Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

The Nuclear Genie

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You can’t put the Genie back in the bottle. The twentieth century brought about a weapon of such magnitude that we now, for the first time in the history of our existence as a species, have the power to utterly destroy our entire planet. I’m not talking about fossil fuels, though their use ranks with many as a greater danger, but rather nuclear technology.

Of course, like many things, nuclear technology is in-and-of itself neutral. It can be used for good, providing clean energy to the entire world (solving Al Gore’s problem). It can also be used for evil, the creation and use of weapons with enough power to make the mind boggle. The United States is the only country in the world ever to have used nuclear weapons in war, and we have only done it twice during a single conflict (World War II). Thankfully, the nuclear powers of the world have thus far used discretion.

I can accept the existence our nuclear arsenal, since we are extremely unlikely to ever use it except in response to somebody else using nuclear weapons on us. I don’t mind Israel, for example, having nuclear weapons either, since they are clearly only going to use them as deterrent and defensive weapons. I’m a little more wary of Russia, China, India, and Pakistan having them, but I’m not too worried since their leaders have shown enough sense not to commit suicide (the doctrine of ‘Mutually Assured Destruction‘ is, indeed, still alive). India, Pakistan, and Russia are, at least nominally, democracies like Israel, the United States, and the nuclear-capable European powers. China is non-democratic, but its leaders for the last several decades have limited themselves to only committing evil acts against its own citizens.

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Beggars Can’t Be Choosers

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I try to be a generous person. Usually, when I have something that has any value that I am replacing, I’m happy to give the old thing away either for free (usually) or at the same cost I paid to refurbish it (like, if I upped an old computers’ memory for $50 to make it more capable for whoever receives it, I would sell it for zero profit at $50). Melissa and I have been very blessed, and it’s just a small way that we can share our blessings with others instead of selling our old things on eBay to try and make some money.

Since we’re nerds and like to stay pretty cutting-edge with our technology as much as our finances allow, most of what we end up giving away is computer and electronic stuff. Old cell phones (excluding PDA phones) go to a battered women’s shelter that gives them to women in need. Old monitors, computers, and useful peripherals either go to Western Fairfax Christian Ministries or other local charities.

But occasionally we have other things to give away too. I’m in the process of buying a desk from a friend of mine which is much better suited for my work environment than the desks I had before, so I suddenly had two old desks that I didn’t need anymore. One of them was very old and beat-up, but still solid and perfectly useful (and perhaps even worth something, if it had been restored). The other was inexpensive and slightly beat up, but also perfectly usable. We were in a similar situation shortly after our wedding in 2005 when we received money from a relative to buy a couch, so we had a love-seat we’d been using as a couch to give away.

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‘Global Warming’ Through Bad Math and Bad Pipes

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I haven’t spent a lot of time on the whole ‘Global Warming’ thing except when really major things happen (like NASA grossly miscalculating several years of climate data). The 0.7 degree Celsius increase in mean temperature over the last fifty years hardly strikes me as conclusive evidence of anything. It definitely doesn’t make me feel like the world is falling apart or like Al Gore deserves a Nobel Prize for complaining about it. Even if you accept the argument that Earth is getting ‘warm’, which is a pretty goofy claim when we only have about 100 years of reliable temperature records on which to form a baseline, the evidence that it’s because of anything we did is paper-thin and circumstantial.

Anyway, NASA is at it again with their recent announcement that October was the warmest October on record. The problem is that much of the data from Russia was simply a repeat of the August numbers which, as you might expect, are supposed to be warmer than October’s numbers. Upon correcting the data, it turns out that October was stunningly normal.

Meteorologist Anthony Watts’s excellent ‘Watts Up With That‘ blog deserves much of the credit for uncovering this error (the same blogger who discovered NASA’s earlier miscalculations). Watts also asks why the NASA mean temperature graph has changed fairly significantly over the last ten years with little/no explanation, and independently researches weather stations and uncovers possible explanations for temperature ‘anomalies’ (like thermometers sitting close to air conditioner exhaust ports, which would erroneously skew the data warmer).

One bit I found interesting relates to the anamolous Russian numbers—many Russian cities have inefficient above-ground steam systems from the Soviet era, and these uninsulated above-ground pipes could possibly skew temperatures from entire cities. Even if the impact is more limited, it could certainly affect temperature readings at weather stations mere yards away. That’s the perennial problem with trying to get accurate temperature readings from manned outposts and populated areas in the arctic: humans bring heat with them for their own comfort, and a temperature reading at a manned outpost does not necessarily reflect the ‘real’ climate of the region.

Seeking a Phone That Isn’t Crap

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I wrote two months ago about the sorry state of smartphones, running through the litany of problems with the major smartphone operating systems available at the time. Since then, Google, HTC, and T-Mobile have rolled out the G1, the first phone based on the open-source Android operating system. While Android has a lot of long-term potential, the phone has some major shortcomings and the third-party software universe hasn’t really settled down yet (plus, I’m not particularly interested in becoming a T-Mobile customer).

I bring this back up because I am eligible in about two weeks for a discounted upgrade through AT&T, provided I re-up with a two year contract. This is good timing since I’m about ready to introduce my AT&T 8525 (made by HTC and running Windows Mobile 6) to the business-end of a hammer after it—for the second time this year—unilaterally shifted a random percentage of my appointment times by an hour when the time changed. Of course it didn’t change all my appointments, and there’s no rhyme or reason to which ones it changed and which it didn’t, so I have to manually double check that every appointment is correct now or risk being an hour-off when I arrive.

Needless to say, phones based on Windows Mobile are generally ranked at the very bottom of my list (below the rotary landline phones from the 1960s and the classic string/paper cups combination). I gave Microsoft another honest chance with this phone, my first new device running any version of Windows since back in 2000, and Microsoft blew it again. Good riddance.

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Bailout Bait & Switch

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Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, with the buy-in of President George W. Bush (R) and the Democratic congressional leadership, foisted a 700 billion dollar bailout on the American people and pushed it through with a narrow, bipartisan win in Congress. Paulson told Congress and the American people that he needed all that money primarily to buy ‘troubled’ mortgages off lenders’ books, which is what Congress stupidly voted on and approved.

Now we find out that Paulson, emboldened with more power than any Treasury Secretary has ever had in the history of the United States, is going to use that money to do something else entirely. Instead of buying up ‘troubled’ mortgages and bad debt, he’ll be buying even more stakes in U.S. banks. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a classic ‘bait & switch’. The swindlers get buy-in with fancy, nice-sounding talk and then, after you’re committed, the rules change.

Meanwhile, we find out that the oversight committees mandated by the bill to protect the taxpayers’ investments have nobody on them. Yes, the U.S. government is nationalizing industries, blithely overstepping Constitutional limitation of its power, intervening in our economy in ways it has never done before, and nobody is policing what is happening.

Last time the government intruded in our economy on this scale—Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ spending programs and economic interventionism—it turned a moderately serious recession into an unprecedented decade-long depression that was only broken by our entering World War II. That’s not a road we should be walking down again.

Most laughably, President Bush—this bailout’s biggest cheerleader and, sadly, the only person who has the immediate legal authority to stop Paulson’s power trip in its tracks—is warning foreign leaders against the very interventionism he solidly supports at home. “History has shown that the greater threat to economic prosperity is not too little government involvement in the market, but too much,” says Bush, while his own administration engages in the unconstitutional partial nationalization of private businesses.

What country is this again?

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.