John B. Cole

@johnbcole.com

762 Followers 2643 Following

Dairy cattle geneticist, mediocre Python programmer, eccentric cat gentleman, Irish bouzouki owner, LSMSA, LSU, AAAS Fellow.

A pigeon, sitting on the back of a chair at an outdoor café in Verona (Italy, not Wosvonsin). It's boldly watching the camera.
Five stacked bar charts, one for each breed with genomic evaluations in the U.S. (top to bottom: Ayrshires, Brown Swiss, Guernseys, Holsteins, and Jerseys). Each row shows the chromosomal breeding value for the Lifetime Net Merit selection index for each of the 29 autosomes. These values range from $175 (chromosome 13 in the Ayrshire breed) to $839 (chromosome 14 in the Holstein breed).
The cover of the hardcover von "Milk: The Biology of Lactation" by Power and Schulkin. It's a photo of a meerkat.
A Jersey bull calf lying in a stall with lots of straw. His name is PEAK Burreaux-ET.
A yellow A-frame work station on the tarmac at the Sioux Falls, South Dakota, USA, airport which resembles the power armor stands seen in Fallout 4.
Two empty booths at Alliant Energy Center in Madison, Wisconsin. The photo was taken on October 2, 2025 during World Dairy Expo, a major agricultural trade and livestock show. The booth on the left is for USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service. The booth on the rightis for USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service. Both are unstaffed because of the shutdown of the US government.
A long-haired black cat (left) and a short-haired gray-and-white cat (right) sitting side-by-side on a rug by the back door, looking towards the camera.
Photo of a blue bird with a white breast and white-tipped tail feathers sitting on a fencepost in the parking lot of the Kelch Aviation Museum in Brodhead, WI.
A photo of the back end of a Tesla Cybertruck. The roof is blue and the tailgate is a neon orange-red. "Cybertrukk" is written on the tailgate in a style mimicking a graffiti tag. Vinyl (I guess) is peeling off the rear bumper. The license plate reads "MYTESLA" and has a US flag background.
A photo of the front portico of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC.
Photo of the Pentagon taken on final into DCA.
A 6-by-4 graphic showing the correlated responses of selection for 24 traits and trait composites to 12 different indices. The traits are: Row 1: Milk, Fat, Protein, Productive Life, Somatic Cell Score, and Body Weight Composite; Row 2: Udder Composite, Foot and Leg Composite, Daughter Pregnancy Rate, Calving Trait $, Heifer Conception Rate, and Cow Conception Rate; Row 3: Livability, Gestation Length, Health $, Residual Feed Intake, Milk Fever, and Displaced Abomasum; and Row 4: Ketosis, Mastitis, Metritis, Retained Placenta, Early First Calving, and Heifer Livability. The indices compared are Predicted Difference $ (1971), Milk-Fat-Protein $ (1976), Cheese Yield $ (1984), Lifetime Net Merit (NM$) 1994, NM$ 2000, NM$ 2006, NM$ 2010, NM$ 2014, NM$ 2017, NM$ 2018, NM$ 2021, and NM$ 2025. Over time, the weight on production traits (milk, fat, and protein) has decreased and more weight has been placed on fertility, longevity, and health traits. This has resulted in slower but still favorable trends for yield, with dramatically improving trends for non-production traits. NM$ 2021 and 2025 place considerable negative emphasis on residual feed intake and body weight composite while maintaining favorable trends for other traits. The goal is to produce efficient, healthy, long-lived cows that are profitable.
It's some attempted math. It looks like the partial derivative of maybe a variance component estimate?
Left: A framed print of a painting of James McMurtry by Darren Hess; center: a signed promotional photo of McMurtry; right: a framed poster and tickets from McMurtry's spring 2024 tour with Betty Soo.
Red Washington State University logo, which stylistically resembles its cougar mascot, on a white background.
John B. Cole is standing at a lectern with a laptop on it. He's doing something awkward with his hands. Not shown is the audience to which he's talking about genetic improvement of dairy cow fertility at the November 2024 DCRC meeting in Arlington, TX.
A short-haired gray-and-white cat sits next to a long-haired black cat on a windowsill. Both are staring intently out the window.
Buster, a black-ish cat, is curled up likr a donut in the crook of my arm on my desk.
The front page of The Washington post from Thursday, January 7, 2021, with the headline, "Trump mob storms Capitol".
A gray-and-white shorthaired cat and a long-haired black cat are sitting on a long windowsill looking attentively out the window.
Buster, a long-haired black cat, sits possessively on my right hand.
A suburban lawn in Wisconsin with a light dusting of snow on it.