Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent
Politics
Faith
Liberty
Akela999 (Pixabay)
Posted

I live in Loudoun County, Virginia—the data center capital of the world. Many of the online services and websites you use every day come to you from blocky, windowless buildings somewhere within a fifteen-mile radius of my house. The majority of them are here in Loudoun, but they are starting to pop-up in neighboring Fairfax, Prince William, and Fauquier counties too.

For security reasons, the service providers don’t offer concrete details about what systems live in which buildings. But we know the default region for new “cloud” services on Amazon AWS is US East (N. Virginia) (us-east-1), which is probably in Ashburn. Customers on Google Cloud who choose that service’s us-east4 region and Microsoft Azure customers who choose East US (eastus) or East US 2 (eastus2) are utilizing centers near here. Countless smaller “cloud” providers, hosting services, telecom companies, and more, have their own data centers in the area too.

The closest data center to my home is Google ARA1A, about 1.5 miles away in Arcola. It’s a huge facility with tight security and, apparently, its own on-site power plant. On cold days you can see big columns of steam coming up from its cooling towers. It’s not pretty, but it’s not really an eyesore either. It’s just a big building, which isn’t that different from all the other blocky buildings—offices, townhomes, and strip-malls—that spring-up as the suburbs continue to expand outward from our nation’s capital. And I really don’t see how ARA1A is any worse to look at than the abandoned fields, derelict farmhouses, rotting barns, and mounds of dirt that were there before.

Read more . . .

Andrey Grushnikov (Pexels)
Posted

In a 1784 letter to the editor of the Journal de Paris, Benjamin Franklin, then the U.S. Minister to France, satirically suggested that Parisians could improve their productivity and save money on candle wax by synchronizing their lives more closely to the sun during the summer months.

According to Franklin’s calculations, if Paris woke up at sunrise “in the six months between the 20th of March and the 20th of September” the city could save 64 million pounds of candle wax per-year. To make this happen, he proposed, among other things, that “guards . . . be posted to stop all the coaches, etc., that would pass the streets after sunset, except those of physicians, surgeons, and midwives,” and that “as soon as the sun rises, let all the bells in every church be set ringing; and . . . let cannon be fired in every street, to wake the sluggards. . . .”

Somehow, Franklin’s silly joke about saving energy by shifting the working hours of the day eventually developed into the very serious (and very annoying) practice of arbitrarily changing time twice a year: Daylight Saving Time (DST). I don’t know if Franklin would have been amused or horrified to learn that his countrymen would eventually be dumb enough to do what he only joked about.

Anyway, since the purpose of DST is to save daylight, I thought it might be useful to calculate its effectiveness. I wrote a little Python script to iterate through 2025 day-by-day and figure out the sunrise and sunset times at Washington Dulles International Airport under three possible time systems: the current DST system with biannual time changes, permanent standard time with no time changes, and permanent DST with no time changes.

The results are stunning:

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Election 2025 Results (Final)

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Updated
Ballot Races
Virginia Governor
Winsome Earle-Sears (R):42.22%
Abigail Spanberger (D):57.58%
Other:0.20%
Virginia Lt. Governor
Ghazala Hashmi (D):55.65%
John Reid (R):44.09%
Other:0.25%
Virginia Atty. General
Jay Jones (D):53.14%
Jason Miyares (R):46.45%
Other:0.40%
Virginia House, 26th
Ommair Butt (R):30.36%
JJ Singh (D):69.36%
Other:0.29%
Loudoun Sch. Board, Dulles
Santos Muñoz:43.16%
Jon Pepper:56.05%
Other:0.78%
Ballot Issues
Loudoun School Bonds
Yes:65.23%
No:34.77%
Loudoun Parks/Safety Bonds
Yes:74.03%
No:25.97%
Loudoun Transp. Bonds
Yes:67.76%
No:32.24%

Read more . . .

Posted

Back in January, Melissa and I visited South America and Antarctica. It was an amazing once-in-a-lifetime trip centered around a fourteen-day cruise on the Norwegian Star. This post includes a lot of photos . . . including more penguins than you probably ever wanted to see.

There was a pretty big “snafu” right at the start of the trip. We were booked on Delta Airlines from Washington Dulles International Airport in northern Virginia to Ministro Pistarini (Ezeiza) International Airport in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with a connection at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in Georgia. We made it to Atlanta just fine, then Delta canceled the flight to Argentina.

Delta scheduled an impossible flight—the plane was scheduled by the airline to depart Las Vegas for Atlanta about an hour before it was scheduled to leave Atlanta for Buenos Aires. That was never going to happen. There were no alternatives available to get us to Buenos Aires before the ship departed . . . so we missed it.

The first three days of the cruise were at-sea days and the next port was Ushuaia, Argentina, at the southern end of South America. So the “catch-up” plan had us spend the night in Atlanta, fly to Buenos Aires for a night, then take a domestic Aerolíneas Argentinas flight from Aeroparque Jorge Newbery in Buenos Aires to Ushuaia-Malvinas Argentinas International Airport in Ushuaia to meet the ship a couple days later.

In the end, it all worked out. We got to spend more time in both Buenos Aires and Ushuaia than originally planned and only missed a few at-sea days. Once we were on the ship we traveled as-planned to Antarctic waters; the Falkland Islands; Puerto Madryn, Argentina; and Montevideo, Uruguay; then back to Buenos Aires for the flight home, this time connecting through Benito Juárez International Airport in Mexico City, Mexico.

Between our travel insurance and Norwegian’s guarantees (since we booked airfare through them), we didn’t lose any money in the end either. We might even have saved a little bit once you combine the initial costs, the unexpected costs, and the later reimbursements.

Read more . . .

Governor of Virginia, 2025

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Governor of Virginia
Governor of Virginia

In the open race to serve as Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia, Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears (R) faces former U.S. Representative Abigail Spanberger (D-VA 7th). The Constitution of Virginia prohibits governors from serving multiple consecutive terms, so incumbent Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) is ineligible for reelection.

The office of governor is established by the Constitution of Virginia, and the office holder’s primary duty is to serve as the chief executive of the state government. The governor must report on the state of the commonwealth to the General Assembly, convene the legislature when a special session is called, ensure state laws are executed properly, and serve as commander-in-chief of the state militia. Additionally, governors have the power to submit recommendations to the General Assembly, veto bills (in whole or in part with a line-item veto), commute fines and issue pardons, and restore rights to convicted felons.

Governors must be at least thirty years old, citizens of the Commonwealth of Virginia, and have been a resident and registered voter in the commonwealth for five years preceding the date of the election. They are elected to four-year terms and there are no term limits, but they are barred from serving multiple consecutive terms.

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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.