why not just:

bool WillCharacterBeKilled(Character c) { return IsCharacterPopular(c); }

and if this were C++, I would do:

bool WillCharacterBeKilled(const Character &c) { return IsCharacterPopular(c); }

as passing by reference (using the ampersand) prevents having to create an unnecessary copy of the object.

The formula is not too bad, although I would suggest a minor tweak, mainly that one should change it from:

(compression ratio)/log(time to compress)

to:

(compression ratio)/log(10+time to compress).

This will ensure that no divide by zero occurs, specifically if the time to compress is 1 second, then you would have been dividing by zero in the original formula.

Not only that, but the statement that we are 90 percent microbial and 10 percent human given that there are 10 times as many microbial cells as there are human cells is mathematically incorrect:

x=10y
1.0=x+y
1.0 = (10y)+y
1.0 = 11y

Therefore it is more accurate to say that we are 90.909% microbial and 9.0909% human.

I was just about to post the same thing. I guess the OP figured he had a 50/50 chance of being right and just decided to wing it!

Wrong.

At 30km altitude, you are much more than 30% closer to space than everyone else.

Even if everyone were at the summit of Mt. Everest, which is at 8.8km, you would still be 3.4 times (240%) higher up than they are.

But then we might run into a shortage of carrier pigeons.

...and in other news, it's getting harder to build killer robots in the privacy of your own hotel room

Also, I would like to add that we are really talking about two separate issues here.

For me, I do not like that we lose voting accuracy. So there are simple ways to improve on it, like I stated earlier.
For you, you do not like that it has become a popularity contest, and that it comes down to uninformed masses making the decision. I won't argue with you there.

But for your issue, again that has nothing to do with voting accuracy. Instead, that has to do with educating the uninformed masses, which is indeed an entirely separate issue altogether, and the electoral college does not solve that problem.

Like they say in programming: garbage in, garbage out. Since the electoral votes themselves are based upon the votes of the uninformed masses, they too are going to be garbage. But at least we can have a more accurate outcome if we improve upon the current electoral scheme.

Yeah, that whole thing about each State selecting the president... All that means is that my vote doesn't matter because it is going to be nullified from winner-take-all.

Like I said before, if the US were just one big "State", then winner take all is fine. I get that. But when you have winner-take-all applied across multiple states, you lose voting accuracy.

Again consider my updated example:

State A: 500,001 votes for candidate 1; 499,999 votes for candidate 2
State B: 0 votes for candidate 1; 100,000 votes for candidate 2
State C: 0 votes for candidate 1; 100,000 votes for candidate 2

Again, state A gives ten electoral votes to candidate 1, and states B and C each give one electoral vote to candidate 2.

In this example, candidate 2 gets a total of 699,999 votes, and candidate 1 gets a total of 500,001 votes. Yet due to the electoral votes, even though candidate 2 got 39% more votes, he/she would still lose.

I will not argue that indeed, today it may seem like a popularity contest is taking place, but in the end, to allow for the outcome of one state to nullify the outcome of the others (like in the above example), seems preposterous to me.

And in fact, it becomes even more clear when you consider that the above example could be updated as follows:

State A: 500,001 votes for candidate 1; 499,999 votes for candidate 2
State B: 0 votes for candidate 1; 100,000 votes for candidate 2
State C: 0 votes for candidate 1; 100,000 votes for candidate 2

Again, state A gives ten electoral votes to candidate 1, and states B and C each give one electoral vote to candidate 2.

In this example, candidate 2 gets a total of 699,999 votes, and candidate 1 gets a total of 500,001 votes. Yet due to the electoral votes, even though candidate 2 got 39% more votes, he/she would still lose.

While we're at it, let's also do away with the electoral college. And yes, I'm being serious.

Here is a simple example:

You have three states. The first one is 10x larger than the other two, and the voting outcome is as follows:

State A: 500,001 votes for candidate 1; 499,999 votes for candidate 2
State B: 49,999 votes for candidate 1; 50,001 votes for candidate 2
State C: 49,999 votes for candidate 1; 50,001 votes for candidate 2

State A gives ten electoral votes to candidate 1, and states B and C each give one electoral vote to candidate 2.

As you can see, even though candidate 2 received more actual votes than candidate 1, he/she winds up losing.

The winner-take all rule makes sense whenever there is just one state involved, but when you carry it over across multiple states, you wind up losing accuracy. Currently there are only two states, Nebraska and Maine, which actually implement proportional voting by splitting their electoral votes. But even then, that is not 100% perfect because there are an integer number of electoral votes which are based on population size, so there is still a rounding error.

The most accurate, and to me the simplest approach is to simply add up the actual votes from each state for each candidate, and only at the very end do you compare votes to see who is the winner.