Studio711.com – Ben Martens

We make heavy use of OneNote which probably isn’t much of a surprise, but Tyla and I also use it a lot at home. We both have our own sections where we keep all kinds of notes and then we have a shared section where we keep the grocery list, ideas for gifts for friends and family, lists of doctors, and much more. It’s a great tool for getting rid of miscellaneous pieces of paper and for keeping in sync with other people.

OneNote used to be a paid product but now it’s completely free. You can get it on Windows Phone, Windows, Mac, iPhone and Android. The Office blog has more information and links to download all the freebies.

MattB posted an article on Facebook that I felt deserved it’s own post here. It’s from thefederalist.com and is called “The Death Of Expertise”. The article discusses how our society is full of people who search the internet for 5 minutes and then denounce legitimate experts as idiots. Here are a couple quotes from the article but I encourage you to read the whole thing:

Yes, it’s true that experts can make mistakes, as disasters from thalidomide to the Challenger explosion tragically remind us. But mostly, experts have a pretty good batting average compared to laymen: doctors, whatever their errors, seem to do better with most illnesses than faith healers or your Aunt Ginny and her special chicken gut poultice. To reject the notion of expertise, and to replace it with a sanctimonious insistence that every person has a right to his or her own opinion, is silly…

People in political debates no longer distinguish the phrase “you’re wrong” from the phrase “you’re stupid.” To disagree is to insult. To correct another is to be a hater. And to refuse to acknowledge alternative views, no matter how fantastic or inane, is to be closed-minded…

Thus, at least some of the people who reject expertise are not really, as they often claim, showing their independence of thought. They are instead rejecting anything that might stir a gnawing insecurity that their own opinion might not be worth all that much.

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.