TEDBlog February, 2010 Archive
12 February 2010
Play: Roundup of TED2010, Session 10
David Byrne, Thomas Dolby and Ethel rock out playing (Nothing But) Flowers.
Dave Weaver: “How do you answer, ‘What’s a TED?’”
Sarah Silverman: A new perspective on the number 3000.
David Rockwell on the Imagination Playground: “No project has ever made me happier.”
Yoni Benatar pilots mini drones from his iphone with augmented reality.
Eve Ensler: “Girls: our greatest natural resource.”
Julia Sweeney ruminates on how to have “the talk” with her 8 year old.
Natalie Merchant serenades the audience with musical poetry.
(Photos: TED / James Duncan Davidson)
12 February 2010
"The Sleepy Giant" and more lyrics from Natalie Merchant onstage at TED2010 right now
“The Sleepy Giant,” Charles E. Carryl (1841-1920)
My age is three hundred and seventy-two,
And I think, with the deepest regret,
How I used to pick up and voraciously chew
The dear little boys whom I met.
I’ve eaten them raw, in their holiday suits;
I’ve eaten them curried with rice;
I’ve eaten them baked, in their jackets and boots,
And found them exceedingly nice.
But now that my jaws are too weak for such fare,
I think it exceedingly rude
To do such a thing, when I’m quite well aware
Little boys do not like being chewed.
And so I contentedly live upon eels,
And try to do nothing amiss,
And I pass all the time I can spare from my meals
In innocent slumber — like this.
“Spring and Fall: to a young child,” Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)
MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
“The Janitor’s Boy,” Nathalia Crane (1913-1998)
Oh I’m in love with the janitor’s boy,
And the janitor’s boy loves me;
He’s going to hunt for a desert isle
In our geography.
A desert isle with spicy trees
Somewhere near Sheepshead Bay;
A right nice place, just fit for two
Where we can live alway.
Oh I’m in love with the janitor’s boy,
He’s busy as he can be;
And down in the cellar he’s making a raft
Out of an old settee.
He’ll carry me off, I know that he will,
For his hair is exceedingly red;
And the only thing that occurs to me
Is to dutifully shiver in bed.
The day that we sail, I shall leave this brief note,
For my parents I hate to annoy:
“I have flown away to an isle in the bay
With the janitor’s red-haired boy.”
“If No One Ever Marries Me,” Laurence Alma-Tadema (1865-1940)
If no one ever marries me,—
And I don’t see why they should,
For nurse says I’m not pretty,
And I’m seldom very good—
If no one ever marries me
I shan’t mind very much;
I shall buy a squirrel in a cage,
And a little rabbit-hutch:
I shall have a cottage near a wood,
And a pony all my own,
And a little lamb quite clean and tame,
That I can take to town:
And when I’m getting really old,—
At twenty-eight or nine—
I shall buy a little orphan-girl
And bring her up as mine.
“maggie and milly and molly and may,” e.e. cummings (1894-1962)
maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)
and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles, and
milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;
and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles: and
may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.
For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea
12 February 2010
Photoblog: Nexus One love
Above and below: Unboxing and powerup in Palm Springs. Photos: TED / Michael Brands
Below: Google specialists in the Dome help TEDsters get set up; and at bottom, a Nexus One in the wild. Photos: TED / Marla Aufmuth
12 February 2010
Imagination: Roundup of TED2010 Session 9
Temple Grandin: If you have these smart geeky kids with a touch of autism, you need to get them turned on to cool things.
Chris Anderson (of Wired): We think the tablet is the future of magazines. Flexibility in design, plus interactivity. (He’s holding the March 2010 issue of Wired.)
Mitchell Joachim, a TED Fellow: Imagine growing your own home — out of meat. Read our Q&A with Joachim >>
Designer Marian Bantjes: On every job I ask: Does my work bring joy? inspire wonder? provoke curiosity?
Denis Dutton: Some of these beautiful, symmetrical Acheulean hand axes show no wear on their edges. What were they for? Perhaps they were art. Perhaps these ancient hand axes are not tools, but what Darwinians call “fitness signals” — like a peacock’s tail. “Why don’t you come up to my cave, so I can show you my hand axes?”
Raghava KK: I might look like a clean sweet boy. But I am capable of thinking anything!
12 February 2010
Photoblog: The Summit social space
The Summit social space, supported by Workspring, is a calm and private place to hold small meetings and conversations during TED breaks. With projection screens, conference tables and thoughtful attendants, it’s a place to incubate ideas inspired by TED and have meaningful conversations — like this one, below, held in the front conference room of the Summit just after Bill Gates’ talk in Session 8:
Top photo: TED / Marla Aufmuth; bottom photo: TED / James Duncan Davidson
12 February 2010
Boldness: Roundup of TED2010, Session 8
John Underkoffler: “Technology is capable of expressing generosity. And we need to demand that.”
Sergey Brin: Our focus has really been what’s best for the Chinese people.
George Church: “We’re not making life from scratch; we’re using all the tricks an engineer can use to leverage natural processes.”
Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg of KIPP: “Teaching is the world’s finest calling.”
Bill Gates: “If I only had only one wish for the next 50 years, it’d be to invent the thing that halves the cost of CO2.”
(Photos: TED / James Duncan Davidson)
12 February 2010
A tour of TEDActive's Innovation Lounge, where machines and humans make art together
At TEDActive, The Innovation Lounge by Bing is a flickering future-gallery from a time when desks and desktop computers have been forgotten, and machines are considered art collaborators rather than just tools. We talked with the space’s curators and each of the artists.
Tell me about how you selected the exhibits for the Bing Innovation Lounge.
Aya Zook: Being that this space all about finding the next generation of thinkers, we thought Bing as a newcomer would be perfect for it. We wanted it to be very interactive. We wanted people to actually touch the pieces, and really create something. We looked for artists who were not as big or established. We also looked for artists with a strong visual aspect. … We wanted to focus on a visually rich experience in the physical world.
When I look at what you’re trying to do with search, and these pieces here, it seems like a theme is that the process of creativity is being shared with algorithms — in a way, the creative act is being partially outsourced.
Stefan Weitz: We’re not outsourcing creativity; we’re outsourcing mundane tasks. There’s a lot of things computers are good at. Computers are good at tackling massive amounts of data, identifying patterns, distilling them down to relevant pieces of information. … What we’re doing is augmenting human processing capability, not displacing it.
“I work for the Jet Propulsion Lab at NASA. Our scientists are looking at how to find planets around other stars. … The difficult part is that stars are big and bright and planets are small and dim. So we have to come up with a way of blocking a really bright light to see a dim light. That’s what this installation is doing. We have a bright projection, and it’s so bright you can’t see the other projection. But when you walk in front of the projection, you can see the other movie inside of your shadow. It’s called The Hidden Light.” — Dan Goods
“Our ideas is to gradually, more and more, make artwork that responds to people. … In the little birdhouse, there’s a camera. We’re looking for ways to hide the technology from you, so it gives a more magical feeling. It’s built like an old puppet-house, where you really do feel like the puppets are coming alive. Part of your mind knows it’s an illusion, but another part you’re really emotionally participating.” — Nova Jiang
“It’s called Audio Pad. It’s a new type of DJ mixer. Some of the physical objects on the surface represent different audio tracks. Others represent microphones, selectors, which change the properties of the other objects on the table … We have a spatial mixing metaphor. This is one application developed on hardware called the Sense Table, which tracks the position of objects. It’s a tile-able antenna, so it can be built into a table of any size.” — James Patten
“This is the first prototype. It’s similar to a multitouch table, the difference being that it’s a lot more tactile. … It lends itself to multi-user participation. The way it’s orientated, people immediately want to touch it. We try to break away from the screen and into the real world, to do something that’s a bit more natural.” — Evan Grant
“We’ve taken all the topics that have come up in all the TEDTalks from the past few years on the website, and by moving your hand above this box you’ll be able to look see the ideas that people are writing about TED as they’re happening from the Twitter feed. You can control the movement and capture ideas in the aerogel as they’re coming back.” — Gilad Lotan
“This is a piece by the video and new-media artist Lincoln Schatz. It’s a generative portrait. We created this especially for the space here. It started Monday; we plugged it in, and that’s its ‘born-on date.’ That’s when it started collecting memories. … The software makes all the decisions about what it wants to keep and what it wants to discard. It’s a portrait, but the artist surrenders control to the software.” — Nell Taylor
(Photos: TED / Michael Brands)
12 February 2010
Photoblog: Opening the doors
Above: TEDsters line up waiting for the sound of the “March Trionfale” from Aida — the signal to open the doors (below).
Photos: TED / Marla Aufmuth
12 February 2010
At TEDActive, Ross Evans' bikes make mobility for good
Ross Evans met the TED Blog to talk about the Worldbike and Xtracycle bicycles that TEDActive attendees have enjoyed on their early-morning rides through the streets of Palm Springs.
“The Worldbike is the genesis of this. When I was a sophomore in college I took some time out to go to Nicaragua to help some guys learn how to weld. They wanted to make a cargo bike, and we were trying to figure out the simplest way to do that. Now, 15 years later, that is a reflection of a lot of development effort to see what’s the cheapest, simplest way to make an impact in a poor person’s life….”
“The Xtracycle is an extended, wheel-based cargo bike or ‘long-tail,’ as we call them. It’s built around an open-source standard that we developed and put out on a Wiki.
… The idealist in me asked, ‘How do we inspire people to use their bikes every day?’ I had grown up racing, BMX riding. But I came to have a tremendous amount of passion, probably from my experience in Nicaragua, for just day-to-day riding. … I started having experiences carrying passengers, getting my groceries, and then carrying kayaks and going on expeditions.”
“One thing I like to talk about is how the functionality meets frivolity. The utilitarian and the play — how we can do that and merge those two together.”
(Photos: TED / Michael Brands)
11 February 2010
Breakthrough: Roundup of TED2010 Session 7
Andrew Bird says what the world needs now is more reckless curiosity.
Stephen Wolfram: Could it be that somewhere out there in the computational universe that we could find our physical universe?
Gary Flake demos Pivot — a way to navigate the web as if it’s actually a web.
Seth Berkley: “As variable as flu is, HIV makes it look like the Rock of Gibraltar.”
TED Senior Fellow Rachel Armstrong talks about creating carbon-zero buildings.
Mark Roth: Doctors have a saying that you’re not dead until you’re warm and dead.
Erick Tseng demos the Nexus One.
(Photo credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson)
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