Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent
Michael Foran (CC BY 2.0)
Posted

The al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, are known by their date.

This is unusual. Other major events, though we might recall their dates, aren’t named by their dates. We know that the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, but we don’t call it the “December 7” attack. We don’t refer to the Normandy landing on D-Day as the “June 6 landing.”

Most events are known by their place—the Northridge earthquake, the Chernobyl disaster, the Battle of Bull Run. Those affecting ships and planes are known by their names or flight numbers—the Titanic disaster, Pan-Am Flight 103, the USS Cole attack, TWA Flight 800. But this event affected too many places . . . and too many planes. We know the places and flight numbers too, but they’re just parts of something bigger and more horrible.

The government now officially refers to the annual September 11 commemoration as “Patriot Day,” but nobody calls it that. We call it “September 11,” or just “nine-eleven.”

Read more . . .

Posted

Yeah, I’m still pretty late with this. But I’m a lot less late than I was last year! And next year might yet be better. Maybe.

This is a fairly minor year for the list; there have not been many discontinuations or redesigns. The Honda Civic Si has fallen completely off the bottom since the new one isn’t half bad. That made room for the new 2022 Hyundai Santa Cruz, which debuts in the number eight position. There have also been some changes in the order as my tastes change.

The criteria are unchanged. Cars that are sold new in the United States are eligible unless they sell in very low volume or are not sold to the general public. Volume is defined based on my observations—if I see ’em on the roads, they qualify; if I don’t, they don’t. Vehicles that are only sold for exotic, military, commercial, or special purposes are excluded.

Read more . . .

Gerd Altmann, Pixabay
Posted

Large numbers are hard to understand. For example, consider this number: 63,000,000. Sixty-three million. How can we put a number like that into perspective? One common technique is to put the number into the context of something more comprehensible.

If you had 63 million 12-ounce bottles of Aquafina water, you could fill up almost nine Olympic-sized pools.

63 million miles is about two-thirds of the average distance from the Earth to the sun. It’s about 264 times further than the average distance from the Earth to the moon.

63 million inches would be 5.25 million feet—about a thousand miles.

If you had 63 million gallons of gasoline, that would enough for half a million people to drive from San Francisco to New York (assuming their cars get 25 miles-per-gallon).

Read more . . .

The Old Plantation (attr. John Rose)
Posted

Listen to Scott Bradford reading this essay.

America’s original sin was chattel slavery. It was a reprehensible, inexcusable, indefensible institution that stained most of our first century as a nation and continued to have repercussions for much of a second century after that.

In the 1770s and 1780s, as we were moving from colonial subjugation into our new constitutional republic, the people that built our nation—the founders—wrote beautiful, timeless words about human rights and freedom. These are words that I live by today. And yet there was an inescapable contradiction: Some of the most illustrious of those founders—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Patrick Henry, and Benjamin Franklin—owned slaves.

They spoke and wrote eloquently about freedom while claiming to own other human beings.

These men, and others like them, cannot be wholly condemned. Like everyone else, they were products of their time who often failed to live up to their own principles. In the grand Christian tradition, I acknowledge that everybody is a sinner. Everybody is a failure. Everybody falls short of the ideal. My own shortcomings seem significantly smaller than those of the people who thought they owned other people, but they aren’t. I am, in my own ways, as reprehensible as they are. This is the reality of our flawed, broken existence.

Read more . . .

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.