ted
You are viewing stuff tagged with ted.
You are viewing stuff tagged with ted.
Jill Bolte Taylor’s stroke of insight: “I knew I was no longer the choreographer of my life…”
And on what it is like to have a left hemisphere stroke: “And in that moment, my brain chatter — my left hemisphere brain chatter — went totally silent. Just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mute button. Total silence. And at first I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind. But then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of the energy around me. And because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there.”
Srikumar Rao gave a talk a few TEDs back (2009) called “Plug into your hard-wired happiness”. I’ve transcribed parts of it in a kind of note format, because it was really interesting:
Made in USA, by Paul Graham. His point: we make things fast, other countries make things well. These two positions both have advantages, depending entirely upon the industry.
Cars aren’t the worst thing we make in America. Where the just-do-it model fails most dramatically is in our cities— or rather, exurbs. If real estate developers operated on a large enough scale, if they built whole towns, market forces would compel them to build towns that didn’t suck. But they only build a couple office buildings or suburban streets at a time, and the result is so depressing that the inhabitants consider it a great treat to fly to Europe and spend a couple weeks living what is, for people there, just everyday life.
A great talk by Richard Dawkins in July 2005, The universe is queerer than we can suppose. A quick summary:
Biologist Richard Dawkins makes a case for “thinking the improbable” by looking at how our human frame of reference — the things we can perceive with our five senses, and understand with our eight-pound brain — limits our understanding of the universe. Think of it: We can’t see atoms, we can’t see infrared light, we can’t hear ultrasonic frequencies, but we know without a doubt that they exist. What else is out there that we can’t yet perceive — what dimensions of space, what aspects of time, what forms of life?
Have you ever seen software that animates and compares data in an utterly useful yet also entertaining way? I hadn’t, until this presentation… At last year’s Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference, the Swedish leader of the organization Gapminder gave a fantastic talk. Here’s the video of “Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you’ve ever seen”.
Ze Frank’s presentation at TED - TED stands for Technology Entertainment Design. Even if you don’t find the tech-geek humor funny, Ze Frank has some undeniably useful presentation practices that would be highly beneficial to the typical power point garbage. Via Waxy … you know waxy … the guy who coined the term “star wars kid.”