Hugh's Worthless Blog

Happy New Year! It is now 2014 and in celebration I have started the transition to move my main site to a new host and provider, Hostgator , with the new shorter URL hughcalc.org which is the base URL for all my online calculators . This will keep my site active longer with increased bandwidth and stability, and offload traffic off our department server which should never have been hosting this site in the first place. I should add some new content for the new year. Let me know if there are any new calculators I should add to my new site, like any modifications to my cholesterol ratio or BMI/BMR calculations. I am enjoying using my new Asus Chromebook C7 I won from a raffle at  Novu.com  because I am a UnitedHealthcare member (so I do not need my "Affordable Care Act" calculator ). I can use my Google Chromebook for just about everything. Some people say they are not "real laptops" but I can use it for 95% of the things I do at home on my computer. I thi...

Since I work for a large employer who provides us with our healthcare, I do not need to look up the premiums for what it would cost us under the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") for health insurance through the new federal healthcare marketplace. However that information is now available online at www.healthcare.gov for the 34 states whose marketplaces are being run by the federal government (my state of Missouri is included.) The site has been incredibly loaded since October 1 when the plans were first released, but they do provide a spreadsheet with all the premiums for every county in those 34 states. But that spreadsheet has almost 80,000 records which is a lot for Excel or LibreOffice Calc to digest, so I have decided to create my own little Affordable Care Act premium web application to make it easier for people to find the information for any county in the 34 states. Just select your state and your county and it lists all the options in a very plain web page t...

Today stltoday.com (i.e. the Post-Dispatch) had a very informative article posted about the new Missouri standards from the Department of Elementary & Seconary Education for rating the performance of schools. The new system (called the MSIP5 )  uses a 140 point system to rate all the school districts to determine how well they are doing. The Post article lists all the schools in a big chart that could be sorted either alphabetically or by percentage, but you truly cannot see the big picture without charting them all out like I did above. A similar article on KMOX contained hardly any data at all. In reality the vast majority of the school districts are doing a fine job with 43 out of 53 fulfilling 80% of the requirements and 47 out of 53 fulfilling 70% of the requirements. There are only six districts not meeting at least 70% of the state goals. Three of those are very close, Ferguson-Florissant at 69.3%, University City at 66.8% and Jennings at 65.7%. To meet 70% (the lev...

Now that the vast majority of the students who wanted to transfer out of the unaccredited Normandy and Riverview Gardens are preparing to start school in new districts, I thought the insanity would start to die down. But I was mistaken! Not just one, but two organizations are helping parents file suit against both the Mehlville and the Kirkwood school districts for not allowing their children to attend there. The NAACP is filing suit against both Mehlville and Kirkwood, and the CEAM  is just filing against Mehlville . Does anybody really think Mehlville and Kirkwood did anything maliciously wrong trying to limit how many students could enroll in their districts? I thought trying to limit class sizes to state recommended ratios was a good thing! The outcome here is making Normandy appear like the brilliant district now by picking a "free transportation" district large enough and far enough away so that the supply of available slots was greater than the demand for the slo...

After Mehlville voiced concerns about having  only enough space for 150 of all the transfer students from Riverview Gardens who wanted to attend there, I was curious where RG would choose as their second choice district. Now they even had some solid numbers to know where their students preferred to attend. If they had been looking out for their own students they would have selected a district already picked by a large number of their students like Ferguson-Florissant (200*), Hazelwood (149*) or Pattonville (60*), so that those students could have buses to ride there and not have to be driven every morning and afternoon. But instead they selected the Kirkwood school district , a choice picked by only 13 of their students. Plus Kirkwood is a smaller district with only one high school who has already stated they can only take in about 100 additional students . This choice makes almost no sense at all, unless Riverview Gardens is just trying to save money and deter as many studen...

Today the stltoday site had an article that gave the latest tallies of where all the students from Normandy and Riverview Gardens want to transfer throughout the St. Louis and St. Charles county school districts, with a very detailed spreadsheet in a PDF . I found all of the numbers pretty interesting. I found it quite interesting how different the choices and numbers were for the two unaccredited districts, and I made a pretty graph from the numbers as well (sorted by total number of transfers, combining Normandy and RG numbers). Both districts had Clayton as their third most popular choice, but with 139 total requests there (96 for Normandy and 43 for RG) that is equivalent to 5.6% of the students for Clayton's district of 2,500 students. The other districts selected varied substantially. Nearby Ritenour, for example, is the second most popular district in Normandy with 122 transfer requests, but only 7 from Riverview. Hazelwood is almost exactly the reverse with 113 from ...

As a resident of the mid-county area I was initially pretty excited about the idea of having a " South County Connector " route to connect mid-county to South County. I had always wondered why I-170 abruptly ended at highway 64/40 and why there was no better way to drive down to Webster Groves and on south to South County without just taking smaller roads. So, yes, in concept creating a "South County Connector" sounded like a great idea. And then I saw the plans. The plan by the county is to build about 2 miles of two lane divided roadway (not a real highway) starting at Hanley south of Manchester and continuing on to River Des Peres Blvd near Watson. And as at a cost of $110 million, that seems a lot of money for not much "connector". That means all that traffic would still have to go through the Hanley/64 interchange of lights, then hit the many lights on Hanley and the traffic all the way down to Manchester. I am not sure exactly how this little b...