Hugh's Worthless Blog

The recent article on the medical school at the University of Missouri-Columbia possibly losing its accreditation, made me curious of the demographics of the current medical students at the four medical schools within the state, and also prospective undergraduates who may be applying to the schools. Some quick Google searches led me to a bunch of interesting tables at the Association of American Medical Colleges  which shed some light to the diversity of medical students in Missouri. The first thing I noticed on the AAMC site was some tables of the racial breakdown of students from various undergraduate programs who apply to medical colleges. In Missouri, there is only one undergrad program that produces 15 or more African-American graduates that apply to med school, Washington University with 20. There are, in fact, only three undergrad programs in Missouri that produce more than 100 Caucasian-American med school applicants. Below I have a table I compiled of medical school ...

Since the Pokemon Go craze started, I was excited to realize there were three PokeStops which I could reach without having to leave our building, with one being the Mars Rover Replica in the middle of our building. One day while Googling about Pokemon Go, I found an online travel company, Skiplagged ,  that put up a really cool, real time Pokemon monitor , which anyone can contribute to by running a scanning process over a specific geographical area. They had a rather involved method written up to run it using Python on a Windows PC, but with a Linux system pre-installed with Python, running it was pretty trivial. They even have a threaded version now that runs extremely fast, so I have it scanning all sorts of areas in the St. Louis area (specifically Richmond Heights/Brentwood, WashU to the Loop, the Central West End, and SLU.) With just my one Linux server scanning those four areas with their Python script, it has made St. Louis show up as a bright, purple Pokemon hot sp...

Read my new travel blog on our exploits during our May 2016 vacation at shafted-adventure.blogspot.com

Yesterday was election day here in our area and the one issue that concerned us the most was the Proposition R for the Ladue School District . This was a $85 million bond issue to renovate the high school which needs to be significantly updated. The proponent group has been very active and vocal (they even tried to recruit me) so I was guessing the proposition would probably pass, and it won in pretty good style, 4459 for and 2505 against for a 64.03% approval rate, well above the 57.14% needed for passage. But what struck me at those numbers was not how many people voted for the proposition, but how few voted against it. We had a bond issue vote in 2010 and then a general operating expense vote in 2012 and the numbers for and against those issues shows an interesting contrast:       For Against        Total     Percent 2010 4717 3092 7809 60.40% 2012 4754 4255 ...