Featuring the vocals and mischievous bell-playing of accordionist and singer Rachelle Garniez, the TED House Band — led by Thomas Dolby on keyboard — delivers this delightful rendition of the Edith Piaf standard “La Vie en Rose.”
Satirist Tom Rielly delivers a wicked parody of the 2006 TED conference, taking down the $100 laptop, the plight of the polar bear, and people who mention, one too many times, that they work at Harvard. Watch for a special moment between Tom and Al Gore.
It’s a classic problem in theology: How can the existence of evil be reconciled with a God who is supposed to be all-loving, all-knowing and all-powerful? Reverend Tom Honey attempts to answer this question in the wake of the tsunami. NEW: Read the transcript >>
Singer/songwriter Eddi Reader performs “What You Do With What You’ve Got,” a meditation on a very TED theme: how to use your gifts and talents to make a difference. With Thomas Dolby on piano.
Rives recaps the most memorable moments of TED2006 in the free-spirited rhyming verse of a fantastical mockingbird lullaby.
The dot-com boom and bust is often compared to the Gold Rush. But Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos says it’s more like the early days of the electric industry.
Green-minded architect and designer William McDonough asks what our buildings and products would look like if designers took into account “all children, all species, for all time.”
A happy song about global warming, from Jill Sobule.
Caroline Lavelle plays the cello like a sorceress casting a spell, occasionally hiding behind her wild mane of blond hair as she sings of pastoral themes. She performs “Farther than the Sun,” backed by Thomas Dolby on keyboards.
Philosopher Dan Dennett makes a compelling argument that not only don’t we understand our own consciousness, but that half the time our brains are actively fooling us.
Scientific discoveries, futurist Juan Enriquez notes, demand a shift in code, and our ability to thrive depends on our mastery of that code. Here, he applies this notion to the field of genomics.
Al Seckel, a cognitive neuroscientist, explores the perceptual illusions that fool our brains. Loads of eye tricks help him prove that not only are we easily fooled, we kind of like it. Read the transcript >>
Biologist Sheila Patek talks about her work measuring the feeding strike of the mantis shrimp, one of the fastest movements in the animal world, using video cameras recording at 20,000 frames per second.
Susan Savage-Rumbaugh‘s work with bonobo apes, which can understand spoken language and learn tasks by watching, forces the audience to rethink how much of what a species can do is determined by biology — and how much by cultural exposure.
Musician Nora York gives a stunning performance of her original song “What I Want.”
Worldchanging.com founder Alex Steffen argues that reducing humanity’s ecological footprint is incredibly vital now, as the western consumer lifestyle spreads to developing countries.