Philosophical aether

It's Monday already. Fleet Week 2010 is taking all my time lately. The picture above is the first deliveries to Pier 30-32. Today Al and I spent the day helping to mount antennas on Pier 35. Just to help out, the monitor on my laptop started to flicker, then got rather artistic, then simply gave up the ghost. Over time, I've installed so many mods, both physical and soft, that I think the poor baby is farpotshket. That's a roadie term, borrowed from Yiddish, meaning one too many layers of duct tape. As long as I'm muttering about my computer, here are two links about what others are doing with theirs.

• The New Hacker Frontier: Wireless tire pressure monitoring systems, which also were touted as a way to increase fuel economy, communicate via a radio frequency transmitter to a tire pressure control unit that sends commands to the central car computer over the Controller-Area Network (CAN). The CAN bus, which allows electronics to communicate with each other via the On-Board Diagnostics systems (OBD-II), is then able to trigger a warning message on the vehicle dashboard.
• Avatars in the workplace: Walk the halls of any large business over the last decade or two and you will have seen most of the workers “living on the screen,” joining in the vast and intricate world of modern commerce made possible by the Internet. Look over their shoulders and you will see that some of these workers are not just living on the screen but, in a sense, in the screen. They are immersed in elaborate virtual worlds as avatars, on-screen identities that can be controlled to produce some sort of movement, gesture, and speech.

The next two links are about writing. I chose the first one because it is one of the best examples of null content I've seen all week. You're all set to R&R down at the deep end of the philosophical pool when you realize that the author hasn't said a darn thing. My personal bug-a-bear is the concept of a higher morality. Higher than what? How much higher? (3 feet 9 inches) What kind of philosophical aether did you spin to provide the metric. It sounds a lot like the dreaded relativity that was dismissed in the first paragraph.

• How do ideas have consequences: The intellectual bubble of a false, relativist understanding of freedom casts a shadow over our whole society and profoundly affects the terms of moral and political debates. So in a way it is everywhere. But if we limit ourselves to fighting its effects piecemeal we will often end up shadow-boxing, lunging at an elusive target that may seem to slip away only to reappear in more subtle and virulent forms.
• Article about a scientific paper: In the standfirst I will make a fairly obvious pun about the subject matter before posing an inane question I have no intention of really answering: is this an important scientific finding?"

Here's a bit of history. It contains something about patronyms I sort of knew, but didn't. I think it's related to the way The Royals name themselves. (or not, I leave that exercise to the reader)

• Homogenization and the State: Western state-making, writes Scott, in the seventeenth and eighteenth imposed permanent patronyms as a condition of citizenship. This was largely to help organize and to make it easier for states to properly perform a census.

A bit of business.

• McDonald’s health insurance: So the big Wall Street Journal article today is about fast-food giant, McDonald’s, threatening that new provisions in the Affordable Care Act will mean that they may need to dump healthcare coverage for thousands of employees. Here’s a handy table of exactly what sort of insurance McDonald’s provides:

And of course, this , that, and the other about our current political zoo.

• Meet Jim DeMint: OK, so we'd have missed out on some good songs, and that Ending Slavery thing was a good deal, and Ken Burns wouldn't be as rich and famous, and a lot of grizzled men who like to play soldier-man dress-up would have to go back to the Star Trek conventions where they belong.
• The Angry Rich: Yet if you want to find real political rage — the kind of rage that makes people compare President Obama to Hitler, or accuse him of treason — you won’t find it among these suffering Americans. You’ll find it instead among the very privileged, people who don’t have to worry about losing their jobs, their homes, or their health insurance, but who are outraged, outraged, at the thought of paying modestly higher taxes.
• A Real Conservative Foreign Policy: So what would a truly conservative foreign and defense policy look like? Such a policy would focus on separating the wheat from the chaff of what is truly important for protecting and advancing the vital interests of the United States rather than focusing on objectives, which, while worthy, do not have a significant impact on those interests.
• Hegel on Wall Street: In pondering this issue I want to, again, draw on the resources of Georg W.F. Hegel. He is not, by a long shot, the only philosopher who could provide a glimmer of philosophical illumination in this area. But the primary topic of his practical philosophy was analyzing the exact point where modern individualism and the essential institutions of modern life meet. And right now, this is also where many of the hot-button topics of the day reside.