Hugh's Worthless Blog

Last night was an interesting evening for seeing two different methods of determining "winners" to a contest. I am comparing the results of the free skate program of the Vancouver Olympic women's figure skating competition to the "elimination round" of the American Idol competition. First in skating, there can be no dispute. Kim Yuna skated an extremely technical, difficult routine, but skated it nearly flawlessly and with grace. She was judged by the same set of expert judges who scored all the other skaters of the evening, and they each gave specific points to her for each element she performed and how well she performed them. Because they have very specific criteria on how to judge (number of revolutions, position of skates on the ice, wobbles, precision of skate circles, etc) it is difficult to dispute the scores she received. In reality I think the judges may have scored all the skaters high, but frankly that is perfectly fair since they were all the same...

I was visiting the St Louis County Library headquarters on Lindbergh last weekend thumbing through their most recent non-fiction books when I found " The New Rule for Mortgages " by Dale Robyn Siegel . Being the number geek that I am, I quickly found a chart in the book that shows how much lenders adjust interest rates based on your FICO credit score and loan to value (LTV) ratio. I quickly thought "that looks like a cool online calculator to me!" So I checked out the book, even after my wife gave me a weird look for checking out yet another bizarre non-fiction selection. I have now coded it up in PHP as usual and now it is living on my financial calculators page as my latest fun web calculator for the masses. The calculator is only useful for folks with FICO scores of 620 and higher, and shows your principal and interest payment both before and after the rate has been adjusted. The book also explains a lot of how the mortgage industry has changed and how everyth...

I just went to see my physician this week, and they took some blood and analyzed my numbers. I have had elevated cholesterol numbers for a long time now, even though I am not too old and not overweight. My doctor called and gave me the numbers, mentioning that they were a little higher than before but still looked good, and the higher HDL number was good too. So I thought it was time to take my online calculator expertise to task to create an interactive cholesterol ratio calculator on my calculator website . If you know 3 of the 4 values of total cholesterol,. HDL, LDL and triglycerides, you can actually calculate the missing value, but I did not find any such calculator available! However, using PHP and a little bit of time I could do it myself as well as calculate the ratios that tell you how healthy your blood levels are relative to each other. So I thought I would share my creation to the world at large. It sure is not fun getting older, but we may as well try to understand it a ...

One of the more interesting  news articles yesterday was that the chair of our Economics department here was being called upon for a court case against Paul McKee's redevelopment efforts on the northside of the city. The faculty member, Michele Boldrin , kept calling it "pie in the sky" with his best argument being about the 6,000 single family homes with an average price of about $450,000. He asks "Where are these 6,000 homeowners who can afford $450,000 homes going to come from?" That is a very good question! Personally I believe redevelopment on the northside of the city would be fantastic, but only if it is done realistically. That is a lot of fairly high priced homes to be for sale in the city. If there were 6,000 of those homes out in the county it would still be hard to sell so many of them, but in the city it would be next to impossible. In fact I checked one of my favorite local housing websites,  stlouis.blockshopper.com . If you look at the sales ...

This morning I received my regular Washington University propaganda e-mail spam which had an interesting article about a cool competition at the Olin Business School . The Olin Sustainability Case Competition  has students thinking of ways to solve the parking problem we have here on campus and possibly win a $5,000 prize.While checking their site I found a PDF file which contains some interesting survey data about from where all the Wash U students, faculty and staff commute. The data there is hopefully from a representative sampling, since there are many more than 300 faculty members and much more than 900 staff members (I know I do not believe I took that survey). I compiled the survey data and wrote up my own little PHP  statistics page which I put on my web site. This includes the top 30 zip codes (by total number of commuters) and I let the user sort by any column and I allow display the percentages of the totals. From the page you can see the ZIP codes where commutin...

Well, the forecasters were actually a bit closer this time and we did get a few inches on the ground, but since the snow was pretty much over by this morning the road crews were able to do a great job clearing them out. That made my son very sad, until we received a late phone call at 6:45am from Ladue Schools saying that the district was closing school because they did not have enough bus drivers to drive all the buses. I know Parkway, Rockwood and other larger districts had already closed schools, so you would think those drivers could have covered the Ladue routes. It looks like Brentwood, Clayton and some other inner county districts are still holding classes today, though, so not every child had the day off. I thought about it awhile and decided to stay home too, more for the bitter sub-zero wind chills than the roads which do not look too bad. I know my favorite way to check the weather conditions is to just look out the window, and to check how it looks on campus I use the Clay...

I just received an e-mail announcement yesterday from the university saying that our always dapper chancellor, Mark Wrighton , will be starring in a television advertisement supporting Proposition A . Since the election is only two months away, I suppose it is time for the campaign to start going strong with both opponents and proponents trying to convince the public to vote their way. I am, of course, strongly for the initiative, but I do hope the campaign is careful how they sell the sales tax increase. I have my own method, by writing up another one of my handy, dandy on-line calculators! Here, my Proposition A Tax Calculator attempts to show how the additional increase in sales tax for most county residents will still be a lot less than the gasoline tax they are currently paying to drive all over the county. I wonder if most county residents realize they are already paying a 0.50% sales tax to support St. Louis County's transportation department, and a current small 0.25% sal...

I just finished reading a very  appropriate book to lead up to the Grammy Awards this past Sunday, Ripped , a non-fiction piece by Greg Kot following the changes in the music industry over the past decade or so, primarily dealing with digital distribution. It follows the rise of peer to peer file sharing beginning with Napster, and also how specific artists like Prince, Radiohead and NIN tried to change how music could be distributed from the artist directly to the music consumer. I was hoping he would get into more of the other P2P networks and software that have come and gone over the years (Kazaa, eMule, LimeWire, BitTorrent), but he left that stuff out. I remember during some little speech during the Grammy broadcast someone was indirectly hinting about how piracy and file sharing were a bad thing, especially hurting the artists. They did not mention how most artists only receive a very small fraction of the proceeds of any CD sale. Since I tend to purchase primarily Christian...