Studio711.com – Ben Martens

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.

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.

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!

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.

I love beer. The Pacific Northwest is one of the best places in the country for a beer drinker. There are 186 breweries in Washington alone and it seems like new ones are popping up regularly. With all the great beer around here, I was amazed when I saw the latest list of beer consumed per capita by state. Washington ranks 45th on the list! You people disappoint me.

Here’s the full list in order from most to least:

1. North Dakota
2. New Hampshire
3. Montana
4. South Dakota
5. Wisconsin
6. Nevada
7. Vermont
8. Nebraska
9. Texas
10. Maine
11. Louisiana
12. Mississippi
13. Iowa
14. Delaware
15. Wyoming
16. South Carolina
17. New Mexico
18. Missouri
19. Hawaii
20. Oregon
21. West Virginia
22. Alabama
23. Ohio
24. Colorado
25. Arizona
26. Illinois
27. Alaska
28. Pennsylvania
29. Minnesota
30. Oklahoma
31. Kansas
32. District of Columbia
33. Idaho
34. Florida
35. North Carolina
36. Michigan
37. Arkansas
38. Virginia
39. Rhode Island
40. Massachusetts
41. Tennessee
42. Indiana
43. Georgia
44. California
45. Washington
46. Kentucky
47. Maryland
48. New York
49. New Jersey
50. Connecticut
51. Utah

RSS feeds have been a great way for me to keep up with a long list of websites in a very efficient manner. Google Reader was the app of choice for me, but unfortunately it closed it’s doors on July 1. The search was on for a replacement.

After trying out a variety of sites designed to fill the void, I settled on one called theoldreader.com. As the name implies, it’s pretty much a clone of the old Google Reader. It might be boring, but since the Google app was all I needed in the first place, I wasn’t keen on learning something completely new.

It’s free so definitely give it a shot if you haven’t found anything that you like yet.

Last spring I wrote about a YouTube channel called Smarter Every Day. It continues to be one of the best web video series that I’ve found. The last episode about caterpillars was pretty incredible. Imagine you’re a caterpillar and you want to move as quickly as possible. There’s only so fast that you can walk by yourself, but what if 100 of your friends are walking to the same spot? How could you walk faster as a group than as an individual?

Watch the episode to find out:

And while you’re at it, I also recommend the Minute Physics channel. In each video he very quickly breaks down a complicated physics topic.

Now that we’ve restarted our Netflix streaming membership thanks to Arrested Development, I think we’ll probably keep it going for a while. This gives us access to more online streaming content than we had with just our Amazon Prime membership and Comcast streaming options. So now the problem becomes how do I figure out which service has the content I want? That’s exactly what canistream.it aims to answer. Type in a TV show or movie and it will search Netflix, Amazon, Hulu Plus, XFinity and a bunch of other streaming options as well as places you might be able to purchase the show. It’s pretty handy!