Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Just trying to get through life without looking stupid, so far it's not going very well.

Housing Market

I’ve been happily watching my house value skyrocket since we bought it. In less than 5 years, Zillow says we’re up 44%! I say “happily” because it’s nice to see that I bought in a trough instead of at a peak like last time, but since I have no plans to move for quite a while, all it really does is raise my property taxes.

The market is crazy though. It feels like we have to be heading toward another bubble pop. I don’t see how it’s possible to sustain growth like this. I have a couple friends at work looking for houses. This is their routine:

Thursday: Browse online to see all the new houses that come online.
Weekend: Go to an open house and make an offer.
Monday: Hear if you won or not.

You probably didn’t get the house. It’s not uncommon to have 10 offers on the house and the top one probably waved the inspection, paid $20-100K over asking price, and might even be paying cash. Yikes.

benmartens June 8, 2016 Commentary

Zero Clearance Insert

A year ago, I made a new table saw insert so I could use a dado stack safely. As soon as I finished that and realized how easy it was, I thought that I should make another one for use with a regular blade. I thought that pretty much every time I used my table saw for the next year. I finally spent an hour and built another one. It’s ridiculous how long that took because I’ve already benefited greatly from it. If you have a table saw, this is a great project and a very easy upgrade. They give you cleaner cuts since your wood is supported all the way up to the blade, and it’s also safer to cut thin strips because you don’t have to worry about them falling down next to the blade.

benmartens June 7, 2016 Woodworking

Adam Savage At Maker Faire

An estimated 160,000 people descended upon San Fancisco for Maker Faire this year. It’s a celebration of any kind of making you can imagine: woodworking, electronics, metal, jewelry, clothing, music, models and more (and all the various combinations of the various genres). There are many things I’m excited to do with Elijah when he’s a little older. Near the top of the list is a trip to Maker Faire.

There’s so much going on that I hear you can’t see it all in one weekend, but thankfully more and more of it is starting to appear online. One of the better videos that came out this year was Adam Savage’s one hour talk. The first part is read from notes and won’t win any awards for delivery, but the content is really good. It’s about the importance and value of making things. He then does a good Q&A session for the rest of the hour. He’s very passionate about creating ANYTHING and does a good job explaining why it’s such a great way to spend your time.

benmartens June 6, 2016 Links, Maker

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.

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.

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.

benmartens June 1, 2016 Outdoors, Travel

Losing Our Views

Usually 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

Andy, 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

It 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.

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