volatile elements.
This process is not new -- it's been done elsewhere (Japan, Canada, UK) before. It works. They know what they're doing.
I'm a first year graduate student in physics, and about 1/3 of my class have iPhones. We're definitely low-income -- Teaching Assistant pay is ~$14k/year.
Usually when the phrase "low income" comes up, people think poor people in the inner city or whatnot. Here, I bet low income mostly means students and the likes. I think owning an iPhone is silly on our pay, but at least we have decent future income potential (better than most low income people), so it may not really be beyond our means.
The first mechanically propelled vehicles were military ones, made by governments. Troop trains, steam ships, and so forth. There were very few of them and they were very expensive.
That's a nice theory, but that doesn't make it true. Look at the history of the development of the steamship, railroad, or car. Most of the early development was by people looking to make a buck or simply to tinker, and development was not payed for by the military (although financing often came from government officials, because being rich often meant having a government position). Of course, that's not to say that the military was never involved, but they often became involved at a later stage once the technology had proved itself to some extent. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steamboat#Early_development
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rail_transport#Steam_power_introduced
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_automobile#Eras_of_invention
Since it doesn't seem to be, that would seem to indicate that perhaps there is no evolutionary advantage to either side. With no advantage, there is no pressure for humanity to tend in one direction or the other. That could yield a pattern closer to what we are seeing now.
Or it could be that it's a mixed strategy equilibrium in which case it makes sense for a certain percentage of people to be monogamous and the rest not to be.
Would one non-monogamous guy be at an advantage in an otherwise monogamous society? Possibly -- he'd be able to father more children that way. Would one monogamous guy be at an advantage in an otherwise non-monogamous society? Possibly -- since everyone else doesn't really stick around to take care of their kids, his children would be better cared for and thus more likely to survive.
If those two statements are true, you'd expect some sort of mixed strategy equilibrium.
See:
Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (the book -- I haven't read the article of the same name).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_(game_theory)#Mixed_strategy
For trips less than 250 miles, it's just not worth the hassle of getting to a major rail hub, parking your car (or taking transit and transfering), waiting to board the train, arriving at your destination with no ground transport and having to rent a car, etc.. It's easier to just jump in your car and drive there. Cheaper, too.
You just made a whole lot of assumptions (one, that you're not close to a train station -- why does it have to be a major hub?, that you need to get there by car, and that you need to rent a car on the other end because there is no other ground transport). Under those circumstances, you're right, it probably doesn't make sense. But those are not the circumstances many people live in.
A couple of other points.
If you drive, then that's all you can do (or at least all you should do). If you take a train, then you can read, work, watch movies, etc. Amtrak provides power outlets for every seat so that you can use your laptop. If you factor in the value of your time, taking the train can make a lot more sense.
As for capacity -- there are already railroad right-of-ways for almost anywhere you want to go (go look at some old rail maps -- there used to be trains running almost everywhere). They may be old, or abandoned, but it's not like you'd have to run new tracks through someone's yard.
Finally, as for security, how is this different from thousands of other places where lots of people congregate? Sure, trains have more kinetic energy than most things, but if you go to a city and spit in any direction you cant help but hit some soft target. Trains are nothing special. Hell, it's probably easier to keep a train line safe than it is to prevent a bombing in a city -- since tracks are so linear, just mount some cameras along them if you're paranoid.
I think high speed rail makes a lot of sense for trips than can be done in, say, 4 hours or less. That's the type of range where you can often beat flying (no waiting to get through security and whatnot). If you absolutely need to keep price to a minimum when traveling, than cars probably win. But if gas prices remain high, your time is worth more than $10 an hour, and the service isn't too expensive, then high speed rail could be cheaper if you take opportunity costs in to account.
All I know is that the books I've used for graduate math classes have had both diagrams and examples... I suppose that makes me outright hilarious.
From TFA:
The result was austere books with almost no examples, guide for intuition or pictures. Philip Davis of Brown University described them in an article in SIAM News as "mathematics with all its juices extracted; bare bones, skeletonic, anorexic stuff; Twiggy dressed in the tunic of Euclid." Michael Atiyah of the University of Edinburgh says: "They're not designed to be read. They're designed to set out a the is for how mathematics ought to be done."
Any they thought other books were dry? I guess books like this may have some use for hard core math types, but they sound like horrible books for almost anyone else. Examples, pictures, and the likes are very important for learning. Designing books not to be read seems like silly exercise.
An important question that the article does not address is why science education is important (the article is about science education in college, but it's an important question in general). Despite periodic complaints about how there aren't enough engineers, chemists, or what ever the flavor of the moment is, that's not really a problem. Many of us believe that some science training makes better citizens (better ability to reason, better knowledge of why things happen, etc.). Another reason is laid out by David Goodstein, a physicist at CalTech, in an article titled The Big Crunch (which focuses on a different issue for science -- how the number of researchers, amount of funding, etc. is no longer growing exponentially).
I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result. ...(skipping a lot)
the mining and sorting operation I've described must be discarded and replaced by genuine education in science, not just for the scientific elite, but for all the citizens who must form that broad political consensus [that basic research should be funded by the government]. ...(skipping a fair amount again)
The frontiers of science have moved far from the experience of ordinary persons. Unfortunately, we have never developed a way to bring people along as informed tourists of the vast terrain we have conquered, without training them to become professional explorers. If it turns out to be impossible to do that, the people may decide that the technological trinkets we send back from the frontier are not enough to justify supporting the cost of the expedition. If that happens, science will not merely stop expanding, it will die.
Sorry for butchering his article so much -- the whole thing is a good read.
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
I don't think academics are the problem here.
http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn13907
IANAAS, but it appears that if the gas can float up to near the Thermosphere, then it can get fairly hot. Also, hydrogen is the lightest gas out there, so it moves the fastest. Escape velocity is ~11,000 m/s. Using T=2,500 and integrating over the Maxwell Boltzmann distribution, I calculate that something over 10% of hydrogen atoms would have speeds exceeding escape velocity (hydrogen is usual diatomic, but I'd guess that it gets ionized up there). In short, you may be significantly underestimating the chance of thermal escape.
Maybe that's not the way to do it. Can anyone more knowledgeable in this area chime in?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7281989.stm
The effect of the Electoral College is that candidates only have to worry about swing states when campaigning. Otherwise, a candidate would have to campaign across the whole nation...
KY, WY, and MT are you examples? The last time WY went for a Democrat was in 1976 (8 elections ago!) MT and KY went for Democrats in 2 of those 8 elections. No candidate is going to sink much time in to any of those three states (with the possible exception of KY). It's going to be all about the big swing states like PA, OH and FL.
The Electoral College voting system and a popular voting system set different priorities, and the BOTH have their drawbacks. You should consider both sides.
I don't know the details of how things work in Ohio, but this may not be a 100% bad thing. In some areas local control results in only one cable company being allowed in a municipality. Removing local control eliminates the possibility of this monopoly -- according to TFA both Time Warner and AT&T are now allowed to do business in all areas of the state.
IANA Radiation Researcher, but this may be what you were looking for (and did not expect to find).
334 more deaths due to solid cancer than expected for a population that size (table 2)
87 more deaths due to Leukemia than expected (table 5)
Studies of the Mortality of Atomic Bomb Survivors. Report 12, Part I. Cancer: 1950-1990
Donald A. Pierce; Yukiko Shimizu; Dale L. Preston; Michael Vaeth; Kiyohiko Mabuchi
Radiation Research, Vol. 146, No. 1. (Jul., 1996), pp. 1-27.
Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0033-7587(199607)146%3A1%3C1%3ASOTMOA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-G
The results are sort of summarized at http://www.rerf.or.jp/general/qa_e/qa2.html (although the numbers don't quite match)