Recent Input

Recently heard Talks

These are talks, available as videos on the Internet, that I enjoyed and/or learned something new from. Particularly the talks from the TED conferences are very educational, and often very entertaining. (See also this Wired article on TED 2009.)

Go to: 2010, 2009, 2008.

2010

Matt Ridley: When ideas have sex (16 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100715)
Trade is older than farming. The exchange of ideas and specialization is the key to our rapidly increasing standards of living. Individuals are the neurons of our collective mind.
Ellen Dunham-Jones: Retrofitting suburbia (19 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100714)
Because of the suburbian life style, 1 in 3 kids born in the U.S. today are expected to develop diabetes. Suburbia is bad for health, economy and environment. Fortunately, the Americans are slowly learing, retrofitting/redeveloping all those places where no one wants to be, as James Howard Kunstler put it.
Michael Shermer: The pattern behind self-deception (19 minutes): Rating: TTT (100714)
Christopher "moot" Poole: The case for anonymity online (11 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100711)
About 4chan.org.
Carter Emmart demos a 3D atlas of the universe (7 minutes): Rating: TTT (100710)
What the world needs now...
Hans Rosling on global population growth (10 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100709)
Introducing a new presentaiton tools: boxes from IKEA.
Hillel Cooperman: Legos for grownups (6 minutes): Rating: TTT (100708)
I like his food photography.
Mitchell Joachim: Don't build your home, grow it! (3 minutes): Rating: TTT (100708)
Ellen Gustafson: Obesity + Hunger = 1 global food issue (9 minutes): Rating: TTT (100708)
www.feedprojects.com, www.30project.org
Stephen Fry: What I wish I'd known when I was 18 (31 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100707)
Benoit Mandelbrot: Fractals and the art of roughness (17 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100706)
z→z²+c
Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity (19 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100705)
Where does creativity come from? How do you go on after a big success? If you believe creativity comes form within you, the thought that your best work might be behind you can create despair. The greek believed in daemons and the romans in geniouses as external sources of creativity. In nothern Africa, people chanted Allah (meaning it's a glimpse of good) when someone's dance was good. The spanish turned this in to Olé.
Tony Robbins asks why we do what we do (22 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100704)
Aditi Shankardass: A second opinion on learning disorders (7 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100624)
It's so obivous. By observing brain function directly, and figuring out what is wrong, you can treat much more accurately and successfully than if you use a diagnosis based on behavior (like autism and attention disorder).
Michael Sandel: The lost art of democratic debate (19 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100622)
What the world needs now...
Rory Sutherland: Sweat the small stuff (13 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100619)
Large organisations (like governments) usually favor expensive solutions even when there are cheap and simple solutions that would be more effective, simply because they people in charge have big budgets. That's why Rory Sutherland thinks every organisation should have a Ministry of Detail/Chief Detail Officer without a big budget...
Johanna Blakley: Lessons from fashion's free culture (15 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100615)
Imagine that. The fashion industry is doing great without copyright protection. The lack of protection encourages fashion designers to be more inventive in their designs, to make them harder to copy. In general, industries with little copyright protection (cars, food, fashion, ...) make a lot more money than industries with a lot of copyright protection (movies, books, music, ...). (www.readytoshare.org)
Margaret Gould Stewart: How YouTube thinks about copyright (5.5 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100615)
YouTube's content id system lets copyright owners choose what to do when a copy is detected.
Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution! (16 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100603)
Craig Venter unveils "synthetic life" (18 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100603)
Lawrence Lessig: Re-examining the remix (18 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100603)
About the importance of balanced copyright laws.
John Underkoffler points to the future of UI (15 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100602)
The user Interface from Minority Report works!
Dan Meyer: Math class needs a makeover (12 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100515)
Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action (18 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100515)
The golden circle: why, how, what. People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. The law of diffusion of innovation: innovators (2.5%), early adopters (13.5%), early majority (34%), late majority (34%), laggards (16%).
Kevin Bales: How to combat modern slavery (18 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100515)
There are still slaves in most countries, 27 billion in total.
Dennis Hong: My seven species of robot (18 minutes): Rating: TTT+ (100515)
Don't forget to have fun!
Nathan Myhrvold: Could this laser zap malaria? (15 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100513)
Crazy cool! An appropriate talk to watch on the 50th anniversary of the laser. And remember: don't look into the laser beam with remaining eye!
George Whitesides: Toward a science of simplicity (18 minutes): Rating: TTT+ (100513)
Both the academic world and industry has a tendency to reward complexity, but it is simplicity that is they key to real progress. Simple things are reliable, predictable, cheap (high value/performance for money) and can serve as building blocks. It is only thanks to simple building blocks that complex things like the Internet can be built. Quotes: Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. (Einstein), Perfection in design is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away. (de Saint-Exupery).
Patent Absurdity (29 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100513)
Very educational movie about the rise and (hopefully) fall of software patents.
Sebastian Wernicke: Lies, damned lies and statistics (about TEDTalks) (6 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100508)
For how to create your own TED talk, see www.get-tedpad.com.
James Randi's fiery takedown of psychic fraud (17 minutes): Rating: TTT++ (100425)
Michael Specter: The danger of science denial (16 minutes): Rating: TTT (100425)
Omar Ahmad: Political change with pen and paper (6 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100425)
Tom Wujec: Build a tower, build a team (6.5 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100425)
Who builds the best spagetti towers? Business school graduates are among the worst. Kindergarten graduates are among the best. Why? Iterative prototyping is the answer.
Derek Sivers: How to start a movement (3 minutes): Rating: TTT (100419)
Catherine Mohr builds green (6 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100417)
www.301monroe.com
Sam Harris: Science can answer moral questions (23 minutes): Rating: TTT (100417)
What the world needs now is not people like Sam Harris.
Joel Levine: Why we need to go back to Mars (16 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100417)
Alternative title: "Why you should let us send our airplane to Mars".
Alan Siegel: Let's simplify legal jargon! (4 minutes): Rating: TTT (100417)
Clarity, transparency, simplicity. Yes, please!
Jonathan Klein: Photos that changed the world (6 minutes): Rating: TTT (100414)
Kirk Citron: And now, the real news (3 minutes): Rating: TTT (100412)
www.longnews.org. We are drowning in news. Reuters alone put out 3500000 news stories per year.
Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world (20 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100319)
WoW. Wow.
Eric Mead: The magic of the placebo (9 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100319)
Fake or real?
Peter Ward on Earth's mass extinctions (19 minutes): Rating: TTT (100316)
Did H₂S cause mass extinctions?
Mark Roth: Suspended animation is within our grasp (18 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100316)
H₂S can kill and save lives.
Gary Lauder's new traffic sign: Take Turns (4.5 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100316)
What the world needs now is a "take turns" sign to replace stop signs.
Tim Berners-Lee: The year open data went worldwide (6 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100316)
Open data is actually happening. Cool!
Gary Flake: is Pivot a turning point for web exploration? (6 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100316)
James Cameron: Before Avatar ... a curious boy (17 minutes): Rating: TTT (100308)
Temple Grandin: The world needs all kinds of minds (19 minutes): Rating: TTT (100308)
Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory (20 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100306)
"All is well that ends well.". Only a small fraction of our experience influences our memory of the experience. The last part of an experience is usually more important than the rest. The memory of a two week vacation is not twice as good as the memory of a one-week vacation, even if both weeks were equally good. To be able to measure happiness and make government policies that make people happier, it is important to understand the difference between the happiness of the experiencing self and the hapiness of the remembering self. For example, in the U.S. one Gallup study showed that the happiness of the experiencing self increase with income, but only up to $60.000 per year, while the remembering self is happier the higher the income even beyond that limit.
Bill Gates on energy: Innovating to zero! (29 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100306)
Bill Gates is optimisitc that we can reduce CO₂ emmisions to 0 by the year 2050.
David Cameron: The next age of government (14 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100304)
People-power through transparency, choice and accountability. Understanding human behavior.
Philip K. Howard: Four ways to fix a broken legal system (18 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100304)
Law is a powerful driver of human behavior. The land of the free has become a legal minefield. A free society requires red lights and green lights, otherwise it soon decends into gridlock. That is what has happened to America. What the world needs now is to restore the authority to make common choices. It's the only way to release the energy and passion needed to meet the challenges of our time.
Eric Topol: The wireless future of medicine (17 minutes): Rating: TTT (100304)
Kevin Kelly tells technology's epic story (16 minutes) and on how technology evolves (20 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100220)
Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos Photosynth (7 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100213)
Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos augmented-reality maps (8 minutes + 2 minutes of comments): Rating: TTTT (100213)
Is it possible that Microsoft's maps are cooler than Google's?!
Derek Sivers: Weird, or just different? (2.5 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100202)
Bill Davenhall: Your health depends on where you live (9 minutes): Rating: TTT (100202)
David Blaine: How I held my breath for 17 min (20 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100123)
Dan Buettner: How to live to be 100+ (19 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100123)
Charles Fleischer insists: All things are Moleeds (18 minutes): Rating: TTT (100121)
Nick Veasey: Exposing the invisible (13 minutes): Rating: TTT (100120)
Lalitesh Katragadda: Making maps to fight disaster, build economies (2.5 minutes): Rating: TTT (100117)
VS Ramachandran: The neurons that shaped civilization (7.5 minutes): Rating: TTTT (100107)
James Geary, metaphorically speaking (9 minutes): Rating: TTT (100107)
Alexis Ohanian: How to make a splash in social media (4 minutes): Rating: TTT (100105)
If you want to succeed you got to be OK to just loose control.

2009

Steven Cowley: Fusion is energy's future (10 minutes)

Rating: TTT (091226)
The current hope is that we will be able to produce electric power from fusion sometime in the 2030s.

Marc Pachter: The art of the interview (21 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (091213)
"The key point was empathy, because everybody is really waiting for people to ask them questions so that they can be truthful about who they are and how they became what they are. Just be that way with your friends, particularly with the older members of your family."

Shereen El Feki: Pop culture in the Arab world (5 minutes)

Rating: TTT (091213)

Rory Bremner's one-man world summit (14.5 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (091213)
Great immitations.

Rachel Pike: The science behind a climate headline (4 minutes)

Rating: TTT

Hans Rosling: Asia's rise -- how and when (16 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (091123)

John Gerzema: The post-crisis consumer (16 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (091122)
This is about the good effects of the financial crisis. For exmaple, consumers are demanding openess and transparency. GoreTex think bosses are a bad idea and they make all expense reports public.

Rachel Armstrong: Architecture that repairs itself? (7 minutes)

Rating: TTT (091122)

Becky Blanton: The year I was homeless (7 minutes)

Rating: TTT (091122)

Itay Talgam: Lead like the great conductors (21 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (091108)

Willard Wigan: Hold your breath for micro-sculpture (19 minutes)

Rating: TTT (091108)

Rory Sutherland: Life lessons from an ad man (16.5 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (091108)
Entertaining talk about the value of intangible value.

Stefana Broadbent: How the Internet enables intimacy (8.5 minutes)

Rating: TTT (091107)

David Deutsch: A new way to explain explanation (17 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (091107)
Our progress was very slow until learned the difference between a good eplanation and a bad one...

Garik Israelian: How spectroscopy could reveal alien life (16 minutes)

Rating: TTT (091106)
The light from our sun contains 24000 spectral lines. 15% of them are still unexplained. In 5 years, we will be able to analyze the spectrums of earth-like planets in other solar systems. In 15-20 years we will be able to tell if there is life on such planets.

Marcus du Sautoy: Symmetry, reality's riddle (18 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (091105)
About Évariste Galois (1811-1832), Alhambra and symmetry. There are only two objects with 6 symmetries. 6-3-2, 4-4-2. Rubik's Cube has ~2.1×10²⁴ symmetries.

Julian Treasure: The 4 ways sound affects us (5.5 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (091105)
The noise in an open plan office can reduce your productivity by 66%. Inappropriate retail soundscapes can reduce sales by 28%.

Sam Martin: The quirky world of "manspaces" (4.5 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (091105)
Created by men with a passion. (Manspacesite.com)

Christiaan Baaij: CLasH: From Haskell to Hardware (19 minutes)

Rating: TT (091028)
From the Haskell Symposium 2009.

Jean-Philippe Bernardy: Lazy Functional Incremental Parsing (26 minutes)

Rating: TTT (091028)
From the Haskell Symposium 2009.

Lee Pike: Roll Your Own Test Bed for Embedded Real-Time Protocols: A Haskell Experience (18 minutes)

Rating: TTT (091028)
From the Haskell Symposium 2009.

Max Bolingbroke: Types Are Calling Conventions (25 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (091028)
From the Haskell Symposium 2009.

Eric Sanderson pictures New York -- before the City (16 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (091026)
The Mannahatta project.

Paul Debevec animates a photo-real digital face (6 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (091026)
Capturing structure, texture and motion.

Henry Markram builds a brain in a supercomputer (15 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (091015)
He says we will be able to simulate a complete human brain within 10 years.

David Logan on tribal leadership (16 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (091014)
Tribes (the groups that people naturally form) can be at five levels of culture.

(2%) Life sucks
(25%) My life sucks
(48%) I am great (and you are not)
(22%) We are great
(2%) Life is great

Leaders have to be fluent at all levels to be able to touch every person in society. Leaders nudge people to the next level.

Carolyn Steel: How food shapes our cities (15 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (091011)
Interesting.

Beau Lotto: Optical illusions show how we see (16 minutes)

Rating: TTT (091011)
Nothing new. But the IBM ad after was about the congestion charges (trängselskatt) in Stockholm, which reduced traffic by 22% and air pollution by 14%, and I learned that U.S. traffic causes 45% of the air pollution in the world.

Stefan Sagmeister: The power of time off (17 minutes)

Rating: TTT+ (091009)
He takes a sabbatical every 7 years. That's 12.5% off, but he things it still pays off by increasing the quality (and hence price) of his work. To do whatever you want. 3M gives employees 15% off. Google gives employess 20% off. (Job vs Career vs Calling)

Jonathan Zittrain: The Web as random acts of kindness (19 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090930)
The Internet infrastructure itself and things like the Wikipedia are good examples of the amazing things can be accomplished with neighborly friendliness and cooperation, without control, bureaucracy and corporate greed.

Neil Mitchell: Losing Functions Without Gaining Data - Another Look at Defunctionalisation (26 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090929)
From the Haskell Symposium 2009.

Atze Dijkstra: The Architectures of The Utrecht Haskell Compiler (30 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090929)
From the Haskell Symposium 2009.

Parag Khanna maps the future of countries (18 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090929)

Tim Brown urges designers to think big (15 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090929)

Oliver Sacks: What hallucination reveals about our minds (18 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090919)
The neurons in understimulated parts of the brain can start to fire spontaneously. This is why it is common for blind people to have visual hallucinations. By using fMRI, specific visual impressions can be associated with specific parts of the brain. There are parts devoted to recognizing cartoons, faces, buildings, cars, even different makes of cars, etc. (See also the talk by Ramachandran.)

Lewis Pugh swims the North Pole (19 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090917)
The water temperature is -1.7°C there and he swam 1km in 18.5 minutes. It took 4 months before he could feel his hands again.

Steve Truglia: A leap from the edge of space (15 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090917)
He wants to sky dive from 36600m in a space suit...

Evan Grant: Making sound visible through cymatics (5 minutes)

Rating: TTT (090917)

Bjarke Ingels: 3 warp-speed architecture tales (18 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090917)
Awesome Danish architecture.

John Lloyd inventories the invisible (10 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090916)
Very clever and amusing. I learned a new word: ignostic, meaning "I refuse to be drawn on the question on whether god exists until someone properly defines the terms".

Rebecca Saxe: How we read each other's minds (17 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090913)
There is a small region in the brain devoted to thinking about other people's thoughts, and it develops fairly slowly. You can tell the difference between 3, 5 and 7 year old children.

James Balog: Time-lapse proof of extreme ice loss (19 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090910)

Josh Silver demos adjustable liquid-filled eyeglasses (5 minutes)

Rating: TTT (090902)
Adjustable glasses for everyone? From the Centre for Vision in the Developing World.

Ethan Zuckerman: Internet Censorship: How Cute Cats Can Help (1 hour)

Rating: TTTT (090830)
An interesting talk at Princeton in November 2008.

Natasha Tsakos' multimedia theatrical adventure (15 minutes)

Rating: TTT (090829)

Hans Rosling: Let my dataset change your mindset (20 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090827)
Fascinating, as always.

Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation (18 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090825)
There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. For anything but trivial routine jobs, Autonomy (the urge to direct our own lives), Mastery (the desire to get better and better at something that matters) and Purpose (the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves) are better motivators and result in better performance than managers with carrots and sticks. (Encarta vs Wikipedia. ROWE.)

Eric Giler demos wireless electricity (10 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090825)

Janine Benyus: Biomimicry in action (17 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090807)
Nature already has much better solutions to many problems than engineers try to solve with new technology. It is time we learn to consider those solutions every time we think about inventing something new.

Alain de Botton: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success (16 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090803)
Career crises. It is easier than ever to make a living, but harder than ever to stay free of career anxiety. Job snobbery. The opposite of a snob is your mother. Most people make a strict correlation between how much time/love/respect they are prepared to give you and your position in the social hierarchy. That's why we need careers and material status symbols (luxury items) even if we not necessarily materialistic. Someone with a Ferrary isn't greedy, but more likely vulnerable and in need of love. Meritocracy: people reach the top based on their merits and vice versa. This leads to more suicides, because we have no one to blame but our selves when things go wrong. But the justice meritocracy implies is impossible, too many things are random. About success: you can't be successful at everything. Also make sure you use your own definition of success, not someone else's.

Golan Levin makes art that looks back at you (15 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090803)

Kevin Kelly on the next 5,000 days of the web (19 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090731)

Jim Fallon: Exploring the mind of a killer (6 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090716)

Go behind the scenes of a TEDTalk (6.5 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090715)
TED talks have evolved into a new unit of information: we have things like a 4 minute song, a 90 minute movie, a 5 page article, and now we have an 18 minute talk. ... the most important videos online right now. I can only agree.

Stewart Brand proclaims 4 environmental 'heresies' (16 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090715)
Interesting perspecives on our world and the future.

Olafur Eliasson: Playing with space and light (9 minutes)

Rating: TTT (090715)

Tom Wujec on 3 ways the brain creates meaning (6 minutes)

Rating: TTT (090712)

Kary Mullis' next-gen cure for killer infections (4 minutes)

Rating: TTT (090712)
A nobel price winner with a new way to help our immune defence kill bacteria.

Daniel Libeskind's 17 words of architectural inspiration (18 minutes)

Rating: TT (090702)

Gever Tulley teaches life lessons through tinkering (4 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090702)
The best way to learn!

Arthur Benjamin's formula for changing math education (3 minutes)

Rating: TTT (090702)
His message, which was very popular with the audience, is to focus on statistics instead of calculus.

Paul Collier's new rules for rebuilding a broken nation (16 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090627)

Katherine Fulton: You are the future of philanthropy (12 minutes)

Rating: TTT (090627)
I learned a new word: philanthropreneur. Also, I like this quote:

We have lived in this world where little things are done for love and big things for money. Now we have Wikipedia. Suddenly big things can be done for love. (Clay Shirky)

Ray Zahab treks to the South Pole (5.5 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090627)

Philip Zimbardo prescribes a healthy take on time (6 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090623)
One marshmallow now or two later? It is good to think about what influences your decisions more: the past, the present or the future? Negative or positive aspects?

Chris Hughes: Augmented reality made easy (2 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090623)
Cool video effects with only a web browser and flash.

Qi Zhang's electrifying organ performance

Rating: TTT (090619)
Wow, Yamaha Electone organs still exist!

Catherine Mohr: Surgery's past, present and robotic future

Rating: TTTT (090618)

Jane Poynter: Life in Biosphere 2 (15 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090616)

Richard St. John: "Success is a continuous journey" (4 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090616)
Success and money doesn't automatically bring happiness. "Money can't by happiness, but it can by prozac". If you forget to follow the 8 principles of success, things can go downhill fast...

Nancy Etcoff on the surprising science of happiness (19 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090616)
Looking at happiness from many perspectives. Interesting.

John La Grou plugs smart power outlets (4 minutes)

Rating: TTT (090616)

Robert Full: Learning from the gecko's tail (12 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090611)

Pete Alcorn on the world in 2200 (3 minutes)

Rating: TTT (090610)

Ray Kurzweil: A university for the coming singularity (8.5 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090602)
Ray Kurzweil thinks computers will be powerful enough to simulate human brains and pass the turing test in 20 years. I can't wait! His slides contain many examples of exponential progress to support this prediction.

Michelle Obama's plea for education (12 minutes)

Rating: TTT (090531)

Ray Anderson on the business logic of sustainability (15 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090530)

Seth Godin on the tribes we lead (17 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090530)
How to change everything (by leading a tribe): challange, culture, curiosity, connect, commit. Being a leader gives you charisma, you don't need it to become a leader.

Al Gore warns on latest climate trends (7 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090528)
He also shows some TV ads about clean coal and repowering America.

Carolyn Porco: Could a Saturn moon harbor life? (3 minutes)

Rating: TTT (090528)
There are organic molecules, and evidence of water in contact with rock.

Jonathan Drori: Why we're storing billions of seeds (6 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090528)
3·10⁹ seeds have been stored. 24000 speices have been preserved. Cost: $2800 per species.

Jay Walker on the world's English mania (4 minutes)

Rating: TTT (090528)
A common language to solve common problems.

Joachim de Posada says, Don't eat the marshmallow yet

Rating: TTTT (090525)
Interesting and amusing!

Dan Ariely asks, Are we in control of our own decisions?

Rating: TTTT (090524)
Interestingly, adding a third inferior option influences which of two good options we prefer. Decisions are often cognitive illusions...

Sean Gourley on the mathematics of war

Rating: TTT (090524)

Mary Roach: 10 things you didn't know about orgasm

Rating: TTT (090520)

Hans Rosling on HIV: New facts and stunning data visuals

Rating: TTTT (090516)

Charles Leadbeater: The rise of the amateur professional

Rating: TTTT (090509)
Insightful! Where did the mountain-bike come from? Consumers are often ahead of producers. Most creativity is cumulative and collaborative, so there is no distinct moment of invention, which is what the patent system assumes. Users are the source of big disruptive innovation. The big new ideas do not come from big corporations. Corproprations now use patents and copyright to prevent invetion from taking place, to protect their own business, i.e. a complete corruption of the original purpose of patent and copyright.

Bjorn Lomborg: Our priorities for saving the world

Rating: TTTT (090509)
About the Copenhagen consensus. Top economists from the developed world and university students from all over came up with more or less the same list.

David Pogue: When it comes to tech, simplicity sells

Rating: TTTT (090505)
Very entertaining! In addition to delivering the important message indicated in the title and making fun of Microsoft, David Pogue sings about tech support, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

Brian Cox: What went wrong (and what's next) at the Large Hadron Collider

Rating: TTT (090501)

Al Seckel: Your brain is badly wired -- enjoy it!

Rating: TTTT (090501)
Some cool optical illusions.

Alex Tabarrok: How ideas trump economic crises -- a surprising lesson from 1929

Rating: TTTT (090501)
In a global economy, new ideas become more valuable because they are applicable to a greated market. Economic growth in the 1900s after the great depression exceeded predictions that could reasonably be made before it.

Sarah Jones: One woman, eight hilarious characters

Rating: TTTT (090501)

Laurie Garrett: What can we learn from the 1918 flu pandemic?

Rating: TTT (090501)

Dan Dennett: A secular, scientific rebuttal to Rick Warren

Rating TTTT (090422)
He says "All the religions in the world should be taught in school, because democracy depends on informed consent.". Well, that has been done in Sweden since I was a kid (probably even longer), but I guess it won't happen in America until hell freezes over :-). Also, he likes Rick Warren's book, but has a problem with some of the things said in it, e.g. "Surrendered people obey God's word, even if it doesn't make sense".

Carl Honore: Slowing down in a world built for speed

Rating: TTTT (090422)
There is a global backlash the against the culture that tells us that faster and busier is better. Slow food. Slow cities. Fewer working hours. Homework bans. Less is more. "You need to unplug, take time to recharge, so your brain can slide back into that creative mode of thought." "The nordic countries are showing that it is possible to have a kick-ass economy without being a workaholic. They now rank among the top 6 most competitive nations on earth, and they work the kind of hours that would make the average American weep with envy."

Rives: "If I controlled the Internet" (a poem)

Rating: TTT (090422)

Clay Shirky: Institutions vs. collaboration

Rating: TTTT (090420)
Journalists vs bloggers. Photographers vs flickr. Microsoft vs Linux. Clay Shirky predicts 50 years of similar battles. (Which is not as bad as the printing press, which lead to 200 years of chaos...). Let's just hope the institutions under threat don't succeed in locking down the Internet.

Juan Enriquez: Beyond the crisis, mindboggling science and the arrival of Homo evolutis

Rating: TTTT (090420)
Biology and technology might merge within our lifetime. Interesting...

Ray Kurzweil: How technology's accelerating power will transform us

Rating: TTTT (090420)
The future will be here sooner than you think!

Aubrey de Grey: Why we age and how we can avoid it

Rating: TTTT (090420)

Margaret Wertheim: The beautiful math that links coral, crochet and hyperbolic geometry

Rating: TTT (090420)
A talk on the importance of not relying just on symblic/algebraic methods, but also using concrete representations of abstract ideas.

Helen Fisher: The science of love, and the future of women

Rating: TTTT (090415)
An interesting talk that covers a lot of ground.

Helen Fisher: The brain in love

Rating: TTTT (090415)
"No wonder we have so many crimes of passion around the world", Helen Fisher says after using fMRI to study what goes on in the brain when you have been recjected by someone you really love.

Barry Schwartz: The paradox of choice

Rating: TTTT (090415)
Too much choice makes us miserable. Everyone needs a (metaphorical) fish bowl. In 1983 when I went to America for the first time, I couldn't believe there was a whole isle with different kinds of milk in the super market. At home there was ony three kinds (regular, low fat, no fat), and I am happy the choices are still fairly limited (3 levels of fat, 2 brands, organic, lactose free).

JoAnn Kuchera-Morin: Tour the AlloSphere, a stunning new way to see scientific data

Rating: TT (090415)

A.J. Jacobs: My year of living biblically

Rating: TTT (090415)

Larry Burns: Reinventing the car

Rating: TT (090414)
In this talk from 2005, Larry Burns from GM talks about how GM is committed to creating the car for the future, based on hydrogen fuel cells. But GM had their chance already in the 90s, and they blew it. The electric car they created then was a success, and even though the lucky few who got the chance to lease one wanted to buy their car and keep it, all the cars were recalled and destroyed. After hearing Shai Agassi talk about eletric cars, and seeing the situation GM is in today, it seems pretty obvious that neither GM nor fuel cells have a future.

Shai Agassi: A bold plan for mass adoption of electric cars

Rating: TTTT (090414)
How do you run a whole country without oil? Ethanol? No! Hydrogen? No! Car 2.0 is an electric car. I really hope this takes off!

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita: Three predictions on the future of Iran, and the math to back it up

Rating: TTT (090414)
Based on simple assumptions about human behavior and decision making, game theoretic models simulated in a computer can take more facts and relations into account than a human export, and let you make predictions that are more likely to be correct.

Renny Gleeson: Busted! The sneaky moves of anti-social smartphone users

Rating: TTT (090411)
(3 minutes) An important message about mobile devices.

David Pogue: Cool new things you can do with your mobile phone

Rating: TTTT (090411)
Don't miss his songs at the end: I want an iPhone. Also, another song, Imagine there's no Apple, was edited out from the TED video of this talk, but is included in the video at the EG.

Bonnie Bassler: Discovering bacteria's amazing communication system

Rating: TTTT (090410)
I never heard about bacterial communication before. Very interesting! Very good speaker. From Princeton.

Ueli Gegenschatz: Fulfilling the dream of flight in a high-tech wingsuit

Rating: TTTT (090410)
Cool! I never heard about wingsuits before.

Jacqueline Novogratz: From a Nairobi slum, a tale of hope

Rating: TTT (090410)
Being poor doesn't mean being ordinary.

Jacek Utko: Can design save the newspaper?

Rating: TTTT (090410)
Everybody can do it. We just need is inspiration, vision and determination. To be good is not enough.

Emily Levine: A trickster's theory of everything

Rating: TTTT (090410)
There is a lot of depth below the humorous surface.

Ze Frank: What's so funny about the Web?

Rating: TTTT (090329)
Funny guy!

Saul Griffith: Inventing a super-kite to tap the energy of high-altitude wind

Rating: TTTT (090323)
5 minutes. Sounds great. What's the catch?

Dan Ariely: Why we think it's OK to cheat and steal (sometimes)

Rating: TTTT (090321)

Stuart Brown: Why play is vital -- no matter your age

Rating: TTTT (090316)
A very interesting talk on how important play is for both humans and animals.

Dan Dennett: Cute, sexy, sweet and funny -- an evolutionary riddle

Rating: TTTT (090316)

Tim Berners-Lee: The next Web of open, linked data

Rating: TTTT (090315)
Tim Berners-Lee shares Hans Rosling's plea: make all data available and link it together. Tear down the walls between the databases.

Mike Rowe: Celebrating work -- all kinds of work

Rating: TTTT (090315)
Anagnorisis and peripeteia. Maybe Dirty Jobs is a TV show worth watching...

Pattie Maes & Pranav Mistry: Unveiling the "Sixth Sense," game-changing wearable tech

Rating: TTTT (090315)

Don Norman: The three ways that good design makes you happy

Rating: TTTT (090315)

Nalini Nadkarni: Unveiling the beautiful, fragile world of rainforest treetop ecosystems

Rating: TTT (090314)
Her projects include using inmates to save moss and frogs in the Pacific Northwest.

Stephen Hawking: Asking big questions about the universe

Rating: TTT (090228)

Evan Williams: How Twitter's spectacular growth is being driven by unexpected uses

Rating: TTT (090228)
Introduction to Twitter in 8 minutes.

Charles Moore: Sailing the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Rating: TTTT (090227)
After 50 years of "throwaway living", the oceans are full of plastic trash, harming both birds and fish, and we will never be able to clean it up...

Miru Kim: Making art of New York's urban ruins

Rating: TTTT (090226)
She explores the unseen layers of our cities, i.e. underground tunnels and other abandoned areas that most people never see. She showed photos from in New York, Berlin, Paris and London.

Richard Pyle: Exploring the reef's Twilight Zone

Rating: TTTT (090226)

Bill Gates: How I'm trying to change the world now

Rating: TTTT (090206)
Bill gates is optimistic that malaria can eliminated. But since malaria has already been eliminated from all the rich countries, more money is spent on baldness drugs than on fighting malaria. Another equally important problem to solve is the U.S. education system. The top 20% students in the U.S. are better than the top 20% in other places in the world, but the difference is getting smaller. The remaning 80% are weaker than the rest of the world and they are getting worse. In the U.S., 30% of all kids drop out of high school (50% among minorities). If you are low-income in the U.S., you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a [college] degree. That does not seem entirely fair. Good teachers is the key ingredient in the solution to this problem. But good teachers aren't rewarded in the current system, and their skills are not spread. But KIPP schools are different.

Steven Pinker: A brief history of violence

Rating: TTTT (090129)
In spite of what it seems like, based on many sources of statistics, and over many time scales, the world is more peaceful now than it ever has been. The trend will probably continue as globalization and technology allows our circles of empathy to grow larger and larger.

Noah Feldman: Politics and religion are technologies

Rating: TTT (090129)
An passionate talk on the compatibility between democracy and Islam, given in February 2003, just before the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google co-founders): Inside the Google machine

Rating: TTT (090129)

Paula Scher: Great design is serious (not solemn)

Rating: TTT (090128)
Her goal in life was to do stuff that wasn't made out of Helvetica. The best way to accomplish serious design is to be totally and completely unqualified for the job.

Joseph Pine: What do consumers really want?

Rating: TTT (090127)
First it was commodities. Then goods. Then services. Now, the new economy is about selling authentic experiences. But note that the Netherlands is no more authentic than Disney Land.

Bill Lange / David Gallo: New eyes on the wonders of the ocean

Rating: TTTT (090126)
High-defenition video of life at 3000m below the surface. Only 3% of the oceans have been explored.

Jamais Cascio: Tools for building a better world

Rating: TTT (090126)
Open knowledge and technology enabled global collaboration will save the planet.

Sherwin Nuland: A meditation on hope

Rating: TTT (090126)
The word hope comes from the same indoeuropean root as curve. The word patient means sufferer and comes from the same indoeuropean root as compassion. The world is the patient and the audience (americans) are the healers.

Thomas Barnett: The Pentagon's new map for war and peace

Rating: TTT (090119)

Ford Model T - 100 Years Later

Rating: TTTT (090118)

Stefan Sagmeister: Yes, design can make you happy and Things I have learned in my life so far

Rating: TTT+ (090116)
He shared som interesting insights.

Peter Hirshberg: The Web and TV, a sibling rivalry

Rating: TTT+ (090114)
Intersting, but be prepared to be bombarded with historical tidbits...

Susan Savage-Rumbaugh: Apes that write, start fires and play Pac-Man

Rating: TTTT (090112)
I had never heard of them before, but bonobo apes seem more human-like than chimpanzees...

Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?

Rating: TTTT (090111)
A funny guy with an important message.

Erin McKean: Redefining the dictionary

Rating: TTTT (090110)
Very entertaining. I learned some new words, like synecdochically, serendipity and erinaceous :-)

Vilayanur Ramachandran: A journey to the center of your mind (23 minutes)

Rating: TTTT (090110)
Very interesting talk about how the brain works and how different parts of the brain interact to create our experiences. For exmaple, creativity and the ability to think in metaphores depend on cross-wiring between different parts of the brain, which, due to genetic differences, are much more extensive in some families than in others.

George Smoot: The design of the universe

Rating: TTTT (090110)
On a large scale, taking dark matter into account, the universe looks more like a web than a random collection of galaxies. George smooth shows how simulations from simple ingredients with small random fluctuations develop into a universe that fits with what we can see with the Hubble space telescope and other instruments.

Phil Schiller: Macworld 2009 Keynote Address

Rating: TTT+ (090110)
Face recognition and geotagging in iPhoto 09. New cool video editing functionality in iMovie 09. All music sold in the iTunes store will be DRM free!

Stephen Petranek: 10 ways the world could end

Rating: TTT (090107)

Brian Greene: The universe on a string

Rating: TTTT (090107)
The superstring theory requires a universe with 10 dimensions of space, not just the 3 dimensions of space that we can see. If energy dissapears in particle collisions in the Large Hadron Collider, it could confirm that these extra dimensions are real, and not just a mathematical construction. There is a problem, though: Patricia Burchar said that missing energy could confirm the existence of dark energy and dark matter. But I guess the superstring theory would have to explain dark energy & and matter, so it will all fit nicely together...

Brian Cox: An inside tour of the world's biggest supercollider

Rating: TTTT (090107)

Rob Hubbard Interview

Rating: TTT (090101)
A 4 minute talk with legendary Rob Hubbard, who composed a lot of classic game tunes, especially on the C64.

2008

Jennifer 8. Lee: Who was General Tso? and other mysteries of American Chinese food: Rating: TTT (081224)
There are over 40,000 Chinese restaurants in America, more restaurants than McDonalds, Burger King, KFC & Wendy's have together. Even though there is no central control, Chinese restaurants are remarkably similar. (Most of them serve beef with broccoli, although broccoli is not a Chinese vegetable. Most of them also fortune cookies, which are unknown in China.) Chinese restaurants in this sense corresponds to open source software (Linux) while McDonalds and the like correspond to proprietary software (Microsoft). Finally I understand why I like Chinese food more than burgers... :-)
Susan Blackmore: Memes and "temes": Rating: TTT (081224)
Evolution is inevitable, provided a small number of key factors are present. On earth, evolution was first based on the replication of selfish genes. Then, evolution on a second level was added, with the replication of selfish memes. It makes sense to to also talk about a third level of evolution: temes (pieces of technology). At present, temes depend on the two lower levels for replication, but with technology is improving, they might soon start to replicate and evolve on their own...
Yochai Benkler: Open-source economics: Rating: TTT (081224)
Nicholas Negroponte: Bringing One Laptop per Child to Colombia: Rating: TTTT (081224)
Steven Strogatz: How things in nature tend to sync up: Rating: TTT (081223)
About the simple rules that explain the behaviour of a school of fish, a flock of birds, blinking fire flies and a bridge in London.
Rick Warren: Living a life of purpose: Rating: TTTT (081218)
30.000.000 copies sold. It must be a really good book!
Peter Donnelly: How juries are fooled by statistics: Rating: TTTT
Without even realizing it, we often get it wrong when reasoning in the presence of uncertainty.
Richard St. John: Secrets of success in 8 words: Rating: TTTT
500 interviews during 7 years, summarized into 8 words, explained in 3 minutes.
Richard Dawkins: The universe is queerer than we can suppose: Rating: TTTT
Richard Dawkins: An atheist's call to arms: Rating: TTTT (081219)
If I am right, high office in the greatest country in the world is barred to the very people best qualified to hold it. To put it bluntly, American political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest. I am not a citizen of this country, so I hope it won't be thought unbecoming if I suggest that something needs to be done.
Robert Wright: How cooperation (eventually) trumps conflict: Rating: TTT
Arthur Benjamin: Lightning calculation and other "Mathemagic": Rating: TTTT (081210)
Who knew squares could be so much fun :-)
Patricia Burchat: The search for dark energy and dark matter: Rating: TTTT (081205)
A talk that makes some mysterious things easy to understand.
Philip Rosedale: Second Life, where anything is possible: Rating: TTT (081203)
The talk about the motivation behind Second Life reminds me of what got me hooked on computers when I was a teenager.
Robin Chase: Getting cars off the road and data into the skies: Rating: TTT
Hans Rosling: New insights on poverty and life around the world: Rating: TTTT (081107)
Another great talk by Hans Rosling. In addition to the informative, colorful animated bubbles, this talk also involves a sword! :-)
Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you've ever seen: Rating: TTTT (081030)
Thanks to statistics and clever visualization techniques, you can probably learn a lot more about health and development in the world from this 20 minute talk than you learned about it from years in school.
James Howard Kunstler: The tragedy of suburbia: Rating: TTTT (081106)
After living in America for 5 years, it is nice to see that it's not just me: even people who understand architecture and urban planning are appalled that there there are so many places (38,000 according to Kunstler) where no one wants to be, places not worth caring about.
Jane Godall: Helping humans and animals live together in Africa: Rating: TTTT (081106)
Hearing Jane Godall talk is amazing. It is reassuring to hear someone with her experience say that she is still inspired and full of hope that it is not too late to make the world a better place for everyone. (Two programs that she talks about here are Take Care and Roots & Shoots.)
Jonathan Haidt: The real difference between liberals and conservatives: Rating: TTTT (081106)
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Creativity, fulfillment and flow: Rating: TTT (081028)
Our material well-being has increased a lot in the last century, but how happy we are has not changed that much. So what is it that makes our everyday life meaningful and worth living? This talk describes how two factors determine whether you feel worried, bored, relaxed, in control or "in the flow" (being creative).
Benjamin Wallace: Does happiness have a price tag?: Rating: TTT
Dan Gilbert: Why are we happy? Why aren't we happy?: Rating: TTTT (081027)
When we have the freedom, we make choices according to what makes us happy. But when we don't have a choice, our brains can synthesize happiness. If you go out on a date with a guy and he picks his nose, you don't go out on another date. If you are married to a guy and he picks his nose... you find a way to be happy with what's happened.
Garrett Lisi: A beautiful new theory of everything: Rating: TTTT (081027)
If the Large Hadron Collider offers further evidence that all the elementary particles and their interaction can be beautifully characterized by the largest exceptional Lie group E₈, it is not entirely unreasonable to conclude that god was a mathematician :-)
John Hodgman: A brief digression on matters of lost time: Rating: TTTT (081026)
High precision humor :-)
Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight: Rating: TTT (081025)
A brain scientist describes what it was like having a stroke.
Lawrence Lessig: How creativity is being strangled by the law: Rating: TTTT (080906)
A great talk (19 minutes) by Lawrence Lessig, about culture and copyright. Regarding the difference between kids and the older generation he says: We need to recognize, you can't kill the instinct that technology produces, we can only criminalize it. We can't stop our kids from using it, we can only drive it underground. We can't make our kids passive again, we can only make them "pirates". Is that good? We live in this weird time, let's call it the age of prohibitions, where in many areas of our life, we live life constantly against the law. Ordinary people live life against the law. And that's what we are doing to our kids, they live life knowing that they live it against the law, and that realization is extraordinarily corrosive, extraordinarily corrupting. And in a democracy, we ought to be able to do better
Michael Wesch: An anthropological introduction to YouTube: Rating: TTT (080906)
A very entertaining presentation that also is also food for thought. While the web started out by hyperlinking text, it is now linking people through the sharing of user generated content on sites like YouTube and social networking on sites like Facebook. Our politicians respond these phenomena by proposing stricter regulations, require ISPs to keep record all communication patterns and filter "illegal" content, when we really need to rethink things like copyright, authorship, identity, ethics, governance, commerce and privacy. We have to get it right, to save our kids from growing up in a society where they will be breaking the law every day, just by living a normal life.
Fredrik Härén om kunskap, del 2: Rating: TTTT (080427)
Fredrik Härén is telling us, in an entertaining way, that if we (the "developed" countries) don't open our eyes to the changes in the world around us (the "developing" countries), we will soon start to lag behind. For example, in Zimbabwe, which has been rated the worst country in the world to live in, you can pay your gardener by sending an SMS to his cell phone. When will that be possible in "developed" countries like Sweden?