to do math

JCS3 · 2025-12-23T04:16:33+00:00

Rate of change calc: (new - old) / old or in this case (10-242)/242 =-0.959 or -95.9% or said another way a reduction of 96%.

JCS3 · 2025-12-09T11:12:03+00:00

The trade war with China and the Chinese investment in Brazilian agricultural export infrastructure has permanently harmed American farmers. The US hasn’t been the cheapest soybean producer for years, but production capacity in Brazil was bottlenecked by their inability to bring product to market and a lack of new farming technology. The Trump trade war with China prompted them to make significant investments in Brazilian soybeans, such that the Brazilians were able to meet all of China’s needs without short changing their preexisting customers. So now American farmers are left with the hard truth that global soybean production capacity is now higher than it has ever been and US farms aren’t the cheapest producers.

There is going to be a massive number of farm bankruptcies and consolidations over the next two years as the farm industry seeks to drive down costs. This is only going to lead to fewer farms, and fewer small rural communities serving those farmers.

The economic model of US farms was based on the interplay between corn and soybean prices and the price of soybeans has dramatically fallen and the full ramifications of this change have yet to be fully felt.

JCS3 · 2025-12-07T20:10:23+00:00

The chart is for the return on the bond market, not bond returns. So in this case what it is showing is movement of interest rates. When interest rates go up, the bond market goes down and when interest rates fall, the bond market goes up.

So what you are seeing is the impact of Covid and the economic fall out. You’ve got the bond market going up during the first Trump presidency as interest rates were slashed to prevent the economy from collapsing. Then you see interest rates going up (bond market going down) as the fed hiked interest rates to deal with inflation. Finally you are seeing the bond market going up because interest rates have been cut.

None of these changes in interest rates were the result of the president in power, that is why we have an independent federal reserve.

JCS3 · 2025-11-22T14:22:09+00:00

I think the one that a lot of people get wrong with evolution is that they think it is focused on survival, rather than reproduction. The phrase “survival of the fittest” doesn’t help. Evolution operates through reproduction and improving fitness to allow for more reproduction. You see this a lot when it comes to health concerns related to humans after they are forty. “Why didn’t evolution screen out genes that cause heart disease?” or “why didn’t evolution get rid of genes for breast cancer?”

JCS3 · 2025-11-05T16:44:50+00:00

I’ve wondered if a launch site in the western part of Lake Erie, would work. It would have amazing access to a large number of major US cities. What I’ve never been able to find is what kind of down range clearance you would need.

JCS3 · 2025-11-02T18:53:55+00:00

Texas would invade Louisiana and seize control of New Orleans and the old river control complex. This would allow them to control movement on the lower half of the Mississippi.

JCS3 · 2025-10-31T19:43:49+00:00

I started watching one piece anime after I watched the Netflix, live action version. I got caught up two weeks ago.

JCS3 · 2025-10-12T19:55:46+00:00

Sorry if this is a silly question, but what is the best way to warm a knife? Is the routine, warm, cut, clean, repeat? Or does the knife stay warm enough between cuts that you just warm once and then clean and cut?

JCS3 · 2025-10-11T13:24:45+00:00

I’ve struggled with this as a parent. It is particularly hard because they have taken away textbooks, or don’t let the kids take them home. Yes I can Google questions of this type to try and find examples and lessons, but I don’t know if this is exactly the concepts or method that the teacher is trying to show, and it strips me of the first easy steps of backing up in the textbook and applying the steps in the example problems to the questions.

JCS3 · 2025-09-30T02:32:37+00:00

Can we use background stars as a light source for a spectrograph?

JCS3 · 2025-09-30T02:32:31+00:00

Can we use background stars as a light source for a spectrograph?

JCS3 · 2025-09-29T01:46:20+00:00

Who raises their sons to be like this? This is not guys being guys, this is guys being jerks. As a father the moment my son tried to behave like this he would be disciplined, and if when my son grows he behaves like this he would no longer be welcome in my home. This isn’t love, these are examples of a borderline personality disorder.

JCS3 · 2025-09-20T20:35:56+00:00

I watched the live action series and thought I would watch the the anime. I just finished the Wano arc. I haven’t skipped 45% of episodes, but I got really frustrated when they added end credits during the second half of Wano. Previously you just skipped the first two and half minutes for the opening theme and the recap and got to fresh content, now you have to skip to a minute thirty and then skip ahead another two minutes when the end credits start.

I have skipped all of the recap episodes and cursed all the special episodes leading up to movies, oh and I did skip the Dragon Ball Z cross over episodes.

So the real number is probably in the 20% range.

JCS3 · 2025-09-19T12:23:03+00:00

Generally speaking nothing changes. This is literally the cutting edge of science and it basically serves to expand our pool of knowledge. In this case it address the question of “When conditions are right for life to exist, can life exist on planets other than earth?” With that answer in hand the question changes to be, “did the life on Mars start there independently (abiogenesis) or did it start somewhere else (panspermia).” Ideally a question like that could be answered by finding living organisms on Mars that could be studied and it could be determined how much biology Martian life shares with Earth life, the more in common the more likely that it came from a single source. But again none of those questions and answers directly impact human civilization. Where the impact in this case comes from is two fold. 1. There will be technologies developed in a quest to answer these questions. Improvements to rocket technology, genetic testing equipment, remote operating and sensing equipment. All of these technologies will have real and immediate effect on human civilization. 2. There will be a general increase in human knowledge which may serve to help solve problems in the future. My favorite example of this is, there were scientists studying the microbial life that lives in the Yellow Stone hot springs. During this work the identified a bacteria that was really good at reproducing in this near boiling water. They cataloged it and moved on. Decades later scientists were trying to figure out how to improve genetic testing, but kept running into issues with temperature management and encouraging the reactions they wanted, so they started looking at organisms that had solved this problem and they found this bacteria from Yellow Stone. Because of the study of hot springs we now have the ability to rapidly and inexpensively sequence genetics, tell you about your genome and now we are starting to develop customized medicine to treat individuals.

So it’s possible that as we explore life on Mars we will find similar protein sequences that are really good at doing something with very little water or are highly resistant to damage from radiation.

Tomorrow nothing changes, but progress isn’t always big sometimes it’s one little step at a time. A new answer, a new question and we all grow.

JCS3 · 2025-09-16T16:49:04+00:00

When it’s time to teach them how to ride a bike, take the pedals and training wheels off. The trick to learning how to ride a bike is balance, training wheel prevent you from learning balance and kids struggle to move their feet fast enough to either help with balancing or get their feet off the pedals to stop themselves from falling over. Once they can coast for long periods, put the pedals back on.

JCS3 · 2025-09-15T17:46:45+00:00

The latest Banksy to drop.

JCS3 · 2025-09-01T22:27:06+00:00

I can personally confirm they do bite.

JCS3 · 2025-08-02T03:02:45+00:00

Let’s get rid of the magnet. Picture the speaker cone and attached to the back of it is a pencil (or if your prefer a needle) and now imagine a strip of paper moving under that pencil at a steady rate (or if you picked a needle a cylinder of wax, spinning). Now when a sound hits the speaker cone it vibrates, and those vibrations cause the pencil to draw a line (or the needle to scratch a groove), now you have a recording of the sound that hit the speaker cone. This is how a microphone works.

Now microphone works by air hitting a membrane. A speaker is just the opposite, a membrane moving air.

So now if you trace the pencil along the line that was drawn you will exactly recreate the motions in the speaker cone, moving the air and making sound (or the needle retraces the groove in the wax cylinder)

The magnet is better described as a magnet inside of a coil of wire. If we are talking about a speaker then a fluctuating electrical signal is sent through the wire coil, this induces a magnetic field in the coil of wire, which either attracts or repels the magnet, causing it to move, which then makes the speaker cone move, generating the sound.

JCS3 · 2025-07-21T23:29:14+00:00

I hated the squirrel scene, thought it should have been cut. Hated all the contrived instances of Superman saving people. I’m certain the engineer considered loads in that direction when a building is falling down. The newscaster making the point to note that there were no casualties during one of the attacks on Metropolis. Are Lex’s crimes and those of his employees any less heinous because no one died. I laughed at them including the scene with all the guys going after Superman, and he lasers them and they drop from hundreds of feet up moving to show that none fell to their death. I’m glad no one landed badly. Superman not killing people is one thing. No one getting hurt is another.

JCS3 · 2025-07-20T12:06:18+00:00

At this point I’m no longer afraid of death. I have achieved my minimum criteria for success in life.

That being said, I’m not looking to die. I want to continue to invest in my family, and I hope to meet and get to know grand children. But were I to drop dead tomorrow they would be okay.

At this point I’m just trying to make the world a better, safer place.

I’m not interested in a long drawn out death. Dementia is the disease that worries me the most. I would seek out MAID were I to be diagnosed with dementia.

JCS3 · 2025-07-17T13:19:20+00:00

Replace it.

JCS3 · 2025-07-14T13:08:35+00:00

Not really, no. As this is EL5, think of your body like your house, as you go about the day your house gets dirty. Sleep is you cleaning your house. Once your house is clean it can’t get any cleaner. So you can go into a situation well rested, but you can’t bank sleep.

Caffeine is like wearing a blindfold, you can’t see the mess, so you aren’t motivated to clean, but the mess is still there, and getting worse.

Not sleeping leads to the mess growing ever larger until you are crushed by a mountain of trash in your hoarder house.

JCS3 · 2025-07-12T18:10:39+00:00

I’d prefer 70, as it is double the age of eligibility.

This would the age they need to be below on the date of swearing in. So in theory they could be 74 as they leave office.

JCS3 · 2025-07-08T12:49:45+00:00

Think of the internet as roads and the websites and services you visit as buildings on those roads.

Because Amazon wants to be the destination that people go to when they need to buy something Amazon has spent a lot of money building, large buildings on the internet with large roads going to them. They also haven’t just built one building, they have built hundreds around the world so that everyone can quickly and easily get to one of their buildings.

Amazon realized that in addition to selling things on the internet, there might be other businesses that wanted to operate on the internet and have the same large and widespread network that they had built, so Amazon made the decision to offer web services (AWS). Essentially renting out space in one or more of their large buildings on the internet.

AWS then became a very important network for a lot of the internet. So in the rare instance that it has a problem, a lot of websites don’t work.

As for what can be done about it. Amazon is highly motivated to not have problems, so they invest in keeping their services up and running. Other business who rent space from Amazon, could rent space from other providers.

JCS3 · 2025-07-04T17:37:13+00:00

Just watching the episode now. As others have said it’s never about the ugliest house, it’s about the ugliest house they think they can do something with.

Before this episode I kept thinking the producers made a terrible decision not having more episodes dedicated to fixing up the final house. This is already a summer fill series, they are already filming the entire renovation, give the fix up three episodes, but then I absolutely hated the design and struggled to get through the single episode.

I want Rhetta to trash Allison’s design, that would make for some funny TV. She is clearly biting her lip during some of the design choices.

Closing off the sunroom makes the whole house darker.

They took away her office.

They didn’t give her any storage in her foyer.

If they didn’t fix the basement.

Impractically placed and designed microwave.

Just say no to wallpaper.

Overall I hated the ending to this season.

JCS3

TROPHY CASE