Photo: James Duncan Davidson Angie Miller was the New Hampshire Teacher of the Year in 2011. She has three children, and she shares a box in which she keeps all her teaching paraphernalia. It’s filled with the thank-you notes you might expect, but it also includes some of her less savored moments, including letters of reprimand […]
Photo: James Duncan Davidson Kate Messner begins by asking us, “How many of you have ever played with Legos?” Those of us who have (which is most) already know about world building, and the power of What If? Messner is a writer, and all of her books grow out of What If. “What If there […]
Photos: James Duncan Davidson Al Vernacchio is here to talk about sex. In particular, he wants to talk about reframing the ways we talk about sex. In short, he says, “we need to stop talking baseball.” “Baseball is the dominant cultural metaphor that Americans use to think about and talk about sexual activity,” he continues. […]
Photos: James Duncan Davidson John Bohannon and Black Label Movement are not ones for the ordinary. “Remember that conversation you had as a kid, with your parents, about sex or drugs. It’s a myth. We don’t talk to kids about that stuff. It’s embarrassing.” They emerge on stage, dancing to string music. But this is not […]
Photos: James Duncan Davidson Ainissa Ramirez comes on stage armed with a blowtorch. Well, that sure got everyone’s attention. She promptly uses said blowtorch to straighten a piece of bent piece of wire. Her point: atoms often rearrange usefully to create entirely different types of structures. The Yale associate professor goes on to explain why this […]
Photos: James Duncan Davidson Bill Nye, The Science Guy, would like to discuss with us our place in space. Not with black holes, or multiverses, but here on Earth, where his dad was born. In World War II, Bill Nye’s dad was building an airstrip on Wake Island, in the middle of the Pacific, when it […]
We all know how important education is for our future. For this very special session at TED2012, we invited a host of current educators to share their latest thinking. For this session, we’re joined by 400 students from Long Beach area high schools. In this session: Bill Nye is a man with a mission: to […]
Photo: Duncan Davidson Aaron Reedy starts by taking us on a quick tour of evolution, natural selection and Darwin. But what’s more interesting than what we know, he adds, and the question all curious students ask him: How do we know all this? The best way to answer this question is to give examples: Fossils: […]
Photo: James Duncan Davidson Journalist and writer Jon Ronson is now on stage to share some of the insights from his recent book on, well, psychopaths. Now, here’s the thing about Ronson. On first sight, he looks something like a sleepy, shuffly mole, slightly surprised at where he seems to have woken up. Yet his tousled […]
Photo: Ryan Lash Philippe Petit is most famous for walking between the towers of the World Trade Center, but he’s done much, much more. At TED2012, he tells a story of the campfires of his childhood. “There was a time when fire and story would fall asleep in unison. It was dream time.” And that […]
Marco Tempest wowed the TED crowd yesterday, and now he’s back with an experiment, a demonstration of live augmented reality using the Kinect. This one is “technological magic” and we are advised to keep our eyes on the big screen. Photos: Ryan Lash Magic is deception we enjoy, he says. The audience must suspend its […]
Photo: James Duncan Davidson Joshua Foer challenges the audience to close their eyes, and then he tells a very strange story. In summary: “Imagine yourself standing outside the front door of your home. Notice the color of the door, the material it’s made out of. Now visualize a pack of overweight nudists on bicycles. They are […]
Photo: Ryan Lash Jared Ficklin‘s passions are music, technology, and making things. And he brings them together to visualize sound — with fire. Real fire on stage. He’s built a Ruben Tube, a long copper pipe with a hundred holes on it, attached to a tank of propane. He turns on a tune at 550 Hertz, […]
Session 10: The Campfire is about storytelling, connecting, and the power of gathering around a shared light. We start with Jared Ficklin, a winner of the 2011 Full Spectrum Auditions. And he brings us fire! Next up is Joshua Foer, a writer and the one-time US Memory Champion. How did he manage to remember enough […]
Initial sketch above: Click to pop this image to FULL SIZE! And see the final image below or here. Nat Al-Tahhan is a graphic designer and illustrator based in the UK, with a wide background in creative endeavors, including the design of video games, podcast illustration, and live drawing, among other things. We were lucky […]
Photo: James Duncan Davidson Journalist and commentator John Hockenberry takes the stage to share an incredibly personal insight into thinking smartly about design. For one thing, he says, we should think about it in terms of music. Cover versions that don’t add anything to the original are creepy; cover versions that make a tune into […]