In addition to the simulator, I’ve also been learning a lot from the Flite Test YouTube channel. These guys have apparently been around for quite a while so I have a lot of videos to catch up on. They review various RC planes, have instructions for building your own planes from scratch, and they recently started a fantastic beginner series. If I’m not messing around in the simulator, I’m probably watching one of their videos.
Quick Install
It had been a while since I rebuilt my computer so I decided to do it over Thanksgiving break. I was amazed at how quickly it went! Windows 8.1 installed off a USB key in the blink of an eye. I probably could have used the reset functionality built into Windows 8 but I really wanted to do a bare bones completely clean install. Windows 8.1 remembers pretty much every customization I did to the machine and even all of the apps that I had downloaded from the Windows Store. Office and a few other desktop apps required manual install, but Office 2013 is takes literally a couple minutes to install.
I also gave Ninite a try for the first time. It’s free to use and it streamlines the install of some of the most popular apps. Put a check next to whatever you want to install (Chrome, 7-Zip, Skype, Notepad++, ImgBurn, Steam, etc) and it will install them with default settings and tell you when it’s done. It saves so much mindless clicking!
The final thing that made the reinstall so quick and painless is that all of my files are backed up in the cloud. So I didn’t think twice before formatting my hard drive. I knew if I had forgotten some important files, I could quickly restore them from a backup.
I remember when a task like this used to take the whole weekend or more. This time I fired it off before going to bed, clicked a few buttons in the morning, and I was pretty much done!
Worldwide Causes of Death
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.
In Depth Orchestra Viewing
The London Symphony Orchestra published a great website that lets you have four concurrent HD views of their music and you can choose which view you want in each quadrant. There’s some extra stuff thrown in that lets you drill in for information about each instrument in each chair too. This type of thing has been promised since DVDs were first introduced but it has yet to see the mainstream.
Grant Imahara
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.
Pacific Northwest Rally
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.
Tracing Waterways
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.
British Accents
If you watch a movie set in England before the mid-1700s and the actors are speaking with a British accent, feel free to annoy your fellow movie watchers and point out that the accents are not historically accurate. What we think of today as a British accent didn’t exist back then. They spoke pretty much like we do in America now. The British accent was created by rich people in England who wanted to distinguish themselves from commoners. And since Boston and New York City in America had similar deposits of rich people with connections to England, they picked up some of the accent too (dropping the R’s.) I’m not sure who sits around at a party and decides to stop saying a letter to sound more cool, but hey, stranger things have happened!
Thanks to KenC for posting the article in Live Science about this.
NE 160th St and 405
We live just off the intersection of 405 and 160th St. Recently, a bunch of flowers appeared on the bridge. I finally searched for what it was about and thought it was this story about a fatal hit and run accident on 405. Unfortunately it looks like it might have been this other story about a teen who jumped or fell off the bridge and was run over by multiple cars. Occam’s razor suggests that second story is a suicide since he was wearing all black and it’s pretty hard to fall over that railing. So whichever event those flowers are for, it’s a lot of sadness happening close to home!
Dry July
Seattle generally has great summer weather, but this one has been extraordinary. The forecast every day is 80 and cloudless sunshine. That generally starts in July but this year it started in early/mid June. If you want to read all the details, check out Cliff Mass’s blog post, but here are some highlights for the entire month of July:
- Quillayute, WA (on the coast) tied the driest month on record set 124 years ago (0.01 inch.)
- Seattle had only a trace of rain, the driest since 1960.
- The coast in the Northwest experienced 2% of our normal rain.
- Only two days failed to reach 70 and no days were in the 90s.
While “the best” is hard to quantify, this is probably “the best” July most Seattle residents have ever experienced and that’s saying a lot because July is usually so good anyway.
The fantastic weather isn’t set to end anytime soon. The long range forecasts from the national climate center are showing continued dry, nice weather for at least the next couple weeks.