Dog Being Patient

I'm Only Sleeping

My friend Scott (Burridge) playing at a Buffalo coffeehouse.

Holy Cow

Figures of Speech

Marsha Tosk is an NYC artist. Tough way to make a living, mind you, but someone has to provide the merchandise for gallery openings. The hand crafted Malbec and free range chicken with localy grown freekeh don't pay for themselves. To this end Artist Tosk has produced a sales kit with all the goodies.

• A nebulous Artist's statement including such things as pregnable, health of the environment, Leda, and allegorical.
• A genuine coffee table sized tchotchke with enough cute and cuddly to exclude anyone not in the biz. ( I didn't borrow the idea, I merely was exploring the terrain suggested by earlier, nameless illustrators )
• An advertisment in the NY Times Sunday magazine with the price. One darn quick way to let all your friends on the Upper West know how much disposable cash you can spend on your bleeding edge tastes.

Let's hope this project puts some food on Ms. Tosk's table.( you don't get an artist's discount at the grocery) She has some very well wrought pieces in the other part of her site, well worth looking at. $850 is a bit steep for borrowed clever, but so isn't an ad in the Times.

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.

Like Kearny St. after the rain

The result of an earthquake in Taiwan in April of this year.

Via: TYWKIDBI

No sir, I don't need any details

We had a ship on Pier 30-32 this week. We were a bit short of proper security people, so I ended up standing at the gateway giving directions to the passengers. (no, the hippies and the sea lions both moved North a while back... yes the ferry boats dock at the ferry building, are you asking about something else? .. F line to the Castro, be back by 5:30) As you can tell from the frequency of my posting, I've been busy. The first link is a good old fashoned snarl.

• A Brief History of Time Wasted: This cocksure claim begs to be differed with because humans in this post Y2K America really don’t need Satan to unleash the horrors of Hell anymore. We do quite well enough on our own, thank you very much. Being cheerful Americans, we’ve concocted our very own Hell-On -Earth with a Happy Face, a kind of sprightly ornamented Skinner Box Sit Com of relentlessly droning idiocy.

The next set involves the sciences and the uses the political class puts them to.

• The Last Countdown: At present, it looks like there will be two more space shuttle launches. That’s it. Within a year, our nation will no longer have the capability to launch humans into space. For some this is a sure sign that America is sliding into mediocrity.
• Bizarre Robot Traders: The trading bots visualized in the stock charts in this story aren't doing anything that could be construed to help the market. Unknown entities for unknown reasons are sending thousands of orders a second through the electronic stock exchanges with no intent to actually trade. Often, the buy or sell prices that they are offering are so far from the market price that there's no way they'd ever be part of a trade.
• One step ahead of the future: What if there was a way to predict how a virus is going to evolve? What if technology could help peer into the future and see the next steps in mutation? What if there was a missile warning system for incoming viral threats?
• Iran Fights Malware Attacking Computers: Stuxnet, which was first publicly identified several months ago, is aimed solely at industrial equipment made by Siemens that controls oil pipelines, electric utilities, nuclear facilities and other large industrial sites.

Media soul searching. The media doesn't have a soul, it's owned and operated. They must have pre-printed articles like this one, with fill in the blank areas for the specific mea culpa, because like the sales down this Christmas article you see every year, the same outline pops up on a weekly basis. If it draws eyeballs to advertising, it's professional journalism.

• Forbes Article Spurs Media Soul Searching: I received a call yesterday from Nathan Verdi, a fact checker at Forbes, who was calling to fact check your article after it was published. (Is this how journalism works now?)

Keeping up on science fiction. As a side note, I haven't read Zero History yet and every time I stop to buy it, something comes up. Soon come on that one.

• Science influenced by science fiction: There’s not a lot of science fiction around these days, so pretty soon science will have to put up with being influenced by paranormal romance.
  I never minded that working scientists were influenced by science fiction, but I was always impressed by what bad science fiction scientists liked. It was usually junk that they had read back when they were 14, before they had to knuckle down and earn a doctorate.

The remainder of the links are political. I'll end with Lapham's interview: an upbeat reflection as opposed to the fear-mongering we recieve as daily fare.

• The End of an Insurgency: As the Obama administration weighs its strategy, it would be wise to consider the history of 89 insurgencies in the second half of the twentieth century. How governments manage to defeat -- or be defeated by -- insurgencies reveals a number of lessons for Washington today.
• Americans Turning Against Hegemonism: A large majority (69-28%) said that it was “mostly good” for Turkey and Brazil to become more independent of U.S. foreign policy, which suggests that the hysterical anti-Turkish reaction in the last few months has a very limited base of support. I should note that the questions might have biased the result towards the “mostly good” side by explaining that Turkish and Brazilian independence in foreign policy would mean that they do not rely on the U.S. as much.
• Lewis Lapham on the end of capitalism: It’s faith in the spirit and mechanics and moral value of capitalism. It is a country of expectant millionaires. You have the notions of risk, of labor put to a productive use, deferred pleasure — ideas that come out of our Puritan ancestry.

Pete's Back from the Cape