Busy, Busy, Busy

Lots and lots of important and time-consuming stuff going on at work lately. Two weeks worth of travel coming up w/probably limited Internet access. Items:

• Spike Lee's documentary on the flooding of New Orleans, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, was excellent.
• Lots of cool stuff to buy at Simple Memory Art. I just bought two periodic table shower curtains -- One for my friend's soon-to-be-married daughter, and one for ourselves!
• Freaky Muppet videos! Excerpt: The Muppets exploded into worldwide popularity in the 1970s as regular performers on Sesame Street. But as pop culture changed, Jim Henson and his company found even stranger creatures to parody by mingling with real-world celebrities. The five-year run of The Muppet Show set the weird tone for a tradition they’ve continued to this day. These 5 online videos show what a long strange trip it’s been.
• John Battelle interview with Web 2.0 YouTuber Michael Wesch (blogged about here). Excerpt: For me, cultural anthropology is a continuous exercise in expanding my mind and my empathy, building primarily from one simple principle: everything is connected. This is true on many levels. First, everything including the environment, technology, economy, social structure, politics, religion, art and more are all interconnected. As I tried to illustrate in the video, this means that a change in one area (such as the way we communicate) can have a profound effect on everything else, including family, love, and our sense of being itself. Second, everything is connected throughout all time, and so as anthropologists we take a very broad view of human history, looking thousands or even millions of years into the past and into the future as well. And finally, all people on the planet are connected. This has always been true environmentally because we share the same planet. Today it is even more true with increasing economic and media globalization.
• Vocabulary associated with the philosophy of knowledge. Example: Rationalism (a priori knowledge) and Empiricism (a posteriori knowledge). When someone burns their hand, they learn not to do it again. Has experience taught them, or by analysing the experience?