After Razib posed the question about Red and Blue State values that Steve will be writing about I thought it might have to do with academic and military cultures, which do map quite nicely to the liberal vs. conservative ideologies, but very quickly disgarded this hypothesis because it didn't meet the other conditions stated in the post.

However, after a cursory search of the net I didn't find a nice summary of the hypthosis so I thought I'd do a first order approximation and below are the graphs.

Here is the source data for National Science Foundation Grants by States.
Here is the source data for Population by State (copied from Census data.)
Here is the source data for Military, Dept. of Energy, and NASA (only for Texas) spending by State.

The fact that the Blue states dominate in the area of research funding per capita and the strength of liberal values on university campuses shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.

The fact that the Red states dominiate in the area of military spending per capita and the strength of conservative values within the military shouldn't come as a surpise to anyone either.

So, this is a post that simply states the obvious, as least on a first order examnation of the data. For those who want to break the data down and look for more surprising results let me know and I'll add an addendum to this post.