Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Technical Difficulties (Resolved)

Posted August 21, 2007, 7:05 p.m.

You may have noticed some problems with the site today, which have been caused by infrastructure changes at my hosting provider. The problems manifest themselves when I have ‘friendly URLs’ turned on, so for the moment I have turned them off. This means that links to specific pieces of content are temporarily different (and uglier) than usual. I am working to fix this and will post updates (probably won’t have time to work on it for a day or two).

Update: I have reactivate the ‘friendly URLs’ as the problem appears to be resolved. I’ll keep an eye on it.

Fixing the Civic’s Deficiency (With Photos & Audio)

Posted August 18, 2007, 9:00 p.m.

I had one complaint about our 2006 Honda Civic—an excellent car that has served us well since we bought it a year ago January. It came with a terrible horn. I mean, it was bad. I described it recently as sounding like a ‘rabbit being stepped on’, which is a slight exaggeration but gets the point across. Given that I live in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area and have to grapple with the gauntlet of this area’s rush hours, I wanted my car to have a horn that sounds at least slightly imposing. So I fixed it!

Car Repair for Dummies (i.e., Me)

Posted August 12, 2007, 8:57 p.m.

So, I’m not a car guy. I’m the guy who takes his cars to the dealership (not a garage!) and pays the service department to do whatever they recommend be done on the assumption that they know better than I do. All-in-all, I’ve probably shelled out thousands more than I should have over the years. That said, Melissa and I just laid out a lot of money for our upcoming move, so I was not looking forward to the bill I figured was coming when our 2002 Mazda Tribute wouldn’t start correctly this morning (nor, for that matter, the hassle of having it towed to the dealership).

NASA Climate Data Miscalculated . . . Badly

Posted August 10, 2007, 12:55 p.m.

1998 was not the warmest year on record in the United States, contrary to nearly a decade’s worth of it being reported as such. The error in NASA’s climate data, due to a variation of the Y2K bug, apparently mixed a lot of things up. With correct data now available, it turns out that the warmest year on record in the U.S. was . . . 1934! In fact, five of the ten warmest years on record were before World War II. Doesn’t this raise questions about the ‘global warming’ meme, since the data it relied on was grossly miscalculated?

1998 No Longer the Hottest Year on Record in USA (Watts Up With That).
Blogger Finds Y2K Bug in NASA Climate Data (DailyTech Science Blog).

Do Not Incinerate the $800 Piano

Posted August 6, 2007, 2:50 p.m.

Melissa was going through our manuals (we have a stash, especially for our more expensive stuff), and found this gem on the product warnings page for her full-size Casio digital piano. Yes, for those of you who were planning to throw your full-size digital piano into a fire, you should be aware that there is a risk of the piano exploding.

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.

Quotes

There are many hypotheses in science that are wrong. That’s perfectly alright; it’s the aperture to finding out what’s right. Science is a self-correcting process.

Carl Sagan

Think of a hypothesis as a card. A theory is a house made of hypotheses.

Marilyn vos Savant

Socialism of any type leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Death is not the end. There remains the litigation over the estate.

Ambrose Bierce

It is as foolish to reject the senses because they sometimes seem to deceive us as it is to reject mathematics because we sometimes make mistakes in our checkbooks.

Scott Hahn

Where the people are free there can be no great contrast or distinction among honest citizens in or out of office.

Anonymous

To sit home . . . and scoff at the misdeeds of the men who do things is easy, but it is markedly ineffective. It is what evil men count upon the good men’s doing.

Teddy Roosevelt

And as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born.

Edgar Allan Poe

I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong.

Salman Rushdie

Philosophy [is] a route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.

Ambrose Bierce

I was walking around one day trying to figure out what the meaning of life was. I figured it was something that would come to me easily while walking around, but I didn’t actually figure it out until I sat down.

Scott Bradford

Nobody ever outgrows Scripture; the book widens and deepens with our years.

Charles Spurgeon

In all toil there is profit, but mere talk tends only to want.

Holy Bible

I . . . am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land can never be purged away but with blood.

John Brown

Our freedom is threatened in many fields because of the fact that we are much too ready to leave the decision to the expert or to accept too uncritically his opinion about a problem of which he knows intimately only one little aspect.

Friedrich Hayek

The Constitution was designed to keep government off the backs of the people.

William O. Douglas

People who live their lives selfishly and at the detriment of others are often the ones who complain loudest about how badly they think they’ve been mistreated.

Scott Bradford

If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.

John von Neumann

There is no great merit in any merely outward act; all depends upon the inward motive that provokes the deed.

Henry Steel Olcott

Early and provident fear is the mother of safety.

Edmund Burke

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