Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Waze is a traffic app that has been around on iPhone and Android for quite a while, but it finally came to Windows Phone. It quickly replaced the other traffic apps that I use. Waze combines public traffic data along with data that it receives from everyone who is using the app. That means that theoretically every street in your area could be covered as long as someone has driven it recently. The more you use Waze, the more points you get. You get points for the distance you’ve driven as well as for reporting accidents, police, road hazards and more. What are the points good for? Well, not much, but they of course encourage competition. You can link the app to your Facebook friends list to see which of them are also using it and see how many points they have.

There are about three major choices I can make for my commute. Chose the wrong one can easily turn 30 minutes into 50 minutes. Waze has been doing a great job of making good picks for my commute and I use it every day!

Wives, do you think your husband has a hobby that takes up too much time and space? It could be worse. Hack A Day recently posted an article about a guy who is building a 1/3 scale replica of a B-17G Flying Fortress! You might think this is just a big RC plane, but no, it’s actually designed to carry a human. This scale model plane has a wing span of 34 feet and is 25 feet long. He started this back in 1999 and there’s no estimate that I can find on when he’ll be ready to fly but it looks like he’s getting close. You can follow along on his website or on Facebook.

Bill Gates posted a great graphic on his Facebook page recently showing what causes deaths around the world. If you watch the nightly news, you might think that wars are a majority of the chart, but nope, that’s only 0.05% of all deaths. The biggest killers are heart disease and stroke. They combine for over 25% of all deaths. I’ve spent a lot of time just staring at the chart and being surprised by it. For example, did you know that diarrhea kills more people than car accidents? Or did you know that brain, pancreactic, cervical, breast, and throat cancers each kill about the same number of people as whooping cough?

Bill’s foundation is focused on eradicating huge chunks of this chart, specifically malaria. It’s is one of the biggest killers of children and it’s completely preventable. I’m really interested to see this same chart in 20 years.

Grant Imahara is currently one of the hosts of Discovery’s Mythbusters. He’s fun to watch on the show, but that’s all I knew about him. He was recently interviewed on a Triangulation podcast, and wow, this is one interesting guy! I don’t want to spoil all the surprises for you but for example he worked on all 13 R2D2 units, he built the Energizer bunny, and he built Craig Ferguson’s robot on the Late Late Show. If you are at all intrigued by Grant, do yourself a favor and watch/listen to that episode of the podcast.

A recent episode of the American version of Top Gear featured multiple locations in Washington State. (You can watch the whole episode at history.com) It started at DirtFish rally school which is down the road in Fall City. Tanner Foust had a segment driving his car along some of the roads in the area and I recognized a lot of them from my motorcycle rides. Later on, they headed out to the south east corner of the state for some driving along the Snake River Canyon.

During the show, I learned that there’s a new rally race in the area called the Nameless Rally. It happened on June 21-23 so I’m way too late this year, but if they run it next year I’d love to go out and watch it.

That Dirt Fish school isn’t cheap, but I’d love to take a class there some day. Maybe if I combine birthday and Christmas presents for a few years it would add up.

On a hike through the mountains in the Pacific Northwest, you’ll often cross some streams flowing down the mountain. Where do they start? How do they make their way to the ocean? There’s a tool from nationalatlas.gov that can answer these questions. You click on any point in a river and trace it upstream and downstream. It’s neat to see how differently a raindrop could flow if it lands just a couple hundred yards east or west. One is a quick trip to the Puget sound while another might be a more roundabout trip into the Columbia River and then out into the Pacific on the border between Washington and Oregon.