How come no one told me there were seven Muppets with their own YouTube accounts? Sam the Eagle (patrioticeagle), Gonzo (weirdowhatever), Swedish Chef (deumnborkborkbork), Statler and Waldorf (heckleu247), Rizzo (rizzratz), Fozzy (wockawockabear) and Beaker (meepmeepmeepow). I have no idea if the videos are official, though the production seems pretty good.

(Be sure to check out Beaker’s Ode to Joy .)

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One sentence in particular stuck out in this Crooked Timber entry about predictions of the economic crisis : “The big problem for the Cassandras (and we were certainly both correct and disregarded) was that it was easy to see that the bubble could not continue and much harder to foresee how it would end – it’s one thing to say that dark matter must exist and another to work out what it is really like.”

As Virginia Postrel pointed out in the Atlantic recently , there is a human tendency towards bubbles. In the article she talks about a very interesting experiment: “take a bunch of volunteers, usually undergraduates but sometimes businesspeople or graduate students; divide them into experimental groups of roughly a dozen; give each person money and shares to trade with; and pay dividends of 24 cents at the end of each of 15 rounds, each lasting a few minutes.” It’s an “efficient market” where everyone knows the same as everyone else and they all know exactly how much the securities are worth. However, every experiment turns up the same thing: “the trading price runs up way above fundamental value. Then, as the 15th round nears, it crashes.” Bubbles, it seems, are a fundamental part of who we are as people.

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Paul Goldberger , architecture critic over at the New Yorker lists his top ten buildings of 2008. Out of curiosity, I collected links to pictures/descriptions of all of them: Herzog and de Meuron’s extraordinary Olympic Stadium , Norman Foster’s Beijing Airport , the headquarters of CCTV, the Chinese television network, by Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren ( the official CCTV writeup with renderings ), the California Academy of Sciences, in San Francisco, by Renzo Piano , the New Museum, on the Bowery in New York, by SANAA Architecture , Art Gallery of Ontario , the new Cathedral of Christ the Light, in Oakland, by Skidmore partner Craig Hartman , Paul Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building, at Yale (now renamed Paul Rudolph Hall), by Gwathmey Siegel , the Eldridge Street Synagogue, on the Lower East Side, by Walter Sedovic and Olafur Eliasson’s extraordinary New York Waterfalls Project .

I think my personal favorites are the Birds Nest and the new Cathedral of Christ the Light , neither of which I had seen before reading this.

via kottke.org

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An interesting thesis from Momus : “Only a medium which is seen as ‘realistic’ can inspire moral panics—in other words, that moral panics correlate to the perceived power of a medium to represent .” He then proceeds to go through panics in television, video, music and video games, making a pretty good case for his thesis that moral panic doesn’t come along until the medium is a real “threat” for the masses.

I’ll let Momus wrap it up: “Ambitious young media turks take note—don’t waste your time dabbling with Daddy’s toxins. No moral panic, no credibility. Not inappropriate? Not appropriate.”

via tecznotes

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