Have you met TED??

Thanks to some random, and unrelated, Amazon book searches and two timely chats with R & D (tee hee!), I stumbled upon TED. And frankly, TED is my new best friend!

TED offers videos of talks on a huge variety of topics, from a huge variety of really smart people! They are short (short enough for a coffee break, so I am told), interesting, and done in a super friendly format. I have yet to meet a talk I didn't like, enjoy, and learn something from. A lot of them are very simple, as the speaker only has 15-20 minutes to "make their point", but they really offer a stepping stone to get people interested in the broader topic and push them to go out and do some more investigating on their own!

Here are some of my recent favourites:

Louise Leakey: Digging for human origins (my kind of talk!)

James Hansen: Why I must speak out about climate change

Iain Gilchrist: The divided brain. This talk is animated...and it's amazing!!

Cary Fowler: One seed at a time, protecting the future of food

Evgeny Morozov: How the Net aids dictatorships

Clay Shirky: How social media can make history

And I find that the comments for a lot of these talks are just as interesting and informative as the talks themselves!! Just reading some of the threads, and the discussions happening between committed members is quite amazing. I can almost pretend I am back on campus again.

TED also does TED-Ed, which are shorter "educational" talks. Here's one done by Adam Savage (Mythbusters) about how simple ideas can lead to [amazing] scientific discoveries. And this one about how pandemics spread. This one is elementary school stuff about symbiosis, and super short, but still informative for someone who has no idea what symbiosis means! (not me...)

I have so far just scratched the surface with all that is offered on this site...I find it to be a much more mind-blowing and inspirational "time-waster" than Pinterest & Facebook combined.

I encourage you to go meet TED for yourself, watch some of the highlighted videos, then go exploring in the vaults! You won't be sorry that you did...

later loves


p.s. I found these as well:
Taylor Wilson: yup, I built a nuclear fusion reactor (clever kid)
Rob Reid: The $8 billion iPod (hilarious!!)