You can either buy the mail-order kit or go to FAO Schwartz in NYC now — or starting in February, you can design your own Muppet “whatnot” (muppet code for “humanoid extra”) online.

Ta-Nehisi Coates recommends a profile of an ultimate fighter and dagnabit, you gotta read that profile of an ultimate fighter.

Speaking of objects and our attachment to them, I’m excited to see that Helvetica director Gary Hustwit is making a new film about “the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets.” Sounds like a natural extension of that ingenious first film.

The Objectified site also has a blog for designers talking about everyday objects that they love. I really liked Marian Bantjes’s praise of what she first thought was an overdesigned toothbrush:

If everything in our lives were afforded the design attention that my toothbrush has, we would sit in chairs that floated while tickling our troubled backs, have tables that yielded at our aching elbows while remaining firm on top, walk on floors that tingled like active sand, and sleep on pillows that would never allow our ears to flatten against our heads.

My favorite song*, Smog’s “To Be of Use,” summarizes my attitude perfectly:

Most of my fantasies

Are of

To be of use

To be of some hard

Simple

Undeniable use

Like a spindle

Like a candle

Like a horseshow

Like a corkscrew

* See also Nick Drake, “Northern Sky.”

I already have a love/hate relationship with this analogy from Virginia Heffernan:

Does anyone still believe that the forms of movies, television, magazines and newspapers might exist independently of their rapidly changing modes of distribution? The thought has become unsustainable. Take magazine writing. In school or on the job, magazine writers never learn anything so broad as to

Kottke plugs The Millions’ annual Year in Reading list, a collection of (not necessarily timely) awesome-book nominations from interesting Web people. I’ve actually wanted to read most of the books they recommend, which separates this list from most others.

Kevin Kelly, one of Snarkmarket’s many intellectual crushes, now has a downloadable PDF of his “Better Than Free” manifesto available through Change This, which is like Revelator‘s brainy futurist cousin.

Here’s how “Better Than Free” starts:

The Internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, and every thought we make while we ride upon it. In order to send a message from one corner of the internet to another, the protocols of communication demand that the whole message be copied along the way several times.

True! But the internet isn’t just a copy machine; it’s an all-in-one machine! Sure, we might mostly be using it to make copies, especially in the blogosphere. But when it’s not all jammed up, this machine of ours can really do a whole lot more.

Change This is a great example. Sure, they could just copy the text of Kelly’s manifesto, or point to it with a link. But instead they’ve taken the time to add value by giving that text a new, physically rich form. In other words, they’ve printed it — taking that text and creating a well-designed document.

And what about Wikipedia? Sure, a lot of those entries are just auto-generated from old Brittanicas, or cut-and-pasted from fan sites and news articles. But a whole lot are patiently entered in by devotees, translating either from the offline analog world or from one language or context into the new, universal encyclopedia. It’s the same impulse that leads people to track down old TV commercials or bootleg alternate endings to movies. It’s what prompts them to track down the genuine text for obscure interviews between George Bernard Shaw and an Islamic mystic. These are the digital humanists, the scanners — in this case freeing media from their old physical form before it can bounce around on the copying web.

Because ultimately, the web is really about faxing — broadcasting your content to the world. The ability to freely copy, scan, or print would just be an exercise in narcissism if there wasn’t a way for that message to reach a receiver, whether anonymous or known to us. This is what YouTube does, what Facebook does, and (yes) what blogging does — it creates that electronic chain between sender and recipient, only in all directions, like light itself.

If you want to be more than a copy machine, you have to do at least one of these, and do it well.

From Infocult: The Economist’s annual predictions for the year ahead. They’re blogging about the world in 2009 as well.

All posted by Ezra Klein at some point or another:

• The Health of Nations: Klein’s 2007 round-up of European health care systems.
• The Evidence Gap: “The institute, known as NICE, has decided that Britain, except in rare cases, can afford only
  

In no particular order (and with no particular forethought):

1) The Big Three need access to credit, sure; it’s a huge industry, credit is tight, and an underrecognized chunk of their business is tied up in financing loans, investing pensions, etc. — GM is really a bank with a side business in automotive manufacturing. But instead of a huge bridge loan for token gestures, why can’t the U.S. gov’t really help them by taking over their pension and health care responsibilities outright and using that system + Medicare as a basis for a national health plan? The auto industry’s outlook changes instantly, and we don’t have to build our health care infrastructure from scratch.

2) Philadelphia has a huge budget crisis, and the most controversial part of its cost-cutting plan involves scrapping neighborhood libraries. How about instead of closing those libraries, you move other neighborhood-based government offices into the libraries? Public health offices, places to pull permits, bill payment centers, etc. Close or lease those offices, and keep the libraries open (even with reduced space and staff).

3) All government stimulus to the states should be paid directly to the universities, all of it, and a large part of the infrastructure spending should be devoted to creating new universities in cities and towns all across the country, innovative universities, teachers’ universities, alternative energy engineering research universities, cinema and philosophy and modernist literature universities, poetry universities, public service universities, tranny prostitute computer-training universities, Ford and GM and Chrysler universities. We should consecrate ourselves to higher education, to building libraries and archives and hospitals and research centers and to hire, hire, and hire professors and administrators and staff like the G.I. bill was on and the returning vets and their baby boomer kids had seen nothing, nothing compared to this.

Matt Yglesias says, eh, Nate Silver’s not all that great; Ta-Nehisi Coates says Silver should call Matt a washed-up punk on YouTube (since Silver is clearly Souljah Boy to Yggy’s Ice-T).

I say 538 wasn’t great in this election season (just) because Silver’s formula worked; it was great because it so consistently tempered the insanity of polling fluctuations (including at Pollster.com) by identifying erratic data, bad sampling, house effects, and other quantitative noise. In other words, Silver’s formula (and his explanatory rationale for it), instead of just being an aggregate output, actually helped its readers to make sense of the broader universe of polling, from process to results.

As a result, the blog wound up being one of the best political reporting sites on the web. It helped take political junkies from obsessing about “the polls” as an undifferentiated black box out of which numbers spewed into something they could understand and criticize. I also can’t say enough about its calming effects — every time a friend would call me freaking out about some new polling “shift” (usually as a result of one poll’s numbers following another’s, or Drudge beating a cherry-picked drum), I was able to talk them down, using Silver and 538 as my authority.

When virtually every political blog is devoted to channeling outrage, it’s salutary to have one that, even when challenging the CW, reassures.