Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Flat Rainbow

On Tuesday, my Facebook and Instagram feeds lit up with pictures of a “flat rainbow” in the area. It turns out that this was a “circumhorizontal arc”. Cliff Mass has a good blog post explaining it. “The sun’s light was refracted (bent) by ice crystals in the thin upper clouds”. Wikipedia describes it like this: “The complete halo is a huge, multi-coloured band running parallel to the horizon with its centre beneath the sun” I’ll let you read those two linked articles if you want to learn more about the science, but for now, enjoy this beautiful flat rainbow over Stevens Pass.

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benmartens June 3, 2016 Commentary

Ecobee3 Data

I’m still enjoying this Ecobee thermostat. Now that the weather is warmer, the house is “coasting” a lot more meaning that we don’t run either the furnace or the air conditioner. It’s interesting to watch how the house warms and cools throughout the day based on the outdoor temperature and the sunshine. For example, here is data for a 4 day period. It was very cloudy the first two days and the second two days were sunny and much warmer.

You can also see roughly in the middle of the graph where the indoor temps jump up quickly. That’s when we returned from being gone for a while and turned the thermostat back on. The rest of the time, the HVAC wasn’t running.

The next step is to measure how much power our furnace blower motor and air conditioner use so I can start to get an idea of how much it costs to run them. I’ll have to figure out how to measure the gas usage too.

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benmartens June 2, 2016 Gadgets, Home Improvement

Birch Bay

We spent Memorial Day up at Birch Bay with Tyla’s family. The weather was pretty wet on Saturday but Sunday was gorgeous. We spent all of Sunday morning down by the water enjoying the views and attempting to fly kites. (Logan won that contest.) Traveling with a kid means a lot of extra work but it was nice to get away and enjoy some good times and nice scenery.

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benmartens June 1, 2016 Outdoors, Travel

Losing Our Views

blockedviewUsually conservationist efforts are about conserving our natural areas. But what happens when the natural areas grow up so much that they remove any of the good views that caused us to want to preserve the spot in the first place? Is it ok to cut some trees down in that case? Cliff Mass has an interesting post showing photos of some trouble spots. It would be interesting to see some kind of bill go through to conserve views at specific nature spots. I wonder how it would play out?

http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2016/05/washington-state-is-losing-its.html

benmartens May 31, 2016 Links, Outdoors

Baseball Ticket Pricing

mariners-logoAndy, Tim and I went to a Mariners game this week. It was nice to have a guy’s night out. The end of the game was fantastic. Down by one run in the bottom of the night with a man on second, two outs and a 1-2 count, Martin hit a walk-off home run to win it. Too bad the stadium was almost empty. Part of our conversation was around why the Mariners don’t lower their ticket prices enough to fill the stadium.

Many clubs are doing some kind of dynamic pricing, but it mostly seems like a way to charge more money for in-demand games. That makes sense if you’re regularly selling out your stadium. The law of supply and demand says that you should increase prices if demand outpaces supply. But why not follow that same logic when the reverse is true?

I couldn’t find any satisfactory reason for why teams wouldn’t charge the amount that would fill the stadium for each game. In this world of big data, they should be able to set that price per game very accurately based on day of the week, opponent, number of wins in the season, weather, etc. How would they not benefit from having the stadium full even if they were giving away some tickets for free? The incremental cost of having another fan in the stadium is almost nothing, but there’s a good change they’ll end up buying a $9 Coors Light.

The only sticky point I can think of is that you have season ticket holders that prepay a set price for their seats. To get around that you can either provide them additional value (discounted merchandise, free parking, etc) that makes it worth their while to pay more for the seats than the person next to them or you can give them vouchers at the end of the year for discounts on next year’s season tickets.

Fill the stadium Mariners! I bet you can even find some data that shows a team plays better when the stadium is full so maybe it’s an easy way to get a few more wins each season.

There has to be some legal/contract reason why they can’t do this because there’s no way that the current system is generating the maximum amount of revenue.

P.S. This isn’t directly related to the topic, but I did run across an interesting paper about ticket pricing per team.

benmartens May 30, 2016 Sports

Tent

cabelastentIt has been 11 years since I bought a tent. That last $35 tent served me well over the years but it was always flimsy, it wasn’t great in the rain, and the last time we used it, Oskar ran through the door destroying the zipper.

With Elijah getting to an age where we are considering camping, I decided it was time to stock up on some new gear. Instead of going for another cheapo tent, I decided to buy one that will probably last us for the rest of our lives. Tim and Chelsea bought the 6-person Cabela’s Alaskan Guide Geodesic Tent a few years ago. They’ve had that tent out in a lot of wild weather and it’s still in fantastic condition. Those experiences coupled with a $100-off sale on tents at Cabelas caused me to pull the trigger before even figuring out if Elijah actually likes camping. In addition to the $100-off sale, I was able to ship it to the store which is in another county that has a lower tax rate so I saved quite a bit of money.

Elijah and I picked up the tent last weekend and set it up in the front room. We didn’t set it up fully, but it was enough to make sure that the tent was in good shape and to get him excited about the idea of camping. We’re going to book a quick camping weekend with just the three of us somewhere close by to see how it goes, but hopefully we’ll be getting out a little more often in the coming summers.

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benmartens May 27, 2016 Outdoors

John Oliver On Scientific Studies

John Oliver has an HBO news show called Last Week Tonight. We don’t have HBO, but a lot of the clips are on YouTube and I find it an entertaining way to get a perspective on the news that I might not get otherwise. The only catch is that since this is on HBO, it’s sometimes R-rated content .This video is no exception, but the content is so exceptional that i have to content on it. In this 20 minute clip, Oliver gives example after example of click-bait “science” stories that are completely wrong. The news media is so eager to get views and clicks that they will deliberately twist (or lazily ignore) the details to produce a story. It’s out of control and it’s sad how many people fall for them. By default, you should probably disbelieve any scientific study that you hear or read about, especially if it’s from a show like Good Morning America, the Today Show or Fox and Friends. If you’re really going to adjust your life because of a study, isn’t it worth a few minutes of your time to maybe READ the study instead of trusting somebody else’s 3 minute over-hyped review of it?

benmartens May 26, 2016 Links

Shed

Our house came with a small Rubbermaid shed in the backyard. It’s a handy place to keep stuff like the lawn mower, but it rapdily gathered so much stuff that it was hard to even pull the lawnmower out.

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Last week I decided it was time to build some organization. Thankfully, that turned out to be a very quick and relatively cheap project. The whole thing was built with about 25 2x4s and a bunch of scrap plywood that I already had.

I started out with Sketchup to figure out how I would get all the big items to fit in there. I measured the interior dimensions of the shed and also the dimensions of the mower, the wheelbarrow, etc. It was very helpful to figure this all out on the computer instead of doing it on the fly.

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The plan was to build an “attic” and two shelves as well as some places to hang tools along the wall. Floor space is really valuable and I can pretty much fill it up with the mower, generator, wheelbarrow, ladder and cornhole boards. Everything else needs to be off the ground.

I moved all of the contents out onto the patio and covered them with a tarp (which Elijah thought was very interesting.) Then it only took about 4 hours of work to build everything inside. After doing a bunch of nicer woodworking projects, it was kind of relaxing to frame the project out with 2x4s. I covered the shelves with scrap pieces of plywood and before I knew it, the project was done.

Everything fits in there very nicely now and I no longer dread opening the doors to get something out. I still have plenty of empty space that I can use now too.

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benmartens May 25, 2016 Home Improvement, Woodworking

Truck VIN

Now that Ford has assigned a VIN to my truck, I can use some interesting tools. For example, did you know that the letters and numbers in the VIN tell all kinds of things like what range the gross vehicle weight is in, the type of engine, the plant it was built in (mine is Kansas City) and how many vehicles were built before yours?

Another nifty tool for Ford buyers is COTUS. It’s a website that lets you check the status of your order. You can get to it either at http://www.cotus.ford.com or http://wwwqa.cotus.ford.com. The sites are notoriously flaky but I finally got the second one to work for my order. As expected, it shows that my truck is “In Order Processing”. That’s the longest phase, but you know I’ll be checking this site pretty regularly!

cotusIt’s amazing what you can find on the Internet if you look around! If you’re in the market for an F150, I highly recommend F150Forum.com. It’s a goldmine of information.

UPDATE: This afternoon when I logged in, COTUS told me the estimated delivery date was July 9! Let’s see if that holds true…

benmartens May 24, 2016 Commentary

CrashPlan Success Story

crashplanlogoAll of our photos, including the ones we take on the phone, end up getting stored on our computer. This week, Tyla was looking back at photos from 2013 and she noticed that all the photos from her phone between January 1 and June 6 were gone. Uh oh.

I said I’d take a look but obviously they were nowhere to be found on the computer. Thankfully, it wasn’t a problem. I fired up CrashPlan, told it to show me all the files including ones that were later deleted from the computer and voila, there they were. A couple clicks and I had all the photos back on my machine again.

We’ve been happily using CrashPlan for five years now and this is the first time I’ve used it for a major recovery operation. But even if we never used it, I’d still pay for it. It’s only $60 and that’s cheap insurance.

benmartens May 23, 2016 Commentary