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Are games better than life?

David Perry

{0: 'David Perry'}

{0: ['game designer']}

{0: 'Dave Perry is the visionary game designer behind some of the most beloved titles of the past two decades -- Earthworm Jim, MDK, Messiah, and game adaptations of films such as Terminator and The Matrix.'}

2006-02-02

2008-10-06

TED2006

en

['ar', 'bg', 'ca', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'et', 'fr', 'gl', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'lv', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['business', 'design', 'entertainment', 'gaming', 'technology']

{146: 'Spore, birth of a game', 205: 'The mystery box', 241: 'A new kind of music video', 1618: 'Your brain on video games', 996: '7 ways games reward the brain', 799: 'Gaming can make a better world'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/david_perry_are_games_better_than_life/

Game designer David Perry says tomorrow's videogames will be more than mere fun to the next generation of gamers. They'll be lush, complex, emotional experiences -- more involving and meaningful to some than real life. With an excerpt from Michael Highland's film "As Real as Your Life."

I grew up in Northern Ireland, right up in the very, very north end of it there, where it's absolutely freezing cold. This was me running around in the back garden mid-summer. (Laughter) I couldn't pick a career. In Ireland the obvious choice is the military, but to be honest it actually kind of sucks. (Laughter) My mother wanted me to be a dentist. But the problem was that people kept blowing everything up. So I actually went to school in Belfast, which was where all the action happened. And this was a pretty common sight. The school I went to was pretty boring. They forced us to learn things like Latin. The school teachers weren't having much fun, the sports were very dirty or very painful. So I cleverly chose rowing, which I got very good at. And I was actually rowing for my school here until this fateful day, and I flipped over right in front of the entire school. And that was the finishing post right there. (Laughter) So this was extremely embarrassing. But our school at that time got a grant from the government, and they got an incredible computer — the research machine 3DZ — and they left the programming manuals lying around. And so students like myself with nothing to do, we would learn how to program it. Also around this time, at home, this was the computer that people were buying. It was called the Sinclair ZX80. This was a 1K computer, and you'd buy your programs on cassette tape. Actually I'm just going to pause for one second, because I heard that there's a prerequisite to speak here at TED — you had to have a picture of yourself from the old days with big hair. So I brought a picture with big hair. (Laughter). I just want to get that out of the way. So after the Sinclair ZX80 came along the very cleverly named Sinclair ZX81. (Laughter) And — you see the picture at the bottom? There's a picture of a guy doing homework with his son. That's what they thought they had built it for. The reality is we got the programming manual and we started making games for it. We were programming in BASIC, which is a pretty awful language for games, so we ended up learning Assembly language so we could really take control of the hardware. This is the guy that invented it, Sir Clive Sinclair, and he's showing his machine. You had this same thing in America, it was called the Timex Sinclair1000. To play a game in those days you had to have an imagination to believe that you were really playing "Battlestar Galactica." The graphics were just horrible. You had to have an even better imagination to play this game, "Death Rider." But of course the scientists couldn't help themselves. They started making their own video games. This is one of my favorite ones here, where they have rabbit breeding, so males choose the lucky rabbit. It was around this time we went from 1K to 16K, which was quite the leap. And if you're wondering how much 16K is, this eBay logo here is 16K. And in that amount of memory someone programmed a full flight simulation program. And that's what it looked like. I spent ages flying this flight simulator, and I honestly believed I could fly airplanes by the end of it. Here's Clive Sinclair now launching his color computer. He's recognized as being the father of video games in Europe. He's a multi-millionaire, and I think that's why he's smiling in this photograph. So I went on for the next 20 years or so making a lot of different games. Some of the highlights were things like "The Terminator," "Aladdin," the "Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles." Because I was from the United Kingdom, they thought the word ninja was a little too mean for children, so they decided to call it hero instead. I personally preferred the Spanish version, which was "Tortugas Ninja." That was much better. (Laughter) Then the last game I did was based on trying to get the video game industry and Hollywood to actually work together on something — instead of licensing from each other, to actually work. Now, Chris did ask me to bring some statistics with me, so I've done that. The video game industry in 2005 became a 29 billion dollar business. It grows every year. Last year was the biggest year. By 2008, we're going to kick the butt of the music industry. By 2010, we're going to hit 42 billion. 43 percent of gamers are female. So there's a lot more female gamers than people are really aware. The average age of gamers? Well, obviously it's for children, right? Well, no, actually it's 30 years old. And interestingly, the people who buy the most games are 37. So 37 is our target audience. All video games are violent. Of course the newspapers love to beat on this. But 83 percent of games don't have any mature content whatsoever, so it's just not true. Online gaming statistics. I brought some stuff on "World of Warcraft." It's 5.5 million players. It makes about 80 million bucks a month in subscriptions. It costs 50 bucks just to install it on your computer, making the publisher about another 275 million. The game costs about 80 million dollars to make, so basically it pays for itself in about a month. A player in a game called "Project Entropia" actually bought his own island for 26,500 dollars. You have to remember that this is not a real island. He didn't actually buy anything, just some data. But he got great terms on it. This purchase included mining and hunting rights, ownership of all land on the island, and a castle with no furniture included. (Laughter) This market is now estimated at over 800 million dollars annually. And what's interesting about it is the market was actually created by the gamers themselves. They found clever ways to trade items and to sell their accounts to each other so that they could make money while they were playing their games. I dove onto eBay a couple of days ago just to see what was gong on, typed in World of Warcraft, got 6,000 items. I liked this one the best: a level 60 Warlock with lots of epics for 174,000 dollars. It's like that guy obviously had some pain while making it. So as far as popularity of games, what do you think these people are doing here? It turns out they're actually in Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles listening to the L.A. Philharmonic playing video game music. That's what the show looks like. You would expect it to be cheesy, but it's not. It's very, very epic and a very beautiful concert. And the people that went there absolutely loved it. What do you think these people are doing? They're actually bringing their computers so they can play games against each other. And this is happening in every city around the world. This is happening in your local cities too, you're probably just not aware of it. Now, Chris told me that you had a timeline video a few years ago here just to show how video game graphics have been improving. I wanted to update that video and give you a new look at it. But what I want you to do is to try to understand it. We're on this curve, and the graphics are getting so ridiculously better. And I'm going to show you up to maybe 2007. But I want you to try and think about what games could look like 10 years from now. So we're going to start that video. Video: Throughout human history people have played games. As man's intellect and technology have evolved so too have the games he plays. (Music) (Applause) David Perry: The thing again I want you to think about is, don't look at these graphics and think of that's the way it is. Think about that's where we are right now, and the curve that we're on means that this is going to continue to get better. This is an example of the kind of graphics you need to be able to draw if you wanted to get a job in the video game industry today. You need to be really an incredible artist. And once we get enough of those guys, we're going to want more fantasy artists that can create places we've never been to before, or characters that we've just never seen before. So the obvious thing for me to talk about today is graphics and audio. But if you were to go to a game developers conference, what they're all talking about is emotion, purpose, meaning, understanding and feeling. You'll hear about talks like, can a video game make you cry? And these are the kind of topics we really actually care about. I came across a student who's absolutely excellent at expressing himself, and this student agreed that he would not show his video to anybody until you here at TED had seen it. So I'd like to play this video. So this is a student's opinion on what his experience of games are. Video: I, like many of you, live somewhere between reality and video games. Some part of me — a true living, breathing person — has become programmed, electronic and virtual. The boundary of my brain that divides real from fantasy has finally begun to crumble. I'm a video game addict and this is my story. (Music) In the year of my birth the Nintendo Entertainment System also went into development. I played in the backyard, learned to read, and even ate some of my vegetables. Most of my childhood was spent playing with Legos. But as was the case for most of my generation, I spent a lot of time in front of the TV. Mr. Rogers, Walt Disney, Nick Junior, and roughly half a million commercials have undoubtedly left their mark on me. When my parents bought my sister and I our first Nintendo, whatever inherent addictive quality this early interactive electronic entertainment possessed quickly took hold of me. At some point something clicked. (Music) With the combination of simple, interactive stories and the warmth of the TV set, my simple 16-bit Nintendo became more than just an escape. It became an alternate existence, my virtual reality. (Music) I'm a video game addict, and it's not because of a certain number of hours I have spent playing, or nights I have gone without sleep to finish the next level. It is because I have had life-altering experiences in virtual space, and video games had begun to erode my own understanding of what is real and what is not. I'm addicted, because even though I know I'm losing my grip on reality, I still crave more. (Music) From an early age I learned to invest myself emotionally in what unfolded before me on screen. Today, after 20 years of watching TV geared to make me emotional, even a decent insurance commercial can bring tears to my eyes. I am just one of a new generation that is growing up. A generation who may experience much more meaning through video games than they will through the real world. Video games are nearing an evolutionary leap, a point where game worlds will look and feel just as real as the films we see in theatres, or the news we watch on TV. And while my sense of free will in these virtual worlds may still be limited, what I do learn applies to my real life. Play enough video games and eventually you will really believe you can snowboard, fly a plane, drive a nine-second quarter mile, or kill a man. I know I can. Unlike any pop culture phenomenon before it, video games actually allow us to become part of the machine. They allow us to sublimate into the culture of interactive, downloaded, streaming, HD reality. We are interacting with our entertainment. I have come to expect this level of interaction. Without it, the problems faced in the real world — poverty, war, disease and genocide — lack the levity they should. Their importance blends into the sensationalized drama of prime time TV. But the beauty of video games today lies not in the lifelike graphics, the vibrating joysticks or virtual surround sound. It lies in that these games are beginning to make me emotional. I have fought in wars, feared for my own survival, watched my cohorts die on beaches and woods that look and feel more real than any textbook or any news story. The people who create these games are smart. They know what makes me scared, excited, panicked, proud or sad. Then they use these emotions to dimensionalize the worlds they create. A well-designed video game will seamlessly weave the user into the fabric of the virtual experience. As one becomes more experienced the awareness of physical control melts away. I know what I want and I do it. No buttons to push, no triggers to pull, just me and the game. My fate and the fate of the world around me lie inside my hands. I know violent video games make my mother worry. What troubles me is not that video game violence is becoming more and more like real life violence, but that real life violence is starting to look more and more like a video game. (Music) These are all troubles outside of myself. I, however, have a problem very close to home. Something has happened to my brain. (Music) Perhaps there is a single part of our brain that holds all of our gut instincts, the things we know to do before we even think. While some of these instincts may be innate, most are learned, and all of them are hardwired into our brains. These instincts are essential for survival in both real and virtual worlds. Only in recent years has the technology behind video games allowed for a true overlap in stimuli. As gamers we are now living by the same laws of physics in the same cities and doing many of the same things we once did in real life, only virtually. Consider this — my real life car has about 25,000 miles on it. In all my driving games, I've driven a total of 31,459 miles. To some degree I've learned how to drive from the game. The sensory cues are very similar. It's a funny feeling when you have spent more time doing something on the TV than you have in real life. When I am driving down a road at sunset all I can think is, this is almost as beautiful as my games are. For my virtual worlds are perfect. More beautiful and rich than the real world around us. I'm not sure what the implications of my experience are, but the potential for using realistic video game stimuli in repetition on a vast number of loyal participants is frightening to me. Today I believe Big Brother would find much more success brainwashing the masses with video games rather than just simply TVs. Video games are fun, engaging, and leave your brain completely vulnerable to re-programming. But maybe brainwashing isn't always bad. Imagine a game that teaches us to respect each other, or helps us to understand the problems we're all facing in the real world. There is a potential to do good as well. It is critical, as these virtual worlds continue to mirror the real world we live in, that game developers realize that they have tremendous responsibilities before them. I'm not sure what the future of video games holds for our civilization. But as virtual and real world experiences increasingly overlap there is a greater and greater potential for other people to feel the same way I do. What I have only recently come to realize is that beyond the graphics, sound, game play and emotion it is the power to break down reality that is so fascinating and addictive to me. I know that I am losing my grip. Part of me is just waiting to let go. I know though, that no matter how amazing video games may become, or how flat the real world may seem to us, that we must stay aware of what our games are teaching us and how they leave us feeling when we finally do unplug. (Applause) DP: Wow. (Applause) I found that video very, very thought provoking, and that's why I wanted to bring it here for you guys to see. And what was interesting about it is the obvious choice for me to talk about was graphics and audio. But as you heard, Michael talked about all these other elements as well. Video games give an awful lot of other things too, and that's why people get so addicted. The most important one being fun. The name of this track is "The Magic To Come." Who is that going to come from? Is it going to come from the best directors in the world as we thought it probably would? I don't think so. I think it's going to come from the children who are growing up now that aren't stuck with all of the stuff that we remember from the past. They're going to do it their way, using the tools that we've created. The same with students or highly creative people, writers and people like that. As far as colleges go, there's about 350 colleges around the world teaching video game courses. That means there's literally thousands of new ideas. Some of the ideas are really dreadful and some of them are great. There's nothing worse than having to listen to someone try and pitch you a really bad video game idea. (Laughter) Chris Anderson: You're off, you're off. That's it. He's out of time. DP: I've just got a little tiny bit more if you'll indulge me. CA: Go ahead. I'm going to stay right here though. (Laughter) DP: This is just a cool shot, because this is students coming to school after class. The school is closed; they're coming back at midnight because they want to pitch their video game ideas. I'm sitting at the front of the class, and they're actually pitching their ideas. So it's hard to get students to come back to class, but it is possible. This is my daughter, her name's Emma, she's 17 months old. And I've been asking myself, what is Emma going to experience in the video game world? And as I've shown here, we have the audience. She's never going to know a world where you can't press a button and have millions of people ready to play. You know, we have the technology. She's never going to know a world where the graphics just aren't stunning and really immersive. And as the student video showed, we can impact and move. She's never going to know a world where video games aren't incredibly emotional and will probably make her cry. I just hope she likes video games. (Laughter) So, my closing thought. Games on the surface seem simple entertainment, but for those that like to look a little deeper, the new paradigm of video games could open entirely new frontiers to creative minds that like to think big. Where better to challenge those minds than here at TED? Thank you. Chris Anderson: David Perry. That was awesome.

Lessons from past presidents

Doris Kearns Goodwin

{0: 'Doris Kearns Goodwin'}

{0: ['historian']}

{0: "Doris Kearns Goodwin writes insightful books on the US Presidency (JFK, LBJ, FDR and Lincoln, so far), telling each president's personal story against the backdrop of history."}

2008-02-02

2008-10-07

TED2008

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['entertainment', 'history', 'politics', 'sports', 'storytelling', 'work-life balance']

{208: 'The life-long learner', 204: 'Tales of passion', 60: 'Four American characters', 708: 'The art of the interview', 1983: 'Success, failure and the drive to keep creating', 562: 'Odes to vice and consequences'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/doris_kearns_goodwin_lessons_from_past_presidents/

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin talks about what we can learn from American presidents, including Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson. Then she shares a moving memory of her own father, and of their shared love of baseball.

So, indeed, I have spent my life looking into the lives of presidents who are no longer alive. Waking up with Abraham Lincoln in the morning, thinking of Franklin Roosevelt when I went to bed at night. But when I try and think about what I've learned about the meaning in life, my mind keeps wandering back to a seminar that I took when I was a graduate student at Harvard with the great psychologist Erik Erikson. He taught us that the richest and fullest lives attempt to achieve an inner balance between three realms: work, love and play. And that to pursue one realm to the disregard of the other, is to open oneself to ultimate sadness in older age. Whereas to pursue all three with equal dedication, is to make possible a life filled not only with achievement, but with serenity. So since I tell stories, let me look back on the lives of two of the presidents I've studied to illustrate this point — Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson. As for that first sphere of work, I think what Abraham Lincoln's life suggests is that fierce ambition is a good thing. He had a huge ambition. But it wasn't simply for office or power or celebrity or fame — what it was for was to accomplish something worthy enough in life so that he could make the world a little better place for his having lived in it. Even as a child, it seemed, Lincoln dreamed heroic dreams. He somehow had to escape that hard-scrabble farm from which he was born. No schooling was possible for him, except a few weeks here, a few weeks there. But he read books in every spare moment he could find. It was said when he got a copy of the King James Bible or "Aesop's Fables," he was so excited he couldn't sleep. He couldn't eat. The great poet Emily Dickinson once said, "There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away." How true for Lincoln. Though he never would travel to Europe, he went with Shakespeare's kings to merry England, he went with Lord Byron's poetry to Spain and Portugal. Literature allowed him to transcend his surroundings. But there were so many losses in his early life that he was haunted by death. His mother died when he was only nine years old; his only sister, Sarah, in childbirth a few years later; and his first love, Ann Rutledge, at the age of 22. Moreover, when his mother lay dying, she did not hold out for him the hope that they would meet in an afterworld. She simply said to him, "Abraham, I'm going away from you now, and I shall never return." As a result he became obsessed with the thought that when we die our life is swept away — dust to dust. But only as he grew older did he develop a certain consolation from an ancient Greek notion — but followed by other cultures as well — that if you could accomplish something worthy in your life, you could live on in the memory of others. Your honor and your reputation would outlive your earthly existence. And that worthy ambition became his lodestar. It carried him through the one significant depression that he suffered when he was in his early 30s. Three things had combined to lay him low. He had broken his engagement with Mary Todd, not certain he was ready to marry her, but knowing how devastating it was to her that he did that. His one intimate friend, Joshua Speed, was leaving Illinois to go back to Kentucky because Speed's father had died. And his political career in the state legislature was on a downward slide. He was so depressed that friends worried he was suicidal. They took all knives and razors and scissors from his room. And his great friend Speed went to his side and said, "Lincoln, you must rally or you will die." He said that, "I would just as soon die right now, but I've not yet done anything to make any human being remember that I have lived." So fueled by that ambition, he returned to the state legislature. He eventually won a seat in Congress. He then ran twice for the Senate, lost twice. "Everyone is broken by life," Ernest Hemingway once said, "but some people are stronger in the broken places." So then he surprised the nation with an upset victory for the presidency over three far more experienced, far more educated, far more celebrated rivals. And then when he won the general election, he stunned the nation even more by appointing each of these three rivals into his Cabinet. It was an unprecedented act at the time because everybody thought, "He'll look like a figurehead compared to these people." They said, "Why are you doing this, Lincoln?" He said, "Look, these are the strongest and most able men in the country. The country is in peril. I need them by my side." But perhaps my old friend Lyndon Johnson might have put it in less noble fashion: "Better to have your enemies inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in." (Laughter) But it soon became clear that Abraham Lincoln would emerge as the undisputed captain of this unruly team. For each of them soon came to understand that he possessed an unparalleled array of emotional strengths and political skills that proved far more important than the thinness of his external résumé. For one thing, he possessed an uncanny ability to empathize with and to think about other peoples' point of view. He repaired injured feelings that might have escalated into permanent hostility. He shared credit with ease, assumed responsibility for the failure of his subordinates, constantly acknowledged his errors and learned from his mistakes. These are the qualities we should be looking for in our candidates in 2008. (Applause) He refused to be provoked by petty grievances. He never submitted to jealousy or brooded over perceived slights. And he expressed his unshakeable convictions in everyday language, in metaphors, in stories. And with a beauty of language — almost as if the Shakespeare and the poetry he had so loved as a child had worked their way into his very soul. In 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, he brought his old friend, Joshua Speed, back to the White House, and remembered that conversation of decades before, when he was so sad. And he, pointing to the Proclamation, said, "I believe, in this measure, my fondest hopes will be realized." But as he was about to put his signature on the Proclamation his own hand was numb and shaking because he had shaken a thousand hands that morning at a New Year's reception. So he put the pen down. He said, "If ever my soul were in an act, it is in this act. But if I sign with a shaking hand, posterity will say, 'He hesitated.'" So he waited until he could take up the pen and sign with a bold and clear hand. But even in his wildest dreams, Lincoln could never have imagined how far his reputation would reach. I was so thrilled to find an interview with the great Russian writer, Leo Tolstoy, in a New York newspaper in the early 1900s. And in it, Tolstoy told of a trip that he'd recently made to a very remote area of the Caucasus, where there were only wild barbarians, who had never left this part of Russia. Knowing that Tolstoy was in their midst, they asked him to tell stories of the great men of history. So he said, "I told them about Napoleon and Alexander the Great and Frederick the Great and Julius Caesar, and they loved it. But before I finished, the chief of the barbarians stood up and said, 'But wait, you haven't told us about the greatest ruler of them all. We want to hear about that man who spoke with a voice of thunder, who laughed like the sunrise, who came from that place called America, which is so far from here, that if a young man should travel there, he would be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man. Tell us of Abraham Lincoln.'" He was stunned. He told them everything he could about Lincoln. And then in the interview he said, "What made Lincoln so great? Not as great a general as Napoleon, not as great a statesman as Frederick the Great." But his greatness consisted, and historians would roundly agree, in the integrity of his character and the moral fiber of his being. So in the end that powerful ambition that had carried Lincoln through his bleak childhood had been realized. That ambition that had allowed him to laboriously educate himself by himself, to go through that string of political failures and the darkest days of the war. His story would be told. So as for that second sphere, not of work, but of love — encompassing family, friends and colleagues — it, too, takes work and commitment. The Lyndon Johnson that I saw in the last years of his life, when I helped him on his memoirs, was a man who had spent so many years in the pursuit of work, power and individual success, that he had absolutely no psychic or emotional resources left to get him through the days once the presidency was gone. My relationship with him began on a rather curious level. I was selected as a White House Fellow when I was 24 years old. We had a big dance at the White House. President Johnson did dance with me that night. Not that peculiar — there were only three women out of the 16 White House Fellows. But he did whisper in my ear that he wanted me to work directly for him in the White House. But it was not to be that simple. For in the months leading up to my selection, like many young people, I'd been active in the anti-Vietnam War movement, and had written an article against Lyndon Johnson, which unfortunately came out in The New Republic two days after the dance in the White House. (Laugher) And the theme of the article was how to remove Lyndon Johnson from power. (Laughter) So I was certain he would kick me out of the program. But instead, surprisingly, he said, "Oh, bring her down here for a year, and if I can't win her over, no one can." So I did end up working for him in the White House. Eventually accompanied him to his ranch to help him on those memoirs, never fully understanding why he'd chosen me to spend so many hours with. I like to believe it was because I was a good listener. He was a great storyteller. Fabulous, colorful, anecdotal stories. There was a problem with these stories, however, which I later discovered, which is that half of them weren't true. But they were great, nonetheless. (Laughter) So I think that part of his attraction for me was that I loved listening to his tall tales. But I also worried that part of it was that I was then a young woman. And he had somewhat of a minor league womanizing reputation. So I constantly chatted to him about boyfriends, even when I didn't have any at all. Everything was working perfectly, until one day he said he wanted to discuss our relationship. Sounded very ominous when he took me nearby to the lake, conveniently called Lake Lyndon Baines Johnson. And there was wine and cheese and a red-checked tablecloth — all the romantic trappings. And he started out, "Doris, more than any other woman I have ever known ... " And my heart sank. And then he said, "You remind me of my mother." (Laughter) It was pretty embarrassing, given what was going on in my mind. But I must say, the older I've gotten, the more I realize what an incredible privilege it was to have spent so many hours with this aging lion of a man. A victor in a thousand contests, three great civil rights laws, Medicare, aid to education. And yet, roundly defeated in the end by the war in Vietnam. And because he was so sad and so vulnerable, he opened up to me in ways he never would have had I known him at the height of his power — sharing his fears, his sorrows and his worries. And I'd like to believe that the privilege fired within me the drive to understand the inner person behind the public figure, that I've tried to bring to each of my books since then. But it also brought home to me the lessons which Erik Erikson had tried to instill in all of us about the importance of finding balance in life. For on the surface, Lyndon Johnson should have had everything in the world to feel good about in those last years, in the sense that he had been elected to the presidency; he had all the money he needed to pursue any leisure activity he wanted; he owned a spacious ranch in the countryside, a penthouse in the city, sailboats, speedboats. He had servants to answer any whim, and he had a family who loved him deeply. And yet, years of concentration solely on work and individual success meant that in his retirement he could find no solace in family, in recreation, in sports or in hobbies. It was almost as if the hole in his heart was so large that even the love of a family, without work, could not fill it. As his spirits sagged, his body deteriorated until, I believe, he slowly brought about his own death. In those last years, he said he was so sad watching the American people look toward a new president and forgetting him. He spoke with immense sadness in his voice, saying maybe he should have spent more time with his children, and their children in turn. But it was too late. Despite all that power, all that wealth, he was alone when he finally died — his ultimate terror realized. So as for that third sphere of play, which he never had learned to enjoy, I've learned over the years that even this sphere requires a commitment of time and energy — enough so that a hobby, a sport, a love of music, or art, or literature, or any form of recreation, can provide true pleasure, relaxation and replenishment. So deep, for instance, was Abraham Lincoln's love of Shakespeare, that he made time to spend more than a hundred nights in the theater, even during those dark days of the war. He said, when the lights went down and a Shakespeare play came on, for a few precious hours he could imagine himself back in Prince Hal's time. But an even more important form of relaxation for him, that Lyndon Johnson never could enjoy, was a love of — somehow — humor, and feeling out what hilarious parts of life can produce as a sidelight to the sadness. He once said that he laughed so he did not cry, that a good story, for him, was better than a drop of whiskey. His storytelling powers had first been recognized when he was on the circuit in Illinois. The lawyers and the judges would travel from one county courthouse to the other, and when anyone was knowing Lincoln was in town, they would come from miles around to listen to him tell stories. He would stand with his back against a fire and entertain the crowd for hours with his winding tales. And all these stories became part of his memory bank, so he could call on them whenever he needed to. And they're not quite what you might expect from our marble monument. One of his favorite stories, for example, had to do with the Revolutionary War hero, Ethan Allen. And as Lincoln told the story, Mr. Allen went to Britain after the war. And the British people were still upset about losing the Revolution, so they decided to embarrass him a little bit by putting a huge picture of General Washington in the only outhouse, where he'd have to encounter it. They figured he'd be upset about the indignity of George Washington being in an outhouse. But he came out of the outhouse not upset at all. And so they said, "Well, did you see George Washington in there?" "Oh, yes," he said, "perfectly appropriate place for him." "What do you mean?" they said. "Well," he said, "there's nothing to make an Englishman shit faster than the sight of General George Washington." (Laughter) (Applause) So you can imagine, if you are in the middle of a tense cabinet meeting — and he had hundreds of these stories — you would have to relax. So between his nightly treks to the theater, his story telling, and his extraordinary sense of humor and his love of quoting Shakespeare and poetry, he found that form of play which carried him through his days. In my own life, I shall always be grateful for having found a form of play in my irrational love of baseball. Which allows me, from the beginning of spring training to the end of the fall, to have something to occupy my mind and heart other than my work. It all began when I was only six years old, and my father taught me that mysterious art of keeping score while listening to baseball games — so that when he went to work in New York during the day, I could record for him the history of that afternoon's Brooklyn Dodgers game. Now, when you're only six years old, and your father comes home every single night and listens to you — as I now realize that I, in excruciating detail, recounted every single play of every inning of the game that had just taken place that afternoon. But he made me feel I was telling him a fabulous story. It makes you think there's something magic about history to keep your father's attention. In fact, I'm convinced I learned the narrative art from those nightly sessions with my father. Because at first, I'd be so excited I would blurt out, "The Dodgers won!" or, "The Dodgers lost!" Which took much of the drama of this two-hour telling away. (Laughter) So I finally learned you had to tell a story from beginning to middle to end. I must say, so fervent was my love of the old Brooklyn Dodgers in those days that I had to confess in my first confession two sins that related to baseball. The first occurred because the Dodgers' catcher, Roy Campanella, came to my hometown of Rockville Centre, Long Island, just as I was in preparation for my first Holy Communion. And I was so excited — first person I'd ever see outside of Ebbets Field. But it so happened he was speaking in a Protestant Church. When you are brought up as a Catholic, you think that if you ever set foot in a Protestant Church, you'll be struck dead at the threshold. So I went to my father in tears, "What are we going to do?" He said, "Don't worry. He's speaking in a parish hall. We're sitting in folding chairs. He's talking about sportsmanship. It's not a sin." But as I left that night, I was certain that somehow I'd traded the life of my everlasting soul for this one night with Roy Campanella. (Laughter) And there were no indulgences around that I could buy. So I had this sin on my soul when I went to my first confession. I told the priest right away. He said, "No problem. It wasn't a religious service." But then, unfortunately, he said, "And what else, my child?" And then came my second sin. I tried to sandwich it in between talking too much in church, wishing harm to others, being mean to my sisters. And he said, "To whom did you wish harm?" And I had to say that I wished that various New York Yankees players would break arms, legs and ankles — (Laughter) — so that the Brooklyn Dodgers could win their first World Series. He said, "How often do you make these horrible wishes?" And I had to say, every night when I said my prayers. (Laughter) So he said, "Look, I'll tell you something. I love the Brooklyn Dodgers, as you do, but I promise you some day they will win fairly and squarely. You do not need to wish harm on others to make it happen." "Oh yes," I said. But luckily, my first confession — to a baseball-loving priest! (Laughter) Well, though my father died of a sudden heart attack when I was still in my 20s, before I had gotten married and had my three sons, I have passed his memory — as well as his love of baseball — on to my boys. Though when the Dodgers abandoned us to come to L.A., I lost faith in baseball until I moved to Boston and became an irrational Red Sox fan. And I must say, even now, when I sit with my sons with our season tickets, I can sometimes close my eyes against the sun and imagine myself, a young girl once more, in the presence of my father, watching the players of my youth on the grassy fields below: Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, and Duke Snider. I must say there is magic in these moments. When I open my eyes and I see my sons in the place where my father once sat, I feel an invisible loyalty and love linking my sons to the grandfather whose face they never had a chance to see, but whose heart and soul they have come to know through all the stories I have told. Which is why, in the end, I shall always be grateful for this curious love of history, allowing me to spend a lifetime looking back into the past. Allowing me to learn from these large figures about the struggle for meaning for life. Allowing me to believe that the private people we have loved and lost in our families, and the public figures we have respected in our history, just as Abraham Lincoln wanted to believe, really can live on, so long as we pledge to tell and to retell the stories of their lives. Thank you for letting me be that storyteller today. (Applause) Thank you.

The Web as a city

Steven Johnson

{0: 'Steven Johnson'}

{0: ['writer']}

{0: 'Steven Berlin Johnson examines the intersection of science, technology and personal experience.'}

2003-02-02

2008-10-08

TED2003

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'tr', 'uk', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['cities', 'communication', 'community', 'design', 'global issues', 'web']

{319: 'The next 5,000 days of the web', 216: 'The new power of collaboration', 72: "Technology's long tail", 1091: 'Beware online "filter bubbles"', 2061: 'A Magna Carta for the web', 783: 'Is Pivot a turning point for web exploration?'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_the_web_as_a_city/

Outside.in's Steven Johnson says the Web is like a city: built by many people, completely controlled by no one, intricately interconnected and yet functioning as many independent parts. While disaster strikes in one place, elsewhere, life goes on.

I want to take you back basically to my hometown, and to a picture of my hometown of the week that "Emergence" came out. And it's a picture we've seen several times. Basically, "Emergence" was published on 9/11. I live right there in the West Village, so the plume was luckily blowing west, away from us. We had a two-and-a-half-day-old baby in the house that was ours — we hadn't taken it from somebody else. (Laughter) And one of the thoughts that I had dealing with these two separate emergences of a book and a baby, and having this event happen so close — that my first thought, when I was still kind of in the apartment looking out at it all or walking out on the street and looking out on it just in front of our building, was that I'd made a terrible miscalculation in the book that I'd just written. Because so much of that book was a celebration of the power and creative potential of density, of largely urban density, of connecting people and putting them together in one place, and putting them on sidewalks together and having them share ideas and share physical space together. And it seemed to me looking at that — that tower burning and then falling, those towers burning and falling — that in fact, one of the lessons here was that density kills. And that of all the technologies that were exploited to make that carnage come into being, probably the single group of technologies that cost the most lives were those that enable 50,000 people to live in two buildings 110 stories above the ground. If they hadn't been crowded — you compare the loss of life at the Pentagon to the Twin Towers, and you can see that very powerfully. And so I started to think, well, you know, density, density — I'm not sure if, you know, this was the right call. And I kind of ruminated on that for a couple of days. And then about two days later, the wind started to change a little bit, and you could sense that the air was not healthy. And so even though there were no cars still in the West Village where we lived, my wife sent me out to buy a, you know, a large air filter at the Bed Bath and Beyond, which was located about 20 blocks away, north. And so I went out. And obviously I'm physically a very strong person, as you can tell — (Laughter) — so I wasn't worried about carrying this thing 20 blocks. And I walked out, and this really miraculous thing happened to me as I was walking north to buy this air filter, which was that the streets were completely alive with people. There was an incredible — it was, you know, a beautiful day, as it was for about a week after, and the West Village had never seemed more lively. I walked up along Hudson Street — where Jane Jacobs had lived and written her great book that so influenced what I was writing in "Emergence" — past the White Horse Tavern, that great old bar where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death, and the Bleecker Street playground was filled with kids. And all the people who lived in the neighborhood, who owned restaurants and bars in the neighborhood, were all out there — had them all open. People were out. There were no cars, so it seemed even better, in some ways. And it was a beautiful urban day, and the incredible thing about it was that the city was working. The city was there. All the things that make a great city successful and all the things that make a great city stimulating — they were all on display there on those streets. And I thought, well, this is the power of a city. I mean, the power of the city — we talked about cities as being centralized in space, but what makes them so strong most of the time is they're decentralized in function. They don't have a center executive branch that you can take out and cause the whole thing to fail. If they did, it probably was right there at Ground Zero. I mean, you know, the emergency bunker was right there, was destroyed by the attacks, and obviously the damage done to the building and the lives. But nonetheless, just 20 blocks north, two days later, the city had never looked more alive. If you'd gone into the minds of the people, well, you would have seen a lot of trauma, and you would have seen a lot of heartache, and you would have seen a lot of things that would take a long time to recover. But the system itself of this city was thriving. So I took heart in seeing that. So I wanted to talk a little bit about the reasons why that works so well, and how some of those reasons kind of map on to where the Web is going right now. The question that I found myself asking to people when I was talking about the book afterwards is — when you've talked about emergent behavior, when you've talked about collective intelligence, the best way to get people to kind of wrap their heads around that is to ask, who builds a neighborhood? Who decides that Soho should have this personality and that the Latin Quarter should have this personality? Well, there are some kind of executive decisions, but mostly the answer is — everybody and nobody. Everybody contributes a little bit. No single person is really the ultimate actor behind the personality of a neighborhood. Same thing to the question of, who was keeping the streets alive post-9/11 in my neighborhood? Well, it was the whole city. The whole system kind of working on it, and everybody contributing a small little part. And this is increasingly what we're starting to see on the Web in a bunch of interesting ways — most of which weren't around, actually, except in very experimental things, when I was writing "Emergence" and when the book came out. So it's been a very optimistic time, I think, and I want to just talk about a few of those things. I think that there is effectively a new kind of model of interactivity that's starting to emerge online right now. And the old one looked like this. This is not the future King of England, although it looks like it. It's some guy, it's a GeoCities homepage of some guy that I found online who's interested, if you look at the bottom, in soccer and Jesus and Garth Brooks and Clint Beckham and "my hometown" — those are his links. But nothing really says this model of interactivity — which was so exciting and captures the real, the Web Zeitgeist of 1995 — than "Click here for a picture of my dog." That is — you know, there's no sentence that kind of conjures up that period better than that, I think, which is that you suddenly have the power to put up a picture of your dog and link to it, and somebody reading the page has the power to click on that link or not click on that link. And, you know, I don't want to belittle that. That, in a sense — to reference what Jeff was talking about yesterday — that was, in a sense, the kind of interface electricity that powered a lot of the explosion of interest in the Web: that you could put up a link, and somebody could click on it, and it could take you anywhere you wanted to go. But it's still a very one-to-one kind of relationship. There's one person putting up the link, and there's another person on the other end trying to decide whether to click on it or not. The new model is much more like this, and we've already seen a couple of references to this. This is what happens when you search "Steven Johnson" on Google. About two months ago, I had the great breakthrough — one of my great, kind of shining achievements — which is that my website finally became a top result for "Steven Johnson." There's some theoretical physicist at MIT named Steven Johnson who has dropped two spots, I'm happy to say. (Laughter) And, you know, I mean, I'll look at a couple of things like this, but Google is obviously the greatest technology ever invented for navel gazing. It's just that there are so many other people in your navel when you gaze. Because effectively, what's happening here, what's creating this page, obviously — and we all know this, but it's worth just thinking about it — is not some person deciding that I am the number one answer for Steven Johnson, but rather somehow the entire web of people putting up pages and deciding to link to my page or not link to it, and Google just sitting there and running the numbers. So there's this collective decision-making that's going on. This page is effectively, collectively authored by the Web, and Google is just helping us kind of to put the authorship in one kind of coherent place. Now, they're more innovative — well, Google's pretty innovative — but there are some new twists on this. There's this incredibly interesting new site — Technorati — that's filled with lots of little widgets that are expanding on these. And these are looking in the blog world and the world of weblogs. He's analyzed basically all the weblogs out there that he's tracking. And he's tracking how many other weblogs linked to those weblogs, and so you have kind of an authority — a weblog that has a lot of links to it is more authoritative than a weblog that has few links to it. And so at any given time, on any given page on the Web, actually, you can say, what does the weblog community think about this page? And you can get a list. This is what they think about my site; it's ranked by blog authority. You can also rank it by the latest posts. So when I was talking in "Emergence," I talked about the limitations of the one-way linking architecture that, basically, you could link to somebody else but they wouldn't necessarily know that you were pointing to them. And that was one of the reasons why the web wasn't quite as emergent as it could be because you needed two-way linking, you needed that kind of feedback mechanism to be able to really do interesting things. Well, something like Technorati is supplying that. Now what's interesting here is that this is a quote from Dave Weinberger, where he talks about everything being purposive in the Web — there's nothing artificial. He has this line where he says, you know, you're going to put up a link there, if you see a link, somebody decided to put it there. And he says, the link to one site didn't just grow on the other page "like a tree fungus." And in fact, I think that's not entirely true anymore. I could put up a feed of all those links generated by Technorati on the right-hand side of my page, and they would change as the overall ecology of the Web changes. That little list there would change. I wouldn't really be directly in control of it. So it's much closer, in a way, to a data fungus, in a sense, wrapped around that page, than it is to a deliberate link that I've placed there. Now, what you're having here is basically a global brain that you're able to do lots of kind of experiments on to see what it's thinking. And there are all these interesting tools. Google does the Google Zeitgeist, which looks at search requests to test what's going on, what people are interested in, and they publish it with lots of fun graphs. And I'm saying a lot of nice things about Google, so I'll be I'll be saying one little critical thing. There's a problem with the Google Zeitgeist, which is it often comes back with news that a lot of people are searching for Britney Spears pictures, which is not necessarily news. The Columbia blows up, suddenly there are a lot of searches on Columbia. Well, you know, we should expect to see that. That's not necessarily something we didn't know already. So the key thing in terms of these new tools that are kind of plumbing the depths of the global brain, that are sending kind of trace dyes through that whole bloodstream — the question is, are you finding out something new? And one of the things that I experimented with is this thing called Google Share which is basically, you take an abstract term, and you search Google for that term, and then you search the results that you get back for somebody's name. So basically, the number of pages that mention this term, that also mention this page, the percentage of those pages is that person's Google Share of that term. So you can do kind of interesting contests. Like for instance, this is a Google Share of the TED Conference. So Richard Saul Wurman has about a 15 percent Google Share of the TED conference. Our good friend Chris has about a six percent — but with a bullet, I might add. (Laughter) But the interesting thing is, you can broaden the search a little bit. And it turns out, actually, that 42 percent is the Mola mola fish. I had no idea. No, that's not true. (Laughter) I made that up because I just wanted to put up a slide of the Mola mola fish. (Laughter) I also did — and I don't want to start a little fight in the next panel — but I did a Google Share analysis of evolution and natural selection. So right here — now this is a big category, you have smaller percentages, so this is 0.7 percent — Dan Dennett, who'll be speaking shortly. Right below him, 0.5 percent, Steven Pinker. So Dennett's in the lead a little bit there. But what's interesting is you can then broaden the search and actually see interesting things and get a sense of what else is out there. So Gary Bauer is not too far behind — has slightly different theories about evolution and natural selection. And right behind him is L. Ron Hubbard. So — (Laughter) you can see we're in the ascot, which is always good. And by the way, Chris, that would've been a really good panel, I think, right there. (Laughter) Hubbard apparently started to reach, but besides that, I think it would be good next year. Another quick thing — this is a slightly different thing, but this analysis some of you may have seen. It just came out. This is bursty words, looking at the historical record of State of the Union Addresses. So these are words that suddenly start to appear out of nowhere, so they're kind of, you know, memes that start taking off, that didn't have a lot of historical precedent before. So the first one is — these are the bursty words around 1860s — slaves, emancipation, slavery, rebellion, Kansas. That's Britney Spears. I mean, you know, OK, interesting. They're talking about slavery in 1860. 1935 — relief, depression, recovery banks. And OK, I didn't learn anything new there as well — that's pretty obvious. 1985, right at the center of the Reagan years — that's, we're, there's, we've, it's. (Laughter) Now, there's one way to interpret this, which is to say that "emancipation" and "depression" and "recovery" all have a lot of syllables. So you know, you can actually download — it's hard to remember those. But seriously, actually, what you can see there, in a way that would be very hard to detect otherwise, is Reagan reinventing the political language of the country and shifting to a much more intimate, much more folksy, much more telegenic — contracting all those verbs. You know, 20 years before it was still, "Ask not what you can do," but with Reagan, it's, "that's where, there's Nancy and I," that kind of language. And so something we kind of knew, but you didn't actually notice syntactically what he was doing. I'll go very quickly. The question now — and this is the really interesting question — is, what kind of higher-level shape is emerging right now in the overall Web ecosystem — and particularly in the ecosystem of the blogs because they are really kind of at the cutting edge. And I think what happens there will also happen in the wider system. Now there was a very interesting article by Clay Shirky that got a lot of attention about a month ago, and this is basically the distribution of links on the web to all these various different blogs. It follows a power law, so that there are a few extremely well-linked to, popular blogs, and a long tail of blogs with very few links. So 20 percent of the blogs get 80 percent of the links. Now this is a very interesting thing. It's caused a lot of controversy because people thought that this was the ultimate kind of one man, one modem democracy, where anybody can get out there and get their voice heard. And so the question is, "Why is this happening?" It's not being imposed by fiat from above. It's an emergent property of the blogosphere right now. Now, what's great about it is that people are working on — within seconds of Clay publishing this piece, people started working on changing the underlying rules of the system so that a different shape would start appearing. And basically, the shape appears largely because of a kind of a first-mover advantage. if you're the first site there, everybody links to you. If you're the second site there, most people link to you. And so very quickly you can accumulate a bunch of links, and it makes it more likely for newcomers to link to you in the future, and then you get this kind of shape. And so what Dave Sifry at Technorati started working on, literally as Shirky started — after he published his piece — was something that basically just gave a new kind of priority to newcomers. And he started looking at interesting newcomers that don't have a lot of links, that suddenly get a bunch of links in the last 24 hours. So in a sense, bursty weblogs coming from new voices. So he's working on a tool right there that can actually change the overall system. And it creates a kind of planned emergence. You're not totally in control, but you're changing the underlying rules in interesting ways because you have an end result which is maybe a more democratic spread of voices. So the most amazing thing about this — and I'll end on this note — is, most emergent systems, most self-organizing systems are not made up of component parts that are capable of looking at the overall pattern and changing their behavior based on whether they like the pattern or not. So the most wonderful thing, I think, about this whole debate about power laws and software that could change it is the fact that we're having the conversation. I hope it continues here. Thanks a lot.

Playing invisible turntables

James Burchfield

{0: 'James Burchfield'}

{0: ['human beatbox']}

{0: 'James Burchfield is a human beatbox. Using only his mouth, tongue, throat and vocal cords, he performs heavy, layered, club-style jams that seem to come from real drum machines and lusciously scratched turntables.'}

2003-02-02

2008-10-10

TED2003

en

['ar', 'bg', 'bn', 'ca', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'gu', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ka', 'ko', 'ku', 'lt', 'lv', 'mk', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sq', 'sr', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['entertainment', 'humor', 'illusion', 'live music', 'music', 'performance']

{103: 'How to truly listen', 14: 'Software (as) art', 218: 'The untouchable music of the theremin', 2147: 'A dance in a hurricane of paper, wind and light', 2273: 'An 11-year-old prodigy performs old-school jazz', 179: 'My magic moves'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/james_burchfield_playing_invisible_turntables/

Human beatbox James "AudioPoet" Burchfield performs an intricate three-minute breakdown -- sexy, propulsive hip-hop rhythms and turntable textures -- all using only his voice.

Let's just get started here. Okay, just a moment. (Whirring) All right. (Laughter) Oh, sorry. (Music) (Beatboxing) Thank you. (Applause)

An 8-dimensional model of the universe

Garrett Lisi

{0: 'Garrett Lisi'}

{0: ['physicist']}

{0: 'Physicist Garrett Lisi has proposed a new "theory of everything" -- a grand unified theory that explains all the elementary particles, as well as gravity.'}

2008-02-02

2008-10-14

TED2008

en

['ar', 'az', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'th', 'tr', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['physics', 'science', 'technology']

{253: "CERN's supercollider", 47: 'Chemical scum that dream of distant quasars', 326: 'Shedding light on dark matter', 2654: 'How we explore unanswered questions in physics', 27790: "What's the smallest thing in the universe?", 2396: 'Have we reached the end of physics?'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/garrett_lisi_an_8_dimensional_model_of_the_universe/

Physicist and surfer Garrett Lisi presents a controversial new model of the universe that -- just maybe -- answers all the big questions. If nothing else, it's the most beautiful 8-dimensional model of elementary particles and forces you've ever seen.

Whoa, dude. (Laughter) Check out those killer equations. Sweet. Actually, for the next 18 minutes I'm going to do the best I can to describe the beauty of particle physics without equations. It turns out there's a lot we can learn from coral. A coral is a very beautiful and unusual animal. Each coral head consists of thousands of individual polyps. These polyps are continually budding and branching into genetically identical neighbors. If we imagine this to be a hyperintelligent coral, we can single out an individual and ask him a reasonable question. We can ask how exactly he got to be in this particular location compared to his neighbors — if it was just chance, or destiny, or what? Now, after admonishing us for turning the temperature up too high, he would tell us that our question was completely stupid. These corals can be kind of mean, you see, and I have surfing scars to prove that. But this polyp would continue and tell us that his neighbors were quite clearly identical copies of him. That he was in all these other locations as well, but experiencing them as separate individuals. For a coral, branching into different copies is the most natural thing in the world. Unlike us, a hyperintelligent coral would be uniquely prepared to understand quantum mechanics. The mathematics of quantum mechanics very accurately describes how our universe works. And it tells us our reality is continually branching into different possibilities, just like a coral. It's a weird thing for us humans to wrap our minds around, since we only ever get to experience one possibility. This quantum weirdness was first described by Erwin Schrödinger and his cat. The cat likes this version better. (Laughter) In this setup, Schrödinger is in a box with a radioactive sample that, by the laws of quantum mechanics, branches into a state in which it is radiated and a state in which it is not. (Laughter) In the branch in which the sample radiates, it sets off a trigger that releases poison and Schrödinger is dead. But in the other branch of reality, he remains alive. These realities are experienced separately by each individual. As far as either can tell, the other one doesn't exist. This seems weird to us, because each of us only experiences an individual existence, and we don't get to see other branches. It's as if each of us, like Schrödinger here, are a kind of coral branching into different possibilities. The mathematics of quantum mechanics tells us this is how the world works at tiny scales. It can be summed up in a single sentence: Everything that can happen, does. That's quantum mechanics. But this does not mean everything happens. The rest of physics is about describing what can happen and what can't. What physics tells us is that everything comes down to geometry and the interactions of elementary particles. And things can happen only if these interactions are perfectly balanced. Now I'll go ahead and describe how we know about these particles, what they are and how this balance works. In this machine, a beam of protons and antiprotons are accelerated to near the speed of light and brought together in a collision, producing a burst of pure energy. This energy is immediately converted into a spray of subatomic particles, with detectors and computers used to figure out their properties. This enormous machine — the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva — has a circumference of 17 miles and, when it's operating, draws five times as much power as the city of Monterey. We can't predict specifically what particles will be produced in any individual collision. Quantum mechanics tells us all possibilities are realized. But physics does tell us what particles can be produced. These particles must have just as much mass and energy as is carried in by the proton and antiproton. Any particles more massive than this energy limit aren't produced, and remain invisible to us. This is why this new particle accelerator is so exciting. It's going to push this energy limit seven times beyond what's ever been done before, so we're going to get to see some new particles very soon. But before talking about what we might see, let me describe the particles we already know of. There's a whole zoo of subatomic particles. Most of us are familiar with electrons. A lot of people in this room make a good living pushing them around. (Laughter) But the electron also has a neutral partner called the neutrino, with no electric charge and a very tiny mass. In contrast, the up and down quarks have very large masses, and combine in threes to make the protons and neutrons inside atoms. All of these matter particles come in left- and right-handed varieties, and have antiparticle partners that carry opposite charges. These familiar particles also have less familiar second and third generations, which have the same charges as the first but have much higher masses. These matter particles all interact with the various force particles. The electromagnetic force interacts with electrically charged matter via particles called photons. There is also a very weak force called, rather unimaginatively, the weak force ... (Laughter) that interacts only with left-handed matter. The strong force acts between quarks which carry a different kind of charge, called color charge, and come in three different varieties: red, green and blue. You can blame Murray Gell-Mann for these names — they're his fault. Finally, there's the force of gravity, which interacts with matter via its mass and spin. The most important thing to understand here is that there's a different kind of charge associated with each of these forces. These four different forces interact with matter according to the corresponding charges that each particle has. A particle that hasn't been seen yet, but we're pretty sure exists, is the Higgs particle, which gives masses to all these other particles. The main purpose of the Large Hadron Collider is to see this Higgs particle, and we're almost certain it will. But the greatest mystery is what else we might see. And I'm going to show you one beautiful possibility towards the end of this talk. Now, if we count up all these different particles using their various spins and charges, there are 226. That's a lot of particles to keep track of. And it seems strange that nature would have so many elementary particles. But if we plot them out according to their charges, some beautiful patterns emerge. The most familiar charge is electric charge. Electrons have an electric charge, a negative one, and quarks have electric charges in thirds. So when two up quarks and a down quark are combined to make a proton, it has a total electric charge of plus one. These particles also have antiparticles, which have opposite charges. Now, it turns out the electric charge is actually a combination of two other charges: hypercharge and weak charge. If we spread out the hypercharge and weak charge and plot the charges of particles in this two-dimensional charge space, the electric charge is where these particles sit along the vertical direction. The electromagnetic and weak forces interact with matter according to their hypercharge and weak charge, which make this pattern. This is called the unified electroweak model, and it was put together back in 1967. The reason most of us are only familiar with electric charge and not both of these is because of the Higgs particle. The Higgs, over here on the left, has a large mass and breaks the symmetry of this electroweak pattern. It makes the weak force very weak by giving the weak particles a large mass. Since this massive Higgs sits along the horizontal direction in this diagram, the photons of electromagnetism remain massless and interact with electric charge along the vertical direction in this charge space. So the electromagnetic and weak forces are described by this pattern of particle charges in two-dimensional space. We can include the strong force by spreading out its two charge directions and plotting the charges of the force particles in quarks along these directions. The charges of all known particles can be plotted in a four-dimensional charge space, and projected down to two dimensions like this so we can see them. Whenever particles interact, nature keeps things in a perfect balance along all four of these charge directions. If a particle and an antiparticle collide, it creates a burst of energy and a total charge of zero in all four charge directions. At this point, anything can be created as long as it has the same energy and maintains a total charge of zero. For example, this weak force particle and its antiparticle can be created in a collision. In further interactions, the charges must always balance. One of the weak particles could decay into an electron and an antineutrino, and these three still add to zero total charge. Nature always keeps a perfect balance. So these patterns of charges are not just pretty. They tell us what interactions are allowed to happen. And we can rotate this charge space in four dimensions to get a better look at the strong interaction, which has this nice hexagonal symmetry. In a strong interaction, a strong force particle, such as this one, interacts with a colored quark, such as this green one, to give a quark with a different color charge — this red one. And strong interactions are happening millions of times each second in every atom of our bodies, holding the atomic nuclei together. But these four charges corresponding to three forces are not the end of the story. We can also include two more charges corresponding to the gravitational force. When we include these, each matter particle has two different spin charges, spin-up and spin-down. So they all split and give a nice pattern in six-dimensional charge space. We can rotate this pattern in six dimensions and see that it's quite pretty. Right now, this pattern matches our best current knowledge of how nature is built at the tiny scales of these elementary particles. This is what we know for certain. Some of these particles are at the very limit of what we've been able to reach with experiments. From this pattern we already know the particle physics of these tiny scales — the way the universe works at these tiny scales is very beautiful. But now I'm going to discuss some new and old ideas about things we don't know yet. We want to expand this pattern using mathematics alone, and see if we can get our hands on the whole enchilada. We want to find all the particles and forces that make a complete picture of our universe. And we want to use this picture to predict new particles that we'll see when experiments reach higher energies. So there's an old idea in particle physics that this known pattern of charges, which is not very symmetric, could emerge from a more perfect pattern that gets broken — similar to how the Higgs particle breaks the electroweak pattern to give electromagnetism. In order to do this, we need to introduce new forces with new charge directions. When we introduce a new direction, we get to guess what charges the particles have along this direction, and then we can rotate it in with the others. If we guess wisely, we can construct the standard charges in six charge dimensions as a broken symmetry of this more perfect pattern in seven charge dimensions. This particular choice corresponds to a grand unified theory introduced by Pati and Salam in 1973. When we look at this new unified pattern, we can see a couple of gaps where particles seem to be missing. This is the way theories of unification work. A physicist looks for larger, more symmetric patterns that include the established pattern as a subset. The larger pattern allows us to predict the existence of particles that have never been seen. This unification model predicts the existence of these two new force particles, which should act a lot like the weak force, only weaker. Now, we can rotate this set of charges in seven dimensions and consider an odd fact about the matter particles: the second and third generations of matter have exactly the same charges in six-dimensional charge space as the first generation. These particles are not uniquely identified by their six charges. They sit on top of one another in the standard charge space. However, if we work in eight-dimensional charge space, then we can assign unique new charges to each particle. Then we can spin these in eight dimensions and see what the whole pattern looks like. Here we can see the second and third generations of matter now, related to the first generation by a symmetry called "triality." This particular pattern of charges in eight dimensions is actually part of the most beautiful geometric structure in mathematics. It's a pattern of the largest exceptional Lie group, E8. This Lie group is a smooth, curved shape with 248 dimensions. Each point in this pattern corresponds to a symmetry of this very complex and beautiful shape. One small part of this E8 shape can be used to describe the curved space-time of Einstein's general relativity, explaining gravity. Together with quantum mechanics, the geometry of this shape could describe everything about how the universe works at the tiniest scales. The pattern of this shape living in eight-dimensional charge space is exquisitely beautiful, and it summarizes thousands of possible interactions between these elementary particles, each of which is just a facet of this complicated shape. As we spin it, we can see many of the other intricate patterns contained in this one. And with a particular rotation, we can look down through this pattern in eight dimensions along a symmetry axis and see all the particles at once. It's a very beautiful object, and as with any unification, we can see some holes where new particles are required by this pattern. There are 20 gaps where new particles should be, two of which have been filled by the Pati-Salam particles. From their location in this pattern, we know that these new particles should be scalar fields like the Higgs particle, but have color charge and interact with the strong force. Filling in these new particles completes this pattern, giving us the full E8. This E8 pattern has very deep mathematical roots. It's considered by many to be the most beautiful structure in mathematics. It's a fantastic prospect that this object of great mathematical beauty could describe the truth of particle interactions at the smallest scales imaginable. And this idea that nature is described by mathematics is not at all new. In 1623, Galileo wrote this: "Nature's grand book, which stands continually open to our gaze, is written in the language of mathematics. Its characters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering around in a dark labyrinth." I believe this to be true, and I've tried to follow Galileo's guidance in describing the mathematics of particle physics using only triangles, circles and other geometrical figures. Of course, when other physicists and I actually work on this stuff, the mathematics can resemble a dark labyrinth. But it's reassuring that at the heart of this mathematics is pure, beautiful geometry. Joined with quantum mechanics, this mathematics describes our universe as a growing E8 coral, with particles interacting at every location in all possible ways according to a beautiful pattern. And as more of the pattern comes into view using new machines like the Large Hadron Collider, we may be able to see whether nature uses this E8 pattern or a different one. This process of discovery is a wonderful adventure to be involved in. If the LHC finds particles that fit this E8 pattern, that will be very, very cool. If the LHC finds new particles, but they don't fit this pattern — well, that will be very interesting, but bad for this E8 theory. And, of course, bad for me personally. (Laughter) Now, how bad would that be? Well, pretty bad. (Laughter) But predicting how nature works is a very risky game. This theory and others like it are long shots. One does a lot of hard work knowing that most of these ideas probably won't end up being true about nature. That's what doing theoretical physics is like: there are a lot of wipeouts. In this regard, new physics theories are a lot like start-up companies. As with any large investment, it can be emotionally difficult to abandon a line of research when it isn't working out. But in science, if something isn't working, you have to toss it out and try something else. Now, the only way to maintain sanity and achieve happiness in the midst of this uncertainty is to keep balance and perspective in life. I've tried the best I can to live a balanced life. (Laughter) I try to balance my life equally between physics, love and surfing — my own three charge directions. (Laughter) This way, even if the physics I work on comes to nothing, I still know I've lived a good life. And I try to live in beautiful places. For most of the past ten years I've lived on the island of Maui, a very beautiful place. Now, it's one of the greatest mysteries in the universe to my parents how I managed to survive all that time without engaging in anything resembling full-time employment. (Laughter) I'm going to let you in on that secret. This was a view from my home office on Maui. And this is another, and another. And you may have noticed that these beautiful views are similar, but in slightly different places. That's because this used to be my home and office on Maui. (Laughter) I've chosen a very unusual life. But not worrying about rent allowed me to spend my time doing what I love. Living a nomadic existence has been hard at times, but it's allowed me to live in beautiful places and keep a balance in my life that I've been happy with. It allows me to spend a lot of my time hanging out with hyperintelligent coral. But I also greatly enjoy the company of hyperintelligent people. So I'm very happy to have been invited here to TED. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Stay here one second. (Applause) I probably understood two percent of that, but I still absolutely loved it. So I'm going to sound dumb. Your theory of everything — Garrett Lisi: I'm used to coral. CA: That's right. The reason it's got a few people at least excited is because, if you're right, it brings gravity and quantum theory together. So are you saying that we should think of the universe, at its heart — that the smallest things that there are, are somehow an E8 object of possibility? I mean, is there a scale to it, at the smallest scale, or ...? GL: Well, right now the pattern I showed you that corresponds to what we know about elementary particle physics — that already corresponds to a very beautiful shape. And that's the one that I said we knew for certain. And that shape has remarkable similarities — and the way it fits into this E8 pattern, which could be the rest of the picture. And these patterns of points that I've shown for you actually represent symmetries of this high-dimensional object that would be warping and moving and dancing over the space-time that we experience. And that would be what explains all these elementary particles that we see. CA: But a string theorist, as I understand it, explains electrons in terms of much smaller strings vibrating — I know, you don't like string theory — vibrating inside it. How should we think of an electron in relation to E8? GL: Well, it would be one of the symmetries of this E8 shape. So what's happening is, as the shape is moving over space-time, it's twisting. And the direction it's twisting as it moves is what particle we see. So it would be — CA: The size of the E8 shape, how does that relate to the electron? I feel like I need that for my picture. Is it bigger? Is it smaller? GL: As far as we know, electrons are point particles, so this would be going down to the smallest possible scales. So the way these things are explained in quantum field theory is, all possibilities are expanding and developing at once. And this is why I use the analogy to coral. And — in this way, the way that E8 comes in is it will be as a shape that's attached at each point in the space-time. And, as I said, the way the shape twists — the directional along which way the shape is twisting as it moves over this curved surface — is what the elementary particles are, themselves. So through quantum field theory, they manifest themselves as points and interact that way. I don't know if I'll be able to make this any clearer. (Laughter) CA: It doesn't really matter. It's evoking a kind of sense of wonder, and I certainly want to understand more of this. But thank you so much for coming. That was absolutely fascinating. (Applause)

Design and the Elastic Mind

Paola Antonelli

{0: 'Paola Antonelli'}

{0: ['curator of architecture and design']}

{0: "Paola Antonelli is on a mission to introduce -- and explain -- design to the world. With her shows at New York's Museum of Modern Art, she celebrates design's presence in every part of life."}

2007-12-12

2008-10-15

EG 2007

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['art', 'brain', 'design', 'museums', 'graphic design']

{207: 'Treat design as art', 27: 'Organic design, inspired by nature', 172: 'Designing for simplicity', 646: 'Designers -- think big!', 1977: 'My life in typefaces', 1474: 'We are all designers'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/paola_antonelli_design_and_the_elastic_mind/

MOMA design curator Paola Antonelli previews the groundbreaking show Design and the Elastic Mind -- full of products and designs that reflect the way we think now.

I dabble in design. I'm a curator of architecture and design; I happen to be at the Museum of Modern Art. But what we're going to talk about today is really design. Really good designers are like sponges: they really are curious and absorb every kind of information that comes their way, and transform it so that it can be used by people like us. And so that gives me an opportunity, because every design show that I curate kind of looks at a different world. And it's great, because it seems like every time I change jobs. And what I'm going to do today is I'm going to give you a preview of the next exhibition that I'm working on, which is called "Design and the Elastic Mind." The world that I decided to focus on this particular time is the world of science and the world of technology. Technology always comes into play when design is involved, but science does a little less. But designers are great at taking big revolutions that happen and transforming them so that we can use them. And this is what this exhibition looks at. If you think about your life today, you go every day through many different scales, many different changes of rhythm and pace. You work over different time zones, you talk to very different people, you multitask. We all know it, and we do it kind of automatically. Some of the minds in this audience are super elastic, others are a little slower, others have a few stretch marks, but nonetheless this is a quite exceptional audience from that viewpoint. Other people are not as elastic. I can't get my father in Italy to work on the Internet. He doesn't want to put high-speed Internet at home. And that's because there's some little bit of fear, little bit of resistance or just clogged mechanisms. So designers work on this particular malaise that we have, these kinds of discomforts that we have, and try to make life easier for us. Elasticity of mind is something that we really need, you know, we really need, we really cherish and we really work on. And this exhibition is about the work of designers that help us be more elastic, and also of designers that really work on this elasticity as an opportunity. And one last thing is that it's not only designers, but it's also scientists. And before I launch into the display of some of the slides and into the preview, I would like to point out this beautiful detail about scientists and design. You can say that the relationship between science and design goes back centuries. You can of course talk about Leonardo da Vinci and many other Renaissance men and women — and there's a gigantic history behind it. But according to a really great science historian you might know, Peter Galison — he teaches at Harvard — what nanotechnology in particular and quantum physics have brought to designers is this renewed interest, this real passion for design. So basically, the idea of being able to build things bottom up, atom by atom, has made them all into tinkerers. And all of a sudden scientists are seeking designers, just like designers are seeking scientists. It's a brand-new love affair that we're trying to cultivate at MOMA. Together with Adam Bly, who is the founder of Seed magazine — that's now a multimedia company, you might know it — we founded about a year ago a monthly salon for designers and scientists, and it's quite beautiful. And Keith has come, and also Jonathan has come and many others. And it was great, because at the beginning was this apology fest — you know, scientists would tell designers, you know, I don't know what style is, I'm not really elegant. And designers would like, oh, I don't know how to do an equation, I don't understand what you're saying. And then all of a sudden they really started talking each others' language, and now we're already at the point that they collaborate. Paul Steinhardt, a physicist from New York, and Aranda/Lasch, architects, collaborated in an installation in London at the Serpentine. And it's really interesting to see how this happens. The exhibition will talk about the work of both designers and scientists, and show how they're presenting the possibilities of the future to us. I'm showing to you different sections of the show right now, just to give you a taste of it. Nanophysics and nanotechnology, for instance, have really opened the designer's mind. In this case I'm showing more the designers' work, because they're the ones that have really been stimulated. A lot of the objects in the show are concepts, not objects that exist already. But what you're looking at here is the work of some scientists from UCLA. This kind of alphabet soup is a new way to mark proteins — not only by color but literally by alphabet letters. So they construct it, and they can construct all kinds of forms at the nanoscale. This is the work of design students from the Royal College of Arts in London that have been working together with their tutor, Tony Dunne, and with a bunch of scientists around Great Britain on the possibilities of nanotechnology for design in the future. New sensing elements on the body — you can grow hairs on your nails, and therefore grab some of the particles from another person. They seem very, very obsessed with finding out more about the ideal mate. So they're working on enhancing everything: touch, smell — everything they can, in order to find the perfect mate. Very interesting. This is a typeface designer from Israel who has designed — he calls them "typosperma." He's thinking — of course it's all a concept — of injecting typefaces into spermatozoa, I don't know how to say it in English — spermatazoi — in order to make them become — to almost have a song or a whole poem written with every ejaculation. (Laughter) I tell you, designers are quite fantastic, you know. So, tissue design. In this case too, you have a mixture of scientists and designers. This here is part of the same lab at the Royal College of Arts. The RCA is really quite an amazing school from that viewpoint. One of the assignments for a year was to work with in-vitro meat. You know that already you can grow meat in vitro. In Australia they did it — this research company, called SymbioticA. But the problem is that it's a really ugly patty. And so, the assignment to the students was, how should the steak of tomorrow be? When you don't have to kill cows and it can have any shape, what should it be like? So this particular student, James King, went around the beautiful English countryside, picked the best, best cow that he could see, and then put her in the MRI machine. Then, he took the scans of the best organs and made the meat — of course, this is done with a Japanese resins food maker, but you know, in the future it could be made better — which reproduces the best MRI scan of the best cow he could find. Instead, this element here is much more banal. Something that you know can be done already is to grow bone tissue, so that you can make a wedding ring out of the bone tissue of your loved one — literally. So, this is indeed made of human bone tissue. This is SymbioticA, and they've been working — they were the first ones to do this in-vitro meat — and now they've also done an in-vitro coat, a leather coat. It's miniscule, but it's a real coat. It's shaped like one. So, we'll be able to really not have any excuse to be wearing everything leather in the future. One of the most important topics of the show — you know, as anything in our life today, we can look at it from many, many different viewpoints, and at different levels. One of the most interesting and most important concepts is the idea of scale. We change scale very often: we change resolution of screens, and we're not really fazed by it, we do it very comfortably. So you go, even in the exhibition, from the idea of nanotechnology and the nanoscale to the manipulation of really great amounts of data — the mapping and tagging of the universe and of the world. In this particular case a section will be devoted to information design. You see here the work of Ben Fry. This is "Human vs. Chimps" — the few chromosomes that distinguish us from chimps. It was a beautiful visualization that he did for Seed magazine. And here's the whole code of Pac-Man, visualized with all the go-to, go-back-to, also made into a beautiful choreography. And then also graphs by scientists, this beautiful diagraph of protein homology. Scientists are starting to also consider aesthetics. We were discussing with Keith Shrubb* this morning the fact that many scientists tend not to use anything beautiful in their presentations, otherwise they're afraid of being considered dumb blondes. So they pick the worst background from any kind of PowerPoint presentation, the worst typeface. It's only recently that this kind of marriage between design and science is producing some of the first "pretty" — if we can say so — scientific presentations. Another aspect of contemporary design that I think is mind-opening, promising and will really be the future of design, is the idea of collective design. You know, the whole XO laptop, from One Laptop per Child, is based on the idea of collaboration and mash and networking. So, the more the merrier. The more computers, the stronger the signal, and children work on the interface so that it's all based on doing things together, tasks together. So the idea of collective design is something that will become even bigger in the future, and this is chosen as an example. Related to the idea of collective design and to the new balance between the individual and the collectiveness, collectivity is the idea of existence maximum. That's a term that I coined a few years ago while I was thinking of how pressed we are together, and at the same time how these small objects, like the Walkman first and then the iPod, create bubbles of space around us that enable us to have a metaphysical space that is much bigger than our physical space. You can be in the subway and you can be completely isolated and have your own room in your iPod. And this is the work of several designers that really enhance the idea of solitude and expansion by means of various techniques. This is a spa telephone. The idea is that it's become so difficult to have a private conversation anywhere that you go to the spa, you have a massage, you have a facial, maybe a rub, and then you have this beautiful pool with this perfect temperature, and you can have this isolation tank phone conversation with whomever you've been wanting to talk with for a long time. And same thing here, Social Tele-presence. It's actually already used by the military a little bit, but it's the idea of being able to be somewhere else with your senses while you're removed from it physically. And this is called Blind Date. It's a [unclear], so if you're too shy to be really at the date, you can stay at a distance with your flowers and somebody else reenacts the date for you. Rapid manufacturing is another big area in which technology and design are, I think, bound to change the world. You've heard about it before many times. Rapid manufacturing is a computer file sent directly from the computer to the manufacturing machine. It used to be called rapid prototyping, rapid modeling. It started out in the '80s, but at the beginning it was machines carving out of a foam block a model that was very, very fragile, and could not have any real use. Slowly but surely, the materials became better — better resins. Techniques became better — not only carving but also stereolithography and laser — solidifying all kinds of resins, whether in powder or in liquid form. And the vats became bigger, to the point that now we can have actual chairs made by rapid manufacturing. It takes seven days today to manufacture a chair, but you know what? One day it will take seven hours. And then the dream is that you'll be able to, from home, customize your chair. You know, companies and designers will be designing the matrix or the margins that respect both solidity and brand, and design identity. And then you can send it to the Kinko's store at the corner and go get your chair. Now, the implications of this are enormous, not only regarding the participation of the final buyer in the design process, but also no tracking, no warehousing, no wasted materials. Also, I can imagine many design manufacturers will have to retool their own business plans and maybe invest in this Kinko's store. But it really is a big change. And here I'm showing a picture that was in Wired Magazine — you know, the Artifacts of the Future section that I love so much — that shows you can have your desktop 3D printer and print your own basketball. But here instead are examples, you can already 3D-print textiles, which is very interesting. This is just a really nice touch — it's called slow prototyping. It's a designer that put 10,000 bees at work and they built this vase. They had a particular shape that they had to stay in. Mapping and tagging. As the capacity of computers becomes really, really big, and the capacity of our mind not that much bigger, we find that we need to tag as much as we can what we do in order to then retrace our path. Also, we do it in order to share with other people. Again, this communal sense of experience that seems to be so important today. So, various ways to map and tag are also the work of many designers nowadays. Also, the senses — designers and scientists all work on trying to expand our senses capabilities so that we can achieve more. And also animal senses in a way. This particular object that many people love so much is actually based on kind of a scientific experiment — the fact that bees have a very strong olfactory sense, and so — much like dogs that can smell certain kinds of skin cancer — bees can be trained by Pavlovian reflex to detect one type of cancer, and also pregnancy. And so this student at the RCA designed this beautiful blown-glass object where the bees move from one chamber to the other if they detect that particular smell that signifies, in this case, pregnancy. Another shape is made for cancer. Design for Debate is a very interesting new endeavor that designers have really shaped for themselves. Some designers don't design objects, products, things that we're going to actually use, but rather, they design scenarios that are object-based. They're still very useful. They help companies and other designers think better about the future. And usually they are accompanied by videos. This is quite beautiful. It's Dunne and Raby, "All the Robots." Those are a series of robots that are meant to be taken care of. We always think that robots will take care of us, and instead they designed these robots that are very, very needy. You need to take one in your arms and look at it in the eyes for about five minutes before it does something. Another one gets really, really nervous if you get in to the room, and starts shaking, so you have to calm it down. So it's really a way to make us think more about what robots mean to us. Noam Toran and "Accessories for Lonely Men": the idea is that when you lose your loved one or you go through a bad breakup, what you miss the most are those annoying things that you used to hate when you were with the other person. So he designed all these series of accessories. This one is something that takes away the sheets from you at night. Then there's another one that breathes on your neck. There's another one that throws plates and breaks them. So it's just this idea of what we really miss in life. Elio Caccavale: he took the idea of those dolls that explain leukemia. He's working on dolls that explain xenotransplantation, and also the spider gene into the goat, from a few years ago. He's working for the exhibition on a whole series of dolls that explain to children where babies come from today. Because it's not anymore Mom, Dad, the flowers and the bees, and then there's the baby. No, it can be two moms, three dads, in-vitro — there's the whole idea of how babies can be made today that has changed. So it's a series of dolls that he's working on right now. One of the most beautiful things is that designers really work on life, even though they take technology into account. And many designers have been working recently on the idea of death and mourning, and what we can do about it today with new technologies. Or how we should behave about it with new technologies. These three objects over there are hard drives with a Bluetooth connection. But they're in reality very, very beautiful sculpted artifacts that contain the whole desktop and computer memory of somebody who passed away. So instead of having only the pictures, you will be able to put this object next to the computer and all of a sudden have, you know, Gertrude's whole life and all of her files and her address book come alive. And this is even better. This is Auger-Loizeau, "AfterLife." It's the idea that some people don't believe in an afterlife. So to give them something tangible that shows that there is something after death, they take the gastric juices of people who passed away and concentrate them, and put them into a battery that can actually be used to power flashlights. They also go — you know, sex toys, whatever. It's quite amazing how these things can make you smile, can make you laugh, can make you cry sometimes. But I'm hoping that this particular exhibition will be able to trace a new portrait of where design is going — which is always, hopefully, a portrait a few years in advance of where the world is going. Thank you very much.

On glamour

Virginia Postrel

{0: 'Virginia Postrel'}

{0: ['journalist']}

{0: 'Virginia Postrel is a writer and cultural critic who examines the hidden economics of modern society, poking at the unexamined ideas behind the march of progress.'}

2004-02-02

2008-10-16

TED2004

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hy', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'lt', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['beauty', 'business', 'culture', 'entertainment', 'illusion', 'marketing', 'performance']

{16: 'Why we love, why we cheat', 396: 'Fashion and creativity', 197: 'Design and destiny', 1613: '4 lessons in creativity', 436: 'Design and discovery', 400: 'Tidying up art'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/virginia_postrel_on_glamour/

In a timely talk, cultural critic Virginia Postrel muses on the true meaning, and the powerful uses, of glamour -- which she defines as any calculated, carefully polished image designed to impress and persuade.

You might be wondering why I'm wearing sunglasses, and one answer to that is, because I'm here to talk about glamour. So, we all think we know what glamour is. Here it is. It's glamorous movie stars, like Marlene Dietrich. And it comes in a male form, too — very glamorous. Not only can he shoot, drive, drink — you know, he drinks wine, there actually is a little wine in there — and of course, always wears a tuxedo. But I think that glamour actually has a much broader meaning — one that is true for the movie stars and the fictional characters, but also comes in other forms. A magazine? Well, it's certainly not this one. This is the least glamorous magazine on the newsstand — it's all about sex tips. Sex tips are not glamorous. And Drew Barrymore, for all her wonderful charm, is not glamorous either. But there is a glamour of industry. This is Margaret Bourke-White's — one of her pictures she did. Fantastic, glamorous pictures of steel mills and paper mills and all kinds of glamorous industrial places. And there's the mythic glamour of the garage entrepreneur. This is the Hewlett-Packard garage. We know everyone who starts a business in a garage ends up founding Hewlett-Packard. There's the glamour of physics. What could be more glamorous than understanding the entire universe, grand unification? And, by the way, it helps if you're Brian Greene — he has other kinds of glamour. And there is, of course, this glamour. This is very, very glamorous: the glamour of outer space — and not the alien-style glamour, but the nice, clean, early '60s version. So what do we mean by glamour? Well, one thing you can do if you want to know what glamour means is you can look in the dictionary. And it actually helps a lot more if you look in a very old dictionary, in this case the 1913 dictionary. Because for centuries, glamour had a very particular meaning, and the word was actually used differently from the way we think of it. You had "a" glamour. It wasn't glamour as a quality — you "cast a glamour." Glamour was a literal magic spell. Not a metaphorical one, the way we use it today, but a literal magic spell associated with witches and gypsies and to some extent, Celtic magic. And over the years, around the turn of the 20th century, it started to take on this other kind of deception — this definition for any artificial interest in, or association with, an object through which it appears delusively magnified or glorified. But still, glamour is an illusion. Glamour is a magic spell. And there's something dangerous about glamour throughout most of history. When the witches cast a magic spell on you, it was not in your self-interest — it was to get you to act against your interest. Well of course, in the 20th century, glamour came to have this different meaning associated with Hollywood. And this is Hedy Lamarr. Hedy Lamarr said, "Anyone can look glamorous, all you have to do is sit there and look stupid." (Laughter) But in fact, with all due respect to Hedy — about whom we'll hear more later — there's a lot more to it. There was a tremendous amount of technical achievement associated with creating this Hollywood glamour. There were scores of retouchers and lighting experts and make-up experts. You can go to the museum of Hollywood history in Hollywood and see Max Factor's special rooms that he painted different colors depending on the complexion of the star he was going to make up. So you've got this highly stylized portrait of something that was not entirely of this earth — it was a portrait of a star. And actually, we see glamorized photos of stars all the time — they call them false color. Glamour is a form of falsification, but falsification to achieve a particular purpose. It may be to illuminate the star; it may be to sell a film. And it involves a great deal of technique. It's not — glamour is not something — you don't wake up in the morning glamorous. I don't care who you are. Even Nicole Kidman doesn't wake up in the morning glamorous. There is a process of "idealization, glorification and dramatization," and it's not just the case for people. Glamour doesn't have to be people. Architectural photography — Julius Schulman, who has talked about transfiguration, took this fabulous, famous picture of the Kauffman House. Architectural photography is extremely glamorous. It puts you into this special, special world. This is Alex Ross's comic book art, which appears to be extremely realistic, as part of his style is he gives you a kind of realism in his comic art. Except that light doesn't work this way in the real world. When you stack people in rows, the ones in the background look smaller than the ones in the foreground — but not in the world of glamour. What glamour is all about — I took this from a blurb in the table of contents of New York magazine, which was telling us that glamour is back — glamour is all about transcending the everyday. And I think that that's starting to get at what the core that combines all sorts of glamour is. This is Filippino Lippi's 1543 portrait of Saint Apollonia. And I don't know who she is either, but this is the [16th] century equivalent of a supermodel. It's a very glamorous portrait. Why is it glamorous? It's glamorous, first, because she is beautiful — but that does not make you glamorous, that only makes you beautiful. She is graceful, she is mysterious and she is transcendent, and those are the central qualities of glamour. You don't see her eyes; they're looking downward. She's not looking away from you exactly, but you have to mentally imagine her world. She's encouraging you to contemplate this higher world to which she belongs, where she can be completely tranquil while holding the iron instruments of her death by torture. Mel Gibson's "Passion Of The Christ" — not glamorous. That's glamour: that's Michelangelo's "Pieta," where Mary is the same age as Jesus and they're both awfully happy and pleasant. Glamour invites us to live in a different world. It has to simultaneously be mysterious, a little bit distant — that's why, often in these glamour shots, the person is not looking at the audience, it's why sunglasses are glamorous — but also not so far above us that we can't identify with the person. In some sense, there has to be something like us. So as I say, in religious art, you know, God is not glamorous. God cannot be glamorous because God is omnipotent, omniscient — too far above us. And yet you will see in religious art, saints or the Virgin Mary will often be portrayed — not always — in glamorous forms. As I said earlier, glamour does not have to be about people, but it has to have this transcendent quality. What is it about Superman? Aside from Alex Ross's style, which is very glamorous, one thing about Superman is he makes you believe that a man can fly. Glamour is all about transcending this world and getting to an idealized, perfect place. And this is one reason that modes of transportation tend to be extremely glamorous. The less experience we have with them, the more glamorous they are. So you can do a glamorized picture of a car, but you can't do a glamorized picture of traffic. You can do a glamorized picture of an airplane, but not the inside. The notion is that it's going to transport you, and the story is not about, you know, the guy in front of you in the airplane, who has this nasty little kid, or the big cough. The story is about where you're arriving, or thinking about where you're arriving. And this sense of being transported is one reason that we have glamour styling. This sort of streamlining styling is not just glamorous because we associate it with movies of that period, but because, in it's streamlining, it transports us from the everyday. The same thing — arches are very glamorous. Arches with stained glass — even more glamorous. Staircases that curve away from you are glamorous. I happen to find that particular staircase picture very glamorous because, to me, it captures the whole promise of the academic contemplative life — but maybe that's because I went to Princeton. Anyway, skylines are super glamorous, city streets — not so glamorous. You know, when you get, actually to this town it has reality. The horizon, the open road, is very, very glamorous. There are few things more glamorous than the horizon — except, possibly, multiple horizons. Of course, here you don't feel the cold, or the heat — you just see the possibilities. In order to pull glamour off, you need this Renaissance quality of sprezzatura, which is a term coined by Castiglione in his book, "The Book Of The Courtier." There's the not-glamorous version of what it looks like today, after a few centuries. And sprezzatura is the art that conceals art. It makes things look effortless. You don't think about how Nicole Kidman is maneuvering that dress — she just looks completely natural. And I remember reading, after the Lara Croft movies, how Angelina Jolie would go home completely black and blue. Of course, they covered that with make-up, because Lara Croft did all those same stunts — but she doesn't get black and blue, because she has sprezzatura. "To conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort": And this is one of the critical aspects of glamour. Glamour is about editing. How do you create the sense of transcendence, the sense of evoking a perfect world? The sense of, you know, life could be better, I could join this — I could be a perfect person, I could join this perfect world. We don't tell you all the grubby details. Now, this was kindly lent to me by Jeff Bezos, from last year. This is underneath Jeff's desk. This is what the real world of computers, lamps, electrical appliances of all kinds, looks like. But if you look in a catalog — particularly a catalog of modern, beautiful objects for your home — it looks like this. There are no cords. Look next time you get these catalogs in your mail — you can usually figure out where they hid the cord. But there's always this illusion that if you buy this lamp, you will live in a world without cords. (Laughter) And the same thing is true of, if you buy this laptop or you buy this computer — and even in these wireless eras, you don't get to live in the world without cords. You have to have mystery and you have to have grace. And there she is — Grace. This is the most glamorous picture, I think, ever. Part of the thing is that, in "Rear Window," the question is, is she too glamorous to live in his world? And the answer is no, but of course it's really just a movie. Here's Hedy Lamarr again. And, you know, this kind of head covering is extremely glamorous because, like sunglasses, it conceals and reveals at the same time. Translucence is glamorous — that's why all these people wear pearls. It's why barware is glamorous. Glamour is translucent — not transparent, not opaque. It invites us into the world but it doesn't give us a completely clear picture. And I think if Grace Kelly is the most glamorous person, maybe a spiral staircase with glass block may be the most glamorous interior shot, because a spiral staircase is incredibly glamorous. It has that sense of going up and away, and yet you never think about how you would really trip if you were — particularly going down. And of course glass block has that sense of translucence. So, this session's supposed to be about pure pleasure but glamour's really partly about meaning. All individuals and all cultures have ideals that cannot possibly be realized in reality. They have contradictions, they uphold principles that are incommensurable with each other — whatever it is — and yet these ideals give meaning and purpose to our lives as cultures and as individuals. And the way we deal with that is we displace them — we put them into a golden world, an imagined world, an age of heroes, the world to come. And in the life of an individual, we often associate that with some object. The white picket fence, the perfect house. The perfect kitchen — no bills on the counter in the perfect kitchen. You know, you buy that Viking range, this is what your kitchen will look like. The perfect love life — symbolized by the perfect necklace, the perfect diamond ring. The perfect getaway in your perfect car. This is an interior design firm that is literally called Utopia. The perfect office — again, no cords, as far as I can tell. And certainly, no, it doesn't look a thing like my office. I mean, there's no paper on the desk. We want this golden world. And some people get rich enough, and if they have their ideals — in a sort of domestic sense, they get to acquire their perfect world. Dean Koontz built this fabulous home theater, which is — I don't think accidentally — in Art Deco style. That symbolizes this sense of being safe and at home. This is not always good, because what is your perfect world? What is your ideal, and also, what has been edited out? Is it something important? "The Matrix" is a movie that is all about glamour. I could do a whole talk on "The Matrix" and glamour. It was criticized for glamorizing violence, because, look — sunglasses and those long coats, and, of course, they could walk up walls and do all these kinds of things that are impossible in the real world. This is another Margaret Bourke-White photo. This is from Soviet Union. Attractive. I mean, look how happy the people are, and good-looking too. You know, we're marching toward Utopia. I'm not a fan of PETA, but I think this is a great ad. Because what they're doing is they're saying, your coat's not so glamorous, what's been edited out is something important. But actually, what's even more important than remembering what's been edited out is thinking, are the ideals good? Because glamour can be very totalitarian and deceptive. And it's not just a matter of glamorizing cleaning your floor. This is from "Triumph Of The Will" — brilliant editing to cut together things. There's a glamour shot. National Socialism is all about glamour. It was a very aesthetic ideology. It was all about cleaning up Germany, and the West, and the world, and ridding it of anything unglamorous. So glamour can be dangerous. I think glamour has a genuine appeal, has a genuine value. I'm not against glamour. But there's a kind of wonder in the stuff that gets edited away in the cords of life. And there is both a way to avoid the dangers of glamour and a way to broaden your appreciation of it. And that's to take Isaac Mizrahi's advice and confront the manipulation of it all, and sort of admit that manipulation is something that we enjoy, but also enjoy how it happens. And here's Hedy Lamarr. She's very glamorous but, you know, she invented spread-spectrum technology. So she's even more glamorous if you know that she really wasn't stupid, even though she thought she could look stupid. David Hockney talks about how the appreciation of this very glamorous painting is heightened if you think about the fact that it takes two weeks to paint this splash, which only took a fraction of a second to happen. There is a book out in the bookstore — it's called "Symphony In Steel," and it's about the stuff that's hidden under the skin of the Disney Center. And that has a fascination. It's not necessarily glamorous, but unveiling the glamour has an appeal. There's a wonderful book called "Crowns" that's all these glamour pictures of black women in their church hats. And there's a quote from one of these women, and she talks about, "As a little girl, I'd admire women at church with beautiful hats. They looked like beautiful dolls, like they'd just stepped out of a magazine. But I also knew how hard they worked all week. Sometimes under those hats there's a lot of joy and a lot of sorrow." And, actually, you get more appreciation for glamour when you realize what went into creating it. Thank you.

Healing through diet

Dean Ornish

{0: 'Dean Ornish'}

{0: ['physician', 'author']}

{0: "Dean Ornish is a clinical professor at UCSF and founder of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute. He's a leading expert on fighting illness -- particularly heart disease with dietary and lifestyle changes."}

2004-02-02

2008-10-17

TED2004

en

['ar', 'bg', 'da', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'te', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['health', 'health care', 'medicine', 'science']

{39: 'A roadmap to end aging', 263: "What's wrong with what we eat", 73: 'In praise of slowness', 10: "The killer American diet that's sweeping the planet", 24361: 'What is obesity?', 25103: 'What causes heartburn?'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/dean_ornish_healing_through_diet/

Dean Ornish talks about simple, low-tech and low-cost ways to take advantage of the body's natural desire to heal itself.

This session is on natural wonders, and the bigger conference is on the pursuit of happiness. I want to try to combine them all, because to me, healing is really the ultimate natural wonder. Your body has a remarkable capacity to begin healing itself, and much more quickly than people had once realized, if you simply stop doing what's causing the problem. And so, really, so much of what we do in medicine and life in general is focused on mopping up the floor without also turning off the faucet. I love doing this work, because it really gives many people new hope and new choices that they didn't have before, and it allows us to talk about things that — not just diet, but that happiness is not — we're talking about the pursuit of happiness, but when you really look at all the spiritual traditions, what Aldous Huxley called the "perennial wisdom," when you get past the names and forms and rituals that divide people, it's really about — our nature is to be happy; our nature is to be peaceful, our nature is to be healthy. And so happiness is not something you get, health is generally not something that you get, but rather, all of these different practices — you know, the ancient swamis and rabbis and priests and monks and nuns didn't develop these techniques to just manage stress or lower your blood pressure or unclog your arteries, even though it can do all those things. They're powerful tools for transformation, for quieting down our mind and bodies to allow us to experience what it feels like to be happy, to be peaceful, to be joyful and to realize that it's not something that you pursue and get, but rather, it's something that you have already, until you disturb it. I studied yoga for many years with a teacher named Swami Satchidananda. People would say, "What are you, a Hindu?" He'd say, "No, I'm an undo." (Laughter) It's about identifying what's causing us to disturb our innate health and happiness and then to allow that natural healing to occur. To me, that's the real natural wonder. So, within that larger context, we can talk about diet, stress management — which are really these spiritual practices — moderate exercise, smoking cessation, support groups and community, which I'll talk more about, and some vitamins and supplements. And it's not a diet. When people think about the diet I recommend, they think it's really strict. For reversing disease, that's what it takes. But if you're just trying to be healthy, you have a spectrum of choices. To the degree that you can move in a healthy direction, you're going to live longer, feel better, lose weight, and so on. And in our studies, what we've been able to do is to use very expensive, high-tech, state-of-the-art measures to prove how powerful these very simple and low-tech and low-cost — and in many ways, ancient — interventions can be. We first began by looking at heart disease. When I began doing this work 26 or 27 years ago, it was thought that once you have heart disease, it can only get worse. What we found was, instead of getting worse and worse, in many cases, it could get better and better, and much more quickly than people had once realized. This is a representative patient who, at the time, was 73, told he needed to have a bypass, decided to do this instead. We used quantitative arteriography, showing the narrowing. This is one of the main arteries that feeds the heart, and you can see the narrowing here. A year later, it's not as clogged; normally, it goes the other direction. These minor changes in blockages caused a 300 percent improvement in blood flow, and using cardiac positron-emission tomography, or PET, scans — blue and black is no blood flow, orange and white is maximal — huge differences can occur without drugs, without surgery. Clinically, he couldn't walk across the street without getting severe chest pain. Within a month, like most people, he was pain-free, and within a year, climbing more than 100 floors a day on a StairMaster. This is not unusual, and it's part of what enables people to maintain these kinds of changes, because it makes a big difference in their quality of life. If you looked at all the arteries in all the patients, they got worse and worse from one year to five years in the comparison group. This is the natural history of heart disease. But it's really not natural; we found it could get better and better, and much more quickly than people thought. We also found the more people changed, the better they got. It wasn't a function of how old or sick they were, but of how much they changed. The oldest patients improved as much as the young ones. I got this Christmas card a few years ago from patients in one of our programs. The younger brother is 86; the older one is 95. They wanted to show me how much more flexible they were. The following year they sent this, which I thought was funny. (Laughter) You just never know. And what we found was that 99 percent of the patients stopped or reversed the progression of their heart disease. Now, I thought if we just did good science, that would change medical practice. But that was naive. It's important, but not enough, because we doctors do what we get paid to do and trained to do what we get paid to do, so if we change insurance, then we change medical practice and medical education. Insurance will cover the bypass and angioplasty but won't, until recently, cover diet and lifestyle. So we began, through our nonprofit institute, training hospitals around the country, and we found that most people could avoid surgery. And not only was it medically effective, it was also cost-effective. The insurance companies found that they began to save almost 30,000 dollars a patient, and Medicare is now in the middle of doing a demonstration project, paying for 1,800 people to go through the program in the sites we train. The fortuneteller says, "I give smokers a discount, because there's not as much to tell." (Laughter) I like this slide, because it's a chance to talk about what really motivates people to change and what doesn't. What doesn't work is fear of dying, and that's what's normally used. Everybody who smokes knows it's not good for you. Still, 30 percent of Americans smoke, 80 percent in some parts of the world. Why do people do it? Well, because it helps them get through the day. I'll talk more about this, but the real epidemic isn't just heart disease or obesity or smoking, it's loneliness and depression. One woman said, "I've got 20 friends in this pack of cigarettes. They're always there for me, and nobody else is. You're going to take away my 20 friends? What are you going to give me?" Or they eat when they get depressed or use alcohol to numb the pain or work too hard or watch too much TV. There are lots of ways we have of avoiding and numbing and bypassing pain, but the point of all of this is to deal with the cause of the problem. The pain is not the problem, it's the symptom. And telling people they're going to die is too scary to think about, or that they'll get emphysema or a heart attack is too scary, and they don't want to think about it, so they don't. The most effective anti-smoking ad was this one. You'll notice the limp cigarette hanging out of his mouth. And the headline is "Impotent," it's not "Emphysema." What was the biggest-selling drug of all time, when it was introduced a few years ago? Viagra, right? Why? Because a lot of guys need it. It's not like you say, "Joe, I'm having erectile dysfunction. How about you?" And yet, look at the number of prescriptions that are being sold. It's not so much psychological, it's vascular, and nicotine makes your arteries constrict. So does cocaine, so does a high-fat diet, so does emotional stress. So the very behaviors that we think of as being so sexy in our culture are the very ones that leave so many people feeling tired, lethargic, depressed and impotent. And that's not much fun. But when you change those behaviors, your brain gets more blood, you think more clearly, have more energy, your heart gets more blood, as I've shown you. Your sexual function improves. These things occur within hours. This is a study: a high-fat meal, within one or two hours, blood flow is measurably less. And you've all experienced this at Thanksgiving. When you eat a big fatty meal, how do you feel? You feel kind of sleepy afterwards. On a low-fat meal, the blood flow doesn't go down — it even goes up. Many of you have kids, and you know that's a big change in your lifestyle. People are not afraid to make big changes in lifestyle if they're worth it. And the paradox is that when you make big changes, you get big benefits, and you feel so much better so quickly. For many people, those are choices worth making — not to live longer, but to live better. I want to talk a little bit about the obesity epidemic, because it really is a problem. Two-thirds of adults are overweight or obese, and diabetes in kids and 30-year-olds has increased 70 percent in the last 10 years. It's no joke, it's real. And just to show you this, this is from the CDC. These are not election returns; these are the percentage of people who are overweight. And if you see from '85 to '86 to '87, '88, '89, '90, '91 — you get a new category, 15 to 20 percent; '92, '93, '94, '95, '96, '97 — you get a new category; '98, '99, 2000 and 2001. Mississippi, more than 25 percent of people are overweight. Why is this? Well, this is one way to lose weight that works very well — (Laughter) but it doesn't last, which is the problem. (Laughter) Now, there's no mystery in how you lose weight; you either burn more calories by exercise or you eat fewer calories. Now, one way to eat fewer calories is to eat less food, which is why you can lose weight on any diet if you eat less food, or if you restrict entire categories of foods. But the problem is, you get hungry, so it's hard to keep it off. The other way is to change the type of food. And fat has nine calories per gram, whereas protein and carbs only have four. So when you eat less fat, you eat fewer calories without having to eat less food. So you can eat the same amount of food, but you're getting fewer calories because the food is less dense in calories. And it's the volume of food that affects satiety, rather than the type. I don't like talking about the Atkins diet, but I get asked about it, so thought I'd spend a few minutes on it. The myth that you hear is, Americans have been told to eat less fat, the percent of calories from fat is down, Americans are fatter than ever, therefore fat doesn't make you fat. It's a half-truth. Actually, Americans are eating more fat than ever, and even more carbs. So the percentage is lower, but the actual amount is higher, so the goal is to reduce both. Dr. Atkins and I debated each other many times before he died, and we agreed that Americans eat too many simple carbs, the "bad carbs." And these are things like — (Laughter) sugar, white flour, white rice, alcohol. And you get a double whammy: you get all these calories that don't fill you up because you've removed the fiber, and they get absorbed quickly so your blood sugar zooms up. Your pancreas makes insulin to bring it back down, which is good, but insulin accelerates the conversion of calories into fat. So the goal is not to go to pork rinds, bacon and sausages — these are not health foods — but to go from "bad carbs" to "good carbs." These are things like whole foods or unrefined carbs. Fruits, vegetables, whole wheat flour, brown rice, in their natural forms, are rich in fiber. The fiber fills you up before you get too many calories and it slows the absorption, so you don't get that rapid rise in blood sugar. And you get all the disease-protective substances. It's not just what you exclude from your diet, but also what you include that's protective. Just as all carbs are not bad for you, all fats are not bad; there are good fats. These are predominantly what are called omega-3 fatty acids. You find them, for example, in fish oil. Bad fats are things like trans-fatty acids in processed food and saturated fats, which we find in meat. If you remember nothing else from this talk: three grams a day of fish oil can reduce the risk of heart attack and sudden death by 50 to 80 percent. Three grams a day. They come in one-gram capsules; more than that just gives you extra fat you don't need. It also helps reduce the risk of the most common cancers, like breast, prostate and colon. The problem with the Atkins diet is, everyone knows people who've lost weight on it, but you can lose weight on amphetamines and fen-phen; there are lots of ways of losing weight that aren't good for you. You want to do it in a way that enhances your health, not one that harms it. The problem is, it's based on this half-truth: Americans eat too many simple carbs, so if you eat fewer, you'll lose weight, and even more weight if you eat whole foods and less fat, and you'll enhance your health rather than harming it. He says, "I've got good news. While your cholesterol level has remained the same, the research findings have changed." (Laughter) Now what happens to your heart when you go on an Atkins diet? The red is good; at the beginning and a year later. This is from a study in a peer-reviewed journal called "Angiology." There's more red after a year on a diet like I would recommend, there's less red, less blood flow after a year on an Atkins-type diet. So, yes, you can lose weight, but your heart isn't happy. Now one of the studies funded by the Atkins Center found that 70 percent of the people were constipated, 65 percent had bad breath, 54 percent had headaches — this is not a healthy way to eat. So you might start to lose weight and start to attract people towards you, but when they get too close, it's going to be a problem. (Laughter) And more seriously, there are case reports now of 16-year-old girls who died after a few weeks on the Atkins diet, of bone disease, kidney disease, and so on. And that's how your body excretes waste — through your breath, bowels and perspiration. So when you go on these kinds of diet, they begin to smell bad. An optimal diet is low in fat, low in the bad carbs, high in the good carbs and enough of the good fats. And then, again, it's a spectrum: when you move in this direction, you're going to lose weight, you'll feel better, and you'll gain health. There are ecological reasons for eating lower on the food chain too, whether it's the deforestation in the Amazon or making more protein available to the four billion people who live on a dollar a day, not to mention whatever ethical concerns people have. So there are lots of reasons for eating this way that go beyond just your health. Now, we're about to publish the first study looking at the effects of this program on prostate cancer, in collaboration with Sloan Kettering and UCSF. We took 90 men who had biopsy-proven prostate cancer, who had elected, for reasons unrelated to the study, not to have surgery. We could randomly divide them into two groups, and then we could have one group that is a nonintervention control group to compare to, which you can't do with, say, breast cancer, because everyone gets treated. We found that after a year, none of the experimental group patients who made these lifestyle changes needed treatment, while six of the control group patients needed surgery or radiation. When we looked at their PSA levels, which is a marker for prostate cancer, they got worse in the control group but got better in the experimental group. And the differences were highly significant. I wondered — was there any relationship between how much people changed their diet and lifestyle, whichever group they were in, and the changes in PSA? And sure enough, we found a dose-response relationship, just like we did in the arterial blockages in our cardiac studies. And in order for the PSA to go down, they had to make big changes. I then wondered if they're just changing their PSA, but it's not really affecting the tumor growth. So we took some of their blood serum and sent it to UCLA. They added it to a standard line of prostate tumor cells growing in tissue culture, and it inhibited the growth seven times more in the experimental group than in the control group — 70 versus 9 percent. Finally, I wondered if there's any relationship between how much people changed and how much it inhibited their tumor growth, whichever group they were in. And this really got me excited because again, we found the same pattern: the more people change, the more it affected the growth of their tumors. Finally, we did MRI and MR spectroscopy scans on some of these patients. The tumor activity is shown in red in this patient, and you can see clearly it's better a year later, along with the PSA going down. If it's true for prostate cancer, it'll almost certainly be true for breast cancer. And whether or not you have conventional treatment, in addition, if you make these changes, it may help reduce the risk of recurrence. The last thing I want to talk about, apropos of the issue of the pursuit of happiness, is that study after study has shown that people who are lonely and depressed — and depression is the other real epidemic in our culture — are many times more likely to get sick and die prematurely, in part because, as we talked about, they're more likely to smoke, overeat, drink too much, work too hard, and so on. But also, through mechanisms that we don't fully understand, people who are lonely and depressed are many times — three to five to ten times in some studies — more likely to get sick and die prematurely. And depression is treatable. We need to do something about that. Now on the other hand, anything that promotes intimacy is healing. It can be sexual intimacy — I happen to think healing energy and erotic energy are just different forms of the same thing. Friendship, altruism, compassion, service — all the perennial truths that we talked about that are part of all religion and all cultures, once you stop trying to see the differences — these are the things that are in our own self-interest, because they free us from our suffering and our disease. And it's, in a sense, the most selfish thing that we can do. Just to look at one study, done by David Spiegel at Stanford. He took women with metastatic breast cancer, randomly divided them into two groups. One group met for an hour and a half once a week in a support group. It was a nurturing, loving environment, where they were encouraged to let down their emotional defenses and talk about how awful it is to have breast cancer with people who understood because they were going through it too. They met once a week for a year. Five years later, those women lived twice as long. And that was the only difference between the groups. It was a randomized control study published in "The Lancet." Other studies have shown this as well. So these simple things that create intimacy are really healing. Even the word "healing" comes from the root "to make whole." The word "yoga" comes from the Sanskrit, meaning "union," "to yoke, to bring together." The last slide I want to show you is from — again, this swami that I studied with for so many years. I did a combined oncology and cardiology grand rounds at the University of Virginia medical school a couple years ago. And at the end of it, somebody said, "Hey, Swami, what's the difference between wellness and illness?" So he went up on the board and wrote the word "illness" and circled the first letter, then wrote the word "wellness," and circled the first two letters. To me, it's just shorthand for what we're talking about: that anything that creates a sense of connection and community and love is really healing. And then we can enjoy our lives more fully without getting sick in the process. Thank you. (Applause)

Aliens, love -- where are they?

John Hodgman

{0: 'John Hodgman'}

{0: ['expert']}

{0: 'John Hodgman is a writer, humorist, geek celebrity, former professional literary agent and expert on all world knowledge. He was the bumbling PC in Apple\'s long-running "I\'m a Mac; I\'m a PC" ad campaign.'}

2008-02-02

2008-10-21

TED2008

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'sv', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['entertainment', 'extraterrestrial life', 'humor', 'love', 'physics', 'science', 'time', 'comedy', 'movies']

{87: 'Nerdcore comedy', 86: 'Letting go of God', 148: 'The 4 a.m. mystery', 1048: "The 3 A's of awesome", 1650: 'How movies teach manhood', 785: 'Before Avatar ... a curious boy'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/john_hodgman_aliens_love_where_are_they/

Humorist John Hodgman rambles through a new story about aliens, physics, time, space and the way all of these somehow contribute to a sweet, perfect memory of falling in love.

You all know this story. In the summer of 1950, Enrico Fermi, the Italian-American physicist and atomic-pile builder, went to lunch at Los Alamos National Laboratory and joined some colleagues there, and asked them a question: "Where is everybody?" This confused his colleagues, obviously, because they were sitting right there with him. And then he had to clarify that he wasn't talking about them. He was talking about the space aliens. You see, this was only a few years after the supposed flying saucer crash at Roswell, New Mexico. And even though that turned out to be nothing, nothing at all — (Laughter) — merely a downed weather balloon piloted by small hairless men with slits for mouths ... Still, America had gone saucer-mad, even famous scientists who were eating lunch. Fermi's reasoning, if I may paraphrase badly, is that the universe is so vast that it stands to reason, there should be other intelligent life out there. And the universe is so old that unless we were the very first civilization ever to evolve, we should have some evidence of their existence by now. And yet, to the best of our knowledge, we are alone. "Where is everybody?" asked Fermi, and his colleagues had no answer. Fermi then went on with the same blunt logic to disprove fairies, Sasquatch, God, the possibility of love — and thereafter, as you know, Enrico Fermi ate alone. (Laughter) Now, I am not a scientist. I have never built an atomic pile. Although, I might argue that, technically, every pile is atomic. (Laughter) However, with respect, I might point out two possibilities that Enrico Fermi perhaps did not consider. One is that the aliens might be very far away. Perhaps, I dare say, even on other planets. The other possibility — (Laughter) — is, perhaps, Enrico Fermi himself was an alien. (Laughter) Think about it. Isn't it a little convenient that in the midst of the World War, out of nowhere, suddenly an Italian scientist showed up with an amazing new technology that would transform everything in the world and darken the history of the human species forever after? And isn't it a little strange that he required no payment for this? That he asked for only one thing — a gift of two healthy sperm whales? That's — that's not true. But it is strange. (Laughter) And if Enrico Fermi were indeed a space alien, wouldn't he be the first to have tried to convince his fellow scientists that the space aliens are not already here? For it is given in certain UFO-ology or UFOlogy circles, that the aliens are already here and have been for millennia; that they have walked among us in disguise, observing us, guiding our evolution from ape to man — if you believe in that sort of thing — and, occasionally, kidnapping us in their flying saucers and taking us away to have sex with us in pyramids. (Laughter) It's a difficult theory to discount, I think you'll agree. (Laughter) For even in my own life, there are memories I have that are difficult to explain — happenings that are so odd and unaccountably weird, that it is difficult to imagine they were not the result of prolonged and frequent contact with aliens throughout my life. For how else will you explain the amazing and absolutely true close encounters that I had and will describe to you now? Encounter one: Ocean City, New Jersey, 1980. This was the summer when the special edition of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" was released. And I went on vacation with my parents to the Jersey shore. Within 12 hours, I was horribly sunburned, just like Richard Dreyfuss in the movie. (Laughter) And so I spent the rest of the vacation largely sitting outside our little rental house at night, the sidewalk still warm from the sun, watching the skies for UFOs. What did I see? Stars, satellites, blinking airplanes — typical sky junk. Occasionally, kids would come and join me and watch, but their necks soon got sore, and they would go off to the boardwalk to play video games and mingle with humans. I was pretty good at the video games. I was not very good at the other part, so I stayed alone with the cosmos. And that's when it happened. An elderly couple came walking down the street. I would say they were in their late seventies, and I would say that they were on a date, because he was wearing a very neat little suit with a yellow tie — a brown suit. And she was wearing a cardigan, because it was now fully night and a chill was coming in off the ocean. I remember, for some reason, that they were exactly the same height. And then they stopped, and the man turned to me and said, "What are you looking for, flying saucers?" (Laughter) You have to admit, that's a pretty boss piece of detective work for an old man on a date. But what was stranger still — and even I realized it at the time, as a nine-year-old child — was that they stopped at all. That this old man would interrupt his moonlight stroll with his sweetheart with the precise reason of making fun of a child. "Oh," he said, "little green men." And then his girlfriend joined in, too. "There's no such thing as space men," she said. "There's no such thing." And then they both laughed. "Ha, ha, ha." I looked around. The street was entirely empty. I had stopped hearing the sound of the ocean. It was as though time had stopped. I did not know why they were teasing me. I looked into their strangely angry faces, and I remember wondering, are they wearing rubber masks? (Laughter) And what would be behind those rubber masks, if they were? Giant, almond-shaped, unblinking eyes? Slits for mouths? The old man crooked his finger as though he were firing a gun, and then he made laser sounds. "Kew, kew, kew — watch out." And they turned at once and walked away. The old man reached out his knobbly claw for the woman's hand, and found it, and left me alone. Now, you could describe this as a simple misunderstanding — a strange encounter among humans. Maybe it was swamp gas, but — (Laughter) — I know what I saw. Close encounter two: Brookline, Massachusetts, 1984. I went to see the movie "Dune," and a girl talked to me. Now, on its face — (Laughter) — this is impossible on its face, I realize — but it is absolutely true. It was opening night, naturally. I went with my friend Tim McGonigal, who sat on my left. On my right was the girl in question. She had long, curly black hair, a blue jean jacket. I remember, she had some sort of injury to her ankle, an Ace bandage, and she had crutches. She was very tall, I would say. I was starting high school at the time. I would say she was a junior, but I had never seen her before. She didn't go to my school. I didn't know her name, and I never will. She was sitting with someone who I presume was her mother, and they were talking about the novel, "Dune." They were both big fans, mother and daughter — very unusual. They were talking about how their favorite characters were the giant sandworms. And then it got stranger. That's when she turned to me and said, "Are you looking forward to seeing the movie?" (Laughter) First of all, I was embarrassed because I had not read the novel "Dune" at that time. I was merely a connoisseur of movies featuring desert planets, as I still am. (Laughter) But it was also the tone of how she asked the question: apropos of nothing, like she didn't even care about the answer, as though she just wanted to talk to me. I did not know what to say. I said, "Yes." I did not even turn my head. The movie began. I need not remind you that this was David Lynch's version of "Dune," in which all of the characters were sexy and deformed at the same time. (Laughter) There was a character called the Third-Stage Guild Navigator, which was a kind of giant, floating fetus-creature that lived in a giant tank with this orange mist of psychedelic spice swirling around him, allowing him to bend space and time. He could never leave the tank or interact with the outside world. He had become, in his isolation, so deformed and so sexy, that he had to talk through a kind of old-timey radio to the outside world, and could never touch them. I mean, I liked him a lot better than the sandworms. The sandworms were fine, but your favorite character? Please. When the movie ended, everyone seemed very happy to get up and get out of the theatre as soon as possible. Except for the girl. As I walked out, her pace slowed. Perhaps it was the crutches, but it seemed — (Laughter) — it seemed as though she might want to talk to me again. When I say it out loud, it sounds so ridiculous, but I can only come to the conclusion that it was what, in the alien abductee community, they call a "screen memory": a ridiculous false recollection designed by their brain to cover up some trauma — say, of being kidnapped and flown off to a sex pyramid. (Laughter) And so I sure am glad I did not slow down to talk to her. I sure am glad I never saw her again. Close encounter three: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1989. In the mid-to-late '80s, the novelist Whitley Strieber wrote a book called "Communion," in which he described his own lifelong experiences being abducted by aliens. And he also described the phenomenon known in this community as "lost time," where Whitley Strieber would suddenly become aware that he could not remember the previous ten minutes, or the previous ten hours, or the previous ten days. And would come to the conclusion that that was when the aliens were taking him and giving him rectal probes. (Laughter) This book became, naturally, an enormous best-seller. This image by Ted Joseph was from that book, and was his, sort of, police sketch of what the creatures looked like that Whitley Strieber had described to him. And it was so successful that they made it into a movie. And in 1989, the way I remember it, I was in Philadelphia visiting my girlfriend, and we decided, apropos of nothing, to go see this movie. And the way I remember it, the movie featured these details. One: Whitley Strieber was played by Christopher Walken. Two: the alien was played by a rubber puppet. (Laughter) Three: there was a surprisingly long sequence of the film in which the rubber puppet gives Christopher Walken a rectal probe. Four: this was being shown in a regular movie theater in Center City, Philadelphia. Five: all of which is to say, they made a movie out of the book, "Communion," and it starred Christopher Walken. Does something seem strange about this to you? Something odd? Something off? Something wrong with this picture? Think about it. Yes. The answer is: I had a girlfriend. What? (Laughter) How did this happen? When did this happen? I remember walking out of the theater and becoming suddenly aware of this fact, as we walked hand in hand, and pondering these very same questions. And to this day, I have no answer for you. Close encounter four: the Algarve, Portugal, 1991. Some years later, I and this woman — we'll call her "Catherine Fletcher" — (Laughter) — went traveling through the south of Portugal together. We stayed in old, crumbling, walled cities, in tiny little hotels, and we would climb up to the roof and drink Vinho Verde and watch the sun set and play checkers. What? Did we do this? Really? Does anyone do this? We went to some topless beaches. Excuse me? No, not in my life. For what it's worth, we went to Sagres, which was considered, at the time, to be the end of the world. And there I was chased by a pack of feral dogs on the dock, and the lead dog bit me on the ass, requiring me to go to a strange Portuguese clinic and receive an ass shot. Make of that what you will. (Laughter) Our last day in Portugal, we were in the district capital of Faro, and Catherine decided that she wanted to go to the beach one last time. Now, Faro is a bustling little city, and to get to the beach, she explained, you would have to take a bus and then a boat. And did I want to come with? But I was exhausted and dog-bitten, and so I said, "No." I remember what she looked like before she left. The freckles had grown and multiplied on her face and shoulders, clustering into a kind of a tan. A tan, we were both tan — is this true? Her eyes were extra bright and extra blue, as a result. She was smiling. She was a single woman about to go alone into a country, not even speaking the language, to travel alone by bus and boat to go to a beach she did not know or had never seen. I loved her, and then she went out into that strange, alien land. It took me some time to come to my senses. I had my own "lost time" moment, where I woke up and suddenly realized it was very late in the day, almost dinnertime, and she had not come back. Nervous, I went down to the street to look for her. Now, I did not speak Portuguese. I did not know where the beach was. I could not call her on a cell phone because this was 1991, and the aliens had not given us that technology yet. (Laughter) I realized that the day would only have two possible outcomes: either Catherine would come back to the hotel, or she would never come back to the hotel. And so I sat down to wait. I did not watch the skies, but the very end of the street where the buses and cars and pedestrians and little scooters were moving along. And I watched those constellations shift, hoping that they would part and I would see her face. It was at that moment, in that very small town of 30,000 or so, that I truly appreciated the vastness of the universe and the searching we might do in it. And that's when the Liberians came along. Five young men — all laughing, happy, traveling together, coming back to this hotel where they were staying. One of them was named Joseph, and he asked me what was I doing, and I explained. And he said, "Don't worry." He was sure that Catherine would be safe. But he did not seem so very sure, for he sat down to wait with me. And for the next two hours, they all waited with me: taking turns, going up to their room, coming back, telling me jokes, distracting me. Two hours, they gave me a message. We are not alone. And then, in the middle of a sentence, at the very birth of twilight, I turned and looked down the street. The stars aligned, and she came back. She was smiling. She did not understand why I was so worried. Neither did the Liberians, although there was a huge amount of relief in their laughter as they clapped us on the back, and went back up to their room and left us alone in the street, holding hands. An event like this leaves a scar on the memory, much like a piece of alien technology that has been inserted into your buttocks by a "Portuguese doctor." (Laughter) And even now, a decade and a half later, even now that we are married, I look for her still, whenever she is not in the room. And even though, I think you'll agree, it is probable that during the time she was away, she was kidnapped and replaced by an alien clone, I love her and wait for her still. Thank you for your kind attention. (Applause)

Nature vs. humans

Paul MacCready

{0: 'Paul MacCready'}

{0: ['engineer']}

{0: 'Paul MacCready, an aircraft designer and environmentalist, is a pioneer of human-powered flight, alternative energy for transportation, and environmentally responsible design.'}

1998-02-02

2008-10-22

TED1998

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'ku', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['demo', 'design', 'drones', 'flight', 'green', 'technology', 'transportation', 'solar energy']

{74: 'The route to a sustainable future', 128: 'Salvation (and profit) in greentech', 18: "Biomimicry's surprising lessons from nature's engineers", 176: 'A flight on solar wings', 723: 'My solar-powered adventure', 492: 'High-altitude wind energy from kites!'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_maccready_nature_vs_humans/

In 1998, aircraft designer Paul MacCready looks at a planet on which humans have utterly dominated nature, and talks about what we all can do to preserve nature's balance. His contribution: solar planes, superefficient gliders and the electric car.

You hear that this is the era of environment — or biology, or information technology ... Well, it's the era of a lot of different things that we're in right now. But one thing for sure: it's the era of change. There's more change going on than ever has occurred in the history of human life on earth. And you all sort of know it, but it's hard to get it so that you really understand it. And I've tried to put together something that's a good start for this. I've tried to show in this — though the color doesn't come out — that what I'm concerned with is the little 50-year time bubble that you are in. You tend to be interested in a generation past, a generation future — your parents, your kids, things you can change over the next few decades — and this 50-year time bubble you kind of move along in. And in that 50 years, if you look at the population curve, you find the population of humans on the earth more than doubles and we're up three-and-a-half times since I was born. When you have a new baby, by the time that kid gets out of high school more people will be added than existed on earth when I was born. This is unprecedented, and it's big. Where it goes in the future is questioned. So that's the human part. Now, the human part related to animals: look at the left side of that. What I call the human portion — humans and their livestock and pets — versus the natural portion — all the other wild animals and just — these are vertebrates and all the birds, etc., in the land and air, not in the water. How does it balance? Certainly, 10,000 years ago, the civilization's beginning, the human portion was less than one tenth of one percent. Let's look at it now. You follow this curve and you see the whiter spot in the middle — that's your 50-year time bubble. Humans, livestock and pets are now 97 percent of that integrated total mass on earth and all wild nature is three percent. We have won. The next generation doesn't even have to worry about this game — it is over. And the biggest problem came in the last 25 years: it went from 25 percent up to that 97 percent. And this really is a sobering picture upon realizing that we, humans, are in charge of life on earth; we're like the capricious Gods of old Greek myths, kind of playing with life — and not a great deal of wisdom injected into it. Now, the third curve is information technology. This is Moore's Law plotted here, which relates to density of information, but it has been pretty good for showing a lot of other things about information technology — computers, their use, Internet, etc. And what's important is it just goes straight up through the top of the curve, and has no real limits to it. Now try and contrast these. This is the size of the earth going through that same — (Laughter) — frame. And to make it really clear, I've put all four on one graph. There's no need to see the little detailed words on it. That first one is humans-versus-nature; we've won, there's no more gain. Human population. And so if you're looking for growth industries to get into, that's not a good one — protecting natural creatures. Human population is going up; it's going to continue for quite a while. Good business in obstetricians, morticians, and farming, housing, etc. — they all deal with human bodies, which require being fed, transported, housed and so on. And the information technology, which connects to our brains, has no limit — now, that is a wonderful field to be in. You're looking for growth opportunity? It's just going up through the roof. And then, the size of the Earth. Somehow making these all compatible with the Earth looks like a pretty bad industry to be involved with. So, that's the stage out of all this. I find, for reasons I don't understand, I really do have a goal. And the goal is that the world be desirable and sustainable when my kids reach my age — and I think that's — in other words, the next generation. I think that's a goal that we probably all share. I think it's a hopeless goal. Technologically, it's achievable; economically, it's achievable; politically, it means sort of the habits, institutions of people — it's impossible. The institutions of the past with all their inertia are just irrelevant for the future, except they're there and we have to deal with them. I spend about 15 percent of my time trying to save the world, the other 85 percent, the usual — and whatever else we devote ourselves to. And in that 15 percent, the main focus is on human mind, thinking skills, somehow trying to unleash kids from the straightjacket of school, which is putting information and dogma into them, get them so they really think, ask tough questions, argue about serious subjects, don't believe everything that's in the book, think broadly or creative. They can be. Our school systems are very flawed and do not reward you for the things that are important in life or for the survival of civilization; they reward you for a lot of learning and sopping up stuff. We can't go into that today because there isn't time — it's a broad subject. One thing for sure, in the future there is an essential feature — necessary, but not sufficient — which is doing more with less. We've got to be doing things with more efficiency using less energy, less material. Your great-great grandparents got by on muscle power, and yet we all think there's this huge power that's essential for our lifestyle. And with all the wonderful technology we have we can do things that are much more efficient: conserve, recycle, etc. Let me just rush very quickly through things that we've done. Human-powered airplane — Gossamer Condor sort of started me in this direction in 1976 and 77, winning the Kremer prize in aviation history, followed by the Albatross. And we began making various odd planes and creatures. Here's a giant flying replica of a pterosaur that has no tail. Trying to have it fly straight is like trying to shoot an arrow with the feathered end forward. It was a tough job, and boy it made me have a lot of respect for nature. This was the full size of the original creature. We did things on land, in the air, on water — vehicles of all different kinds, usually with some electronics or electric power systems in them. I find they're all the same, whether its land, air or water. I'll be focusing on the air here. This is a solar-powered airplane — 165 miles carrying a person from France to England as a symbol that solar power is going to be an important part of our future. Then we did the solar car for General Motors — the Sunracer — that won the race in Australia. We got a lot of people thinking about electric cars, what you could do with them. A few years later, when we suggested to GM that now is the time and we could do a thing called the Impact, they sponsored it, and here's the Impact that we developed with them on their programs. This is the demonstrator. And they put huge effort into turning it into a commercial product. With that preamble, let's show the first two-minute videotape, which shows a little airplane for surveillance and moving to a giant airplane. Narrator: A tiny airplane, the AV Pointer serves for surveillance — in effect, a pair of roving eyeglasses. A cutting-edge example of where miniaturization can lead if the operator is remote from the vehicle. It is convenient to carry, assemble and launch by hand. Battery-powered, it is silent and rarely noticed. It sends high-resolution video pictures back to the operator. With onboard GPS, it can navigate autonomously, and it is rugged enough to self-land without damage. The modern sailplane is superbly efficient. Some can glide as flat as 60 feet forward for every foot of descent. They are powered only by the energy they can extract from the atmosphere — an atmosphere nature stirs up by solar energy. Humans and soaring birds have found nature to be generous in providing replenishable energy. Sailplanes have flown over 1,000 miles, and the altitude record is over 50,000 feet. (Music) The Solar Challenger was made to serve as a symbol that photovoltaic cells can produce real power and will be part of the world's energy future. In 1981, it flew 163 miles from Paris to England, solely on the power of sunbeams, and established a basis for the Pathfinder. (Music) The message from all these vehicles is that ideas and technology can be harnessed to produce remarkable gains in doing more with less — gains that can help us attain a desirable balance between technology and nature. The stakes are high as we speed toward a challenging future. Buckminster Fuller said it clearly: "there are no passengers on spaceship Earth, only crew. We, the crew, can and must do more with less — much less." Paul MacCready: If we could have the second video, the one-minute, put in as quickly as you can, which — this will show the Pathfinder airplane in some flights this past year in Hawaii, and will show a sequence of some of the beauty behind it after it had just flown to 71,530 feet — higher than any propeller airplane has ever flown. It's amazing: just on the puny power of the sun — by having a super lightweight plane, you're able to get it up there. It's part of a long-term program NASA sponsored. And we worked very closely with the whole thing being a team effort, and with wonderful results like that flight. And we're working on a bigger plane — 220-foot span — and an intermediate-size, one with a regenerative fuel cell that can store excess energy during the day, feed it back at night, and stay up 65,000 feet for months at a time. (Music) Ray Morgan's voice will come in here. There he's the project manager. Anything they do is certainly a team effort. He ran this program. Here's ... some things he showed as a celebration at the very end. Ray Morgan: We'd just ended a seven-month deployment of Hawaii. For those who live on the mainland, it was tough being away from home. The friendly support, the quiet confidence, congenial hospitality shown by our Hawaiian and military hosts — (Music) this is starting — made the experience enjoyable and unforgettable. PM: We have real-time IR scans going out through the Internet while the plane is flying. And it's exploring without polluting the stratosphere. That's its goal: the stratosphere, the blanket that really controls the radiation of the earth and permits life on earth to be the success that it is — probing that is very important. And also we consider it as a sort of poor man's stationary satellite, because it can stay right overhead for months at a time, 2,000 times closer than the real GFC synchronous satellite. We couldn't bring one here to fly it and show you. But now let's look at the other end. In the video you saw that nine-pound or eight-pound Pointer airplane surveillance drone that Keenan has developed and just done a remarkable job. Where some have servos that have gotten down to, oh, 18 or 25 grams, his weigh one-third of a gram. And what he's going to bring out here is a surveillance drone that weighs about 2 ounces — that includes the video camera, the batteries that run it, the telemetry, the receiver and so on. And we'll fly it, we hope, with the same success that we had last night when we did the practice. So Matt Keenan, just any time you're — all right — ready to let her go. But first, we're going to make sure that it's appearing on the screen, so you see what it sees. You can imagine yourself being a mouse or fly inside of it, looking out of its camera. Matt Keenan: It's switched on. PM: But now we're trying to get the video. There we go. MK: Can you bring up the house lights? PM: Yeah, the house lights and we'll see you all better and be able to fly the plane better. MK: All right, we'll try to do a few laps around and bring it back in. Here we go. (Applause) PM: The video worked right for the first few and I don't know why it — there it goes. Oh, that was only a minute, but I think you'd be safe to have that near the end of the flight, perhaps. We get to do the classic. All right. If this hits you, it will not hurt you. (Laughter) OK. (Applause) Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause) But now, as they say in infomercials, we have something much better for you, which we're working on: planes that are only six inches — 15 centimeters — in size. And Matt's plane was on the cover of Popular Science last month, showing what this can lead to. And in a while, something this size will have GPS and a video camera in it. We've had one of these fly nine miles through the air at 35 miles an hour with just a little battery in it. But there's a lot of technology going. There are just milestones along the way of some remarkable things. This one doesn't have the video in it, but you get a little feel from what it can do. OK, here we go. (Laughter) MK: Sorry. OK. (Applause) PM: If you can pass it down when you're done. Yeah, I think — I lost a little orientation; I looked up into this light. It hit the building. And the building was poorly placed, actually. (Laughter) But you're beginning to see what can be done. We're working on projects now — even wing-flapping things the size of hawk moths — DARPA contracts, working with Caltech, UCLA. Where all this leads, I don't know. Is it practical? I don't know. But like any basic research, when you're really forced to do things that are way beyond existing technology, you can get there with micro-technology, nanotechnology. You can do amazing things when you realize what nature has been doing all along. As you get to these small scales, you realize we have a lot to learn from nature — not with 747s — but when you get down to the nature's realm, nature has 200 million years of experience. It never makes a mistake. Because if you make a mistake, you don't leave any progeny. We should have nothing but success stories from nature, for you or for birds, and we're learning a lot from its fascinating subjects. In concluding, I want to get back to the big picture and I have just two final slides to try and put it in perspective. The first I'll just read. At last, I put in three sentences and had it say what I wanted. Over billions of years on a unique sphere, chance has painted a thin covering of life — complex, improbable, wonderful and fragile. Suddenly, we humans — a recently arrived species, no longer subject to the checks and balances inherent in nature — have grown in population, technology and intelligence to a position of terrible power. We now wield the paintbrush. And that's serious: we're not very bright. We're short on wisdom; we're high on technology. Where's it going to lead? Well, inspired by the sentences, I decided to wield the paintbrush. Every 25 years I do a picture. Here's the one — tries to show that the world isn't getting any bigger. Sort of a timeline, very non-linear scale, nature rates and trilobites and dinosaurs, and eventually we saw some humans with caves ... Birds were flying overhead, after pterosaurs. And then we get to the civilization above the little TV set with a gun on it. Then traffic jams, and power systems, and some dots for digital. Where it's going to lead — I have no idea. And so I just put robotic and natural cockroaches out there, but you can fill in whatever you want. This is not a forecast. This is a warning, and we have to think seriously about it. And that time when this is happening is not 100 years or 500 years. Things are going on this decade, next decade; it's a very short time that we have to decide what we are going to do. And if we can get some agreement on where we want the world to be — desirable, sustainable when your kids reach your age — I think we actually can reach it. Now, I said this was a warning, not a forecast. That was before — I painted this before we started in on making robotic versions of hawk moths and cockroaches, and now I'm beginning to wonder seriously — was this more of a forecast than I wanted? I personally think the surviving intelligent life form on earth is not going to be carbon-based; it's going to be silicon-based. And so where it all goes, I don't know. The one final bit of sparkle we'll put in at the very end here is an utterly impractical flight vehicle, which is a little ornithopter wing-flapping device that — rubber-band powered — that we'll show you. MK: 32 gram. Sorry, one gram. PM: Last night we gave it a few too many turns and it tried to bash the roof out also. It's about a gram. The tube there's hollow, about paper-thin. And if this lands on you, I assure you it will not hurt you. But if you reach out to grab it or hold it, you will destroy it. So, be gentle, just act like a wooden Indian or something. And when it comes down — and we'll see how it goes. We consider this to be sort of the spirit of TED. (Applause) And you wonder, is it practical? And it turns out if I had not been — (Laughter) (Applause) Unfortunately, we have some light bulb changes. We can probably get it down, but it's possible it's gone up to a greater destiny up there — (Laughter) — than it ever had. And I wanted to make — (Applause) just — (Applause) But I want to make just two points. One is, you think it's frivolous; there's nothing to it. And yet if I had not been making ornithopters like that, a little bit cruder, in 1939 — a long, long time ago — there wouldn't have been a Gossamer Condor, there wouldn't have been an Albatross, a Solar Challenger, there wouldn't be an Impact car, there wouldn't be a mandate on zero-emission vehicles in California. A lot of these things — or similar — would have happened some time, probably a decade later. I didn't realize at the time I was doing inquiry-based, hands-on things with teams, like they're trying to get in education systems. So I think that, as a symbol, it's important. And I believe that also is important. You can think of it as a sort of a symbol for learning and TED that somehow gets you thinking of technology and nature, and puts it all together in things that are — that make this conference, I think, more important than any that's taken place in this country in this decade. Thank you. (Applause)

Flow, the secret to happiness

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

{0: 'Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi'}

{0: ['positive psychologist']}

{0: 'Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has contributed pioneering work to our understanding of happiness, creativity, human fulfillment and the notion of "flow" -- a state of heightened focus and immersion in activities such as art, play and work.'}

2004-02-29

2008-10-23

TED2004

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'da', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ka', 'ko', 'ku', 'lt', 'my', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sl', 'sr', 'sv', 'th', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['culture', 'global issues', 'happiness', 'music', 'psychology', 'work']

{97: 'The surprising science of happiness', 312: 'The new era of positive psychology', 66: 'Do schools kill creativity?', 1094: 'The social animal', 1856: 'Life in the "digital now"', 44: 'A philosophical quest for our biggest problems'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_flow_the_secret_to_happiness/

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi asks, "What makes a life worth living?" Noting that money cannot make us happy, he looks to those who find pleasure and lasting satisfaction in activities that bring about a state of "flow."

I grew up in Europe, and World War II caught me when I was between seven and 10 years old. And I realized how few of the grown-ups that I knew were able to withstand the tragedies that the war visited on them — how few of them could even resemble a normal, contented, satisfied, happy life once their job, their home, their security was destroyed by the war. So I became interested in understanding what contributed to a life that was worth living. And I tried, as a child, as a teenager, to read philosophy and to get involved in art and religion and many other ways that I could see as a possible answer to that question. And finally I ended up encountering psychology by chance. I was at a ski resort in Switzerland without any money to actually enjoy myself, because the snow had melted and I didn't have money to go to a movie. But I found that on the — I read in the newspapers that there was to be a presentation by someone in a place that I'd seen in the center of Zurich, and it was about flying saucers [that] he was going to talk. And I thought, well, since I can't go to the movies, at least I will go for free to listen to flying saucers. And the man who talked at that evening lecture was very interesting. Instead of talking about little green men, he talked about how the psyche of the Europeans had been traumatized by the war, and now they're projecting flying saucers into the sky. He talked about how the mandalas of ancient Hindu religion were kind of projected into the sky as an attempt to regain some sense of order after the chaos of war. And this seemed very interesting to me. And I started reading his books after that lecture. And that was Carl Jung, whose name or work I had no idea about. Then I came to this country to study psychology and I started trying to understand the roots of happiness. This is a typical result that many people have presented, and there are many variations on it. But this, for instance, shows that about 30 percent of the people surveyed in the United States since 1956 say that their life is very happy. And that hasn't changed at all. Whereas the personal income, on a scale that has been held constant to accommodate for inflation, has more than doubled, almost tripled, in that period. But you find essentially the same results, namely, that after a certain basic point — which corresponds more or less to just a few 1,000 dollars above the minimum poverty level — increases in material well-being don't seem to affect how happy people are. In fact, you can find that the lack of basic resources, material resources, contributes to unhappiness, but the increase in material resources does not increase happiness. So my research has been focused more on — after finding out these things that actually corresponded to my own experience, I tried to understand: where — in everyday life, in our normal experience — do we feel really happy? And to start those studies about 40 years ago, I began to look at creative people — first artists and scientists, and so forth — trying to understand what made them feel that it was worth essentially spending their life doing things for which many of them didn't expect either fame or fortune, but which made their life meaningful and worth doing. This was one of the leading composers of American music back in the '70s. And the interview was 40 pages long. But this little excerpt is a very good summary of what he was saying during the interview. And it describes how he feels when composing is going well. And he says by describing it as an ecstatic state. Now, "ecstasy" in Greek meant simply to stand to the side of something. And then it became essentially an analogy for a mental state where you feel that you are not doing your ordinary everyday routines. So ecstasy is essentially a stepping into an alternative reality. And it's interesting, if you think about it, how, when we think about the civilizations that we look up to as having been pinnacles of human achievement — whether it's China, Greece, the Hindu civilization, or the Mayas, or Egyptians — what we know about them is really about their ecstasies, not about their everyday life. We know the temples they built, where people could come to experience a different reality. We know about the circuses, the arenas, the theaters. These are the remains of civilizations and they are the places that people went to experience life in a more concentrated, more ordered form. Now, this man doesn't need to go to a place like this, which is also — this place, this arena, which is built like a Greek amphitheatre, is a place for ecstasy also. We are participating in a reality that is different from that of the everyday life that we're used to. But this man doesn't need to go there. He needs just a piece of paper where he can put down little marks, and as he does that, he can imagine sounds that had not existed before in that particular combination. So once he gets to that point of beginning to create, like Jennifer did in her improvisation, a new reality — that is, a moment of ecstasy — he enters that different reality. Now he says also that this is so intense an experience that it feels almost as if he didn't exist. And that sounds like a kind of a romantic exaggeration. But actually, our nervous system is incapable of processing more than about 110 bits of information per second. And in order to hear me and understand what I'm saying, you need to process about 60 bits per second. That's why you can't hear more than two people. You can't understand more than two people talking to you. Well, when you are really involved in this completely engaging process of creating something new, as this man is, he doesn't have enough attention left over to monitor how his body feels, or his problems at home. He can't feel even that he's hungry or tired. His body disappears, his identity disappears from his consciousness, because he doesn't have enough attention, like none of us do, to really do well something that requires a lot of concentration, and at the same time to feel that he exists. So existence is temporarily suspended. And he says that his hand seems to be moving by itself. Now, I could look at my hand for two weeks, and I wouldn't feel any awe or wonder, because I can't compose. (Laughter) So what it's telling you here is that obviously this automatic, spontaneous process that he's describing can only happen to someone who is very well trained and who has developed technique. And it has become a kind of a truism in the study of creativity that you can't be creating anything with less than 10 years of technical-knowledge immersion in a particular field. Whether it's mathematics or music, it takes that long to be able to begin to change something in a way that it's better than what was there before. Now, when that happens, he says the music just flows out. And because all of these people I started interviewing — this was an interview which is over 30 years old — so many of the people described this as a spontaneous flow that I called this type of experience the "flow experience." And it happens in different realms. For instance, a poet describes it in this form. This is by a student of mine who interviewed some of the leading writers and poets in the United States. And it describes the same effortless, spontaneous feeling that you get when you enter into this ecstatic state. This poet describes it as opening a door that floats in the sky — a very similar description to what Albert Einstein gave as to how he imagined the forces of relativity, when he was struggling with trying to understand how it worked. But it happens in other activities. For instance, this is another student of mine, Susan Jackson from Australia, who did work with some of the leading athletes in the world. And you see here in this description of an Olympic skater, the same essential description of the phenomenology of the inner state of the person. You don't think; it goes automatically, if you merge yourself with the music, and so forth. It happens also, actually, in the most recent book I wrote, called "Good Business," where I interviewed some of the CEOs who had been nominated by their peers as being both very successful and very ethical, very socially responsible. You see that these people define success as something that helps others and at the same time makes you feel happy as you are working at it. And like all of these successful and responsible CEOs say, you can't have just one of these things be successful if you want a meaningful and successful job. Anita Roddick is another one of these CEOs we interviewed. She is the founder of Body Shop, the natural cosmetics king. It's kind of a passion that comes from doing the best and having flow while you're working. This is an interesting little quote from Masaru Ibuka, who was at that time starting out Sony without any money, without a product — they didn't have a product, they didn't have anything, but they had an idea. And the idea he had was to establish a place of work where engineers can feel the joy of technological innovation, be aware of their mission to society and work to their heart's content. I couldn't improve on this as a good example of how flow enters the workplace. Now, when we do studies — we have, with other colleagues around the world, done over 8,000 interviews of people — from Dominican monks, to blind nuns, to Himalayan climbers, to Navajo shepherds — who enjoy their work. And regardless of the culture, regardless of education or whatever, there are these seven conditions that seem to be there when a person is in flow. There's this focus that, once it becomes intense, leads to a sense of ecstasy, a sense of clarity: you know exactly what you want to do from one moment to the other; you get immediate feedback. You know that what you need to do is possible to do, even though difficult, and sense of time disappears, you forget yourself, you feel part of something larger. And once the conditions are present, what you are doing becomes worth doing for its own sake. In our studies, we represent the everyday life of people in this simple scheme. And we can measure this very precisely, actually, because we give people electronic pagers that go off 10 times a day, and whenever they go off you say what you're doing, how you feel, where you are, what you're thinking about. And two things that we measure is the amount of challenge people experience at that moment and the amount of skill that they feel they have at that moment. So for each person we can establish an average, which is the center of the diagram. That would be your mean level of challenge and skill, which will be different from that of anybody else. But you have a kind of a set point there, which would be in the middle. If we know what that set point is, we can predict fairly accurately when you will be in flow, and it will be when your challenges are higher than average and skills are higher than average. And you may be doing things very differently from other people, but for everyone that flow channel, that area there, will be when you are doing what you really like to do — play the piano, be with your best friend, perhaps work, if work is what provides flow for you. And then the other areas become less and less positive. Arousal is still good because you are over-challenged there. Your skills are not quite as high as they should be, but you can move into flow fairly easily by just developing a little more skill. So, arousal is the area where most people learn from, because that's where they're pushed beyond their comfort zone and to enter that — going back to flow — then they develop higher skills. Control is also a good place to be, because there you feel comfortable, but not very excited. It's not very challenging any more. And if you want to enter flow from control, you have to increase the challenges. So those two are ideal and complementary areas from which flow is easy to go into. The other combinations of challenge and skill become progressively less optimal. Relaxation is fine — you still feel OK. Boredom begins to be very aversive and apathy becomes very negative: you don't feel that you're doing anything, you don't use your skills, there's no challenge. Unfortunately, a lot of people's experience is in apathy. The largest single contributor to that experience is watching television; the next one is being in the bathroom, sitting. Even though sometimes watching television about seven to eight percent of the time is in flow, but that's when you choose a program you really want to watch and you get feedback from it. So the question we are trying to address — and I'm way over time — is how to put more and more of everyday life in that flow channel. And that is the kind of challenge that we're trying to understand. And some of you obviously know how to do that spontaneously without any advice, but unfortunately a lot of people don't. And that's what our mandate is, in a way, to do. Thank you. (Applause)

The face of AIDS in Africa

Kristen Ashburn

{0: 'Kristen Ashburn'}

{0: ['photographer']}

{0: "Kristen Ashburn's photographs bring us face-to-face with real people in desperate circumstances. Taking us to the intimate spaces of her subjects -- the victims of war, disaster, epidemic -- she elicits the sublime sadness and resolve of human beings in suffering."}

2003-02-28

2008-10-24

TED2003

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'ha', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'hy', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sq', 'sr', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['AIDS', 'Africa', 'activism', 'disease', 'global issues', 'health', 'media', 'photography', 'science', 'HIV']

{84: 'My wish: Let my photographs bear witness', 279: 'Turning powerful stats into art', 56: 'My wish: Manufactured landscapes and green education', 963: 'Why I am an HIV/AIDS activist', 962: 'Mothers helping mothers fight HIV', 41873: 'How close are we to eradicating HIV?'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/kristen_ashburn_the_face_of_aids_in_africa/

In this moving talk, documentary photographer Kristen Ashburn shares unforgettable images of the human impact of AIDS in Africa.

When I first arrived in beautiful Zimbabwe, it was difficult to understand that 35 percent of the population is HIV positive. It really wasn't until I was invited to the homes of people that I started to understand the human toll of the epidemic. For instance, this is Herbert with his grandmother. When I first met him, he was sitting on his grandmother's lap. He has been orphaned, as both of his parents died of AIDS, and his grandmother took care of him until he too died of AIDS. He liked to sit on her lap because he said that it was painful for him to lie in his own bed. When she got up to make tea, she placed him in my own lap and I had never felt a child that was that emaciated. Before I left, I actually asked him if I could get him something. I thought he would ask for a toy, or candy, and he asked me for slippers, because he said that his feet were cold. This is Joyce who's — in this picture — 21. Single mother, HIV positive. I photographed her before and after the birth of her beautiful baby girl, Issa. And I was last week walking on Lafayette Street in Manhattan and got a call from a woman who I didn't know, but she called to tell me that Joyce had passed away at the age of 23. Joyce's mother is now taking care of her daughter, like so many other Zimbabwean children who've been orphaned by the epidemic. So a few of the stories. With every picture, there are individuals who have full lives and stories that deserve to be told. All these pictures are from Zimbabwe. Chris Anderson: Kirsten, will you just take one minute, just to tell your own story of how you got to Africa? Kirsten Ashburn: Mmm, gosh. CA: Just — KA: Actually, I was working at the time, doing production for a fashion photographer. And I was constantly reading the New York Times, and stunned by the statistics, the numbers. It was just frightening. So I quit my job and decided that that's the subject that I wanted to tackle. And I first actually went to Botswana, where I spent a month — this is in December 2000 — then went to Zimbabwe for a month and a half, and then went back again this March 2002 for another month and a half in Zimbabwe. CA: That's an amazing story, thank you. KB: Thanks for letting me show these.

Why do societies collapse?

Jared Diamond

{0: 'Jared Diamond'}

{0: ['civilization scholar']}

{0: 'Jared Diamond investigates why cultures prosper or decline -- and what we can learn by taking a broad look across many kinds of societies.'}

2003-02-28

2008-10-27

TED2003

en

['ar', 'bg', 'ca', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'eu', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sq', 'sr', 'th', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['culture', 'environment', 'global issues', 'history', 'social change', 'society', 'technology']

{42: 'Is this our final century?', 69: 'Dreams from endangered cultures', 68: 'Progress is not a zero-sum game', 1877: 'How societies can grow old better', 1374: 'The Earth is full', 945: 'Let the environment guide our development'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/jared_diamond_why_do_societies_collapse/

Why do societies fail? With lessons from the Norse of Iron Age Greenland, deforested Easter Island and present-day Montana, Jared Diamond talks about the signs that collapse is near, and how -- if we see it in time -- we can prevent it.

I think all of us have been interested, at one time or another, in the romantic mysteries of all those societies that collapsed, such as the classic Maya in the Yucatan, the Easter Islanders, the Anasazi, Fertile Crescent society, Angor Wat, Great Zimbabwe and so on. And within the last decade or two, archaeologists have shown us that there were environmental problems underlying many of these past collapses. But there were also plenty of places in the world where societies have been developing for thousands of years without any sign of a major collapse, such as Japan, Java, Tonga and Tikopea. So evidently, societies in some areas are more fragile than in other areas. How can we understand what makes some societies more fragile than other societies? The problem is obviously relevant to our situation today, because today as well, there are some societies that have already collapsed, such as Somalia and Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. There are also societies today that may be close to collapse, such as Nepal, Indonesia and Columbia. What about ourselves? What is there that we can learn from the past that would help us avoid declining or collapsing in the way that so many past societies have? Obviously the answer to this question is not going to be a single factor. If anyone tells you that there is a single-factor explanation for societal collapses, you know right away that they're an idiot. This is a complex subject. But how can we make sense out of the complexities of this subject? In analyzing societal collapses, I've arrived at a five-point framework — a checklist of things that I go through to try and understand collapses. And I'll illustrate that five-point framework by the extinction of the Greenland Norse society. This is a European society with literate records, so we know a good deal about the people and their motivation. In AD 984 Vikings went out to Greenland, settled Greenland, and around 1450 they died out — the society collapsed, and every one of them ended up dead. Why did they all end up dead? Well, in my five-point framework, the first item on the framework is to look for human impacts on the environment: people inadvertently destroying the resource base on which they depend. And in the case of the Viking Norse, the Vikings inadvertently caused soil erosion and deforestation, which was a particular problem for them because they required forests to make charcoal, to make iron. So they ended up an Iron Age European society, virtually unable to make their own iron. A second item on my checklist is climate change. Climate can get warmer or colder or dryer or wetter. In the case of the Vikings — in Greenland, the climate got colder in the late 1300s, and especially in the 1400s. But a cold climate isn't necessarily fatal, because the Inuit — the Eskimos inhabiting Greenland at the same time — did better, rather than worse, with cold climates. So why didn't the Greenland Norse as well? The third thing on my checklist is relations with neighboring friendly societies that may prop up a society. And if that friendly support is pulled away, that may make a society more likely to collapse. In the case of the Greenland Norse, they had trade with the mother country — Norway — and that trade dwindled: partly because Norway got weaker, partly because of sea ice between Greenland and Norway. The fourth item on my checklist is relations with hostile societies. In the case of Norse Greenland, the hostiles were the Inuit — the Eskimos sharing Greenland — with whom the Norse got off to bad relationships. And we know that the Inuit killed the Norse and, probably of greater importance, may have blocked access to the outer fjords, on which the Norse depended for seals at a critical time of the year. And then finally, the fifth item on my checklist is the political, economic, social and cultural factors in the society that make it more or less likely that the society will perceive and solve its environmental problems. In the case of the Greenland Norse, cultural factors that made it difficult for them to solve their problems were: their commitments to a Christian society investing heavily in cathedrals; their being a competitive-ranked chiefly society; and their scorn for the Inuit, from whom they refused to learn. So that's how the five-part framework is relevant to the collapse and eventual extinction of the Greenland Norse. What about a society today? For the past five years, I've been taking my wife and kids to Southwestern Montana, where I worked as a teenager on the hay harvest. And Montana, at first sight, seems like the most pristine environment in the United States. But scratch the surface, and Montana suffers from serious problems. Going through the same checklist: human environmental impacts? Yes, acute in Montana. Toxic problems from mine waste have caused damage of billions of dollars. Problems from weeds, weed control, cost Montana nearly 200 million dollars a year. Montana has lost agricultural areas from salinization, problems of forest management, problems of forest fires. Second item on my checklist: climate change. Yes — the climate in Montana is getting warmer and drier, but Montana agriculture depends especially on irrigation from the snow pack, and as the snow is melting — for example, as the glaciers in Glacier National Park are disappearing — that's bad news for Montana irrigation agriculture. Third thing on my checklist: relations with friendlies that can sustain the society. In Montana today, more than half of the income of Montana is not earned within Montana, but is derived from out of state: transfer payments from social security, investments and so on — which makes Montana vulnerable to the rest of the United States. Fourth: relations with hostiles. Montanans have the same problems as do all Americans, in being sensitive to problems created by hostiles overseas affecting our oil supplies, and terrorist attacks. And finally, last item on my checklist: question of how political, economic, social, cultural attitudes play into this. Montanans have long-held values, which today seem to be getting in the way of their solving their own problems. Long-held devotion to logging and to mines and to agriculture, and to no government regulation; values that worked well in the past, but they don't seem to be working well today. So, I'm looking at these issues of collapses for a lot of past societies and for many present societies. Are there any general conclusions that arise? In a way, just like Tolstoy's statement about every unhappy marriage being different, every collapsed or endangered society is different — they all have different details. But nevertheless, there are certain common threads that emerge from these comparisons of past societies that did or did not collapse and threatened societies today. One interesting common thread has to do with, in many cases, the rapidity of collapse after a society reaches its peak. There are many societies that don't wind down gradually, but they build up — get richer and more powerful — and then within a short time, within a few decades after their peak, they collapse. For example, the classic lowland Maya of the Yucatan began to collapse in the early 800s — literally a few decades after the Maya were building their biggest monuments, and Maya population was greatest. Or again, the collapse of the Soviet Union took place within a couple of decades, maybe within a decade, of the time when the Soviet Union was at its greatest power. An analogue would be the growth of bacteria in a petri dish. These rapid collapses are especially likely where there's a mismatch between available resources and resource consumption, or a mismatch between economic outlays and economic potential. In a petri dish, bacteria grow. Say they double every generation, and five generations before the end the petri dish is 15/16ths empty, and then the next generation's 3/4ths empty, and the next generation half empty. Within one generation after the petri dish still being half empty, it is full. There's no more food and the bacteria have collapsed. So, this is a frequent theme: societies collapse very soon after reaching their peak in power. What it means to put it mathematically is that, if you're concerned about a society today, you should be looking not at the value of the mathematical function — the wealth itself — but you should be looking at the first derivative and the second derivatives of the function. That's one general theme. A second general theme is that there are many, often subtle environmental factors that make some societies more fragile than others. Many of those factors are not well understood. For example, why is it that in the Pacific, of those hundreds of Pacific islands, why did Easter Island end up as the most devastating case of complete deforestation? It turns out that there were about nine different environmental factors — some, rather subtle ones — that were working against the Easter Islanders, and they involve fallout of volcanic tephra, latitude, rainfall. Perhaps the most subtle of them is that it turns out that a major input of nutrients which protects island environments in the Pacific is from the fallout of continental dust from central Asia. Easter, of all Pacific islands, has the least input of dust from Asia restoring the fertility of its soils. But that's a factor that we didn't even appreciate until 1999. So, some societies, for subtle environmental reasons, are more fragile than others. And then finally, another generalization. I'm now teaching a course at UCLA, to UCLA undergraduates, on these collapses of societies. What really bugs my UCLA undergraduate students is, how on earth did these societies not see what they were doing? How could the Easter Islanders have deforested their environment? What did they say when they were cutting down the last palm tree? Didn't they see what they were doing? How could societies not perceive their impacts on the environments and stop in time? And I would expect that, if our human civilization carries on, then maybe in the next century people will be asking, why on earth did these people today in the year 2003 not see the obvious things that they were doing and take corrective action? It seems incredible in the past. In the future, it'll seem incredible what we are doing today. And so I've been trying to develop a hierarchical set of considerations about why societies fail to solve their problems — why they fail to perceive the problems or, if they perceive them, why they fail to tackle them. Or, if they tackle them, why do they fail to succeed in solving them? I'll just mention two generalizations in this area. One blueprint for trouble, making collapse likely, is where there is a conflict of interest between the short-term interest of the decision-making elites and the long-term interest of the society as a whole, especially if the elites are able to insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions. Where what's good in the short run for the elite is bad for the society as a whole, there's a real risk of the elite doing things that would bring the society down in the long run. For example, among the Greenland Norse — a competitive rank society — what the chiefs really wanted is more followers and more sheep and more resources to outcompete the neighboring chiefs. And that led the chiefs to do what's called flogging the land: overstocking the land, forcing tenant farmers into dependency. And that made the chiefs powerful in the short run, but led to the society's collapse in the long run. Those same issues of conflicts of interest are acute in the United States today. Especially because the decision makers in the United States are frequently able to insulate themselves from consequences by living in gated compounds, by drinking bottled water and so on. And within the last couple of years, it's been obvious that the elite in the business world correctly perceive that they can advance their short-term interest by doing things that are good for them but bad for society as a whole, such as draining a few billion dollars out of Enron and other businesses. They are quite correct that these things are good for them in the short term, although bad for society in the long term. So, that's one general conclusion about why societies make bad decisions: conflicts of interest. And the other generalization that I want to mention is that it's particularly hard for a society to make quote-unquote good decisions when there is a conflict involving strongly held values that are good in many circumstances but are poor in other circumstances. For example, the Greenland Norse, in this difficult environment, were held together for four-and-a-half centuries by their shared commitment to religion, and by their strong social cohesion. But those two things — commitment to religion and strong social cohesion — also made it difficult for them to change at the end and to learn from the Inuit. Or today — Australia. One of the things that enabled Australia to survive in this remote outpost of European civilization for 250 years has been their British identity. But today, their commitment to a British identity is serving Australians poorly in their need to adapt to their situation in Asia. So it's particularly difficult to change course when the things that get you in trouble are the things that are also the source of your strength. What's going to be the outcome today? Well, all of us know the dozen sorts of ticking time bombs going on in the modern world, time bombs that have fuses of a few decades to — all of them, not more than 50 years, and any one of which can do us in; the time bombs of water, of soil, of climate change, invasive species, the photosynthetic ceiling, population problems, toxics, etc., etc. — listing about 12 of them. And while these time bombs — none of them has a fuse beyond 50 years, and most of them have fuses of a few decades — some of them, in some places, have much shorter fuses. At the rate at which we're going now, the Philippines will lose all its accessible loggable forest within five years. And the Solomon Islands are only one year away from losing their loggable forest, which is their major export. And that's going to be spectacular for the economy of the Solomons. People often ask me, Jared, what's the most important thing that we need to do about the world's environmental problems? And my answer is, the most important thing we need to do is to forget about there being any single thing that is the most important thing we need to do. Instead, there are a dozen things, any one of which could do us in. And we've got to get them all right, because if we solve 11, we fail to solve the 12th — we're in trouble. For example, if we solve our problems of water and soil and population, but don't solve our problems of toxics, then we are in trouble. The fact is that our present course is a non-sustainable course, which means, by definition, that it cannot be maintained. And the outcome is going to get resolved within a few decades. That means that those of us in this room who are less than 50 or 60 years old will see how these paradoxes are resolved, and those of us who are over the age of 60 may not see the resolution, but our children and grandchildren certainly will. The resolution is going to achieve either of two forms: either we will resolve these non-sustainable time-fuses in pleasant ways of our own choice by taking remedial action, or else these conflicts are going to get settled in unpleasant ways not of our choice — namely, by war, disease or starvation. But what's for sure is that our non-sustainable course will get resolved in one way or another in a few decades. In other words, since the theme of this session is choices, we have a choice. Does that mean that we should get pessimistic and overwhelmed? I draw the reverse conclusion. The big problems facing the world today are not at all things beyond our control. Our biggest threat is not an asteroid about to crash into us, something we can do nothing about. Instead, all the major threats facing us today are problems entirely of our own making. And since we made the problems, we can also solve the problems. That then means that it's entirely in our power to deal with these problems. In particular, what can all of us do? For those of you who are interested in these choices, there are lots of things you can do. There's a lot that we don't understand, and that we need to understand. And there's a lot that we already do understand, but aren't doing, and that we need to be doing. Thank you. (Applause)

A story of mixed emoticons

Rives

{0: ' Rives'}

{0: ['performance poet', 'multimedia artist']}

{0: 'Performance artist and storyteller Rives has been called "the first 2.0 poet," using images, video and technology to bring his words to life. '}

2008-02-02

2008-10-28

TED2008

en

['af', 'ar', 'az', 'bg', 'ca', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'et', 'fa', 'fil', 'fr', 'fr-ca', 'he', 'hi', 'hr', 'hu', 'hy', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'kk', 'ko', 'ku', 'lv', 'mk', 'mn', 'ms', 'my', 'nb', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sl', 'sq', 'sr', 'sv', 'th', 'tr', 'ug', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['design', 'entertainment', 'humor', 'love', 'media', 'poetry', 'storytelling']

{26: 'If I controlled the Internet', 119: '"Black Men Ski"', 81: 'Singing "What I Want"', 751: 'Embrace your inner girl', 1646: 'A father-daughter dance ... in prison', 474: 'Why not make video games for girls?'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/rives_a_story_of_mixed_emoticons/

Rives tells a typographical fairy tale that's short and bittersweet ;)

This means, "I'm smiling." So does that. This means "mouse." "Cat." Here we have a story. The start of the story, where this means guy, and that is a ponytail on a passer-by. Here's where it happens. These are when. This is a cassette tape the girl puts into her cassette-tape player. She wears it every day. It's not considered vintage — she just likes certain music to sound a certain way. Look at her posture; it's remarkable. That's because she dances. Now he, the guy, takes all of this in, figuring, "Honestly, geez, what are my chances?" (Laughter) And he could say, "Oh my God!" or "I heart you!" "I'm laughing out loud." "I want to give you a hug." But he comes up with that, you know. He tells her, "I'd like to hand-paint your portrait on a coffee mug." (Laughter) Put a crab inside it. Add some water. Seven different salts. He means he's got this sudden notion to stand on dry land, but just panhandle at the ocean. He says, "You look like a mermaid, but you walk like a waltz." And the girl goes, "Wha'?" So, the guy replies, "Yeah, I know, I know. I think my heartbeat might be the Morse code for inappropriate. At least, that's how it seems. I'm like a junior varsity cheerleader sometimes — for swearing, awkward silences, and very simple rhyme schemes. Right now, talking to you, I'm not even really a guy. I'm a monkey — (Laughter) — blowing kisses at a butterfly. But I'm still suggesting you and I should meet. First, soon, and then a lot. I'm thinking the southwest corner of 5th and 42nd at noon tomorrow, but I'll stay until you show up, ponytail or not. Hell, ponytail alone. I don't know what else to tell you. I got a pencil you can borrow. You can put it in your phone." But the girl does not budge, does not smile, does not frown. She just says, "No thank you." You know? [ "i don't need 2 write it down." ] (Applause)

Toys and materials from the future

Keith Schacht

{0: 'Keith Schacht', 1: 'Zach Kaplan'}

{0: ['inventor'], 1: ['inventor']}

{0: "Keith Schacht co-founded Inventables, a hothouse for innovation. More recently he's brought us the JobCoin listings board, the Freshwater Venture entrepreneur map, and Facebook's Grow-a-Gift.", 1: 'Zach Kaplan is the CEO of Inventables, a company that collects and shows off new materials and new ideas (you can see their latest collection on Discovery Channel\'s new show, "Prototype This!").'}

2005-02-02

2008-10-30

TED2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'eu', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['business', 'creativity', 'design', 'industrial design', 'invention', 'materials', 'science', 'smell', 'technology', 'toy']

{1580: 'Smart failure for a fast-changing world', 1743: 'Hack a banana, make a keyboard!', 1692: 'Play with smart materials', 59050: 'How to spark your curiosity, scientifically', 43: 'Design is in the details', 619: 'A demo of wireless electricity'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/zach_kaplan_keith_schacht_toys_and_materials_from_the_future/

The Inventables guys, Zach Kaplan and Keith Schacht, demo some amazing new materials and how we might use them. Look for squishy magnets, odor-detecting ink, "dry" liquid and a very surprising 10-foot pole.

Zach Kaplan: Keith and I lead a research team. We investigate materials and technologies that have unexpected properties. Over the last three years, we found over 200 of these things, and so we looked back into our library and selected six we thought would be most surprising for TED. Of these six, the first one that we're going to talk about is in the black envelope you're holding. It comes from a company in Japan called GelTech. Now go ahead and open it up. Keith Schacht: Now be sure and take the two pieces apart. What's unexpected about this is that it's soft, but it's also a strong magnet. Zach and I have always been fascinated observing unexpected things like this. We spent a long time thinking about why this is, and it's just recently that we realized: it's when we see something unexpected, it changes our understanding of the way things work. As you're seeing this gel magnet for the first time, if you assume that all magnets had to be hard, then seeing this surprised you and it changed your understanding of the way magnets could work. ZK: Now, it's important to understand what the unexpected properties are. But to really think about the implications of what this makes possible, we found that it helps to think about how it could be applied in the world. So, a first idea is to use it on cabinet doors. If you line the sides of the cabinets using the gel material — if a cabinet slams shut it wouldn't make a loud noise, and in addition the magnets would draw the cabinets closed. Imagine taking the same material, but putting it on the bottom of a sneaker. You know, this way you could go to the container store and buy one of those metal sheets that they hang on the back of your door, in your closet, and you could literally stick your shoes up instead of using a shelf. For me, I really love this idea. (Laughter) If you come to my apartment and see my closet, I'm sure you'd figure out why: it's a mess. KS: Seeing the unexpected properties and then seeing a couple of applications — it helps you see why this is significant, what the potential is. But we've found that the way we present our ideas it makes a big difference. ZK: It was like six months ago that Keith and I were out in L.A., and we were at Starbucks having coffee with Roman Coppola. He works on mostly music videos and commercials with his company, The Directors Bureau. As we were talking, Roman told us that he's kind of an inventor on the side. And we were showing him the same gel magnet that you're holding in your hand — and you know, we shared the same ideas. And you could see it in his face: Roman starts to get really excited and he whips out this manila folder; he opens it up and Keith and I look in, and he starts showing us concepts that he's been working on. These things just get him really excited. And so we're looking at these concepts, and we were just like, whoa, this guy's good. Because the way that he presented the concept — his approach was totally different than ours. He sold it to you as if it was for sale right now. When we were going in the car back to the airport, we were thinking: why was this so powerful? And as we thought about it more, we realized that it let you fill in all the details about the experience, just as if you saw it on TV. So, for TED we decided to take our favorite idea for the gel magnet and work with Roman and his team at the Directors Bureau to create a commercial for a product from the future. Narrator: Do you have a need for speed? Inventables Water Adventures dares you to launch yourself on a magnetically-levitating board down a waterslide so fast, so tall, that when you hit the bottom, it uses brakes to stop. Aqua Rocket: coming this summer. KS: Now, we showed the concept to a few people before this, and they asked us, when's it coming out? So I just wanted to let you know, it's not actually coming out, just the concept is. ZK: So now, when we dream up these concepts, it's important for us to make sure that they work from a technical standpoint. So I just want to quickly explain how this would work. This is the magnetically-levitating board that they mentioned in the commercial. The gel that you're holding would be lining the bottom of the board. Now this is important for two reasons. One: the soft properties of the magnet that make it so that, if it were to hit the rider in the head, it wouldn't injure him. In addition, you can see from the diagram on the right, the underpart of the slide would be an electromagnet. So this would actually repel the rider a little bit as you're going down. The force of the water rushing down, in addition to that repulsion force, would make this slide go faster than any slide on the market. It's because of this that you need the magnetic braking system. When you get to the very bottom of the slide — (Laughter) — the rider passes through an aluminum tube. And I'm going to kick it to Keith to explain why that's important from a technical standpoint. KS: So I'm sure all you engineers know that even though aluminum is a metal, it's not a magnetic material. But something unexpected happens when you drop a magnet down an aluminum tube. So we set up a quick experiment here to show that to you. (Laughter) Now, you see the magnet fell really slowly. Now, I'm not going to get into the physics of it, but all you need to know is that the faster the magnet's falling, the greater the stopping force. ZK: Now, our next technology is actually a 10-foot pole, and I have it right here in my pocket. (Laughter) There're a few different versions of it. (Laughter) KS: Some of them automatically unroll like this one. They can be made to automatically roll up, or they can be made stable, like Zach's, to hold any position in between. ZK: As we were talking to the vendor — to try to learn about how you could apply these, or how they're being applied currently — he was telling us that, in the military they use this one so soldiers can keep it on their chests — very concealed — and then, when they're out on the field, erect it as an antenna to clearly send signals back to the base. In our brainstorms, we came up with the idea you could use it for a soccer goal: so at the end of the game, you just roll up the goal and put it in your gym bag. (Laughter) KS: Now, the interesting thing about this is, you don't have to be an engineer to appreciate why a 10-foot pole that can fit in your pocket is so interesting. (Laughter) So we decided to go out onto the streets of Chicago and ask a few people on the streets what they thought you could do with this. Man: I clean my ceiling fans with that and I get the spider webs off my house — I do it that way. Woman: I'd make my very own walking stick. Woman: I would create a ladder to use to get up on top of the tree. Woman: An olive server. Man: Some type of extension pole — like what the painters use. Woman: I would make a spear that, when you went deep sea diving, you could catch the fish really fast, and then roll it back up, and you could swim easier ... Yeah. (Laughter) ZK: Now, for our next technology we're going to do a little demonstration, and so we need a volunteer from the audience. You sir, come on up. (Laughter) Come on up. Tell everybody your name. Steve Jurvetson: Steve. ZK: It's Steve. All right Steve, now, follow me. We need you to stand right in front of the TED sign. Right there. That's great. And hold onto this. Good luck to you. (Laughter) KS: No, not yet. (Laughter) ZK: I'd just like to let you all know that this presentation has been brought to you by Target. KS: Little bit — that's perfect, just perfect. Now, Zach, we're going to demonstrate a water gun fight from the future. (Laughter) So here, come on up to the front. All right, so now if you'll see here — no, no, it's OK. So, describe to the audience the temperature of your shirt. Go ahead. SJ: It's cold. KS: Now the reason it's cold is that's it's not actually water loaded into these squirt guns — it's a dry liquid developed by 3M. It's perfectly clear, it's odorless, it's colorless. It's so safe you could drink this stuff. (Laughter) And the reason it feels cold is because it evaporates 25 times faster than water. (Laughter) All right, well thanks for coming up. (Laughter) ZK: Wait, wait, Steven — before you go we filled this with the dry liquid so during the break you can shoot your friends. SJ: Excellent, thank you. KS: Thanks for coming up. Let's give him a big round of applause. (Applause) So what's the significance of this dry liquid? Early versions of the fluid were actually used on a Cray Supercomputer. Now, the unexpected thing about this is that Zach could stand up on stage and drench a perfectly innocent member of the audience without any concern that we'd damage the electronics, that we'd get him wet, that we'd hurt the books or the computers. It works because it's non-conductive. So you can see here, you can immerse a whole circuit board in this and it wouldn't cause any damage. You can circulate it to draw the heat away. But today it's most widely used in office buildings — in the sprinkler system — as a fire-suppression fluid. Again, it's perfectly safe for people. It puts out the fires, doesn't hurt anything. But our favorite idea for this was using it in a basketball game. So during halftime, it could rain down on the players, cool everyone down, and in a matter of minutes it would dry. Wouldn't hurt the court. ZK: Our next technology comes to us from a company in Japan called Sekisui Chemical. One of their R&D engineers was working on a way to make plastic stiffer. While he was doing this, he noticed an unexpected thing. We have a video to show you. KS: So you see there, it didn't bounce back. Now, this was an unintended side effect of some experiments they were doing. It's technically called, "shape-retaining property." Now, think about your interactions with aluminum foil. Shape-retaining is common in metal: you bend a piece of aluminum foil, and it holds its place. Contrast that with a plastic garbage can — and you can push in the sides and it always bounces back. ZK: For example, you could make a watch that wraps around your wrist, but doesn't use a buckle. Taking it a little further, if you wove those strips together — kind of like a little basket — you could make a shape-retaining sheet, and then you could embed it in a cloth: so you could make a picnic sheet that wraps around the table, so that way on a windy day it wouldn't blow away. For our next technology, it's hard to observe the unexpected property by itself, because it's an ink. So, we've prepared a video to show it applied to paper. KS: As this paper is bending, the resistance of the ink changes. So with simple electronics, you can detect how much the page is being bent. Now, to think about the potential for this, think of all the places ink is supplied: on business cards, on the back of cereal boxes, board games. Any place you use ink, you could change the way you interact with it. ZK: So my favorite idea for this is to apply the ink to a book. This could totally change the way that you interface with paper. You see the dark line on the side and the top. As you turn the pages of the book, the book can actually detect what page you're on, based on the curvature of the pages. In addition, if you were to fold in one of the corners, then you could program the book to actually email you the text on the page for your notes. KS: For our last technology, we worked again with Roman and his team at the Directors Bureau to develop a commercial from the future to explain how it works. Old Milk Carton: Oh yeah, it smells good. Who are you? New Milk Carton: I'm New Milk. OMC: I used to smell like you. Narrator: Fresh Watch, from Inventables Dairy Farms. Packaging that changes color when your milk's gone off. Don't let milk spoil your morning. ZK: Now, this technology was developed by these two guys: Professor Ken Suslick and Neil Rakow, of the University of Illinois. KS: Now the way it works: there's a matrix of color dyes. And these dyes change color in response to odors. So the smell of vanilla, that might change the four on the left to brown and the one on the right to yellow. This matrix can produce thousands of different color combinations to represent thousands of different smells. But like in the milk commercial, if you know what odor you want to detect, then they can formulate a specific dye to detect just that odor. ZK: Right. It was that that started a conversation with Professor Suslick and myself, and he was explaining to me the things that this is making possible, beyond just detecting spoiled food. It's really where the significance of it lies. His company actually did a survey of firemen all across the country to try to learn, how are they currently testing the air when they respond to an emergency scene? And he kind of comically explained that time after time, what the firemen would say is: they would rush to the scene of the crime; they would look around; if there were no dead policemen, it was OK to go. (Laughter) I mean, this is a true story. They're using policemen as canaries. (Laughter) But more seriously, they determined that you could develop a device that can smell better than the humans, and say if it's safe for the firemen. In addition, he's spun off a company from the University called ChemSensing, where they're working on medical equipment. So, a patient can come in and actually blow into their device. By detecting the odor of particular bacteria, or viruses, or even lung cancer, the dots will change and they can use software to analyze the results. This can radically improve the way that doctors diagnose patients. Currently, they're using a method of trial and error, but this could tell you precisely what disease you have. KS: So that was the six we had for you today, but I hope you're starting to see why we find these things so fascinating. Because every one of these six changed our understanding of what was possible in the world. Prior to seeing this, we would have assumed: a 10-foot pole couldn't fit in your pocket; something as inexpensive as ink couldn't sense the way paper is being bent; every one of these things — and we're constantly trying to find more. ZK: This is something that Keith and I really enjoy doing. I'm sure it's obvious to you now, but it was actually yesterday that I was reminded of why. I was having a conversation with Steve Jurvetson, over downstairs by the escalators, and he was telling me that when Chris sent out that little box, one of the items in it was the hydrophobic sand — the sand that doesn't get wet. He said that he was playing with it with his son. And you know, his son was mesmerized, because he would dunk it in the water, he would take it out and it was bone dry. A few weeks later, he said that his son was playing with a lock of his mother's hair, and he noticed that there were some drops of water on the hair. And he took the thing and he looked up to Steve and he said, "Look, hydrophobic string." (Laughter) I mean, after hearing that story — that really summed it up for me. Thank you very much. KS: Thank you. (Applause)

The story of Ezra

Newton Aduaka

{0: 'Newton Aduaka'}

{0: ['filmmaker']}

{0: "Newton Aduaka's award-winning <em>Ezra</em>, told through the eyes of a young boy in Sierra Leone, illuminates one of the most harrowing consequences of war: the recruitment of child soldiers."}

2007-06-06

2008-10-31

TEDGlobal 2007

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pa', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['Africa', 'creativity', 'culture', 'entertainment', 'film', 'global issues', 'war']

{294: 'On humanity', 171: 'An Iraq war movie crowd-sourced from soldiers', 170: 'My journey into movies that matter', 1650: 'How movies teach manhood', 713: 'Photographing the hidden story', 1999: 'Why veterans miss war'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/newton_aduaka_the_story_of_ezra/

Filmmaker Newton Aduaka shows clips from his powerful, lyrical feature film "Ezra," about a child soldier in Sierra Leone.

This is very strange for me, because I’m not used to doing this: I usually stand on the other side of the light, and now I'm feeling the pressure I put other people into. And it's hard ... The previous speaker has, I think, really painted a very good background as to the impulse behind my work and what drives me, and my sense of loss, and trying to find the answer to the big questions. But this, for me, I mean, coming here to do this, feels like — there’s this sculptor that I like very much, Giacometti, who after many years of living in France — and learning, you know, studying and working — he returned home and he was asked, what did you produce? What have you done with so many years of being away? And he sort of, he showed a handful of figurines. And obviously they were, "Is this what you spent years doing? And we expected huge masterpieces!" But what struck me is the understanding that in those little pieces was the culmination of a man’s life, search, thought, everything — just in a reduced, small version. In a way, I feel like that. I feel like I’m coming home to talk about what I’ve been away doing for 20 years. And I will start with a brief taster of what I’ve been about: a handful of films — nothing much, two feature films and a handful of short films. So, we’ll go with the first piece. (Video) Woman: "I destroy lives," mum said. I love her, you know. She’s not even my real mum. My real mum and dad dumped me and fucked off back to Nigeria. The devil is in me, Court. Court: Sleep. Woman: Have you ever been? Court: Where? Woman: Nigeria. Court: Never. My mum wanted to, couldn’t afford it. Woman: Wish I could. I have this feeling I’d be happy there. Why does everyone get rid of me? Court: I don't want to get rid of you. Woman: You don't need me. You’re just too blind to see it now. Boy: What do you do all day? Marcus: Read. Boy: Don't you get bored? And how come you ain't got a job anyway? Marcus: I am retired. Boy: So? Marcus: So I've done my bit for Queen and country, now I work for myself. Boy: No, now you sit around like a bum all day. Marcus: Because I do what I like? Boy: Look man, reading don't feed no one. And it particularly don't feed your spliff habit. Marcus: It feeds my mind and my soul. Boy: Arguing with you is a waste of time, Marcus. Marcus: You’re a rapper, am I right? Boy: Yeah. Marcus: A modern day poet. Boy: Yeah, you could say that. Marcus: So what do you talk about? Boy: What's that supposed to mean? Marcus: Simple. What do you rap about? Boy: Reality, man. Marcus: Whose reality? Boy: My fuckin' reality. Marcus: Tell me about your reality. Boy: Racism, oppression, people like me not getting a break in life. Marcus: So what solutions do you offer? I mean, the job of a poet is not just — Boy: Man, fight the power! Simple: blow the motherfuckers out of the sky. Marcus: With an AK-47? Boy: Man, if I had one, too fuckin' right. Marcus: And how many soldiers have you recruited to fight this war with you? Boy: Oh, Marcus, you know what I mean. Marcus: When a man resorts to profanities, it’s a sure sign of his inability to express himself. Boy: See man, you’re just taking the piss out of me now. Marcus: The Panthers. Boy: Panthers? Ass kickin' guys who were fed up with all that white supremacist, powers-that-be bullshit, and just went in there and kicked everybody's arse. Fuckin’ wicked, man. I saw the movie. Bad! What? Director 1: I saw his last film. Épuise, right? Woman 1: Yes. D1: Not to make a bad joke, but it was really épuisé. Epuisé — tired, exhausted, fed up. Director 2: Can you not shut up? Now, you talk straight to me, what’s wrong with my films? Let’s go. W1: They suck. Woman 2: They suck? What about yours? What, what, what, what about, what? What do you think about your movie? D1: My movies, they are OK, fine. They are better than making documentaries no one ever sees. What the fuck are you talking about? Did you ever move your fuckin' ass from Hollywood to go and film something real? You make people fuckin' sleep. Dream about bullshit. (Applause) Newton Aduaka: Thank you. The first clip, really, is totally trying to capture what cinema is for me, and where I'm coming from in terms of cinema. The first piece was, really, there's a young woman talking about Nigeria, that she has a feeling she'll be happy there. These are the sentiments of someone that's been away from home. And that was something that I went through, you know, and I'm still going through. I've not been home for quite a while, for about five years now. I've been away 20 years in total. And so it’s really — it's really how suddenly, you know, this was made in 1997, which is the time of Abacha — the military dictatorship, the worst part of Nigerian history, this post-colonial history. So, for this girl to have these dreams is simply how we preserve a sense of what home is. How — and it's sort of, perhaps romantic, but I think beautiful, because you just need something to hold on to, especially in a society where you feel alienated. Which takes us to the next piece, where the young man talks about lack of opportunity: living as a black person in Europe, the glass ceiling that we all know about, that we all talk about, and his reality. Again, this was my — this was me talking about — this was, again, the time of multiculturalism in the United Kingdom, and there was this buzzword — and it was trying to say, what exactly does this multiculturalism mean in the real lives of people? And what would a child — what does a child like Jamie — the young boy — think, I mean, with all this anger that's built up inside of him? What happens with that? What, of course, happens with that is violence, which we see when we talk about the ghettos and we talk about, you know, South Central L.A. and this kind of stuff, and which eventually, when channeled, becomes, you know, evolves and manifests itself as riots — like the one in France two years ago, where I live, which shocked everybody, because everyone thought, "Oh well, France is a liberal society." But I lived in England for 18 years. I've lived in France for about four, and I feel actually thrown back 20 years, living in France. And then, the third piece. The third piece for me is the question: What is cinema to you? What do you do with cinema? There's a young director, Hollywood director, with his friends — fellow filmmakers — talking about what cinema means. I suppose that will take me to my last piece — what cinema means for me. My life started as a — I started life in 1966, a few months before the Biafran, which lasted for three years and it was three years of war. So that whole thing, that whole childhood echoes and takes me into the next piece. (Video) Voice: Onicha, off to school with your brother. Onicha: Yes, mama. Commander: Soldiers, you are going to fight a battle, so you must get ready and willing to die. You must get — ? Child Soldiers: Ready and willing to die. C: Success, the change is only coming through the barrel of the gun. CS: The barrel of the gun! C: This is the gun. CS: This is the gun. C: This is an AK-47 rifle. This is your life. This is your life. This is ... this is ... this is your life. Ezra: They give us the special drugs. We call it bubbles. Amphetamines. Soldiers: Rain come, sun come, soldier man dey go. I say rain come, sun come, soldier man dey go. We went from one village to another — three villages. I don’t remember how we got there. Witness: We walked and walked for two days. We didn't eat. There was no food, just little rice. Without food — I was sick. The injection made us not to have mind. God will forgive us. He knows we did not know. We did not know! Committee Chairman: Do you remember January 6th, 1999? Ezra: I don’t remember. Various Voices: You will die! You will die! (Screaming) Onicha: Ezra! (Ezra: Onicha! Onicha!) Various Voices: ♫ We don't need no more trouble ♫ ♫ No more trouble ♫ They killed my mother. The Mende sons of bastards. (Shouting) Who is she? Me. Why you giving these to me? So you can stop staring at me. My story is a little bit complicated. I’m interested. Mariam is pregnant. You know what you are? A crocodile. Big mouth. Short legs. In front of Rufus you are Ezra the coward. He’s not taking care of his troops. Troop, pay your last honor. Salute. Open your eyes, Ezra. A blind man can see that the diamonds end up in his pocket. ♫ We don't need no more trouble ♫ Get that idiot out! I take you are preparing a major attack? This must be the mine. Your girl is here. Well done, well done. That is what you are here for, no? You are planning to go back to fight are you? ♫ We don't need no more trouble ♫ ♫ No more trouble ♫ ♫ We don't need no more trouble ♫ ♫ No more trouble. ♫ Wake up! Everybody wake up. Road block! ♫ We don't need no more ... ♫ Committee Chairman: We hope that, with your help and the help of others, that this commission will go a long way towards understanding the causes of the rebel war. More than that, begin a healing process and finally to — as an act of closure to a terrible period in this country’s history. The beginning of hope. Mr. Ezra Gelehun, please stand. State your name and age for the commission. Ezra: My name is Ezra Gelehun. I am 15 or 16. I don’t remember. Ask my sister, she is the witch, she knows everything. (Sister: 16.) CC: Mr. Gelehun, I’d like to remind you you’re not on trial here for any crimes you committed. E: We were fighting for our freedom. If killing in a war is a crime, then you have to charge every soldier in the world. War is a crime, yes, but I did not start it. You too are a retired General, not so? CC: Yes, correct. E: So you too must stand trial then. Our government was corrupt. Lack of education was their way to control power. If I may ask, do you pay for school in your country? CC: No, we don’t. E: You are richer than us. But we pay for school. Your country talks about democracy, but you support corrupt governments like my own. Why? Because you want our diamond. Ask if anyone in this room have ever seen real diamond before? No. CC: Mr. Gelehun, I'd like to remind you, you're not on trial here today. You are not on trial. E: Then let me go. CC: I can't do that, son. E: So you are a liar. (Applause) NA: Thank you. Just very quickly to say that my point really here, is that while we’re making all these huge advancements, what we're doing, which for me, you know, I think we should — Africa should move forward, but we should remember, so we do not go back here again. Thank you. Emeka Okafor: Thank you, Newton. (Applause) One of the themes that comes through very strongly in the piece we just watched is this sense of the psychological trauma of the young that have to play this role of being child soldiers. And considering where you are coming from, and when we consider the extent to which it’s not taken as seriously as it should be, what would you have to say about that? NA: In the process of my research, I actually spent a bit of time in Sierra Leone researching this. And I remember I met a lot of child soldiers — ex-combatants, as they like to be called. I met psychosocial workers who worked with them. I met psychiatrists who spent time with them, aid workers, NGOs, the whole lot. But I remember on the flight back on my last trip, I remember breaking down in tears and thinking to myself, if any kid in the West, in the western world, went through a day of what any of those kids have gone through, they will be in therapy for the rest of their natural lives. So for me, the thought that we have all these children — it’s a generation, we have a whole generation of children — who have been put through so much psychological trauma or damage, and Africa has to live with that. But I’m just saying to factor that in, factor that in with all this great advancement, all this pronouncement of great achievement. That’s really my thinking. EO: Well, we thank you again for coming to the TED stage. That was a very moving piece. NA: Thank you. EO: Thank you. (Applause)

The balancing act of compassion

Jackie Tabick

{0: 'Jackie Tabick'}

{0: ['spiritual leader']}

{0: 'As the first woman in the UK to be ordained in the Jewish faith, Rabbi Jackie Tabick has forged a path of inclusiveness from her work’s beginning. '}

2009-10-01

2008-10-31

TEDSalon 2009 Compassion

en

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['charter for compassion', 'compassion', 'global issues', 'religion']

{676: 'Lose your ego, find your compassion', 674: 'The profound journey of compassion', 675: 'Compassion at the dinner table', 647: "Let's revive the Golden Rule", 1074: 'Reconnecting with compassion', 677: 'Expanding your circle of compassion'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/jackie_tabick_the_balancing_act_of_compassion/

While we all agree that compassion is a great idea, Rabbi Tabick acknowledges there are challenges to its execution. She explains how a careful balance of compassion and justice allows us to do good deeds, and keep our sanity.

One of my favorite cartoon characters is Snoopy. I love the way he sits and lies on his kennel and contemplates the great things of life. So when I thought about compassion, my mind immediately went to one of the cartoon strips, where he's lying there and he says, "I really understand, and I really appreciate how one should love one's neighbor as one love's oneself. The only trouble is the people next door; I can't stand them." This, in a way, is one of the challenges of how to interpret a really good idea. We all, I think, believe in compassion. If you look at all the world religions, all the main world religions, you'll find within them some teaching concerning compassion. So in Judaism, we have, from our Torah, that you should love your neighbor as you love yourself. And within Jewish teachings, the rabbinic teachings, we have Hillel, who taught that you shouldn't do to others what you don't like being done to yourself. And all the main religions have similar teachings. And again, within Judaism, we have a teaching about God, who is called the compassionate one, Ha-rachaman. After all, how could the world exist without God being compassionate? And we, as taught within the Torah that we are made in the image of God, so we too have to be compassionate. But what does it mean? How does it impact on our everyday life? Sometimes, of course, being compassionate can produce feelings within us that are very difficult to control. I know there are many times when I've gone and conducted a funeral, or when I have been sitting with the bereaved, or with people who are dying, and I am overwhelmed by the sadness, by the difficulty, the challenge that is there for the family, for the person. And I'm touched, so that tears come to my eyes. And yet, if I just allowed myself to be overwhelmed by these feelings, I wouldn't be doing my job — because I have to actually be there for them and make sure that rituals happen, that practicalities are seen to. And yet, on the other hand, if I didn't feel this compassion, then I feel that it would be time for me to hang up my robe and give up being a rabbi. And these same feelings are there for all of us as we face the world. Who cannot be touched by compassion when we see the terrible horrors of the results of war, or famine, or earthquakes, or tsunamis? I know some people who say "Well, you know there's just so much out there — I can't do anything, I'm not going to even begin to try." And there are some charity workers who call this compassion fatigue. There are others who feel they can't confront compassion anymore, and so they turn off the television and don't watch. In Judaism, though, we tend to always say, there has to be a middle way. You have to, of course, be aware of the needs of others, but you have to be aware in such a way that you can carry on with your life and be of help to people. So part of compassion has to be an understanding of what makes people tick. And, of course, you can't do that unless you understand yourself a bit more. And there's a lovely rabbinic interpretation of the beginnings of creation, which says that when God created the world, God thought that it would be best to create the world only with the divine attribute of justice. Because, after all, God is just. Therefore, there should be justice throughout the world. And then God looked to the future and realized, if the world was created just with justice, the world couldn't exist. So, God thought, "Nope, I'm going to create the world just with compassion." And then God looked to the future and realized that, in fact, if the world were just filled with compassion, there would be anarchy and chaos. There had to be limits to all things. The rabbis describe this as being like a king who has a beautiful, fragile glass bowl. If you put too much cold water in, it will shatter. If you put boiling water in, it will shatter. What do you have to do? Put in a mixture of the two. And so God put both of these possibilities into the world. There is something more though that has to be there. And that is the translation of the feelings that we may have about compassion into the wider world, into action. So, like Snoopy, we can't just lie there and think great thoughts about our neighbors. We actually have to do something about it. And so there is also, within Judaism, this notion of love and kindness that becomes very important: "chesed." All these three things, then, have to be melded together. The idea of justice, which gives boundaries to our lives and gives us a feeling of what's right about life, what's right about living, what should we be doing, social justice. There has to be a willingness to do good deeds, but not, of course, at the expense of our own sanity. You know, there's no way that you can do anything for anyone if you overdo things. And balancing them all in the middle is this notion of compassion, which has to be there, if you like, at our very roots. This idea of compassion comes to us because we're made in the image of God, who is ultimately the compassionate one. What does this compassion entail? It entails understanding the pain of the other. But even more than that, it means understanding one's connection to the whole of creation: understanding that one is part of that creation, that there is a unity that underlies all that we see, all that we hear, all that we feel. I call that unity God. And that unity is something that connects all of creation. And, of course, in the modern world, with the environmental movement, we're becoming even more aware of the connectivity of things, that something I do here actually does matter in Africa, that if I use too much of my carbon allowance, it seems to be that we are causing a great lack of rain in central and eastern Africa. So there is a connectivity, and I have to understand that — as part of the creation, as part of me being made in the image of God. And I have to understand that my needs sometimes have to be sublimated to other needs. This "18 minutes" business, I find quite fascinating. Because in Judaism, the number 18, in Hebrew letters, stands for life — the word "life." So, in a sense, the 18 minutes is challenging me to say, "In life, this is what's important in terms of compassion." But, something else as well: actually, 18 minutes is important. Because at Passover, when we have to eat unleavened bread, the rabbis say, what is the difference between dough that is made into bread, and dough that is made into unleavened bread, or "matzah"? And they say "It's 18 minutes." Because that's how long they say it takes for this dough to become leaven. What does it mean, "dough becomes leaven"? It means it gets filled with hot air. What's matzah? What's unleavened bread? You don't get it. Symbolically, what the rabbis say is that at Passover, what we have to do is try to get rid of our hot air — our pride, our feeling that we are the most important people in the whole entire world, and that everything should revolve round us. So we try and get rid of those, and so doing, try to get rid of the habits, the emotions, the ideas that enslave us, that make our eyes closed, give us tunnel vision so we don't see the needs of others — and free ourselves and free ourselves from that. And that too is a basis for having compassion, for understanding our place in the world. Now there is, in Judaism, a gorgeous story of a rich man who sat in synagogue one day. And, as many people do, he was dozing off during the sermon. And as he was dozing off, they were reading from the book of Leviticus in the Torah. And they were saying that in the ancient times in the temple in Jerusalem, the priests used to have bread, which they used to place into a special table in the temple in Jerusalem. The man was asleep, but he heard the words bread, temple, God, and he woke up. He said, "God wants bread. That's it. God wants bread. I know what God wants." And he rushed home. And after the Sabbath, he made 12 loaves of bread, took them to the synagogue, went into the synagogue, opened the ark and said, "God, I don't know why you want this bread, but here you are." And he put it in the ark with the scrolls of the Torah. Then he went home. The cleaner came into the synagogue. "Oh God, I'm in such trouble. I've got children to feed. My wife's ill. I've got no money. What can I do?" He goes into the synagogue. "God, will you please help me? Ah, what a wonderful smell." He goes to the ark. He opens the ark. "There's bread! God, you've answered my plea. You've answered my question." Takes the bread and goes home. Meanwhile, the rich man thinks to himself, "I'm an idiot. God wants bread? God, the one who rules the entire universe, wants my bread?" He rushes to the synagogue. "I'll get it out of the ark before anybody finds it." He goes in there, and it's not there. And he says, "God, you really did want it. You wanted my bread. Next week, with raisins." This went on for years. Every week, the man would bring bread with raisins, with all sorts of good things, put it into the ark. Every week, the cleaner would come. "God you've answered my plea again." Take the bread. Take it home. Went on until a new rabbi came. Rabbis always spoil things. The rabbi came in and saw what was going on. And he called the two of them to his office. And he said, you know, "This is what's happening." And the rich man — oh, dear — crestfallen. "You mean God didn't want my bread?" And the poor man said, "And you mean God didn't answer my pleas?" And the rabbi said, "You've misunderstood me. You've misunderstood totally," he said. "Of course, what you are doing," he said to the rich man, "is answering God's plea that we should be compassionate. And God," he said to the poor man, "is answering your plea that people should be compassionate and give." He looked at the rich man. He held the rich man's hands and said, "Don't you understand?" He said, "These are the hands of God." So that is the way I feel: that I can only try to approach this notion of being compassionate, of understanding that there is a connectivity, that there is a unity in this world; that I want to try and serve that unity, and that I can try and do that by understanding, I hope, trying to understand something of the pain of others; but understanding that there are limits, that people have to bear responsibility for some of the problems that come upon them; and that I have to understand that there are limits to my energy, to the giving I can give. I have to reevaluate them, try and separate out the material things and my emotions that may be enslaving me, so that I can see the world clearly. And then I have to try to see in what ways I can make these the hands of God. And so try to bring compassion to life in this world.

The profound journey of compassion

Dayananda Saraswati

{0: 'Dayananda Saraswati'}

{0: ['vedantic teacher']}

{0: 'Swami Dayananda Saraswati is an acclaimed spiritual teacher and the founder of AIM for Seva -- a charitable trust that works to relieve poverty across India. '}

2009-10-01

2008-10-31

Chautauqua Institution

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'fr-ca', 'gu', 'he', 'hi', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ka', 'ko', 'lt', 'lv', 'mr', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sr', 'th', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['charter for compassion', 'compassion', 'global issues', 'religion', 'self']

{675: 'Compassion at the dinner table', 679: 'The evolution of compassion', 1074: 'Reconnecting with compassion', 1216: 'Compassion and the true meaning of empathy', 1113: 'Everyday compassion at Google', 677: 'Expanding your circle of compassion'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/dayananda_saraswati_the_profound_journey_of_compassion/

Swami Dayananda Saraswati unravels the parallel paths of personal development and attaining true compassion. He walks us through each step of self-realization, from helpless infancy to the fearless act of caring for others.

A human child is born, and for quite a long time is a consumer. It cannot be consciously a contributor. It is helpless. It doesn't know how to survive, even though it is endowed with an instinct to survive. It needs the help of mother, or a foster mother, to survive. It can't afford to doubt the person who tends the child. It has to totally surrender, as one surrenders to an anesthesiologist. It has to totally surrender. That implies a lot of trust. That implies the trusted person won't violate the trust. As the child grows, it begins to discover that the person trusted is violating the trust. It doesn't know even the word "violation." Therefore, it has to blame itself, a wordless blame, which is more difficult to really resolve — the wordless self-blame. As the child grows to become an adult: so far, it has been a consumer, but the growth of a human being lies in his or her capacity to contribute, to be a contributor. One cannot contribute unless one feels secure, one feels big, one feels: I have enough. To be compassionate is not a joke. It's not that simple. One has to discover a certain bigness in oneself. That bigness should be centered on oneself, not in terms of money, not in terms of power you wield, not in terms of any status that you can command in the society, but it should be centered on oneself. The self: you are self-aware. On that self, it should be centered — a bigness, a wholeness. Otherwise, compassion is just a word and a dream. You can be compassionate occasionally, more moved by empathy than by compassion. Thank God we are empathetic. When somebody's in pain, we pick up the pain. In a Wimbledon final match, these two guys fight it out. Each one has got two games. It can be anybody's game. What they have sweated so far has no meaning. One person wins. The tennis etiquette is, both the players have to come to the net and shake hands. The winner boxes the air and kisses the ground, throws his shirt as though somebody is waiting for it. (Laughter) And this guy has to come to the net. When he comes to the net, you see, his whole face changes. It looks as though he's wishing that he didn't win. Why? Empathy. That's human heart. No human heart is denied of that empathy. No religion can demolish that by indoctrination. No culture, no nation and nationalism — nothing can touch it because it is empathy. And that capacity to empathize is the window through which you reach out to people, you do something that makes a difference in somebody's life — even words, even time. Compassion is not defined in one form. There's no Indian compassion. There's no American compassion. It transcends nation, the gender, the age. Why? Because it is there in everybody. It's experienced by people occasionally. Then this occasional compassion, we are not talking about — it will never remain occasional. By mandate, you cannot make a person compassionate. You can't say, "Please love me." Love is something you discover. It's not an action, but in the English language, it is also an action. I will come to it later. So one has got to discover a certain wholeness. I am going to cite the possibility of being whole, which is within our experience, everybody's experience. In spite of a very tragic life, one is happy in moments which are very few and far between. And the one who is happy, even for a slapstick joke, accepts himself and also the scheme of things in which one finds oneself. That means the whole universe, known things and unknown things. All of them are totally accepted because you discover your wholeness in yourself. The subject — "me" — and the object — the scheme of things — fuse into oneness, an experience nobody can say, "I am denied of," an experience common to all and sundry. That experience confirms that, in spite of all your limitations — all your wants, desires, unfulfilled, and the credit cards and layoffs and, finally, baldness — you can be happy. But the extension of the logic is that you don't need to fulfill your desire to be happy. You are the very happiness, the wholeness that you want to be. There's no choice in this: that only confirms the reality that the wholeness cannot be different from you, cannot be minus you. It has got to be you. You cannot be a part of wholeness and still be whole. Your moment of happiness reveals that reality, that realization, that recognition: "Maybe I am the whole. Maybe the swami is right. Maybe the swami is right." You start your new life. Then everything becomes meaningful. I have no more reason to blame myself. If one has to blame oneself, one has a million reasons plus many. But if I say, in spite of my body being limited — if it is black it is not white, if it is white it is not black: body is limited any which way you look at it. Limited. Your knowledge is limited, health is limited, and power is therefore limited, and the cheerfulness is going to be limited. Compassion is going to be limited. Everything is going to be limitless. You cannot command compassion unless you become limitless, and nobody can become limitless, either you are or you are not. Period. And there is no way of your being not limitless too. Your own experience reveals, in spite of all limitations, you are the whole. And the wholeness is the reality of you when you relate to the world. It is love first. When you relate to the world, the dynamic manifestation of the wholeness is, what we say, love. And itself becomes compassion if the object that you relate to evokes that emotion. Then that again transforms into giving, into sharing. You express yourself because you have compassion. To discover compassion, you need to be compassionate. To discover the capacity to give and share, you need to be giving and sharing. There is no shortcut: it is like swimming by swimming. You learn swimming by swimming. You cannot learn swimming on a foam mattress and enter into water. (Laughter) You learn swimming by swimming. You learn cycling by cycling. You learn cooking by cooking, having some sympathetic people around you to eat what you cook. (Laughter) And, therefore, what I say, you have to fake it and make it. (Laughter) You need to. My predecessor meant that. You have to act it out. You have to act compassionately. There is no verb for compassion, but you have an adverb for compassion. That's interesting to me. You act compassionately. But then, how to act compassionately if you don't have compassion? That is where you fake. You fake it and make it. This is the mantra of the United States of America. (Laughter) You fake it and make it. You act compassionately as though you have compassion: grind your teeth, take all the support system. If you know how to pray, pray. Ask for compassion. Let me act compassionately. Do it. You'll discover compassion and also slowly a relative compassion, and slowly, perhaps if you get the right teaching, you'll discover compassion is a dynamic manifestation of the reality of yourself, which is oneness, wholeness, and that's what you are. With these words, thank you very much. (Applause)

Compassion at the dinner table

James Forbes

{0: 'James Forbes'}

{0: ['preacher']}

{0: 'Known as the preacher’s preacher, Rev. James Forbes is a spiritual leader with charismatic style and radically progressive opinions. '}

2009-10-01

2008-10-31

Chautauqua Institution

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['charter for compassion', 'compassion', 'faith', 'global issues', 'life', 'religion']

{674: 'The profound journey of compassion', 679: 'The evolution of compassion', 676: 'Lose your ego, find your compassion', 677: 'Expanding your circle of compassion', 1074: 'Reconnecting with compassion', 1216: 'Compassion and the true meaning of empathy'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/james_forbes_compassion_at_the_dinner_table/

Join Rev. James Forbes at the dinner table of his Southern childhood, where his mother and father taught him what compassion really means day to day -- sharing with those who need love.

Compassion: what does it look like? Come with me to 915 South Bloodworth Street in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I grew up. If you come in you will see us: evening time, at table — set for ten but not always all seats filled — at the point when dinner is ready to be served. Since mom had eight kids, sometimes she said she couldn't tell who was who and where they were. Before we could eat, she would ask, "Are all the children in?" And if someone happened to be missing, we would have to, we say, "Fix a plate" for that person, put it in the oven, then we could say grace, and we could eat. Also, while we were at the table, there was a ritual in our family: when something significant had happened for any one of us — whether mom had just been elected as the president of the PTA, or whether dad had gotten an assignment at the college of our denomination, or whether someone had won the jabberwocky contest for talent — the ritual at the family was, once the announcement is made, we must take five, ten minutes to do what we call "make over" that person — that is, to make a fuss over the one who had been honored in some way. For when one is honored, all are honored. Also, we had to make a report on our extended "visited" members, that is, extended members of the family, sick and elderly, shut in. My task was, at least once a week, to visit Mother Lassiter who lived on East Street, Mother Williamson who lived on Bledsoe Avenue, and Mother Lathers who lived on Oberlin Road. Why? Because they were old and infirm, and we needed to go by to see if they needed anything. For mom said, "To be family, is to care and share and to look out for one another. They are our family." And, of course, sometimes there was a bonus for going. They would offer sweets or money. Mom says, "If they ask you what it costs to either go shopping for them, you must always say, 'Nothing.' And if they insist, say, 'Whatever you mind to give me.'" This was the nature of being at that table. In fact, she indicated that if we would do that, not only would we have the joy of receiving the gratitude from the members of the extended family, but she said, "Even God will smile, and when God smiles, there is peace, and justice, and joy." So, at the table at 915, I learned something about compassion. Of course, it was a minister's family, so we had to add God into it. And so, I came to think that mama eternal, mama eternal, is always wondering: Are all the children in? And if we had been faithful in caring and sharing, we had the sense that justice and peace would have a chance in the world. Now, it was not always wonderful at that table. Let me explain a point at which we did not rise to the occasion. It was Christmas, and at our family, oh, what a morning. Christmas morning, where we open up our gifts, where we have special prayers, and where we get to the old upright piano and we would sing carols. It was a very intimate moment. In fact, you could come down to the tree to get your gifts and get ready to sing, and then get ready for breakfast without even taking a bath or getting dressed, except that daddy messed it up. There was a member of his staff who did not have any place on that particular Christmas to celebrate. And daddy brought Elder Revels to the Christmas family celebration. We thought he must be out of his mind. This is our time. This is intimate time. This is when we can just be who we are, and now we have this stuffy brother with his shirt and tie on, while we are still in our PJs. Why would daddy bring Elder Revels? Any other time, but not to the Christmas celebration. And mom overheard us and said, "Well, you know what? If you really understand the nature of this celebration, it is that this is a time where you extend the circle of love. That's what the celebration is all about. It's time to make space, to share the enjoyment of life in a beloved community." So, we sucked up. (Laughter) But growing up at 915, compassion was not a word to be debated; it was a sensibility to how we are together. We are sisters and brothers united together. And, like Chief Seattle said, "We did not spin the web of life. We're all strands in it. And whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves." Now that's compassion. So, let me tell you, I kind of look at the world this way. I see pictures, and something says, "Now, that's compassion." A harvested field of grain, with some grain in the corners, reminding me of the Hebrew tradition that you may indeed harvest, but you must always leave some on the edges, just in case there's someone who has not had the share necessary for good nurture. Talk about a picture of compassion. I see — always, it stirs my heart — a picture of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. walking arm in arm with Andy Young and Rabbi Heschel and maybe Thich Nhat Hanh and some of the other saints assembled, walking across the bridge and going into Selma. Just a photograph. Arm in arm for struggle. Suffering together in a common hope that we can be brothers and sisters without the accidents of our birth or our ethnicity robbing us of a sense of unity of being. So, there's another picture. Here, this one. I really do like this picture. When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, that day, everybody in my community was upset. You heard about riots all across the land. Bobby Kennedy was scheduled to bring an inner city message in Indianapolis. This is the picture. They said, "It's going to be too volatile for you to go." He insisted, "I must go." So, sitting on a flatbed truck, the elders of the community are there, and Bobby stands up and says to the people, "I have bad news for you. Some of you may not have heard that Dr. King has been assassinated. I know that you are angry, and I know that you would almost wish to have the opportunity to enter now into activities of revenge. But," he said, "what I really want you to know is that I know how you feel. Because I had someone dear to me snatched away. I know how you feel." And he said, "I hope that you will have the strength to do what I did. I allowed my anger, my bitterness, my grief to simmer a while, and then I made up my mind that I was going to make a different world, and we can do that together." That's a picture. Compassion? I think I see it. I saw it when the Dalai Lama came to the Riverside Church while I was a pastor, and he invited representatives of faith traditions from all around the world. He asked them to give a message, and they each read in their own language a central affirmation, and that was some version of the golden rule: "As you would that others would do unto you, do also unto them." Twelve in their ecclesiastical or cultural or tribal attire affirming one message. We are so connected that we must treat each other as if an action toward you is an action toward myself. One more picture while I'm stinking and thinking about the Riverside Church: 9/11. Last night at Chagrin Fall, a newspaperman and a television guy said, "That evening, when a service was held at the Riverside Church, we carried it on our station in this city. It was," he said, "one of the most powerful moments of life together. We were all suffering. But you invited representatives of all of the traditions to come, and you invited them. 'Find out what it is in your tradition that tells us what to do when we have been humiliated, when we have been despised and rejected.' And they all spoke out of their own traditions, a word about the healing power of solidarity, one with the other." I developed a sense of compassion sort of as second nature, but I became a preacher. Now, as a preacher, I got a job. I got to preach the stuff, but I got to do it too. Or, as Father Divine in Harlem used to say to folks, "Some people preach the Gospel. I have to tangibilitate the Gospel." So, the real issue is: How do you tangibilitate compassion? How do you make it real? My faith has constantly lifted up the ideal, and challenged me when I fell beneath it. In my tradition, there is a gift that we have made to other traditions — to everybody around the world who knows the story of the "Good Samaritan." Many people think of it primarily in terms of charity, random acts of kindness. But for those who really study that text a little more thoroughly, you will discover that a question has been raised that leads to this parable. The question was: "What is the greatest commandment?" And, according to Jesus, the word comes forth, "You must love yourself, you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and soul, and your neighbor as yourself." And then the person asked, "Well, what do you mean, 'neighbor?'" And he answered it by telling the story of the man who fell among thieves, and how religious authorities went the other way, and how their supporters in the congregation went the other way; but an unsuspecting, despised person came along, saw the man in need, provided oil and wine for his wounds, put him on his own transportation, and took him to the inn and asked the innkeeper, "Take care of him." And he said, "Here, this is the initial investment, but if needs continue, make sure that you provide them. And whatever else is needed, I will provide it and pay for it when I return." This always seemed to me to be a deepening of the sense of what it means to be a Good Samaritan. A Good Samaritan is not simply one whose heart is touched in an immediate act of care and charity, but one who provides a system of sustained care — I like that, 'a system of sustained care ' — in the inn, take care. I think maybe it's one time when the Bible talks about a healthcare system and a commitment to do whatever is necessary — that all God's children would have their needs cared for, so that we could answer when mommy eternal asks, "In regards to health, are all the children in?" And we could say yes. Oh, what a joy it has been to be a person seeking to tangibilitate compassion. I recall that my work as a pastor has always involved caring for their spiritual needs; being concerned for housing, for healthcare, for the prisoners, for the infirm, for children — even the foster care children for whom no one can even keep a record where they started off, where they are going. To be a pastor is to care for these individual needs. But now, to be a Good Samaritan — and I always say, and to be a good American — for me, is not simply to congratulate myself for the individual acts of care. Compassion takes on a corporate dynamic. I believe that whatever we did around that table at Bloodworth Street must be done around tables and rituals of faith until we become that family, that family together that understands the nature of our unity. We are one people together. So, let me explain to you what I mean when I think about compassion, and why I think it is so important that right at this point in history. We would decide to establish this charter of compassion. The reason it's important is because this is a very special time in history. It is the time that, biblically, we would speak of as the day, or the year, of God's favor. This is a season of grace. Unusual things are beginning to happen. Please pardon me, as a black man, for celebrating that the election of Obama was an unusual sign of the fact that it is a year of favor. And yet, there is so much more that needs to be done. We need to bring health and food and education and respect for all God's citizens, all God's children, remembering mama eternal. Now, let me close my comments by telling you that whenever I feel something very deeply, it usually takes the form of verse. And so I want to close with a little song. I close with this song — it's a children's song — because we are all children at the table of mama eternal. And if mama eternal has taught us correctly, this song will make sense, not only to those of us who are a part of this gathering, but to all who sign the charter for compassion. And this is why we do it. The song says, ♫ "I made heaven so happy today, ♫ ♫ Receiving God's love and giving it away ♫ ♫ When I looked up, heaven smiled at me ♫ ♫ Now, I'm so happy. Can't you see? ♫ ♫ I'm happy. Look at me. I'm happy. Can't you see? ♫ ♫ Sharing makes me happy, makes heaven happy too ♫ ♫ I'm happy. Look at me. I'm happy. Can't you see? ♫ ♫ Let me share my happy loving smile with you. ♫ That's compassion. (Applause)

Lose your ego, find your compassion

Feisal Abdul Rauf

{0: 'Feisal Abdul Rauf'}

{0: ['chairman of the cordoba initiative']}

{0: 'Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has devoted himself to healing relations between Muslim-Americans and their neighbors, and bringing that message of peace to the wider Muslim world. '}

2009-10-14

2008-10-31

TEDSalon 2009 Compassion

en

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['charter for compassion', 'compassion', 'global issues', 'religion']

{674: 'The profound journey of compassion', 679: 'The evolution of compassion', 675: 'Compassion at the dinner table', 673: 'The balancing act of compassion', 1074: 'Reconnecting with compassion', 677: 'Expanding your circle of compassion'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/feisal_abdul_rauf_lose_your_ego_find_your_compassion/

Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf combines the teachings of the Qur'an, the stories of Rumi, and the examples of Muhammad and Jesus, to demonstrate that only one obstacle stands between each of us and absolute compassion -- ourselves.

I'm speaking about compassion from an Islamic point of view, and perhaps my faith is not very well thought of as being one that is grounded in compassion. The truth of the matter is otherwise. Our holy book, the Koran, consists of 114 chapters, and each chapter begins with what we call the basmala, the saying of "In the name of God, the all compassionate, the all merciful," or, as Sir Richard Burton — not the Richard Burton who was married to Elizabeth Taylor, but the Sir Richard Burton who lived a century before that and who was a worldwide traveler and translator of many works of literature — translates it. "In the name of God, the compassionating, the compassionate." And in a saying of the Koran, which to Muslims is God speaking to humanity, God says to his prophet Muhammad — whom we believe to be the last of a series of prophets, beginning with Adam, including Noah, including Moses, including Abraham, including Jesus Christ, and ending with Muhammad — that, "We have not sent you, O Muhammad, except as a 'rahmah,' except as a source of compassion to humanity." For us human beings, and certainly for us as Muslims, whose mission, and whose purpose in following the path of the prophet is to make ourselves as much like the prophet. And the prophet, in one of his sayings, said, "Adorn yourselves with the attributes of God." And because God Himself said that the primary attribute of his is compassion — in fact, the Koran says that "God decreed upon himself compassion," or, "reigned himself in by compassion" — therefore, our objective and our mission must be to be sources of compassion, activators of compassion, actors of compassion and speakers of compassion and doers of compassion. That is all well and good, but where do we go wrong, and what is the source of the lack of compassion in the world? For the answer to this, we turn to our spiritual path. In every religious tradition, there is the outer path and the inner path, or the exoteric path and the esoteric path. The esoteric path of Islam is more popularly known as Sufism, or "tasawwuf" in Arabic. And these doctors or these masters, these spiritual masters of the Sufi tradition, refer to teachings and examples of our prophet that teach us where the source of our problems lies. In one of the battles that the prophet waged, he told his followers, "We are returning from the lesser war to the greater war, to the greater battle." And they said, "Messenger of God, we are battle-weary. How can we go to a greater battle?" He said, "That is the battle of the self, the battle of the ego." The sources of human problems have to do with egotism, "I." The famous Sufi master Rumi, who is very well known to most of you, has a story in which he talks of a man who goes to the house of a friend, and he knocks on the door, and a voice answers, "Who's there?" "It's me," or, more grammatically correctly, "It is I," as we might say in English. The voice says, "Go away." After many years of training, of disciplining, of search and struggle, he comes back. With much greater humility, he knocks again on the door. The voice asks, "Who is there?" He said, "It is you, O heartbreaker." The door swings open, and the voice says, "Come in, for there is no room in this house for two I's," — two capital I's, not these eyes — "for two egos." And Rumi's stories are metaphors for the spiritual path. In the presence of God, there is no room for more than one "I," and that is the "I" of divinity. In a teaching — called a "hadith qudsi" in our tradition — God says that, "My servant," or "My creature, my human creature, does not approach me by anything that is dearer to me than what I have asked them to do." And those of you who are employers know exactly what I mean. You want your employees to do what you ask them to do, and if they've done that, then they can do extra. But don't ignore what you've asked them to do. "And," God says, "my servant continues to get nearer to me, by doing more of what I've asked them to do" — extra credit, we might call it — "until I love him or love her. And when I love my servant," God says, "I become the eyes by which he or she sees, the ears by which he or she listens, the hand by which he or she grasps, and the foot by which he or she walks, and the heart by which he or she understands." It is this merging of our self with divinity that is the lesson and purpose of our spiritual path and all of our faith traditions. Muslims regard Jesus as the master of Sufism, the greatest prophet and messenger who came to emphasize the spiritual path. When he says, "I am the spirit, and I am the way," and when the prophet Muhammad said, "Whoever has seen me has seen God," it is because they became so much an instrument of God, they became part of God's team — so that God's will was manifest through them, and they were not acting from their own selves and their own egos. Compassion on earth is given, it is in us. All we have to do is to get our egos out of the way, get our egotism out of the way. I'm sure, probably all of you here, or certainly the very vast majority of you, have had what you might call a spiritual experience, a moment in your lives when, for a few seconds, a minute perhaps, the boundaries of your ego dissolved. And at that minute, you felt at one with the universe — one with that jug of water, one with every human being, one with the Creator — and you felt you were in the presence of power, of awe, of the deepest love, the deepest sense of compassion and mercy that you have ever experienced in your lives. That is a moment which is a gift of God to us — a gift when, for a moment, he lifts that boundary which makes us insist on "I, I, I, me, me, me," and instead, like the person in Rumi's story, we say, "Oh, this is all you. This is all you. And this is all us. And us, and I, and us are all part of you. O, Creator! O, the Objective! The source of our being and the end of our journey, you are also the breaker of our hearts. You are the one whom we should all be towards, for whose purpose we live, and for whose purpose we shall die, and for whose purpose we shall be resurrected again to account to God to what extent we have been compassionate beings." Our message today, and our purpose today, and those of you who are here today, and the purpose of this charter of compassion, is to remind. For the Koran always urges us to remember, to remind each other, because the knowledge of truth is within every human being. We know it all. We have access to it all. Jung may have called it "the subconscious." Through our subconscious, in your dreams — the Koran calls our state of sleep "the lesser death," "the temporary death" — in our state of sleep we have dreams, we have visions, we travel even outside of our bodies, for many of us, and we see wonderful things. We travel beyond the limitations of space as we know it, and beyond the limitations of time as we know it. But all this is for us to glorify the name of the creator whose primary name is the compassionating, the compassionate. God, Bokh, whatever name you want to call him with, Allah, Ram, Om, whatever the name might be through which you name or access the presence of divinity, it is the locus of absolute being, absolute love and mercy and compassion, and absolute knowledge and wisdom, what Hindus call "satchidananda." The language differs, but the objective is the same. Rumi has another story about three men, a Turk, an Arab and — and I forget the third person, but for my sake, it could be a Malay. One is asking for angur — one is, say, an Englishman — one is asking for eneb, and one is asking for grapes. And they have a fight and an argument because — "I want grapes." "I want eneb. "I want angur." — not knowing that the word that they're using refers to the same reality in different languages. There's only one absolute reality by definition, one absolute being by definition, because absolute is, by definition, single, and absolute and singular. There's this absolute concentration of being, the absolute concentration of consciousness, awareness, an absolute locus of compassion and love that defines the primary attributes of divinity. And these should also be the primary attributes of what it means to be human. For what defines humanity, perhaps biologically, is our physiology, but God defines humanity by our spirituality, by our nature. And the Koran says, He speaks to the angels and says, "When I have finished the formation of Adam from clay, and breathed into him of my spirit, then, fall in prostration to him." The angels prostrate, not before the human body, but before the human soul. Why? Because the soul, the human soul, embodies a piece of the divine breath, a piece of the divine soul. This is also expressed in biblical vocabulary when we are taught that we were created in the divine image. What is the imagery of God? The imagery of God is absolute being, absolute awareness and knowledge and wisdom and absolute compassion and love. And therefore, for us to be human — in the greatest sense of what it means to be human, in the most joyful sense of what it means to be human — means that we too have to be proper stewards of the breath of divinity within us, and seek to perfect within ourselves the attribute of being, of being alive, of beingness; the attribute of wisdom, of consciousness, of awareness; and the attribute of being compassionate and loving beings. This is what I understand from my faith tradition, and this is what I understand from my studies of other faith traditions, and this is the common platform on which we must all stand, and when we stand on this platform as such, I am convinced that we can make a wonderful world. And I believe, personally, that we're on the verge and that, with the presence and help of people like you here, we can bring about the prophecy of Isaiah. For he foretold of a period when people shall transform their swords into plowshares and will not learn war or make war anymore. We have reached a stage in human history that we have no option: we must, we must lower our egos, control our egos — whether it is individual ego, personal ego, family ego, national ego — and let all be for the glorification of the one. Thank you, and God bless you. (Applause)

Expanding your circle of compassion

Robert Thurman

{0: 'Robert Thurman'}

{0: ['buddhist scholar']}

{0: 'The first American to be ordained a Tibetan Monk by the Dalai Lama, Robert A.F. Thurman is a scholar, author and tireless proponent of peace.'}

2009-10-01

2008-10-31

Chautauqua Institution

en

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['charter for compassion', 'compassion', 'global issues', 'love', 'religion', 'self']

{674: 'The profound journey of compassion', 679: 'The evolution of compassion', 675: 'Compassion at the dinner table', 1216: 'Compassion and the true meaning of empathy', 1074: 'Reconnecting with compassion', 1113: 'Everyday compassion at Google'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_thurman_expanding_your_circle_of_compassion/

It's hard to always show compassion -- even to the people we love, but Robert Thurman asks that we develop compassion for our enemies. He prescribes a seven-step meditation exercise to extend compassion beyond our inner circle.

I want to open by quoting Einstein's wonderful statement, just so people will feel at ease that the great scientist of the 20th century also agrees with us, and also calls us to this action. He said, "A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, the 'universe,' — a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion, to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." This insight of Einstein's is uncannily close to that of Buddhist psychology, wherein compassion — "karuna," it is called — is defined as, "the sensitivity to another's suffering and the corresponding will to free the other from that suffering." It pairs closely with love, which is the will for the other to be happy, which requires, of course, that one feels some happiness oneself and wishes to share it. This is perfect in that it clearly opposes self-centeredness and selfishness to compassion, the concern for others, and, further, it indicates that those caught in the cycle of self-concern suffer helplessly, while the compassionate are more free and, implicitly, more happy. The Dalai Lama often states that compassion is his best friend. It helps him when he is overwhelmed with grief and despair. Compassion helps him turn away from the feeling of his suffering as the most absolute, most terrible suffering anyone has ever had and broadens his awareness of the sufferings of others, even of the perpetrators of his misery and the whole mass of beings. In fact, suffering is so huge and enormous, his own becomes less and less monumental. And he begins to move beyond his self-concern into the broader concern for others. And this immediately cheers him up, as his courage is stimulated to rise to the occasion. Thus, he uses his own suffering as a doorway to widening his circle of compassion. He is a very good colleague of Einstein's, we must say. Now, I want to tell a story, which is a very famous story in the Indian and Buddhist tradition, of the great Saint Asanga who was a contemporary of Augustine in the West and was sort of like the Buddhist Augustine. And Asanga lived 800 years after the Buddha's time. And he was discontented with the state of people's practice of the Buddhist religion in India at that time. And so he said, "I'm sick of all this. Nobody's really living the doctrine. They're talking about love and compassion and wisdom and enlightenment, but they are acting selfish and pathetic. So, Buddha's teaching has lost its momentum. I know the next Buddha will come a few thousand years from now, but exists currently in a certain heaven" — that's Maitreya — "so, I'm going to go on a retreat and I'm going to meditate and pray until the Buddha Maitreya reveals himself to me, and gives me a teaching or something to revive the practice of compassion in the world today." So he went on this retreat. And he meditated for three years and he did not see the future Buddha Maitreya. And he left in disgust. And as he was leaving, he saw a man — a funny little man sitting sort of part way down the mountain. And he had a lump of iron. And he was rubbing it with a cloth. And he became interested in that. He said, "Well what are you doing?" And the man said, "I'm making a needle." And he said, "That's ridiculous. You can't make a needle by rubbing a lump of iron with a cloth." And the man said, "Really?" And he showed him a dish full of needles. So he said, "Okay, I get the point." He went back to his cave. He meditated again. Another three years, no vision. He leaves again. This time, he comes down. And as he's leaving, he sees a bird making a nest on a cliff ledge. And where it's landing to bring the twigs to the cliff, its feathers brushes the rock — and it had cut the rock six to eight inches in. There was a cleft in the rock by the brushing of the feathers of generations of the birds. So he said, "All right. I get the point." He went back. Another three years. Again, no vision of Maitreya after nine years. And he again leaves, and this time: water dripping, making a giant bowl in the rock where it drips in a stream. And so, again, he goes back. And after 12 years there is still no vision. And he's freaked out. And he won't even look left or right to see any encouraging vision. And he comes to the town. He's a broken person. And there, in the town, he's approached by a dog who comes like this — one of these terrible dogs you can see in some poor countries, even in America, I think, in some areas — and he's looking just terrible. And he becomes interested in this dog because it's so pathetic, and it's trying to attract his attention. And he sits down looking at the dog. And the dog's whole hindquarters are a complete open sore. Some of it is like gangrenous, and there are maggots in the flesh. And it's terrible. He thinks, "What can I do to fix up this dog? Well, at least I can clean this wound and wash it." So, he takes it to some water. He's about to clean, but then his awareness focuses on the maggots. And he sees the maggots, and the maggots are kind of looking a little cute. And they're maggoting happily in the dog's hindquarters there. "Well, if I clean the dog, I'll kill the maggots. So how can that be? That's it. I'm a useless person and there's no Buddha, no Maitreya, and everything is all hopeless. And now I'm going to kill the maggots?" So, he had a brilliant idea. And he took a shard of something, and cut a piece of flesh from his thigh, and he placed it on ground. He was not really thinking too carefully about the ASPCA. He was just immediately caught with the situation. So he thought, "I will take the maggots and put them on this piece of flesh, then clean the dog's wounds, and then I'll figure out what to do with the maggots." So he starts to do that. He can't grab the maggots. Apparently they wriggle around. They're kind of hard to grab, these maggots. So he says, "Well, I'll put my tongue on the dog's flesh. And then the maggots will jump on my warmer tongue" — the dog is kind of used up — "and then I'll spit them one by one down on the thing." So he goes down, and he's sticking his tongue out like this. And he had to close his eyes, it's so disgusting, and the smell and everything. And then, suddenly, there's a pfft, a noise like that. He jumps back and there, of course, is the future Buddha Maitreya in a beautiful vision — rainbow lights, golden, jeweled, a plasma body, an exquisite mystic vision — that he sees. And he says, "Oh." He bows. But, being human, he's immediately thinking of his next complaint. So as he comes up from his first bow he says, "My Lord, I'm so happy to see you, but where have you been for 12 years? What is this?" And Maitreya says, "I was with you. Who do you think was making needles and making nests and dripping on rocks for you, mister dense?" (Laughter) "Looking for the Buddha in person," he said. And he said, "You didn't have, until this moment, real compassion. And, until you have real compassion, you cannot recognize love." "Maitreya" means love, "the loving one," in Sanskrit. And so he looked very dubious, Asanga did. And he said, "If you don't believe me, just take me with you." And so he took the Maitreya — it shrunk into a globe, a ball — took him on his shoulder. And he ran into town in the marketplace, and he said, "Rejoice! Rejoice! The future Buddha has come ahead of all predictions. Here he is." And then pretty soon they started throwing rocks and stones at him — it wasn't Chautauqua, it was some other town — because they saw a demented looking, scrawny looking yogi man, like some kind of hippie, with a bleeding leg and a rotten dog on his shoulder, shouting that the future Buddha had come. So, naturally, they chased him out of town. But on the edge of town, one elderly lady, a charwoman in the charnel ground, saw a jeweled foot on a jeweled lotus on his shoulder and then the dog, but she saw the jewel foot of the Maitreya, and she offered a flower. So that encouraged him, and he went with Maitreya. Maitreya then took him to a certain heaven, which is the typical way a Buddhist myth unfolds. And Maitreya then kept him in heaven for five years, dictating to him five complicated tomes of the methodology of how you cultivate compassion. And then I thought I would share with you what that method is, or one of them. A famous one, it's called the "Sevenfold Causal Method of Developing Compassion." And it begins first by one meditating and visualizing that all beings are with one — even animals too, but everyone is in human form. The animals are in one of their human lives. The humans are human. And then, among them, you think of your friends and loved ones, the circle at the table. And you think of your enemies, and you think of the neutral ones. And then you try to say, "Well, the loved ones I love. But, you know, after all, they're nice to me. I had fights with them. Sometimes they were unfriendly. I got mad. Brothers can fight. Parents and children can fight. So, in a way, I like them so much because they're nice to me. While the neutral ones I don't know. They could all be just fine. And then the enemies I don't like because they're mean to me. But they are nice to somebody. I could be them." And then the Buddhists, of course, think that, because we've all had infinite previous lives, we've all been each other's relatives, actually. Therefore all of you, in the Buddhist view, in some previous life, although you don't remember it and neither do I, have been my mother — for which I do apologize for the trouble I caused you. And also, actually, I've been your mother. I've been female, and I've been every single one of yours' mother in a previous life, the way the Buddhists reflect. So, my mother in this life is really great. But all of you in a way are part of the eternal mother. You gave me that expression; "the eternal mama," you said. That's wonderful. So, that's the way the Buddhists do it. A theist Christian can think that all beings, even my enemies, are God's children. So, in that sense, we're related. So, they first create this foundation of equality. So, we sort of reduce a little of the clinging to the ones we love — just in the meditation — and we open our mind to those we don't know. And we definitely reduce the hostility and the "I don't want to be compassionate to them" to the ones we think of as the bad guys, the ones we hate and we don't like. And we don't hate anyone, therefore. So we equalize. That's very important. And then the next thing we do is what is called "mother recognition." And that is, we think of every being as familiar, as family. We expand. We take the feeling about remembering a mama, and we defuse that to all beings in this meditation. And we see the mother in every being. We see that look that the mother has on her face, looking at this child that is a miracle that she has produced from her own body, being a mammal, where she has true compassion, truly is the other, and identifies completely. Often the life of that other will be more important to her than her own life. And that's why it's the most powerful form of altruism. The mother is the model of all altruism for human beings, in spiritual traditions. And so, we reflect until we can sort of see that motherly expression in all beings. People laugh at me because, you know, I used to say that I used to meditate on mama Cheney as my mom, when, of course, I was annoyed with him about all of his evil doings in Iraq. I used to meditate on George Bush. He's quite a cute mom in a female form. He has his little ears and he smiles and he rocks you in his arms. And you think of him as nursing you. And then Saddam Hussein's serious mustache is a problem, but you think of him as a mom. And this is the way you do it. You take any being who looks weird to you, and you see how they could be familiar to you. And you do that for a while, until you really feel that. You can feel the familiarity of all beings. Nobody seems alien. They're not "other." You reduce the feeling of otherness about beings. Then you move from there to remembering the kindness of mothers in general, if you can remember the kindness of your own mother, if you can remember the kindness of your spouse, or, if you are a mother yourself, how you were with your children. And you begin to get very sentimental; you cultivate sentimentality intensely. You will even weep, perhaps, with gratitude and kindness. And then you connect that with your feeling that everyone has that motherly possibility. Every being, even the most mean looking ones, can be motherly. And then, third, you step from there to what is called "a feeling of gratitude." You want to repay that kindness that all beings have shown to you. And then the fourth step, you go to what is called "lovely love." In each one of these you can take some weeks, or months, or days depending on how you do it, or you can do them in a run, this meditation. And then you think of how lovely beings are when they are happy, when they are satisfied. And every being looks beautiful when they are internally feeling a happiness. Their face doesn't look like this. When they're angry, they look ugly, every being, but when they're happy they look beautiful. And so you see beings in their potential happiness. And you feel a love toward them and you want them to be happy, even the enemy. We think Jesus is being unrealistic when he says, "Love thine enemy." He does say that, and we think he's being unrealistic and sort of spiritual and highfalutin. "Nice for him to say it, but I can't do that." But, actually, that's practical. If you love your enemy that means you want your enemy to be happy. If your enemy was really happy, why would they bother to be your enemy? How boring to run around chasing you. They would be relaxing somewhere having a good time. So it makes sense to want your enemy to be happy, because they'll stop being your enemy because that's too much trouble. But anyway, that's the "lovely love. " And then finally, the fifth step is compassion, "universal compassion." And that is where you then look at the reality of all the beings you can think of. And you look at them, and you see how they are. And you realize how unhappy they are actually, mostly, most of the time. You see that furrowed brow in people. And then you realize they don't even have compassion on themselves. They're driven by this duty and this obligation. "I have to get that. I need more. I'm not worthy. And I should do something." And they're rushing around all stressed out. And they think of it as somehow macho, hard discipline on themselves. But actually they are cruel to themselves. And, of course, they are cruel and ruthless toward others. And they, then, never get any positive feedback. And the more they succeed and the more power they have, the more unhappy they are. And this is where you feel real compassion for them. And you then feel you must act. And the choice of the action, of course, hopefully will be more practical than poor Asanga, who was fixing the maggots on the dog because he had that motivation, and whoever was in front of him, he wanted to help. But, of course, that is impractical. He should have founded the ASPCA in the town and gotten some scientific help for dogs and maggots. And I'm sure he did that later. (Laughter) But that just indicates the state of mind, you know. And so the next step — the sixth step beyond "universal compassion" — is this thing where you're linked with the needs of others in a true way, and you have compassion for yourself also, and it isn't sentimental only. You might be in fear of something. Some bad guy is making himself more and more unhappy being more and more mean to other people and getting punished in the future for it in various ways. And in Buddhism, they catch it in the future life. Of course in theistic religion they're punished by God or whatever. And materialism, they think they get out of it just by not existing, by dying, but they don't. And so they get reborn as whatever, you know. Never mind. I won't get into that. But the next step is called "universal responsibility." And that is very important — the Charter of Compassion must lead us to develop through true compassion, what is called "universal responsibility." In the great teaching of his Holiness the Dalai Lama that he always teaches everywhere, he says that that is the common religion of humanity: kindness. But "kindness" means "universal responsibility." And that means whatever happens to other beings is happening to us: we are responsible for that, and we should take it and do whatever we can at whatever little level and small level that we can do it. We absolutely must do that. There is no way not to do it. And then, finally, that leads to a new orientation in life where we live equally for ourselves and for others and we are joyful and happy. One thing we mustn't think is that compassion makes you miserable. Compassion makes you happy. The first person who is happy when you get great compassion is yourself, even if you haven't done anything yet for anybody else. Although, the change in your mind already does something for other beings: they can sense this new quality in yourself, and it helps them already, and gives them an example. And that uncompassionate clock has just showed me that it's all over. So, practice compassion, read the charter, disseminate it and develop it within yourself. Don't just think, "Well, I'm compassionate," or "I'm not compassionate," and sort of think you're stuck there. You can develop this. You can diminish the non-compassion, the cruelty, the callousness, the neglect of others, and take universal responsibility for them. And then, not only will God smile and the eternal mama will smile, but Karen Armstrong will smile. Thank you very much. (Applause)

The evolution of compassion

Robert Wright

{0: 'Robert Wright'}

{0: ['journalist', 'philosopher']}

{0: 'The best-selling author of "Nonzero," "The Moral Animal" and "The Evolution of God," Robert Wright draws on his wide-ranging knowledge of science, religion, psychology, history and politics to figure out what makes humanity tick -- and what makes us moral. '}

2009-10-14

2008-10-31

TEDSalon 2009 Compassion

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['charter for compassion', 'compassion', 'evolution', 'global issues']

{673: 'The balancing act of compassion', 676: 'Lose your ego, find your compassion', 677: 'Expanding your circle of compassion', 1074: 'Reconnecting with compassion', 674: 'The profound journey of compassion', 1216: 'Compassion and the true meaning of empathy'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_wright_the_evolution_of_compassion/

Robert Wright uses evolutionary biology and game theory to explain why we appreciate the Golden Rule ("Do unto others..."), why we sometimes ignore it and why there’s hope that, in the near future, we might all have the compassion to follow it.

I'm going to talk about compassion and the golden rule from a secular perspective and even from a kind of scientific perspective. I'm going to try to give you a little bit of a natural history of compassion and the golden rule. So, I'm going to be sometimes using kind of clinical language, and so it's not going to sound as warm and fuzzy as your average compassion talk. I want to warn you about that. So, I do want to say, at the outset, that I think compassion's great. The golden rule is great. I'm a big supporter of both. And I think it's great that the leaders of the religions of the world are affirming compassion and the golden rule as fundamental principles that are integral to their faiths. At the same time, I think religions don't deserve all the credit. I think nature gave them a helping hand here. I'm going to argue tonight that compassion and the golden rule are, in a certain sense, built into human nature. But I'm also going to argue that once you understand the sense in which they are built into human nature, you realize that just affirming compassion, and affirming the golden rule, is really not enough. There's a lot of work to be done after that. OK so, a quick natural history, first of compassion. In the beginning, there was compassion, and I mean not just when human beings first showed up, but actually even before that. I think it's probably the case that, in the human evolutionary lineage, even before there were homo sapiens, feelings like compassion and love and sympathy had earned their way into the gene pool, and biologists have a pretty clear idea of how this first happened. It happened through a principle known as kin selection. And the basic idea of kin selection is that, if an animal feels compassion for a close relative, and this compassion leads the animal to help the relative, then, in the end, the compassion actually winds up helping the genes underlying the compassion itself. So, from a biologist's point of view, compassion is actually a gene's way of helping itself. OK. I warned you this was not going to be very warm and fuzzy. I'll get there — I hope to get a little fuzzier. This doesn't bother me so much, that the underlying Darwinian rationale of compassion is kind of self-serving at the genetic level. Actually, I think the bad news about kin selection is just that it means that this kind of compassion is naturally deployed only within the family. That's the bad news. The good news is compassion is natural. The bad news is that this kin selected compassion is naturally confined to the family. Now, there's more good news that came along later in evolution, a second kind of evolutionary logic. Biologists call that "reciprocal altruism." OK. And there, the basic idea is that compassion leads you to do good things for people who then will return the favor. Again, I know this is not as inspiring a notion of compassion as you may have heard in the past, but from a biologist's point of view, this reciprocal altruism kind of compassion is ultimately self-serving too. It's not that people think that, when they feel the compassion. It's not consciously self-serving, but to a biologist, that's the logic. And so, you wind up most easily extending compassion to friends and allies. I'm sure a lot of you, if a close friend has something really terrible happen to them, you feel really bad. But if you read in the newspaper that something really horrible happened to somebody you've never heard of, you can probably live with that. That's just human nature. So, it's another good news/bad news story. It's good that compassion was extended beyond the family by this kind of evolutionary logic. The bad news is this doesn't bring us universal compassion by itself. So, there's still work to be done. Now, there's one other result of this dynamic called reciprocal altruism, which I think is kind of good news, which is that the way that this is played out in the human species, it has given people an intuitive appreciation of the golden rule. I don't quite mean that the golden rule itself is written in our genes, but you can go to a hunter gatherer society that has had no exposure to any of the great religious traditions, no exposure to ethical philosophy, and you'll find, if you spend time with these people, that, basically, they believe that one good turn deserves another, and that bad deeds should be punished. And evolutionary psychologists think that these intuitions have a basis in the genes. So, they do understand that if you want to be treated well, you treat other people well. And it's good to treat other people well. That's close to being a kind of built-in intuition. So, that's good news. Now, if you've been paying attention, you're probably anticipating that there's bad news here; we still aren't to universal love, and it's true because, although an appreciation of the golden rule is natural, it's also natural to carve out exceptions to the golden rule. I mean, for example, none of us, probably, want to go to prison, but we all think that there are some people who should go to prison. Right? So, we think we should treat them differently than we would want to be treated. Now, we have a rationale for that. We say they did these bad things that make it just that they should go to prison. None of us really extends the golden rule in truly diffuse and universal fashion. We have the capacity to carve out exceptions, put people in a special category. And the problem is that — although in the case of sending people to prison, you have this impartial judiciary determining who gets excluded from the golden rule — that in everyday life, the way we all make these decisions about who we're not going to extend the golden rule to, is we use a much rougher and readier formula. Basically it's just like, if you're my enemy, if you're my rival — if you're not my friend, if you're not in my family — I'm much less inclined to apply the golden rule to you. We all do that, and you see it all over the world. You see it in the Middle East: people who, from Gaza, are firing missiles at Israel. They wouldn't want to have missiles fired at them, but they say, "Well, but the Israelis, or some of them have done things that put them in a special category." The Israelis would not want to have an economic blockade imposed on them, but they impose one on Gaza, and they say, "Well, the Palestinians, or some of them, have brought this on themselves." So, it's these exclusions to the golden rule that amount to a lot of the world's trouble. And it's natural to do that. So, the fact that the golden rule is in some sense built in to us is not, by itself, going to bring us universal love. It's not going to save the world. Now, there's one piece of good news I have that may save the world. Okay. Are you on the edges of your seats here? Good, because before I tell you about that good news, I'm going to have to take a little excursion through some academic terrain. So, I hope I've got your attention with this promise of good news that may save the world. It's this non-zero-sumness stuff you just heard a little bit about. It's just a quick introduction to game theory. This won't hurt. Okay. It's about zero-sum and non-zero-sum games. If you ask what kind of a situation is conducive to people becoming friends and allies, the technical answer is a non-zero-sum situation. And if you ask what kind of situation is conducive to people defining people as enemies, it's a zero-sum situation. So, what do those terms mean? Basically, a zero-sum game is the kind you're used to in sports, where there's a winner and a loser. So, their fortunes add up to zero. So, in tennis, every point is either good for you and bad for the other person, or good for them, bad for you. Either way, your fortunes add up to zero. That's a zero-sum game. Now, if you're playing doubles, then the person on your side of the net is in a non-zero-sum relationship with you, because every point is either good for both of you — positive, win-win — or bad for both of you, it's lose-lose. That's a non-zero-sum game. And in real life, there are lots of non-zero-sum games. In the realm of economics, say, if you buy something: that means you'd rather have the merchandise than the money, but the merchant would rather have the money than the merchandise. You both feel you've won. In a war, two allies are playing a non-zero-sum game. It's going to either be win-win or lose-lose for them. So, there are lots of non-zero-sum games in real life. And you could basically reformulate what I said earlier, about how compassion is deployed and the golden rule is deployed, by just saying, well, compassion most naturally flows along non-zero-sum channels where people perceive themselves as being in a potentially win-win situation with some of their friends or allies. The deployment of the golden rule most naturally happens along these non-zero-sum channels. So, kind of webs of non-zero-sumness are where you would expect compassion and the golden rule to kind of work their magic. With zero-sum channels you would expect something else. Okay. So, now you're ready for the good news that I said might save the world. And now I can admit that it might not too, now that I've held your attention for three minutes of technical stuff. But it may. And the good news is that history has naturally expanded these webs of non-zero-sumness, these webs that can be these channels for compassion. You can go back all the way to the stone age: technological evolution — roads, the wheel, writing, a lot of transportation and communication technologies — has just inexorably made it so that more people can be in more non-zero-sum relationships with more and more people at greater and greater distances. That's the story of civilization. It's why social organization has grown from the hunter-gatherer village to the ancient state, the empire, and now here we are in a globalized world. And the story of globalization is largely a story of non-zero-sumness. You've probably heard the term "interdependence" applied to the modern world. Well, that's just another term for non-zero-sum. If your fortunes are interdependent with somebody, then you live in a non-zero-sum relationship with them. And you see this all the time in the modern world. You saw it with the recent economic crash, where bad things happen in the economy — bad for everybody, for much of the world. Good things happen, and it's good for much of the world. And, you know, I'm happy to say, I think there's really evidence that this non-zero-sum kind of connection can expand the moral compass. I mean, if you look at the American attitudes toward Japanese during World War II — look at the depictions of Japanese in the American media as just about subhuman, and look at the fact that we dropped atomic bombs, really without giving it much of a thought — and you compare that to the attitude now, I think part of that is due to a kind of economic interdependence. Any form of interdependence, or non-zero-sum relationship forces you to acknowledge the humanity of people. So, I think that's good. And the world is full of non-zero-sum dynamics. Environmental problems, in many ways, put us all in the same boat. And there are non-zero-sum relationships that maybe people aren't aware of. For example, probably a lot of American Christians don't think of themselves as being in a non-zero-sum relationship with Muslims halfway around the world, but they really are, because if these Muslims become happier and happier with their place in the world and feel that they have a place in it, that's good for Americans, because there will be fewer terrorists to threaten American security. If they get less and less happy, that will be bad for Americans. So, there's plenty of non-zero-sumness. And so, the question is: If there's so much non-zero-sumness, why has the world not yet been suffused in love, peace, and understanding? The answer's complicated. It's the occasion for a whole other talk. Certainly, a couple of things are that, first of all, there are a lot of zero-sum situations in the world. And also, sometimes people don't recognize the non-zero-sum dynamics in the world. In both of these areas, I think politicians can play a role. This isn't only about religion. I think politicians can help foster non-zero-sum relationships, Economic engagement is generally better than blockades and so on, in this regard. And politicians can be aware, and should be aware that, when people around the world are looking at them, are looking at their nation and picking up their cues for whether they are in a zero-sum or a non-zero-sum relationship with a nation — like, say, America, or any other nation — human psychology is such that they use cues like: Do we feel we're being respected? Because, you know, historically, if you're not being respected, you're probably not going to wind up in a non-zero-sum, mutually profitable relationship with people. So, we need to be aware of what kind of signals we're sending out. And some of this, again, is in the realm of political work. If there's one thing I can encourage everyone to do, politicians, religious leaders, and us, it would be what I call "expanding the moral imagination" — that is to say, your ability to put yourself in the shoes of people in very different circumstances. This is not the same as compassion, but it's conducive to compassion. It opens the channels for compassion. And I'm afraid we have another good news/bad news story, which is that the moral imagination is part of human nature. That's good, but again we tend to deploy it selectively. Once we define somebody as an enemy, we have trouble putting ourselves in their shoes, just naturally. So, if you want to take a particularly hard case for an American: somebody in Iran who is burning an American flag, and you see them on TV. Well, the average American is going to resist the moral exercise of putting themselves in that person's head and is going to resist the idea that they have much in common with that person. And if you tell them, "Well, they think America disrespects them and even wants to dominate them, and they hate America. Has there ever been somebody who disrespected you so much that you kind of hated them briefly"? You know, they'll resist that comparison and that's natural, that's human. And, similarly, the person in Iran: when you try to humanize somebody in America who said that Islam is evil, they'll have trouble with that. So, it's a very difficult thing to get people to expand the moral imagination to a place it doesn't naturally go. I think it's worth the trouble because, again, it just helps us to understand. If you want to reduce the number of people who are burning flags, it helps to understand what makes them do it. And I think it's good moral exercise. I would say here is where religious leaders come in, because religious leaders are good at reframing issues for people, at harnessing the emotional centers of the brain to get people to alter their awareness and reframe the way they think. I mean, religious leaders are kind of in the inspiration business. It's their great calling right now, to get people all around the world better at expanding their moral imaginations, appreciating that in so many ways they're in the same boat. I would just sum up the way things look, at least from this secular perspective, as far as compassion and the golden rule go, by saying that it's good news that compassion and the golden rule are in some sense built into human nature. It's unfortunate that they tend to be selectively deployed. And it's going to take real work to change that. But, nobody ever said that doing God's work was going to be easy. Thanks. (Applause)

A flight through the ocean

Graham Hawkes

{0: 'Graham Hawkes'}

{0: ['inventor']}

{0: 'A world-renowned engineer and inventor, Graham Hawkes wants to revolutionize the way we experience the oceans. He created the Deep Flight series of winged submersibles, which "fly" to the depths of the oceans with the power and elegance of an airplane.'}

2005-02-28

2008-11-03

TED2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['business', 'design', 'exploration', 'invention', 'oceans', 'technology', 'global commons']

{264: 'The astonishing hidden world of the deep ocean', 4: 'The real future of space exploration', 5: 'Great cars are great art', 926: 'Wiring an interactive ocean', 23912: 'How big is the ocean?', 1387: 'Deep ocean mysteries and wonders'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/graham_hawkes_a_flight_through_the_ocean/

Graham Hawkes takes us aboard his graceful, winged submarines to the depths of planet Ocean (a.k.a. "Earth"). It's a deep blue world we landlubbers rarely see in 3D.

I think the future of this planet depends on humans, not technology, and we already have the knowledge — we’re kind of at the endgame with knowledge. But we’re nowhere near the endgame when it comes to our perception. We still have one foot in the dark ages. And when you listen to some of the presentations here — and the extraordinary range of human capability, our understandings — and then you contrast it with the fact we still call this planet, "Earth:" it’s pretty extraordinary — we have one foot in the dark ages. Just quickly: Aristotle, his thing was, "It’s not flat, stupid, it’s round." Galileo — he had the Inquisition, so he had to be a little bit more polite — his was, "It’s not in the middle, you know." And Hawkes: "it’s not earth, stupid, it’s ocean." This is an ocean planet. T.S. Eliot really said it for me — and this should give you goose bumps: "we shall not cease from exploration and the end of our exploring shall be to return where we started and know the place for the first time." And the next lines are, "Through the unknown remembered gate, where the last of earth discovered is that which is the beginning." So I have one message. It seems to me that we’re all pointed in the wrong direction. For the rocketeers in the audience: I love what you’re doing, I admire the guts, I admire the courage — but your rockets are pointed in the wrong goddamn direction. (Laughter) And it’s all a question of perspective. Let me try and tell you — I don’t mean to insult you, but look, if I — and I’m not doing this for real because it would be an insult, so I’m going to pretend, and it softens the blow — I’m going to tell you what you’re thinking. If I held up a square that was one foot square and the color of earth, and I held up another square that was the root two square — so it’s 1.5 times bigger — and was the color of the oceans; and I said, what is the relative value of these two things? Well, it’s the relative importance. You would say — yeah, yeah, yeah, we all know this; water covers twice the area of the planet than dry land. But it’s a question of perception, and if that’s what you’re thinking, if that’s what you think I mean when I say, "This is an ocean planet stupidly called 'Earth.'" If you think that that’s the relative importance, two to one, you’re wrong by a factor of ten. Now, you’re not as thick as two short planks, but you sound like it when you say "Earth," because that demonstration, if I turned around this way — that earth plane would be as thin as paper. It’s a thin film, two-dimensional existence. The ocean representation would have a depth to it. And if you hefted those two things you might find that the relative scale of those is 20 to 1. It turns out that something more than 94 percent of life on earth is aquatic. That means that us terrestrials occupy a minority. The problem we have in believing that is — you just have to give up this notion that this Earth was created for us. Because it’s a problem we have. If this is an ocean planet and we only have a small minority of this planet, it just interferes with a lot of what humanity thinks. Okay. Let me criticize this thing. I’m not talking about James Cameron — although I could, but I won’t. You really do have to go and see his latest film, "Aliens of the Deep." It’s incredible. It features two of these deep rovers, and I can criticize them because these sweet things are mine. This, I think, represents one of the most beautiful classic submersibles built. If you look at that sub, you’ll see a sphere. This is an acryclic sphere. It generates all of the buoyancy, all of the payload for the craft, and the batteries are down here hanging underneath, exactly like a balloon. This is the envelope, and this is the gondola, the payload. Also coming up later for criticism are these massive lights. And this one actually carries two great manipulators. It actually is a very good working sub — that’s what it was designed for. The problem with it is — and the reason I will never build another one like it — is that this is a product of two-dimensional thinking. It’s what we humans do when we go in the ocean as engineers; we take all our terrestrial hang-ups, all our constraints — importantly, these two-dimensional constraints that we have, and they’re so constrained we don’t even understand it — and we take them underwater. You notice that Jim Cameron is sitting in a seat. A seat works in a two-dimensional world, where gravity blasts down on that seat, OK? And in a two-dimensional world, we do know about the third dimension but we don’t use it because to go up requires an awful lot of energy against gravity. And then our mothers tell us, "Careful you don’t fall down" — because you’ll fall over. Now, go into the real atmosphere of this planet. This planet has an inner atmosphere of water; it’s its inner atmosphere. It has two atmospheres — a lesser, outer gaseous atmosphere, a lighter one. Most of life on earth is in that inner atmosphere. And that life enjoys a three-dimensional existence, which is alien to us. Fish do not sit in seats. (Laughter) They don’t. Their mothers don’t say to little baby fish, "Careful you don’t fall over." They don’t fall over. They don’t fall. They live in a three-dimensional world where there is no difference in energy between going this way, that way, that way or that way. It’s truly a three-dimensional space. And we’re only just beginning to grasp it. I don’t know of any other submersible, or even remote, that just takes advantage that this is a three-dimensional space. This is the way we should be going into the oceans. This is a three-dimensional machine. What we need to do is go down into the ocean with the freedom of the animals, and move in this three-dimensional space. OK, this is good stuff. This is man’s first attempt at flying underwater. Right now, I’m just coming down on this gorgeous, big, giant manta ray. She has twice the wingspan that I do. There I’m coming; she sees me. And just notice how she rolls under and turns; she doesn’t sit there and try and blow air into a tank and kind of flow up or sink down — she just rolls. And the craft that I’m in — this hasn’t been shown before. Chris asked us to show stuff that hasn’t been shown before. I wanted you to notice that she actually turned to come back up. There I am; I see her coming back, coming up underneath me. I put reverse thrust and I try and pull gently down. I’m trying to do everything very gently. We spent about three hours together and she’s beginning to trust me. And this ballet is controlled by this lady here. She gets about that close and then she pulls away. So now I try and go after her, but I’m practicing flying. This is the first flying machine. This was the first prototype. This was a fly by wire. It has wings. There’re no silly buoyancy tanks — it’s permanently, positively buoyant. And then by moving through the water it’s able to take that control. Now, look at that; look, it’s — she just blew me away. She just rolled right away from underneath. Really that’s the only real dive I’ve ever made in this machine. It took 10 years to build. But this lady here taught me, hah, taught me so much. We just learned so much in three hours in the water there. I just had to go and build another machine. But look here. Instead of blowing tanks and coming up slowly without thinking about it, it’s a little bit of back pressure, and that sub just comes straight back up out of the water. This is an internal Sony camera. Thank you, Sony. I don’t really look that ugly, but the camera is so close that it’s just distorted. Now, there she goes, right overhead. This is a wide-angle camera. She’s just a few inches off the top of my head. "Aah, ha, oh, he just crossed over the top of my head about, oh, I don’t know, just so close." I come back up, not for air. "This is an incredible encounter with a manta. I’m speechless. We’ve been just feet apart. I’m going back down now." Okay, can we cut that? Lights back up please. (Applause) Trying to fly and keep up with that animal — it wasn’t the lack of maneuverability that we had. It was the fact she was going so slow. I actually designed that to move faster through the water because I thought that was the thing that we needed to do: to move fast and get range. But after that encounter I really did want to go back with that animal and dance. She wanted to dance. And so what we needed to do was increase the wing area so that we just had more grip, develop higher forces. So the sub that was outside last year — this is the one. You see the larger wing area here. Also, clearly, it was such a powerful thing, we wanted to try and bring other people but we couldn't figure out how to do it. So we opened the world’s first flight school. The rational for the world’s first flight school goes something like: when the coastguards come up to me and say — they used to leave us alone when we were diving these goofy little spherical things, but when we started flying around in underwater jet fighters they got a little nervous — they would come up and say, "Do you have a license for that?" And then I’d put my sunglasses on, the beard that would all sprout out, and I would say, "I don’t need no stinking license." (Laughter) "I write these stinking license," which I do. So Bob Gelfond's around here — but somebody in the audience here has license number 20. They’re one of the first subsea aviators. So we’ve run two flight schools. Where the hell that goes, I don’t know, but it’s a lot of fun. What comes next in 30 seconds? I can’t tell you. But the patent for underwater flight — Karen and I, we were looking at it, some business partners wanted us to patent it — we weren’t sure about that. We’ve decided we’re just going to let that go. It just seems wrong to try and patent — (Applause) — the freedom for underwater flight. So anybody who wants to copy us and come and join us, go for it. The other thing is that we’ve got much lower costs. We developed some other technology called spider optics, and Craig Ventner asked me to make an announcement here this morning: we’re going to be building a beautiful, little, small version of this — unmanned, super deep — for his boat to go and get back some deep sea DNA stuff. (Applause) Thank you.

The power and the danger of online crowds

James Surowiecki

{0: 'James Surowiecki'}

{0: ['finance journalist']}

{0: "James Surowiecki argues that people, when we act en masse, are smarter than we think. He's the author of The Wisdom of Crowds and writes about finance for the New Yorker."}

2005-02-02

2008-11-04

TED2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['culture', 'entertainment', 'media', 'social change', 'social media', 'technology']

{216: 'The new power of collaboration', 63: 'The era of open innovation', 274: 'Institutions vs. collaboration', 1995: 'What ants teach us about the brain, cancer and the Internet', 25751: 'Can you solve the killer robo-ants riddle?', 24091: 'Inside the ant colony'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/james_surowiecki_the_power_and_the_danger_of_online_crowds/

James Surowiecki pinpoints the moment when social media became an equal player in the world of news-gathering: the 2005 tsunami, when YouTube video, blogs, IMs and txts carried the news -- and preserved moving personal stories from the tragedy.

This was in an area called Wellawatta, a prime residential area in Colombo. We stood on the railroad tracks that ran between my friend's house and the beach. The tracks are elevated about eight feet from the waterline normally, but at that point the water had receded to a level three or four feet below normal. I'd never seen the reef here before. There were fish caught in rock pools left behind by the receding water. Some children jumped down and ran to the rock pools with bags. They were trying to catch fish. No one realized that this was a very bad idea. The people on the tracks just continued to watch them. I turned around to check on my friend's house. Then someone on the tracks screamed. Before I could turn around, everyone on the tracks was screaming and running. The water had started coming back. It was foaming over the reef. The children managed to run back onto the tracks. No one was lost there. But the water continued to climb. In about two minutes, it had reached the level of the railroad tracks and was coming over it. We had run about 100 meters by this time. It continued to rise. I saw an old man standing at his gate, knee-deep in water, refusing to move. He said he'd lived his whole life there by the beach, and that he would rather die there than run. A boy broke away from his mother to run back into his house to get his dog, who was apparently afraid. An old lady, crying, was carried out of her house and up the road by her son. The slum built on the railroad reservation between the sea and the railroad tracks was completely swept away. Since this was a high-risk location, the police had warned the residents, and no one was there when the water rose. But they had not had any time to evacuate any belongings. For hours afterwards, the sea was strewn with bits of wood for miles around — all of this was from the houses in the slum. When the waters subsided, it was as if it had never existed. This may seem hard to believe — unless you've been reading lots and lots of news reports — but in many places, after the tsunami, villagers were still terrified. When what was a tranquil sea swallows up people, homes and long-tail boats — mercilessly, without warning — and no one can tell you anything reliable about whether another one is coming, I'm not sure you'd want to calm down either. One of the scariest things about the tsunami that I've not seen mentioned is the complete lack of information. This may seem minor, but it is terrifying to hear rumor after rumor after rumor that another tidal wave, bigger than the last, will be coming at exactly 1 p.m., or perhaps tonight, or perhaps ... You don't even know if it is safe to go back down to the water, to catch a boat to the hospital. We think that Phi Phi hospital was destroyed. We think this boat is going to Phuket hospital, but if it's too dangerous to land at its pier, then perhaps it will go to Krabi instead, which is more protected. We don't think another wave is coming right away. At the Phi Phi Hill Resort, I was tucked into the corner furthest away from the television, but I strained to listen for information. They reported that there was an 8.5 magnitude earthquake in Sumatra, which triggered the massive tsunami. Having this news was comforting in some small way to understand what had just happened to us. However, the report focused on what had already occurred and offered no information on what to expect now. In general, everything was merely hearsay and rumor, and not a single person I spoke to for over 36 hours knew anything with any certainty. Those were two accounts of the Asian tsunami from two Internet blogs that essentially sprang up after it occurred. I'm now going to show you two video segments from the tsunami that also were shown on blogs. I should warn you, they're pretty powerful. One from Thailand, and the second one from Phuket as well. (Screaming) Voice 1: It's coming in. It's coming again. Voice 2: It's coming again? Voice 1: Yeah. It's coming again. Voice 2: Come get inside here. Voice 1: It's coming again. Voice 2: New wave? Voice 1: It's coming again. New wave! [Unclear] (Screaming) They called me out here. James Surowiecki: Phew. Those were both on this site: waveofdestruction.org. In the world of blogs, there's going to be before the tsunami and after the tsunami, because one of the things that happened in the wake of the tsunami was that, although initially — that is, in that first day — there was actually a kind of dearth of live reporting, there was a dearth of live video and some people complained about this. They said, "The blogsters let us down." What became very clear was that, within a few days, the outpouring of information was immense, and we got a complete and powerful picture of what had happened in a way that we never had been able to get before. And what you had was a group of essentially unorganized, unconnected writers, video bloggers, etc., who were able to come up with a collective portrait of a disaster that gave us a much better sense of what it was like to actually be there than the mainstream media could give us. And so in some ways the tsunami can be seen as a sort of seminal moment, a moment in which the blogosphere came, to a certain degree, of age. Now, I'm going to move now from this kind of — the sublime in the traditional sense of the word, that is to say, awe-inspiring, terrifying — to the somewhat more mundane. Because when we think about blogs, I think for most of us who are concerned about them, we're primarily concerned with things like politics, technology, etc. And I want to ask three questions in this talk, in the 10 minutes that remain, about the blogosphere. The first one is, What does it tell us about our ideas, about what motivates people to do things? The second is, Do blogs genuinely have the possibility of accessing a kind of collective intelligence that has previously remained, for the most part, untapped? And then the third part is, What are the potential problems, or the dark side of blogs as we know them? OK, the first question: What do they tell us about why people do things? One of the fascinating things about the blogosphere specifically, and, of course, the Internet more generally — and it's going to seem like a very obvious point, but I think it is an important one to think about — is that the people who are generating these enormous reams of content every day, who are spending enormous amounts of time organizing, linking, commenting on the substance of the Internet, are doing so primarily for free. They are not getting paid for it in any way other than in the attention and, to some extent, the reputational capital that they gain from doing a good job. And this is — at least, to a traditional economist — somewhat remarkable, because the traditional account of economic man would say that, basically, you do things for a concrete reward, primarily financial. But instead, what we're finding on the Internet — and one of the great geniuses of it — is that people have found a way to work together without any money involved at all. They have come up with, in a sense, a different method for organizing activity. The Yale Law professor Yochai Benkler, in an essay called "Coase's Penguin," talks about this open-source model, which we're familiar with from Linux, as being potentially applicable in a whole host of situations. And, you know, if you think about this with the tsunami, what you have is essentially a kind of an army of local journalists, who are producing enormous amounts of material for no reason other than to tell their stories. That's a very powerful idea, and it's a very powerful reality. And it's one that offers really interesting possibilities for organizing a whole host of activities down the road. So, I think the first thing that the blogosphere tells us is that we need to expand our idea of what counts as rational, and we need to expand our simple equation of value equals money, or, you have to pay for it to be good, but that in fact you can end up with collectively really brilliant products without any money at all changing hands. There are a few bloggers — somewhere maybe around 20, now — who do, in fact, make some kind of money, and a few who are actually trying to make a full-time living out of it, but the vast majority of them are doing it because they love it or they love the attention, or whatever it is. So, Howard Rheingold has written a lot about this and, I think, is writing about this more, but this notion of voluntary cooperation is an incredibly powerful one, and one worth thinking about. The second question is, What does the blogosphere actually do for us, in terms of accessing collective intelligence? You know, as Chris mentioned, I wrote a book called "The Wisdom of Crowds." And the premise of "The Wisdom of Crowds" is that, under the right conditions, groups can be remarkably intelligent. And they can actually often be smarter than even the smartest person within them. The simplest example of this is if you ask a group of people to do something like guess how many jellybeans are in a jar. If I had a jar of jellybeans and I asked you all to guess how many jellybeans were in that jar, your average guess would be remarkably good. It would be somewhere probably within three and five percent of the number of beans in the jar, and it would be better than 90 to 95 percent of you. There may be one or two of you who are brilliant jelly bean guessers, but for the most part the group's guess would be better than just about all of you. And what's fascinating is that you can see this phenomenon at work in many more complicated situations. For instance, if you look at the odds on horses at a racetrack, they predict almost perfectly how likely a horse is to win. In a sense, the group of betters at the racetrack is forecasting the future, in probabilistic terms. You know, if you think about something like Google, which essentially is relying on the collective intelligence of the Web to seek out those sites that have the most valuable information — we know that Google does an exceptionally good job of doing that, and it does that because, collectively, this disorganized thing we call the "World Wide Web" actually has a remarkable order, or a remarkable intelligence in it. And this, I think, is one of the real promises of the blogosphere. Dan Gillmor — whose book "We the Media" is included in the gift pack — has talked about it as saying that, as a writer, he's recognized that his readers know more than he does. And this is a very challenging idea. It's a very challenging idea to mainstream media. It's a very challenging idea to anyone who has invested an enormous amount of time and expertise, and who has a lot of energy invested in the notion that he or she knows better than everyone else. But what the blogosphere offers is the possibility of getting at the kind of collective, distributive intelligence that is out there, and that we know is available to us if we can just figure out a way of accessing it. Each blog post, each blog commentary may not, in and of itself, be exactly what we're looking for, but collectively the judgment of those people posting, those people linking, more often than not is going to give you a very interesting and enormously valuable picture of what's going on. So, that's the positive side of it. That's the positive side of what is sometimes called participatory journalism or citizen journalism, etc. — that, in fact, we are giving people who have never been able to talk before a voice, and we're able to access information that has always been there but has essentially gone untapped. But there is a dark side to this, and that's what I want to spend the last part of my talk on. One of the things that happens if you spend a lot of time on the Internet, and you spend a lot of time thinking about the Internet, is that it is very easy to fall in love with the Internet. It is very easy to fall in love with the decentralized, bottom-up structure of the Internet. It is very easy to think that networks are necessarily good things — that being linked from one place to another, that being tightly linked in a group, is a very good thing. And much of the time it is. But there's also a downside to this — a kind of dark side, in fact — and that is that the more tightly linked we've become to each other, the harder it is for each of us to remain independent. One of the fundamental characteristics of a network is that, once you are linked in the network, the network starts to shape your views and starts to shape your interactions with everybody else. That's one of the things that defines what a network is. A network is not just the product of its component parts. It is something more than that. It is, as Steven Johnson has talked about, an emergent phenomenon. Now, this has all these benefits: it's very beneficial in terms of the efficiency of communicating information; it gives you access to a whole host of people; it allows people to coordinate their activities in very good ways. But the problem is that groups are only smart when the people in them are as independent as possible. This is the paradox of the wisdom of crowds, or the paradox of collective intelligence, that what it requires is actually a form of independent thinking. And networks make it harder for people to do that, because they drive attention to the things that the network values. So, one of the phenomena that's very clear in the blogosphere is that once a meme, once an idea gets going, it is very easy for people to just sort of pile on, because other people have, say, a link. People have linked to it, and so other people in turn link to it, etc., etc. And that phenomenon of piling on the existing links is one that is characteristic of the blogosphere, particularly of the political blogosphere, and it is one that essentially throws off this beautiful, decentralized, bottom-up intelligence that blogs can manifest in the right conditions. The metaphor that I like to use is the metaphor of the circular mill. A lot of people talk about ants. You know, this is a conference inspired by nature. When we talk about bottom-up, decentralized phenomena, the ant colony is the classic metaphor, because, no individual ant knows what it's doing, but collectively ants are able to reach incredibly intelligent decisions. They're able to reach food as efficiently as possible, they're able to guide their traffic with remarkable speed. So, the ant colony is a great model: you have all these little parts that collectively add up to a great thing. But we know that occasionally ants go astray, and what happens is that, if army ants are wandering around and they get lost, they start to follow a simple rule — just do what the ant in front of you does. And what happens is that the ants eventually end up in a circle. And there's this famous example of one that was 1,200 feet long and lasted for two days, and the ants just kept marching around and around in a circle until they died. And that, I think, is a sort of thing to watch out for. That's the thing we have to fear — is that we're just going to keep marching around and around until we die. Now, I want to connect this back, though, to the tsunami, because one of the great things about the tsunami — in terms of the blogosphere's coverage, not in terms of the tsunami itself — is that it really did represent a genuine bottom-up phenomenon. You saw sites that had never existed before getting huge amounts of traffic. You saw people being able to offer up their independent points of view in a way that they hadn't before. There, you really did see the intelligence of the Web manifest itself. So, that's the upside. The circular mill is the downside. And I think that the former is what we really need to strive for. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Walk the earth ... my 17-year vow of silence

John Francis

{0: 'John Francis'}

{0: ['planet walker']}

{0: 'John Francis walks the Earth, carrying a message of careful, truly sustainable development and respect for our planet.'}

2008-02-02

2008-11-05

TED2008

en

['ar', 'az', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'lt', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sr', 'sv', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['activism', 'environment', 'global issues']

{53: 'Greening the ghetto', 209: 'Rebuilding a neighborhood with beauty, dignity, hope', 171: 'An Iraq war movie crowd-sourced from soldiers', 2029: 'Why your worst deeds don’t define you', 1126: 'On being wrong', 940: 'The political chemistry of oil'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/john_francis_walk_the_earth_my_17_year_vow_of_silence/

For almost three decades, John Francis has been a planetwalker, traveling the globe by foot and sail with a message of environmental respect and responsibility (for 17 of those years without speaking). A funny, thoughtful talk with occasional banjo.

(Music) (Applause) Thank you for being here. And I say "thank you for being here" because I was silent for 17 years. And the first words that I spoke were in Washington, D.C., on the 20th anniversary of Earth Day. And my family and friends had gathered there to hear me speak. And I said, "Thank you for being here." My mother, out in the audience, she jumped up, "Hallelujah, Johnny’s talking!" (Laughter) Imagine if you were quiet for 17 years and your mother was out in the audience, say. My dad said to me, "That’s one" — I’ll explain that. But I turned around because I didn’t recognize where my voice was coming from. I hadn’t heard my voice in 17 years, so I turned around and I looked and I said, "God, who's saying what I’m thinking?" And then I realized it was me, you know, and I kind of laughed. And I could see my father: "Yeah, he really is crazy." Well, I want to take you on this journey. And the journey, I believe, is a metaphor for all of our journeys. Even though this one is kind of unusual, I want you to think about your own journey. My journey began in 1971 when I witnessed two oil tankers collide beneath the Golden Gate, and a half a million gallons of oil spilled into the bay. It disturbed me so much that I decided that I was going to give up riding and driving in motorized vehicles. That’s a big thing in California. And it was a big thing in my little community of Point Reyes Station in Inverness, California, because there were only about 350 people there in the winter – this was back in '71 now. And so when I came in and I started walking around, people — they just knew what was going on. And people would drive up next to me and say, "John, what are you doing?" And I’d say, "Well, I’m walking for the environment." And they said, "No, you’re walking to make us look bad, right? You’re walking to make us feel bad." And maybe there was some truth to that, because I thought that if I started walking, everyone would follow. Because of the oil, everybody talked about the polllution. And so I argued with people about that, I argued and I argued. I called my parents up. I said, "I’ve given up riding and driving in cars." My dad said, "Why didn’t you do that when you were 16?" (Laughter) I didn’t know about the environment then. They’re back in Philadelphia. And so I told my mother, "I’m happy though, I’m really happy." She said, "If you were happy, son, you wouldn’t have to say it." Mothers are like that. And so, on my 27th birthday I decided, because I argued so much and I talk so much, that I was going to stop speaking for just one day — one day — to give it a rest. And so I did. I got up in the morning and I didn’t say a word. And I have to tell you, it was a very moving experience, because for the first time, I began listening — in a long time. And what I heard, it kind of disturbed me. Because what I used to do, when I thought I was listening, was I would listen just enough to hear what people had to say and think that I could — I knew what they were going to say, and so I stopped listening. And in my mind, I just kind of raced ahead and thought of what I was going to say back, while they were still finishing up. And then I would launch in. Well, that just ended communication. So on this first day I actually listened. And it was very sad for me, because I realized that for those many years I had not been learning. I was 27. I thought I knew everything. I didn’t. And so I decided I’d better do this for another day, and another day, and another day until finally, I promised myself for a year I would keep quiet because I started learning more and more and I needed to learn more. So for a year I said I would keep quiet, and then on my birthday I would reassess what I had learned and maybe I would talk again. Well, that lasted 17 years. Now during that time — those 17 years — I walked and I played the banjo and I painted and I wrote in my journal, and I tried to study the environment by reading books. And I decided that I was going to go to school. So I did. I walked up to Ashland, Oregon, where they were offering an environmental studies degree. It’s only 500 miles. And I went into the Registrar’s office and — "What, what, what?" I had a newspaper clipping. "Oh, so you really want to go to school here? You don’t …? We have a special program for you." They did. And in those two years, I graduated with my first degree — a bachelor’s degree. And my father came out, he was so proud. He said, "Listen, we’re really proud of you son, but what are you going to do with a bachelor’s degree? You don’t ride in cars, you don’t talk — you’re going to have to do those things." (Laughter) I hunched my shoulder, I picked my backpack up again and I started walking. I walked all the way up to Port Townsend, Washington, where I built a wooden boat, rode it across Puget Sound and walked across Washington [to] Idaho and down to Missoula, Montana. I had written the University of Montana two years earlier and said I'd like to go to school there. I said I'd be there in about two years. (Laughter) And I was there. I showed up in two years and they — I tell this story because they really helped me. There are two stories in Montana. The first story is I didn’t have any money — that’s a sign I used a lot. And they said,"Don't worry about that." The director of the program said, "Come back tomorrow." He gave me 150 dollars, and he said, "Register for one credit. You’re going to go to South America, aren’t you?" And I said — Rivers and lakes, the hydrological systems, South America. So I did that. He came back; he said to me, "OK John, now that you've registered for that one credit, you can have a key to an office, you can matriculate — you’re matriculating, so you can use the library. And what we’re going to do is, we’re going to have all of the professors allow you to go to class. They’re going to save your grade, and when we figure out how to get you the rest of the money, then you can register for that class and they’ll give you the grade." Wow, they don’t do that in graduate schools, I don’t think. But I use that story because they really wanted to help me. They saw that I was really interested in the environment, and they really wanted to help me along the way. And during that time, I actually taught classes without speaking. I had 13 students when I first walked into the class. I explained, with a friend who could interpret my sign language, that I was John Francis, I was walking around the world, I didn’t talk and this was the last time this person’s going to be here interpreting for me. All the students sat around and they went ... (Laughter) I could see they were looking for the schedule, to see when they could get out. They had to take that class with me. Two weeks later, everyone was trying to get into our class. And I learned in that class — because I would do things like this ... and they were all gathered around, going, "What's he trying to say?" "I don't know, I think he's talking about clear cutting." "Yeah, clear cutting." "No, no, no, that's not clear cutting, that’s — he's using a handsaw." "Well, you can’t clearcut with a ..." "Yes, you can clear cut ..." "No, I think he’s talking about selective forestry." Now this was a discussion class and we were having a discussion. I just backed out of that, you know, and I just kind of kept the fists from flying. But what I learned was that sometimes I would make a sign and they said things that I absolutely did not mean, but I should have. And so what came to me is, if you were a teacher and you were teaching, if you weren’t learning you probably weren’t teaching very well. And so I went on. My dad came out to see me graduate and, you know, I did the deal, and my father said, "We’re really proud of you son, but ... " You know what went on, he said, "You’ve got to start riding and driving and start talking. What are you going to do with a master’s degree?" I hunched my shoulder, I got my backpack and I went on to the University of Wisconsin. I spent two years there writing on oil spills. No one was interested in oil spills. But something happened — Exxon Valdez. And I was the only one in the United States writing on oil spills. My dad came out again. He said, "I don't know how you do this, son — I mean, you don't ride in cars, you don’t talk. My sister said maybe I should leave you alone, because you seem to be doing a lot better when you’re not saying anything." (Laughter) Well, I put on my backpack again. I put my banjo on and I walked all the way to the East Coast, put my foot in the Atlantic Ocean — it was seven years and one day it took me to walk across the United States. And on Earth Day, 1990 — the 20th anniversary of Earth Day — that’s when I began to speak. And that’s why I said, "Thank you for being here." Because it's sort of like that tree in the forest falling; and if there's no one there to hear, does it really make a sound? And I’m thanking you, and I'm thanking my family because they had come to hear me speak. And that’s communication. And they also taught me about listening — that they listened to me. And it’s one of those things that came out of the silence, the listening to each other. Really, very important — we need to listen to each other. Well, my journey kept going on. My dad said, "That’s one," and I still didn’t let that go. I worked for the Coastguard, was made a U.N. Goodwill Ambassador. I wrote regulations for the United States — I mean, I wrote oil spill regulations. 20 years ago, if someone had said to me, "John, do you really want to make a difference?" "Yeah, I want to make a difference." He said, "You just start walking east; get out of your car and just start walking east." And as I walked off a little bit, they'd say, "Yeah, and shut up, too." (Laughter) "You’re going to make a difference, buddy." How could that be, how could that be? How could doing such a simple thing like walking and not talking make a difference? Well, my time at the Coast Guard was a really good time. And after that — I only worked one year — I said, "That's enough. One year's enough for me to do that." I got on a sailboat and I sailed down to the Caribbean, and walked through all of the islands, and to Venezuela. And you know, I forgot the most important thing, which is why I started talking, which I have to tell you. I started talking because I had studied environment. I’d studied environment at this formal level, but there was this informal level. And the informal level — I learned about people, and what we do and how we are. And environment changed from just being about trees and birds and endangered species to being about how we treated each other. Because if we are the environment, then all we need to do is look around us and see how we treat ourselves and how we treat each other. And so that’s the message that I had. And I said, "Well, I'm going to have to spread that message." And I got in my sailboat, sailed all the way through the Caribbean — it wasn't really my sailboat, I kind of worked on that boat — got to Venezuela and I started walking. This is the last part of this story, because it’s how I got here, because I still didn't ride in motorized vehicles. I was walking through El Dorado — it's a prison town, famous prison, or infamous prison — in Venezuela, and I don’t know what possessed me, because this was not like me. There I am, walking past the guard gate and the guard stops and says, "Pasaporte, pasaporte," and with an M16 pointed at me. And I looked at him and I said, "Passport, huh? I don't need to show you my passport. It’s in the back of my pack. I'm Dr. Francis; I'm a U.N. Ambassador and I'm walking around the world." And I started walking off. What possessed me to say this thing? The road turned into the jungle. I didn’t get shot. And I got to — I start saying, "Free at last — thank God Almighty, I’m free at last." "What was that about," I’m saying. What was that about? It took me 100 miles to figure out that, in my heart, in me, I had become a prisoner. I was a prisoner and I needed to escape. The prison that I was in was the fact that I did not drive or use motorized vehicles. Now how could that be? Because when I started, it seemed very appropriate to me not to use motorized vehicles. But the thing that was different was that every birthday, I asked myself about silence, but I never asked myself about my decision to just use my feet. I had no idea I was going to become a U.N. Ambassador. I had no idea I would have a Ph.D. And so I realized that I had a responsibility to more than just me, and that I was going to have to change. You know, we can do it. I was going to have to change. And I was afraid to change, because I was so used to the guy who only just walked. I was so used to that person that I didn’t want to stop. I didn’t know who I would be if I changed. But I know I needed to. I know I needed to change, because it would be the only way that I could be here today. And I know that a lot of times we find ourselves in this wonderful place where we’ve gotten to, but there’s another place for us to go. And we kind of have to leave behind the security of who we’ve become, and go to the place of who we are becoming. And so, I want to encourage you to go to that next place, to let yourself out of any prison that you might find yourself in, as comfortable as it may be, because we have to do something now. We have to change now. As our former Vice President said, we have to become activists. So if my voice can touch you, if my actions can touch you, if my being here can touch you, please let it be. And I know that all of you have touched me while I’ve been here. So, let’s go out into the world and take this caring, this love, this respect that we’ve shown each other right here at TED, and take this out into the world. Because we are the environment, and how we treat each other is really how we’re going to treat the environment. So I want to thank you for being here and I want to end this in five seconds of silence. Thank you. (Applause)

Tales of creativity and play

Tim Brown

{0: 'Tim Brown'}

{0: ['designer']}

{0: 'Tim Brown is the CEO of the "innovation and design" firm IDEO -- taking an approach to design that digs deeper than the surface.'}

2008-05-07

2008-11-06

Serious Play 2008

en

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['art', 'creativity', 'design', 'education', 'play', 'toy', 'Best of the Web']

{266: 'Designing objects that tell stories', 50: 'Happiness by design', 646: 'Designers -- think big!', 435: 'Great design is serious, not solemn', 483: 'Play is more than just fun', 1170: 'A manifesto for play, for Bulgaria and beyond'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_brown_tales_of_creativity_and_play/

At the 2008 Serious Play conference, designer Tim Brown talks about the powerful relationship between creative thinking and play -- with many examples you can try at home (and one that maybe you shouldn't).

This is a guy named Bob McKim. He was a creativity researcher in the '60s and '70s, and also led the Stanford Design Program. And in fact, my friend and IDEO founder, David Kelley, who’s out there somewhere, studied under him at Stanford. And he liked to do an exercise with his students where he got them to take a piece of paper and draw the person who sat next to them, their neighbor, very quickly, just as quickly as they could. And in fact, we’re going to do that exercise right now. You all have a piece of cardboard and a piece of paper. It’s actually got a bunch of circles on it. I need you to turn that piece of paper over; you should find that it’s blank on the other side. And there should be a pencil. And I want you to pick somebody that’s seated next to you, and when I say, go, you’ve got 30 seconds to draw your neighbor, OK? So, everybody ready? OK. Off you go. You’ve got 30 seconds, you’d better be fast. Come on: those masterpieces ... OK? Stop. All right, now. (Laughter) Yes, lot’s of laughter. Yeah, exactly. Lots of laughter, quite a bit of embarrassment. (Laughter) Am I hearing a few "sorry’s"? I think I’m hearing a few sorry’s. Yup, yup, I think I probably am. And that’s exactly what happens every time, every time you do this with adults. McKim found this every time he did it with his students. He got exactly the same response: lots and lots of sorry’s. (Laughter) And he would point this out as evidence that we fear the judgment of our peers, and that we’re embarrassed about showing our ideas to people we think of as our peers, to those around us. And this fear is what causes us to be conservative in our thinking. So we might have a wild idea, but we’re afraid to share it with anybody else. OK, so if you try the same exercise with kids, they have no embarrassment at all. They just quite happily show their masterpiece to whoever wants to look at it. But as they learn to become adults, they become much more sensitive to the opinions of others, and they lose that freedom and they do start to become embarrassed. And in studies of kids playing, it’s been shown time after time that kids who feel secure, who are in a kind of trusted environment — they’re the ones that feel most free to play. And if you’re starting a design firm, let’s say, then you probably also want to create a place where people have the same kind of security. Where they have the same kind of security to take risks. Maybe have the same kind of security to play. Before founding IDEO, David said that what he wanted to do was to form a company where all the employees are my best friends. Now, that wasn’t just self-indulgence. He knew that friendship is a short cut to play. And he knew that it gives us a sense of trust, and it allows us then to take the kind of creative risks that we need to take as designers. And so, that decision to work with his friends — now he has 550 of them — was what got IDEO started. And our studios, like, I think, many creative workplaces today, are designed to help people feel relaxed: familiar with their surroundings, comfortable with the people that they’re working with. It takes more than decor, but I think we’ve all seen that creative companies do often have symbols in the workplace that remind people to be playful, and that it’s a permissive environment. So, whether it’s this microbus meeting room that we have in one our buildings at IDEO; or at Pixar, where the animators work in wooden huts and decorated caves; or at the Googleplex, where it’s famous for its [beach] volleyball courts, and even this massive dinosaur skeleton with pink flamingos on it. Don’t know the reason for the pink flamingos, but anyway, they’re there in the garden. Or even in the Swiss office of Google, which perhaps has the most wacky ideas of all. And my theory is, that’s so the Swiss can prove to their Californian colleagues that they’re not boring. So they have the slide, and they even have a fireman’s pole. Don’t know what they do with that, but they have one. So all of these places have these symbols. Now, our big symbol at IDEO is actually not so much the place, it’s a thing. And it’s actually something that we invented a few years ago, or created a few years ago. It’s a toy; it’s called a "finger blaster." And I forgot to bring one up with me. So if somebody can reach under the chair that’s next to them, you’ll find something taped underneath it. That’s great. If you could pass it up. Thanks, David, I appreciate it. So this is a finger blaster, and you will find that every one of you has got one taped under your chair. And I’m going to run a little experiment. Another little experiment. But before we start, I need just to put these on. Thank you. All right. Now, what I’m going to do is, I’m going to see how — I can’t see out of these, OK. I’m going to see how many of you at the back of the room can actually get those things onto the stage. So the way they work is, you know, you just put your finger in the thing, pull them back, and off you go. So, don’t look backwards. That’s my only recommendation here. I want to see how many of you can get these things on the stage. So come on! There we go, there we go. Thank you. Thank you. Oh. I have another idea. I wanted to — there we go. (Laughter) There we go. (Laughter) Thank you, thank you, thank you. Not bad, not bad. No serious injuries so far. (Laughter) Well, they’re still coming in from the back there; they’re still coming in. Some of you haven’t fired them yet. Can you not figure out how to do it, or something? It’s not that hard. Most of your kids figure out how to do this in the first 10 seconds, when they pick it up. All right. This is pretty good; this is pretty good. Okay, all right. Let’s — I suppose we'd better... I'd better clear these up out of the way; otherwise, I’m going to trip over them. All right. So the rest of you can save them for when I say something particularly boring, and then you can fire at me. (Laughter) All right. I think I’m going to take these off now, because I can’t see a damn thing when I’ve — all right, OK. So, ah, that was fun. (Laughter) All right, good. (Applause) So, OK, so why? So we have the finger blasters. Other people have dinosaurs, you know. Why do we have them? Well, as I said, we have them because we think maybe playfulness is important. But why is it important? We use it in a pretty pragmatic way, to be honest. We think playfulness helps us get to better creative solutions. Helps us do our jobs better, and helps us feel better when we do them. Now, an adult encountering a new situation — when we encounter a new situation we have a tendency to want to categorize it just as quickly as we can, you know. And there’s a reason for that: we want to settle on an answer. Life’s complicated; we want to figure out what’s going on around us very quickly. I suspect, actually, that the evolutionary biologists probably have lots of reasons [for] why we want to categorize new things very, very quickly. One of them might be, you know, when we see this funny stripy thing: is that a tiger just about to jump out and kill us? Or is it just some weird shadows on the tree? We need to figure that out pretty fast. Well, at least, we did once. Most of us don’t need to anymore, I suppose. This is some aluminum foil, right? You use it in the kitchen. That’s what it is, isn’t it? Of course it is, of course it is. Well, not necessarily. (Laughter) Kids are more engaged with open possibilities. Now, they’ll certainly — when they come across something new, they’ll certainly ask, "What is it?" Of course they will. But they’ll also ask, "What can I do with it?" And you know, the more creative of them might get to a really interesting example. And this openness is the beginning of exploratory play. Any parents of young kids in the audience? There must be some. Yeah, thought so. So we’ve all seen it, haven’t we? We’ve all told stories about how, on Christmas morning, our kids end up playing with the boxes far more than they play with the toys that are inside them. And you know, from an exploration perspective, this behavior makes complete sense. Because you can do a lot more with boxes than you can do with a toy. Even one like, say, Tickle Me Elmo — which, despite its ingenuity, really only does one thing, whereas boxes offer an infinite number of choices. So again, this is another one of those playful activities that, as we get older, we tend to forget and we have to relearn. So another one of Bob McKim’s favorite exercises is called the "30 Circles Test." So we’re back to work. You guys are going to get back to work again. Turn that piece of paper that you did the sketch on back over, and you’ll find those 30 circles printed on the piece of paper. So it should look like this. You should be looking at something like this. So what I’m going to do is, I’m going to give you minute, and I want you to adapt as many of those circles as you can into objects of some form. So for example, you could turn one into a football, or another one into a sun. All I’m interested in is quantity. I want you to do as many of them as you can, in the minute that I’m just about to give you. So, everybody ready? OK? Off you go. Okay. Put down your pencils, as they say. So, who got more than five circles figured out? Hopefully everybody? More than 10? Keep your hands up if you did 10. 15? 20? Anybody get all 30? No? Oh! Somebody did. Fantastic. Did anybody to a variation on a theme? Like a smiley face? Happy face? Sad face? Sleepy face? Anybody do that? Anybody use my examples? The sun and the football? Great. Cool. So I was really interested in quantity. I wasn’t actually very interested in whether they were all different. I just wanted you to fill in as many circles as possible. And one of the things we tend to do as adults, again, is we edit things. We stop ourselves from doing things. We self-edit as we’re having ideas. And in some cases, our desire to be original is actually a form of editing. And that actually isn’t necessarily really playful. So that ability just to go for it and explore lots of things, even if they don’t seem that different from each other, is actually something that kids do well, and it is a form of play. So now, Bob McKim did another version of this test in a rather famous experiment that was done in the 1960s. Anybody know what this is? It’s the peyote cactus. It’s the plant from which you can create mescaline, one of the psychedelic drugs. For those of you around in the '60s, you probably know it well. McKim published a paper in 1966, describing an experiment that he and his colleagues conducted to test the effects of psychedelic drugs on creativity. So he picked 27 professionals — they were engineers, physicists, mathematicians, architects, furniture designers even, artists — and he asked them to come along one evening, and to bring a problem with them that they were working on. He gave each of them some mescaline, and had them listen to some nice, relaxing music for a while. And then he did what’s called the Purdue Creativity Test. You might know it as, "How many uses can you find for a paper clip?" It’s basically the same thing as the 30 circles thing that I just had you do. Now, actually, he gave the test before the drugs and after the drugs, to see what the difference was in people’s facility and speed with coming up with ideas. And then he asked them to go away and work on those problems that they’d brought. And they’d come up with a bunch of interesting solutions — and actually, quite valid solutions — to the things that they’d been working on. And so, some of the things that they figured out, some of these individuals figured out; in one case, a new commercial building and designs for houses that were accepted by clients; a design of a solar space probe experiment; a redesign of the linear electron accelerator; an engineering improvement to a magnetic tape recorder — you can tell this is a while ago; the completion of a line of furniture; and even a new conceptual model of the photon. So it was a pretty successful evening. In fact, maybe this experiment was the reason that Silicon Valley got off to its great start with innovation. We don’t know, but it may be. We need to ask some of the CEOs whether they were involved in this mescaline experiment. But really, it wasn’t the drugs that were important; it was this idea that what the drugs did would help shock people out of their normal way of thinking, and getting them to forget the adult behaviors that were getting in the way of their ideas. But it’s hard to break our habits, our adult habits. At IDEO we have brainstorming rules written on the walls. Edicts like, "Defer judgment," or "Go for quantity." And somehow that seems wrong. I mean, can you have rules about creativity? Well, it sort of turns out that we need rules to help us break the old rules and norms that otherwise we might bring to the creative process. And we’ve certainly learnt that over time, you get much better brainstorming, much more creative outcomes when everybody does play by the rules. Now, of course, many designers, many individual designers, achieve this is in a much more organic way. I think the Eameses are wonderful examples of experimentation. And they experimented with plywood for many years without necessarily having one single goal in mind. They were exploring following what was interesting to them. They went from designing splints for wounded soldiers coming out of World War II and the Korean War, I think, and from this experiment they moved on to chairs. Through constant experimentation with materials, they developed a wide range of iconic solutions that we know today, eventually resulting in, of course, the legendary lounge chair. Now, if the Eameses had stopped with that first great solution, then we wouldn’t be the beneficiaries of so many wonderful designs today. And of course, they used experimentation in all aspects of their work, from films to buildings, from games to graphics. So, they’re great examples, I think, of exploration and experimentation in design. Now, while the Eameses were exploring those possibilities, they were also exploring physical objects. And they were doing that through building prototypes. And building is the next of the behaviors that I thought I’d talk about. So the average Western first-grader spends as much as 50 percent of their play time taking part in what’s called "construction play." Construction play — it’s playful, obviously, but also a powerful way to learn. When play is about building a tower out of blocks, the kid begins to learn a lot about towers. And as they repeatedly knock it down and start again, learning is happening as a sort of by-product of play. It’s classically learning by doing. Now, David Kelley calls this behavior, when it’s carried out by designers, "thinking with your hands." And it typically involves making multiple, low-resolution prototypes very quickly, often by bringing lots of found elements together in order to get to a solution. On one of his earliest projects, the team was kind of stuck, and they came up with a mechanism by hacking together a prototype made from a roll-on deodorant. Now, that became the first commercial computer mouse for the Apple Lisa and the Macintosh. So, they learned their way to that by building prototypes. Another example is a group of designers who were working on a surgical instrument with some surgeons. They were meeting with them; they were talking to the surgeons about what it was they needed with this device. And one of the designers ran out of the room and grabbed a white board marker and a film canister — which is now becoming a very precious prototyping medium — and a clothespin. He taped them all together, ran back into the room and said, "You mean, something like this?" And the surgeons grabbed hold of it and said, well, I want to hold it like this, or like that. And all of a sudden a productive conversation was happening about design around a tangible object. And in the end it turned into a real device. And so this behavior is all about quickly getting something into the real world, and having your thinking advanced as a result. At IDEO there’s a kind of a back-to-preschool feel sometimes about the environment. The prototyping carts, filled with colored paper and Play-Doh and glue sticks and stuff — I mean, they do have a bit of a kindergarten feel to them. But the important idea is that everything’s at hand, everything’s around. So when designers are working on ideas, they can start building stuff whenever they want. They don’t necessarily even have to go into some kind of formal workshop to do it. And we think that’s pretty important. And then the sad thing is, although preschools are full of this kind of stuff, as kids go through the school system it all gets taken away. They lose this stuff that facilitates this sort of playful and building mode of thinking. And of course, by the time you get to the average workplace, maybe the best construction tool we have might be the Post-it notes. It’s pretty barren. But by giving project teams and the clients who they’re working with permission to think with their hands, quite complex ideas can spring into life and go right through to execution much more easily. This is a nurse using a very simple — as you can see — plasticine prototype, explaining what she wants out of a portable information system to a team of technologists and designers that are working with her in a hospital. And just having this very simple prototype allows her to talk about what she wants in a much more powerful way. And of course, by building quick prototypes, we can get out and test our ideas with consumers and users much more quickly than if we’re trying to describe them through words. But what about designing something that isn’t physical? Something like a service or an experience? Something that exists as a series of interactions over time? Instead of building play, this can be approached with role-play. So, if you’re designing an interaction between two people — such as, I don’t know — ordering food at a fast food joint or something, you need to be able to imagine how that experience might feel over a period of time. And I think the best way to achieve that, and get a feeling for any flaws in your design, is to act it out. So we do quite a lot of work at IDEO trying to convince our clients of this. They can be a little skeptical; I’ll come back to that. But a place, I think, where the effort is really worthwhile is where people are wrestling with quite serious problems — things like education or security or finance or health. And this is another example in a healthcare environment of some doctors and some nurses and designers acting out a service scenario around patient care. But you know, many adults are pretty reluctant to engage with role-play. Some of it’s embarrassment and some of it is because they just don’t believe that what emerges is necessarily valid. They dismiss an interesting interaction by saying, you know, "That’s just happening because they’re acting it out." Research into kids' behavior actually suggests that it’s worth taking role-playing seriously. Because when children play a role, they actually follow social scripts quite closely that they’ve learnt from us as adults. If one kid plays "store," and another one’s playing "house," then the whole kind of play falls down. So they get used to quite quickly to understanding the rules for social interactions, and are actually quite quick to point out when they’re broken. So when, as adults, we role-play, then we have a huge set of these scripts already internalized. We’ve gone through lots of experiences in life, and they provide a strong intuition as to whether an interaction is going to work. So we’re very good, when acting out a solution, at spotting whether something lacks authenticity. So role-play is actually, I think, quite valuable when it comes to thinking about experiences. Another way for us, as designers, to explore role-play is to put ourselves through an experience which we’re designing for, and project ourselves into an experience. So here are some designers who are trying to understand what it might feel like to sleep in a confined space on an airplane. And so they grabbed some very simple materials, you can see, and did this role-play, this kind of very crude role-play, just to get a sense of what it would be like for passengers if they were stuck in quite small places on airplanes. This is one of our designers, Kristian Simsarian, and he’s putting himself through the experience of being an ER patient. Now, this is a real hospital, in a real emergency room. One of the reasons he chose to take this rather large video camera with him was because he didn’t want the doctors and nurses thinking he was actually sick, and sticking something into him that he was going to regret later. So anyhow, he went there with his video camera, and it’s kind of interesting to see what he brought back. Because when we looked at the video when he got back, we saw 20 minutes of this. (Laughter) And also, the amazing thing about this video — as soon as you see it you immediately project yourself into that experience. And you know what it feels like: all of that uncertainty while you’re left out in the hallway while the docs are dealing with some more urgent case in one of the emergency rooms, wondering what the heck’s going on. And so this notion of using role-play — or in this case, living through the experience as a way of creating empathy — particularly when you use video, is really powerful. Or another one of our designers, Altay Sendil: he’s here having his chest waxed, not because he’s very vain, although actually he is — no, I’m kidding — but in order to empathize with the pain that chronic care patients go through when they’re having dressings removed. And so sometimes these analogous experiences, analogous role-play, can also be quite valuable. So when a kid dresses up as a firefighter, you know, he’s beginning to try on that identity. He wants to know what it feels like to be a firefighter. We’re doing the same thing as designers. We’re trying on these experiences. And so the idea of role-play is both as an empathy tool, as well as a tool for prototyping experiences. And you know, we kind of admire people who do this at IDEO anyway. Not just because they lead to insights about the experience, but also because of their willingness to explore and their ability to unselfconsciously surrender themselves to the experience. In short, we admire their willingness to play. Playful exploration, playful building and role-play: those are some of the ways that designers use play in their work. And so far, I admit, this might feel like it’s a message just to go out and play like a kid. And to certain extent it is, but I want to stress a couple of points. The first thing to remember is that play is not anarchy. Play has rules, especially when it’s group play. When kids play tea party, or they play cops and robbers, they’re following a script that they’ve agreed to. And it’s this code negotiation that leads to productive play. So, remember the sketching task we did at the beginning? The kind of little face, the portrait you did? Well, imagine if you did the same task with friends while you were drinking in a pub. But everybody agreed to play a game where the worst sketch artist bought the next round of drinks. That framework of rules would have turned an embarrassing, difficult situation into a fun game. As a result, we’d all feel perfectly secure and have a good time — but because we all understood the rules and we agreed on them together. But there aren’t just rules about how to play; there are rules about when to play. Kids don’t play all the time, obviously. They transition in and out of it, and good teachers spend a lot of time thinking about how to move kids through these experiences. As designers, we need to be able to transition in and out of play also. And if we’re running design studios we need to be able to figure out, how can we transition designers through these different experiences? I think this is particularly true if we think about the sort of — I think what’s very different about design is that we go through these two very distinctive modes of operation. We go through a sort of generative mode, where we’re exploring many ideas; and then we come back together again, and come back looking for that solution, and developing that solution. I think they’re two quite different modes: divergence and convergence. And I think it’s probably in the divergent mode that we most need playfulness. Perhaps in convergent mode we need to be more serious. And so being able to move between those modes is really quite important. So, it’s where there’s a more nuanced version view of play, I think, is required. Because it’s very easy to fall into the trap that these states are absolute. You’re either playful or you’re serious, and you can’t be both. But that’s not really true: you can be a serious professional adult and, at times, be playful. It’s not an either/or; it’s an "and." You can be serious and play. So to sum it up, we need trust to play, and we need trust to be creative. So, there’s a connection. And there are a series of behaviors that we’ve learnt as kids, and that turn out to be quite useful to us as designers. They include exploration, which is about going for quantity; building, and thinking with your hands; and role-play, where acting it out helps us both to have more empathy for the situations in which we’re designing, and to create services and experiences that are seamless and authentic. Thank you very much. (Applause)

The science of scent

Luca Turin

{0: 'Luca Turin'}

{0: ['nose']}

{0: "Biophysicist Luca Turin studies the science of smell. He's the author of Perfumes: The Guide, and the subject of Chandler Burr's 2003 book The Emperor of Scent. His next project: developing an artificial nose."}

2005-02-02

2008-11-07

TED2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'et', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'mr', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['Senses', 'beauty', 'happiness', 'materials', 'science', 'smell', 'technology']

{24: 'A dance of "Symbiosis"', 40: 'The story of life in photographs', 162: 'My creations, a new form of life', 2002: 'The smelly mystery of the human pheromone', 16782: 'A crash course in organic chemistry', 24016: 'How do we smell?'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/luca_turin_the_science_of_scent/

What's the science behind a sublime perfume? With charm and precision, biophysicist Luca Turin explains the molecular makeup -- and the art -- of a scent.

The fragrance that you will smell, you will never be able to smell this way again. It’s a fragrance called Beyond Paradise, which you can find in any store in the nation. Except here it’s been split up in parts by Estée Lauder and by the perfumer who did it, Calice Becker, and I'm most grateful to them for this. And it’s been split up in successive bits and a chord. So what you’re smelling now is the top note. And then will come what they call the heart, the lush heart note. I will show it to you. The Eden top note is named after the Eden Project in the U.K. The lush heart note, Melaleuca bark note — which does not contain any Melaleuca bark, because it’s totally forbidden. And after that, the complete fragrance. Now what you are smelling is a combination of — I asked how many molecules there were in there, and nobody would tell me. So I put it through a G.C., a Gas Chromatograph that I have in my office, and it’s about 400. So what you’re smelling is several hundred molecules floating through the air, hitting your nose. And do not get the impression that this is very subjective. You are all smelling pretty much the same thing, OK? Smell has this reputation of being somewhat different for each person. It’s not really true. And perfumery shows you that can’t be true, because if it were like that it wouldn’t be an art, OK? Now, while the smell wafts over you, let me tell you the history of an idea. Everything that you’re smelling in here is made up of atoms that come from what I call the Upper East Side of the periodic table — a nice, safe neighborhood. (Laughter) You really don’t want to leave it if you want to have a career in perfumery. Some people have tried in the 1920s to add things from the bad parts, and it didn’t really work. These are the five atoms from which just about everything that you’re going to smell in real life, from coffee to fragrance, are made of. The top note that you smelled at the very beginning, the cut-grass green, what we call in perfumery — they’re weird terms — and this would be called a green note, because it smells of something green, like cut grass. This is cis-3-hexene-1-ol. And I had to learn chemistry on the fly in the last three years. A very expensive high school chemistry education. This has six carbon atoms, so "hexa," hexene-1-ol. It has one double bond, it has an alcohol on the end, so it’s "ol," and that’s why they call it cis-3-hexene-1-ol. Once you figure this out, you can really impress people at parties. This smells of cut grass. Now, this is the skeleton of the molecule. If you dress it up with atoms, hydrogen atoms — that’s what it looks like when you have it on your computer — but actually it’s sort of more like this, in the sense that the atoms have a certain sphere that you cannot penetrate. They repel. OK, now. Why does this thing smell of cut grass, OK? Why doesn’t it smell of potatoes or violets? Well, there are really two theories. But the first theory is: it must be the shape. And that’s a perfectly reasonable theory in the sense that almost everything else in biology works by shape. Enzymes that chew things up, antibodies, it’s all, you know, the fit between a protein and whatever it is grabbing, in this case a smell. And I will try and explain to you what’s wrong with this notion. And the other theory is that we smell molecular vibrations. Now, this is a totally insane idea. And when I first came across it in the early '90s, I thought my predecessor, Malcolm Dyson and Bob Wright, had really taken leave of their senses, and I’ll explain to you why this was the case. However, I came to realize gradually that they may be right — and I have to convince all my colleagues that this is so, but I’m working on it. Here’s how shape works in normal receptors. You have a molecule coming in, it gets into the protein, which is schematic here, and it causes this thing to switch, to turn, to move in some way by binding in certain parts. And the attraction, the forces, between the molecule and the protein cause the motion. This is a shape-based idea. Now, what’s wrong with shape is summarized in this slide. The way —I expect everybody to memorize these compounds. This is one page of work from a chemist’s workbook, OK? Working for a fragrance company. He’s making 45 molecules, and he’s looking for a sandalwood, something that smells of sandalwood. Because there’s a lot of money in sandalwoods. And of these 45 molecules, only 4629 actually smells of sandalwood. And he puts an exclamation mark, OK? This is an awful lot of work. This actually is roughly, in man-years of work, 200,000 dollars roughly, if you keep them on the low salaries with no benefits. So this is a profoundly inefficient process. And my definition of a theory is, it’s not just something that you teach people; it’s labor saving. A theory is something that enables you to do less work. I love the idea of doing less work. So let me explain to you why — a very simple fact that tells you why this shape theory really does not work very well. This is cis-3-hexene-1-ol. It smells of cut grass. This is cis-3-hexene-1-thiol, and this smells of rotten eggs, OK? Now, you will have noticed that vodka never smells of rotten eggs. If it does, you put the glass down, you go to a different bar. This is — in other words, we never get the O-H — we never mistake it for an S-H, OK? Like, at no concentration, even pure, you know, if you smelt pure ethanol, it doesn’t smell of rotten eggs. Conversely, there is no concentration at which the sulfur compound will smell like vodka. It’s very hard to explain this by molecular recognition. Now, I showed this to a physicist friend of mine who has a profound distaste for biology, and he says, "That’s easy! The things are a different color!" (Laughter) We have to go a little beyond that. Now let me explain why vibrational theory has some sort of interest in it. These molecules, as you saw in the beginning, the building blocks had springs connecting them to each other. In fact, molecules are able to vibrate at a set of frequencies which are very specific for each molecule and for the bonds connecting them. So this is the sound of the O-H stretch, translated into the audible range. S-H, quite a different frequency. Now, this is kind of interesting, because it tells you that you should be looking for a particular fact, which is this: nothing in the world smells like rotten eggs except S-H, OK? Now, Fact B: nothing in the world has that frequency except S-H. If you look on this, imagine a piano keyboard. The S-H stretch is in the middle of a part of the keyboard that has been, so to speak, damaged, and there are no neighboring notes, nothing is close to it. You have a unique smell, a unique vibration. So I went searching when I started in this game to convince myself that there was any degree of plausibility to this whole crazy story. I went searching for a type of molecule, any molecule, that would have that vibration and that — the obvious prediction was that it should absolutely smell of sulfur. If it didn’t, the whole idea was toast, and I might as well move on to other things. Now, after searching high and low for several months, I discovered that there was a type of molecule called a Borane which has exactly the same vibration. Now the good news is, Boranes you can get hold of. The bad news is they’re rocket fuels. Most of them explode spontaneously in contact with air, and when you call up the companies, they only give you minimum ten tons, OK? (Laughter) So this was not what they call a laboratory-scale experiment, and they wouldn’t have liked it at my college. However, I managed to get a hold of a Borane eventually, and here is the beast. And it really does have the same — if you calculate, if you measure the vibrational frequencies, they are the same as S-H. Now, does it smell of sulfur? Well, if you go back in the literature, there’s a man who knew more about Boranes than anyone alive then or since, Alfred Stock, he synthesized all of them. And in an enormous 40-page paper in German he says, at one point — my wife is German and she translated it for me — and at one point he says, "ganz widerlich Geruch," an "absolutely repulsive smell," which is good. Reminiscent of hydrogen sulfide. So this fact that Boranes smell of sulfur had been known since 1910, and utterly forgotten until 1997, 1998. Now, the slight fly in the ointment is this: that if we smell molecular vibrations, we must have a spectroscope in our nose. Now, this is a spectroscope, OK, on my laboratory bench. And it’s fair to say that if you look up somebody’s nose, you’re unlikely to see anything resembling this. And this is the main objection to the theory. OK, great, we smell vibrations. How? All right? Now when people ask this kind of question, they neglect something, which is that physicists are really clever, unlike biologists. (Laughter) This is a joke. I’m a biologist, OK? So it’s a joke against myself. Bob Jacklovich and John Lamb at Ford Motor Company, in the days when Ford Motor was spending vast amounts of money on fundamental research, discovered a way to build a spectroscope that was intrinsically nano-scale. In other words, no mirrors, no lasers, no prisms, no nonsense, just a tiny device, and he built this device. And this device uses electron tunneling. Now, I could do the dance of electron tunneling, but I’ve done a video instead, which is much more interesting. Here’s how it works. Electrons are fuzzy creatures, and they can jump across gaps, but only at equal energy. If the energy differs, they can’t jump. Unlike us, they won’t fall off the cliff. OK. Now. If something absorbs the energy, the electron can travel. So here you have a system, you have something — and there’s plenty of that stuff in biology — some substance giving an electron, and the electron tries to jump, and only when a molecule comes along that has the right vibration does the reaction happen, OK? This is the basis for the device that these two guys at Ford built. And every single part of this mechanism is actually plausible in biology. In other words, I’ve taken off-the-shelf components, and I’ve made a spectroscope. What’s nice about this idea, if you have a philosophical bent of mind, is that then it tells you that the nose, the ear and the eye are all vibrational senses. Of course, it doesn’t matter, because it could also be that they’re not. But it has a certain — (Laughter) — it has a certain ring to it which is attractive to people who read too much 19th-century German literature. And then a magnificent thing happened: I left academia and joined the real world of business, and a company was created around my ideas to make new molecules using my method, along the lines of, let’s put someone else’s money where your mouth is. And one of the first things that happened was we started going around to fragrance companies asking for what they needed, because, of course, if you could calculate smell, you don’t need chemists. You need a computer, a Mac will do it, if you know how to program the thing right, OK? So you can try a thousand molecules, you can try ten thousand molecules in a weekend, and then you only tell the chemists to make the right one. And so that’s a direct path to making new odorants. And one of the first things that happened was we went to see some perfumers in France — and here’s where I do my Charles Fleischer impression — and one of them says, "You cannot make a coumarin." He says to me, "I bet you cannot make a coumarin." Now, coumarin is a very common thing, a material, in fragrance which is derived from a bean that comes from South America. And it is the classic synthetic aroma chemical, OK? It’s the molecule that has made men’s fragrances smell the way they do since 1881, to be exact. And the problem is it’s a carcinogen. So nobody likes particularly to — you know, aftershave with carcinogens. (Laughter) There are some reckless people, but it’s not worth it, OK? So they asked us to make a new coumarin. And so we started doing calculations. And the first thing you do is you calculate the vibrational spectrum of coumarin, and you smooth it out, so that you have a nice picture of what the sort of chord, so to speak, of coumarin is. And then you start cranking the computer to find other molecules, related or unrelated, that have the same vibrations. And we actually, in this case, I’m sorry to say, it happened — it was serendipitous. Because I got a phone call from our chief chemist and he said, look, I’ve just found this such a beautiful reaction, that even if this compound doesn’t smell of coumarin, I want to do it, it’s just such a nifty, one step — I mean, chemists have weird minds — one step, 90 percent yield, you know, and you get this lovely crystalline compound. Let us try it. And I said, first of all, let me do the calculation on that compound, bottom right, which is related to coumarin, but has an extra pentagon inserted into the molecule. Calculate the vibrations, the purple spectrum is that new fellow, the white one is the old one. And the prediction is it should smell of coumarin. They made it ... and it smelled exactly like coumarin. And this is our new baby, called tonkene. You see, when you’re a scientist, you’re always selling ideas. And people are very resistant to ideas, and rightly so. Why should new ideas be accepted? But when you put a little 10-gram vial on the table in front of perfumers and it smells like coumarin, and it isn’t coumarin, and you’ve found it in three weeks, this focuses everybody’s mind wonderfully. (Laughter) (Applause) And people often ask me, is your theory accepted? And I said, well, by whom? I mean most, you know — there’s three attitudes: You’re right, and I don’t know why, which is the most rational one at this point. You’re right, and I don’t care how you do it, in a sense; you bring me the molecules, you know. And: You’re completely wrong, and I’m sure you’re completely wrong. OK? Now, we’re dealing with people who only want results, and this is the commercial world. And they tell us that even if we do it by astrology, they’re happy. But we’re not actually doing it by astrology. But for the last three years, I’ve had what I consider to be the best job in the entire universe, which is to put my hobby — which is, you know, fragrance and all the magnificent things — plus a little bit of biophysics, a small amount of self-taught chemistry at the service of something that actually works. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Science and democracy

Lee Smolin

{0: 'Lee Smolin'}

{0: ['physicist']}

{0: "Lee Smolin is a theoretical physicist, working mainly in the field of quantum gravity. He's a founding member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada, and the author of The Trouble With Physics."}

2003-02-02

2008-11-10

TED2003

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['String theory', 'community', 'global issues', 'physics', 'politics', 'science', 'social change']

{42: 'Is this our final century?', 67: 'How juries are fooled by statistics', 358: 'Politics and religion are technologies', 26263: 'Does time exist?', 843: 'Computing a theory of all knowledge', 2072: 'Why does the universe exist?'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/lee_smolin_science_and_democracy/

Physicist Lee Smolin talks about how the scientific community works: as he puts it, "we fight and argue as hard as we can," but everyone accepts that the next generation of scientists will decide who's right. And, he says, that's how democracy works, too.

So, about three years ago I was in London, and somebody called Howard Burton came to me and said, I represent a group of people, and we want to start an institute in theoretical physics. We have about 120 million dollars, and we want to do it well. We want to be in the forefront fields, and we want to do it differently. We want to get out of this thing where the young people have all the ideas, and the old people have all the power and decide what science gets done. It took me about 25 seconds to decide that that was a good idea. Three years later, we have the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario. It’s the most exciting job I’ve ever had. And it’s the first time I’ve had a job where I’m afraid to go away because of everything that’s going to happen in this week when I’m here. (Laughter) But in any case, what I’m going to do in my little bit of time is take you on a quick tour of some of the things that we talk about and we think about. So, we think a lot about what really makes science work? The first thing that anybody who knows science, and has been around science, is that the stuff you learn in school as a scientific method is wrong. There is no method. On the other hand, somehow we manage to reason together as a community, from incomplete evidence to conclusions that we all agree about. And this is, by the way, something that a democratic society also has to do. So how does it work? Well, my belief is that it works because scientists are a community bound together by an ethics. And here are some of the ethical principles. I’m not going to read them all to you because I’m not in teacher mode. I’m in entertain, amaze mode. (Laughter) But one of the principles is that everybody who is part of the community gets to fight and argue as hard as they can for what they believe. But we’re all disciplined by the understanding that the only people who are going to decide, you know, whether I’m right or somebody else is right, are the people in our community in the next generation, in 30 and 50 years. So it’s this combination of respect for the tradition and community we’re in, and rebellion that the community requires to get anywhere, that makes science work. And being in this process of being in a community that reasons from shared evidence to conclusions, I believe, teaches us about democracy. Not only is there a relationship between the ethics of science and the ethics of being a citizen in democracy, but there has been, historically, a relationship between how people think about space and time, and what the cosmos is, and how people think about the society that they live in. And I want to talk about three stages in that evolution. The first science of cosmology that was anything like science was Aristotelian science, and that was hierarchical. The earth is in the center, then there are these crystal spheres, the sun, the moon, the planets and finally the celestial sphere, where the stars are. And everything in this universe has a place. And Aristotle’s law of motion was that everything goes to its natural place, which was of course, the rule of the society that Aristotle lived in, and more importantly, the medieval society that, through Christianity, embraced Aristotle and blessed it. And the idea is that everything is defined. Where something is, is defined with respect to this last sphere, the celestial sphere, outside of which is this eternal, perfect realm, where lives God, who is the ultimate judge of everything. So that is both Aristotelian cosmology, and in a certain sense, medieval society. Now, in the 17th century there was a revolution in thinking about space and time and motion and so forth of Newton. And at the same time there was a revolution in social thought of John Locke and his collaborators. And they were very closely associated. In fact, Newton and Locke were friends. Their way of thinking about space and time and motion on the one hand, and a society on the other hand, were closely related. And let me show you. In a Newtonian universe, there’s no center — thank you. There are particles and they move around with respect to a fixed, absolute framework of space and time. It’s meaningful to say absolutely where something is in space, because that’s defined, not with respect to say, where other things are, but with respect to this absolute notion of space, which for Newton was God. Now, similarly, in Locke’s society there are individuals who have certain rights, properties in a formal sense, and those are defined with respect to some absolute, abstract notions of rights and justice, and so forth, which are independent of what else has happened in the society. Of who else there is, of the history and so forth. There is also an omniscient observer who knows everything, who is God, who is in a certain sense outside the universe, because he has no role in anything that happens, but is in a certain sense everywhere, because space is just the way that God knows where everything is, according to Newton, OK? So this is the foundations of what’s called, traditionally, liberal political theory and Newtonian physics. Now, in the 20th century we had a revolution that was initiated at the beginning of the 20th century, and which is still going on. It was begun with the invention of relativity theory and quantum theory. And merging them together to make the final quantum theory of space and time and gravity, is the culmination of that, something that’s going on right now. And in this universe there’s nothing fixed and absolute. Zilch, OK. This universe is described by being a network of relationships. Space is just one aspect, so there’s no meaning to say absolutely where something is. There’s only where it is relative to everything else that is. And this network of relations is ever-evolving. So we call it a relational universe. All properties of things are about these kinds of relationships. And also, if you’re embedded in such a network of relationships, your view of the world has to do with what information comes to you through the network of relations. And there’s no place for an omniscient observer or an outside intelligence knowing everything and making everything. So this is general relativity, this is quantum theory. This is also, if you talk to legal scholars, the foundations of new ideas in legal thought. They’re thinking about the same things. And not only that, they make the analogy to relativity theory and cosmology often. So there’s an interesting discussion going on there. This last view of cosmology is called the relational view. So the main slogan here is that there’s nothing outside the universe, which means that there’s no place to put an explanation for something outside. So in such a relational universe, if you come upon something that’s ordered and structured, like this device here, or that device there, or something beautiful, like all the living things, all of you guys in the room — "guys" in physics, by the way, is a generic term: men and women. (Laughter) Then you want to know, you’re a person, you want to know how is it made. And in a relational universe the only possible explanation was, somehow it made itself. There must be mechanisms of self-organization inside the universe that make things. Because there’s no place to put a maker outside, as there was in the Aristotelian and the Newtonian universe. So in a relational universe we must have processes of self-organization. Now, Darwin taught us that there are processes of self-organization that suffice to explain all of us and everything we see. So it works. But not only that, if you think about how natural selection works, then it turns out that natural selection would only make sense in such a relational universe. That is, natural selection works on properties, like fitness, which are about relationships of some species to some other species. Darwin wouldn’t make sense in an Aristotelian universe, and wouldn’t really make sense in a Newtonian universe. So a theory of biology based on natural selection requires a relational notion of what are the properties of biological systems. And if you push that all the way down, really, it makes the best sense in a relational universe where all properties are relational. Now, not only that, but Einstein taught us that gravity is the result of the world being relational. If it wasn’t for gravity, there wouldn’t be life, because gravity causes stars to form and live for a very long time, keeping pieces of the world, like the surface of the Earth, out of thermal equilibrium for billions of years so life can evolve. In the 20th century, we saw the independent development of two big themes in science. In the biological sciences, they explored the implications of the notion that order and complexity and structure arise in a self-organized way. That was the triumph of Neo-Darwinism and so forth. And slowly, that idea is leaking out to the cognitive sciences, the human sciences, economics, et cetera. At the same time, we physicists have been busy trying to make sense of and build on and integrate the discoveries of quantum theory and relativity. And what we’ve been working out is the implications, really, of the idea that the universe is made up of relations. 21st-century science is going to be driven by the integration of these two ideas: the triumph of relational ways of thinking about the world, on the one hand, and self-organization or Darwinian ways of thinking about the world, on the other hand. And also, is that in the 21st century our thinking about space and time and cosmology, and our thinking about society are both going to continue to evolve. And what they’re evolving towards is the union of these two big ideas, Darwinism and relationalism. Now, if you think about democracy from this perspective, a new pluralistic notion of democracy would be one that recognizes that there are many different interests, many different agendas, many different individuals, many different points of view. Each one is incomplete, because you’re embedded in a network of relationships. Any actor in a democracy is embedded in a network of relationships. And you understand some things better than other things, and because of that there’s a continual jostling and give and take, which is politics. And politics is, in the ideal sense, the way in which we continually address our network of relations in order to achieve a better life and a better society. And I also think that science will never go away and — I’m finishing on this line. (Laughter) In fact, I’m finished. Science will never go away.

A complicated hero in the war on dictatorship

Samantha Power

{0: 'Samantha Power'}

{0: ['political scientist and journalist']}

{0: "Samantha Power studies US foreign policy, especially as it relates to war and human rights. Her books take on the world's worst problems: genocide, civil war and brutal dictatorships."}

2008-02-02

2008-11-11

TED2008

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['communication', 'global issues', 'morality', 'politics', 'terrorism', 'war']

{272: 'The psychology of evil', 299: 'A hero of the Congo forest', 204: 'Tales of passion', 84: 'My wish: Let my photographs bear witness', 1003: 'The path to ending ethnic conflicts', 1651: 'What I saw in the war'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/samantha_power_a_complicated_hero_in_the_war_on_dictatorship/

Would you negotiate with someone you knew to be evil, to save lives? Samantha Power tells a story of a complicated hero, Sergio Vieira de Mello. This UN diplomat walked a thin moral line, negotiating with the world's worst dictators to help their people survive crisis. It's a compelling story told with a fiery passion.

I spent the better part of a decade looking at American responses to mass atrocity and genocide. And I'd like to start by sharing with you one moment that to me sums up what there is to know about American and democratic responses to mass atrocity. And that moment came on April 21, 1994. So 14 years ago, almost, in the middle of the Rwandan genocide, in which 800,000 people would be systematically exterminated by the Rwandan government and some extremist militia. On April 21, in the New York Times, the paper reported that somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 people had already been killed in the genocide. It was in the paper — not on the front page. It was a lot like the Holocaust coverage, it was buried in the paper. Rwanda itself was not seen as newsworthy, and amazingly, genocide itself was not seen as newsworthy. But on April 21, a wonderfully honest moment occurred. And that was that an American congresswoman named Patricia Schroeder from Colorado met with a group of journalists. And one of the journalists said to her, what's up? What's going on in the U.S. government? Two to 300,000 people have just been exterminated in the last couple of weeks in Rwanda. It's two weeks into the genocide at that time, but of course, at that time you don't know how long it's going to last. And the journalist said, why is there so little response out of Washington? Why no hearings, no denunciations, no people getting arrested in front of the Rwandan embassy or in front of the White House? What's the deal? And she said — she was so honest — she said, "It's a great question. All I can tell you is that in my congressional office in Colorado and my office in Washington, we're getting hundreds and hundreds of calls about the endangered ape and gorilla population in Rwanda, but nobody is calling about the people. The phones just aren't ringing about the people." And the reason I give you this moment is there's a deep truth in it. And that truth is, or was, in the 20th century, that while we were beginning to develop endangered species movements, we didn't have an endangered people's movement. We had Holocaust education in the schools. Most of us were groomed not only on images of nuclear catastrophe, but also on images and knowledge of the Holocaust. There's a museum, of course, on the Mall in Washington, right next to Lincoln and Jefferson. I mean, we have owned Never Again culturally, appropriately, interestingly. And yet the politicization of Never Again, the operationalization of Never Again, had never occurred in the 20th century. And that's what that moment with Patricia Schroeder I think shows: that if we are to bring about an end to the world's worst atrocities, we have to make it such. There has to be a role — there has to be the creation of political noise and political costs in response to massive crimes against humanity, and so forth. So that was the 20th century. Now here — and this will be a relief to you at this point in the afternoon — there is good news, amazing news, in the 21st century, and that is that, almost out of nowhere, there has come into being an anti-genocide movement, an anti-genocide constituency, and one that looks destined, in fact, to be permanent. It grew up in response to the atrocities in Darfur. It is comprised of students. There are something like 300 anti-genocide chapters on college campuses around the country. It's bigger than the anti-apartheid movement. There are something like 500 high school chapters devoted to stopping the genocide in Darfur. Evangelicals have joined it. Jewish groups have joined it. "Hotel Rwanda" watchers have joined it. It is a cacophonous movement. To call it a movement, as with all movements, perhaps, is a little misleading. It's diverse. It's got a lot of different approaches. It's got all the ups and the downs of movements. But it has been amazingly successful in one regard, in that it has become, it has congealed into this endangered people's movement that was missing in the 20th century. It sees itself, such as it is, the it, as something that will create the impression that there will be political cost, there will be a political price to be paid, for allowing genocide, for not having an heroic imagination, for not being an upstander but for being, in fact, a bystander. Now because it's student-driven, there's some amazing things that the movement has done. They have launched a divestment campaign that has now convinced, I think, 55 universities in 22 states to divest their holdings of stocks with regard to companies doing business in Sudan. They have a 1-800-GENOCIDE number — this is going to sound very kitsch, but for those of you who may not be, I mean, may be apolitical, but interested in doing something about genocide, you dial 1-800-GENOCIDE and you type in your zip code, and you don't even have to know who your congressperson is. It will refer you directly to your congressperson, to your U.S. senator, to your governor where divestment legislation is pending. They've lowered the transaction costs of stopping genocide. I think the most innovative thing they've introduced recently are genocide grades. And it takes students to introduce genocide grades. So what you now have when a Congress is in session is members of Congress calling up these 19-year-olds or 24-year-olds and saying, I'm just told I have a D minus on genocide; what do I do to get a C? I just want to get a C. Help me. And the students and the others who are part of this incredibly energized base are there to answer that, and there's always something to do. Now, what this movement has done is it has extracted from the Bush administration from the United States, at a time of massive over-stretch — military, financial, diplomatic — a whole series of commitments to Darfur that no other country in the world is making. For instance, the referral of the crimes in Darfur to the International Criminal Court, which the Bush administration doesn't like. The expenditure of 3 billion dollars in refugee camps to try to keep, basically, the people who've been displaced from their homes by the Sudanese government, by the so-called Janjaweed, the militia, to keep those people alive until something more durable can be achieved. And recently, or now not that recently, about six months ago, the authorization of a peacekeeping force of 26,000 that will go. And that's all the Bush administration's leadership, and it's all because of this bottom-up pressure and the fact that the phones haven't stopped ringing from the beginning of this crisis. The bad news, however, to this question of will evil prevail, is that evil lives on. The people in those camps are surrounded on all sides by so-called Janjaweed, these men on horseback with spears and Kalashnikovs. Women who go to get firewood in order to heat the humanitarian aid in order to feed their families — humanitarian aid, the dirty secret of it is it has to be heated, really, to be edible — are themselves subjected to rape, which is a tool of the genocide that is being used. And the peacekeepers I've mentioned, the force has been authorized, but almost no country on Earth has stepped forward since the authorization to actually put its troops or its police in harm's way. So we have achieved an awful lot relative to the 20th century, and yet far too little relative to the gravity of the crime that is unfolding as we sit here, as we speak. Why the limits to the movement? Why is what has been achieved, or what the movement has done, been necessary but not sufficient to the crime? I think there are a couple — there are many reasons — but a couple just to focus on briefly. The first is that the movement, such as it is, stops at America's borders. It is not a global movement. It does not have too many compatriots abroad who themselves are asking their governments to do more to stop genocide. And the Holocaust culture that we have in this country makes Americans, sort of, more prone to, I think, want to bring Never Again to life. The guilt that the Clinton administration expressed, that Bill Clinton expressed over Rwanda, created a space in our society for a consensus that Rwanda was bad and wrong and we wish we had done more, and that is something that the movement has taken advantage of. European governments, for the most part, haven't acknowledged responsibility, and there's nothing to kind of to push back and up against. So this movement, if it's to be durable and global, will have to cross borders, and you will have to see other citizens in democracies, not simply resting on the assumption that their government would do something in the face of genocide, but actually making it such. Governments will never gravitate towards crimes of this magnitude naturally or eagerly. As we saw, they haven't even gravitated towards protecting our ports or reigning in loose nukes. Why would we expect in a bureaucracy that it would orient itself towards distant suffering? So one reason is it hasn't gone global. The second is, of course, that at this time in particular in America's history, we have a credibility problem, a legitimacy problem in international institutions. It is structurally really, really hard to do, as the Bush administration rightly does, which is to denounce genocide on a Monday and then describe water boarding on a Tuesday as a no-brainer and then turn up on Wednesday and look for troop commitments. Now, other countries have their own reasons for not wanting to get involved. Let me be clear. They're in some ways using the Bush administration as an alibi. But it is essential for us to be a leader in this sphere, of course to restore our standing and our leadership in the world. The recovery's going to take some time. We have to ask ourselves, what now? What do we do going forward as a country and as citizens in relationship to the world's worst places, the world's worst suffering, killers, and the kinds of killers that could come home to roost sometime in the future? The place that I turned to answer that question was to a man that many of you may not have ever heard of, and that is a Brazilian named Sergio Vieira de Mello who, as Chris said, was blown up in Iraq in 2003. He was the victim of the first-ever suicide bomb in Iraq. It's hard to remember, but there was actually a time in the summer of 2003, even after the U.S. invasion, where, apart from looting, civilians were relatively safe in Iraq. Now, who was Sergio? Sergio Vieira de Mello was his name. In addition to being Brazilian, he was described to me before I met him in 1994 as someone who was a cross between James Bond on the one hand and Bobby Kennedy on the other. And in the U.N., you don't get that many people who actually manage to merge those qualities. He was James Bond-like in that he was ingenious. He was drawn to the flames, he chased the flames, he was like a moth to the flames. Something of an adrenalin junkie. He was successful with women. He was Bobby Kennedy-like because in some ways one could never tell if he was a realist masquerading as an idealist or an idealist masquerading as a realist, as people always wondered about Bobby Kennedy and John Kennedy in that way. What he was was a decathlete of nation-building, of problem-solving, of troubleshooting in the world's worst places and in the world's most broken places. In failing states, genocidal states, under-governed states, precisely the kinds of places that threats to this country exist on the horizon, and precisely the kinds of places where most of the world's suffering tends to get concentrated. These are the places he was drawn to. He moved with the headlines. He was in the U.N. for 34 years. He joined at the age of 21. Started off when the causes in the wars du jour in the '70s were wars of independence and decolonization. He was there in Bangladesh dealing with the outflow of millions of refugees — the largest refugee flow in history up to that point. He was in Sudan when the civil war broke out there. He was in Cyprus right after the Turkish invasion. He was in Mozambique for the War of Independence. He was in Lebanon. Amazingly, he was in Lebanon — the U.N. base was used — Palestinians staged attacks out from behind the U.N. base. Israel then invaded and overran the U.N. base. Sergio was in Beirut when the U.S. Embassy was hit by the first-ever suicide attack against the United States. People date the beginning of this new era to 9/11, but surely 1983, with the attack on the US Embassy and the Marine barracks — which Sergio witnessed — those are, in fact, in some ways, the dawning of the era that we find ourselves in today. From Lebanon he went to Bosnia in the '90s. The issues were, of course, ethnic sectarian violence. He was the first person to negotiate with the Khmer Rouge. Talk about evil prevailing. I mean, here he was in the room with the embodiment of evil in Cambodia. He negotiates with the Serbs. He actually crosses so far into this realm of talking to evil and trying to convince evil that it doesn't need to prevail that he earns the nickname — not Sergio but Serbio while he's living in the Balkans and conducting these kinds of negotiations. He then goes to Rwanda and to Congo in the aftermath of the genocide, and he's the guy who has to decide — huh, OK, the genocide is over; 800,000 people have been killed; the people responsible are fleeing into neighboring countries — into Congo, into Tanzania. I'm Sergio, I'm a humanitarian, and I want to feed those — well, I don't want to feed the killers but I want to feed the two million people who are with them, so we're going to go, we're going to set up camps, and we're going to supply humanitarian aid. But, uh-oh, the killers are within the camps. Well, I'd like to separate the sheep from the wolves. Let me go door-to-door to the international community and see if anybody will give me police or troops to do the separation. And their response, of course, was no more than we wanted to stop the genocide and put our troops in harm's way to do that, nor do we now want to get in the way and pluck genocidaires from camps. So then you have to make the decision. Do you turn off the international spigot of life support and risk two million civilian lives? Or do you continue feeding the civilians, knowing that the genocidaires are in the camps, literally sharpening their knives for future battle? What do you do? It's all lesser-evil terrain in these broken places. Late '90s: nation-building is the cause du jour. He's the guy put in charge. He's the Paul Bremer or the Jerry Bremer of first Kosovo and then East Timor. He governs the places. He's the viceroy. He has to decide on tax policy, on currency, on border patrol, on policing. He has to make all these judgments. He's a Brazilian in these places. He speaks seven languages. He's been up to that point in 14 war zones so he's positioned to make better judgments, perhaps, than people who have never done that kind of work. But nonetheless, he is the cutting edge of our experimentation with doing good with very few resources being brought to bear in, again, the world's worst places. And then after Timor, 9/11 has happened, he's named U.N. Human Rights Commissioner, and he has to balance liberty and security and figure out, what do you do when the most powerful country in the United Nations is bowing out of the Geneva Conventions, bowing out of international law? Do you denounce? Well, if you denounce, you're probably never going to get back in the room. Maybe you stay reticent. Maybe you try to charm President Bush — and that's what he did. And in so doing he earned himself, unfortunately, his final and tragic appointment to Iraq — the one that resulted in his death. One note on his death, which is so devastating, is that despite predicating the war on Iraq on a link between Saddam Hussein and terrorism in 9/11, believe it or not, the Bush administration or the invaders did no planning, no pre-war planning, to respond to terrorism. So Sergio — this receptacle of all of this learning on how to deal with evil and how to deal with brokenness, lay under the rubble for three and a half hours without rescue. Stateless. The guy who tried to help the stateless people his whole career. Like a refugee. Because he represents the U.N. If you represent everyone, in some ways you represent no one. You're un-owned. And what the American — the most powerful military in the history of mankind was able to muster for his rescue, believe it or not, was literally these heroic two American soldiers went into the shaft. Building was shaking. One of them had been at 9/11 and lost his buddies on September 11th, and yet went in and risked his life in order to save Sergio. But all they had was a woman's handbag — literally one of those basket handbags — and they tied it to a curtain rope from one of the offices at U.N. headquarters, and created a pulley system into this shaft in this quivering building in the interests of rescuing this person, the person we most need to turn to now, this shepherd, at a time when so many of us feel like we're lacking guidance. And this was the pulley system. This was what we were able to muster for Sergio. The good news, for what it's worth, is after Sergio and 21 others were killed that day in the attack on the U.N., the military created a search and rescue unit that had the cutting equipment, the shoring wood, the cranes, the things that you would have needed to do the rescue. But it was too late for Sergio. I want to wrap up, but I want to close with what I take to be the four lessons from Sergio's life on this question of how do we prevent evil from prevailing, which is how I would have framed the question. Here's this guy who got a 34-year head start thinking about the kinds of questions we as a country are grappling with, we as citizens are grappling with now. What do we take away? First, I think, is his relationship to, in fact, evil is something to learn from. He, over the course of his career, changed a great deal. He had a lot of flaws, but he was very adaptive. I think that was his greatest quality. He started as somebody who would denounce harmdoers, he would charge up to people who were violating international law, and he would say, you're violating, this is the U.N. Charter. Don't you see it's unacceptable what you're doing? And they would laugh at him because he didn't have the power of states, the power of any military or police. He just had the rules, he had the norms, and he tried to use them. And in Lebanon, Southern Lebanon in '82, he said to himself and to everybody else, I will never use the word "unacceptable" again. I will never use it. I will try to make it such, but I will never use that word again. But he lunged in the opposite direction. He started, as I mentioned, to get in the room with evil, to not denounce, and became almost obsequious when he won the nickname Serbio, for instance, and even when he negotiated with the Khmer Rouge would black-box what had occurred prior to entering the room. But by the end of his life, I think he had struck a balance that we as a country can learn from. Be in the room, don't be afraid of talking to your adversaries, but don't bracket what happened before you entered the room. Don't black-box history. Don't check your principles at the door. And I think that's something that we have to be in the room, whether it's Nixon going to China or Khrushchev and Kennedy or Reagan and Gorbachev. All the great progress in this country with relation to our adversaries has come by going into the room. And it doesn't have to be an act of weakness. You can actually do far more to build an international coalition against a harmdoer or a wrongdoer by being in the room and showing to the rest of the world that that person, that regime, is the problem and that you, the United States, are not the problem. Second take-away from Sergio's life, briefly. What I take away, and this in some ways is the most important, he espoused and exhibited a reverence for dignity that was really, really unusual. At a micro level, the individuals around him were visible. He saw them. At a macro level, he thought, you know, we talk about democracy promotion, but we do it in a way sometimes that's an affront to people's dignity. We put people on humanitarian aid and we boast about it because we've spent three billion. It's incredibly important, those people would no longer be alive if the United States, for instance, hadn't spent that money in Darfur, but it's not a way to live. If we think about dignity in our conduct as citizens and as individuals with relation to the people around us, and as a country, if we could inject a regard for dignity into our dealings with other countries, it would be something of a revolution. Third point, very briefly. He talked a lot about freedom from fear. And I recognize there is so much to be afraid of. There are so many genuine threats in the world. But what Sergio was talking about is, let's calibrate our relationship to the threat. Let's not hype the threat; let's actually see it clearly. We have reason to be afraid of melting ice caps. We have reason to be afraid that we haven't secured loose nuclear material in the former Soviet Union. Let's focus on what are the legitimate challenges and threats, but not lunge into bad decisions because of a panic, of a fear. In times of fear, for instance, one of the things Sergio used to say is, fear is a bad advisor. We lunge towards the extremes when we aren't operating and trying to, again, calibrate our relationship to the world around us. Fourth and final point: he somehow, because he was working in all the world's worst places and all lesser evils, had a humility, of course, and an awareness of the complexity of the world around him. I mean, such an acute awareness of how hard it was. How Sisyphean this task was of mending, and yet aware of that complexity, humbled by it, he wasn't paralyzed by it. And we as citizens, as we go through this experience of the kind of, the crisis of confidence, crisis of competence, crisis of legitimacy, I think there's a temptation to pull back from the world and say, ah, Katrina, Iraq — we don't know what we're doing. We can't afford to pull back from the world. It's a question of how to be in the world. And the lesson, I think, of the anti-genocide movement that I mentioned, that is a partial success but by no means has it achieved what it has set out to do — it'll be many decades, probably, before that happens — but is that if we want to see change, we have to become the change. We can't rely upon our institutions to do the work of necessarily talking to adversaries on their own without us creating a space for that to happen, for having respect for dignity, and for bringing that combination of humility and a sort of emboldened sense of responsibility to our dealings with the rest of the world. So will evil prevail? Is that the question? I think the short answer is: no, not unless we let it. Thank you. (Applause)

The story behind the Mars Rovers

Charles Elachi

{0: 'Charles Elachi'}

{0: ['planetary scientist']}

{0: "Charles Elachi is the director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he oversees space exploration programs such as the Mars Rovers."}

2008-05-07

2008-11-12

Serious Play 2008

en

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['Planets', 'design', 'exploration', 'physics', 'robots', 'science', 'space', 'technology', 'solar system', 'Mars', 'Best of the Web']

{178: 'This is Saturn', 2476: "Your kids might live on Mars. Here's how they'll survive", 2677: 'What time is it on Mars?', 804: 'Why we need to go back to Mars', 2235: 'How Mars might hold the secret to the origin of life', 59801: 'How a miniaturized atomic clock could revolutionize space exploration'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/charles_elachi_the_story_behind_the_mars_rovers/

At Serious Play 2008, Charles Elachi shares stories from NASA's legendary Jet Propulsion Lab -- including tales and video from the Mars Rover project.

I thought I'd start with telling you or showing you the people who started [Jet Propulsion Lab]. When they were a bunch of kids, they were kind of very imaginative, very adventurous, as they were trying at Caltech to mix chemicals and see which one blows up more. Well, I don't recommend that you try to do that now. Naturally, they blew up a shack, and Caltech, well, then, hey, you go to the Arroyo and really do all your tests in there. So, that's what we call our first five employees during the tea break, you know, in here. As I said, they were adventurous people. As a matter of fact, one of them, who was, kind of, part of a cult which was not too far from here on Orange Grove, and unfortunately he blew up himself because he kept mixing chemicals and trying to figure out which ones were the best chemicals. So, that gives you a kind of flavor of the kind of people we have there. We try to avoid blowing ourselves up. This one I thought I'd show you. Guess which one is a JPL employee in the heart of this crowd. I tried to come like him this morning, but as I walked out, then it was too cold, and I said, I'd better put my shirt back on. But more importantly, the reason I wanted to show this picture: look where the other people are looking, and look where he is looking. Wherever anybody else looks, look somewhere else, and go do something different, you know, and doing that. And that's kind of what has been the spirit of what we are doing. And I want to tell you a quote from Ralph Emerson that one of my colleagues, you know, put on my wall in my office, and it says, "Do not go where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path, and leave a trail." And that's my recommendation to all of you: look what everybody is doing, what they are doing; go do something completely different. Don't try to improve a little bit on what somebody else is doing, because that doesn't get you very far. In our early days we used to work a lot on rockets, but we also used to have a lot of parties, you know. As you can see, one of our parties, you know, a few years ago. But then a big difference happened about 50 years ago, after Sputnik was launched. We launched the first American satellite, and that's the one you see on the left in there. And here we made 180 degrees change: we changed from a rocket house to be an exploration house. And that was done over a period of a couple of years, and now we are the leading organization, you know, exploring space on all of your behalf. But even when we did that, we had to remind ourselves, sometimes there are setbacks. So you see, on the bottom, that rocket was supposed to go upward; somehow it ended going sideways. So that's what we call the misguided missile. But then also, just to celebrate that, we started an event at JPL for "Miss Guided Missile." So, we used to have a celebration every year and select — there used to be competition and parades and so on. It's not very appropriate to do it now. Some people tell me to do it; I think, well, that's not really proper, you know, these days. So, we do something a little bit more serious. And that's what you see in the last Rose Bowl, you know, when we entered one of the floats. That's more on the play side. And on the right side, that's the Rover just before we finished its testing to take it to the Cape to launch it. These are the Rovers up here that you have on Mars now. So that kind of tells you about, kind of, the fun things, you know, and the serious things that we try to do. But I said I'm going to show you a short clip of one of our employees to kind of give you an idea about some of the talent that we have. Video: Morgan Hendry: Beware of Safety is an instrumental rock band. It branches on more the experimental side. There's the improvisational side of jazz. There's the heavy-hitting sound of rock. Being able to treat sound as an instrument, and be able to dig for more abstract sounds and things to play live, mixing electronics and acoustics. The music's half of me, but the other half — I landed probably the best gig of all. I work for the Jet Propulsion Lab. I'm building the next Mars Rover. Some of the most brilliant engineers I know are the ones who have that sort of artistic quality about them. You've got to do what you want to do. And anyone who tells you you can't, you don't listen to them. Maybe they're right - I doubt it. Tell them where to put it, and then just do what you want to do. I'm Morgan Hendry. I am NASA. Charles Elachi: Now, moving from the play stuff to the serious stuff, always people ask, why do we explore? Why are we doing all of these missions and why are we exploring them? Well, the way I think about it is fairly simple. Somehow, 13 billion years ago there was a Big Bang, and you've heard a little bit about, you know, the origin of the universe. But somehow what strikes everybody's imagination — or lots of people's imagination — somehow from that original Big Bang we have this beautiful world that we live in today. You look outside: you have all that beauty that you see, all that life that you see around you, and here we have intelligent people like you and I who are having a conversation here. All that started from that Big Bang. So, the question is: How did that happen? How did that evolve? How did the universe form? How did the galaxies form? How did the planets form? Why is there a planet on which there is life which have evolved? Is that very common? Is there life on every planet that you can see around the stars? So we literally are all made out of stardust. We started from those stars; we are made of stardust. So, next time you are really depressed, look in the mirror and you can look and say, hi, I'm looking at a star here. You can skip the dust part. But literally, we are all made of stardust. So, what we are trying to do in our exploration is effectively write the book of how things have came about as they are today. And one of the first, or the easiest, places we can go and explore that is to go towards Mars. And the reason Mars takes particular attention: it's not very far from us. You know, it'll take us only six months to get there. Six to nine months at the right time of the year. It's a planet somewhat similar to Earth. It's a little bit smaller, but the land mass on Mars is about the same as the land mass on Earth, you know, if you don't take the oceans into account. It has polar caps. It has an atmosphere somewhat thinner than ours, so it has weather. So, it's very similar to some extent, and you can see some of the features on it, like the Grand Canyon on Mars, or what we call the Grand Canyon on Mars. It is like the Grand Canyon on Earth, except a hell of a lot larger. So it's about the size, you know, of the United States. It has volcanoes on it. And that's Mount Olympus on Mars, which is a kind of huge volcanic shield on that planet. And if you look at the height of it and you compare it to Mount Everest, you see, it'll give you an idea of how large that Mount Olympus, you know, is, relative to Mount Everest. So, it basically dwarfs, you know, Mount Everest here on Earth. So, that gives you an idea of the tectonic events or volcanic events which have happened on that planet. Recently from one of our satellites, this shows that it's Earth-like — we caught a landslide occurring as it was happening. So it is a dynamic planet, and activity is going on as we speak today. And these Rovers, people wonder now, what are they doing today, so I thought I would show you a little bit what they are doing. This is one very large crater. Geologists love craters, because craters are like digging a big hole in the ground without really working at it, and you can see what's below the surface. So, this is called Victoria Crater, which is about a few football fields in size. And if you look at the top left, you see a little teeny dark dot. This picture was taken from an orbiting satellite. If I zoom on it, you can see: that's the Rover on the surface. So, that was taken from orbit; we had the camera zoom on the surface, and we actually saw the Rover on the surface. And we actually used the combination of the satellite images and the Rover to actually conduct science, because we can observe large areas and then you can get those Rovers to move around and basically go to a certain location. So, specifically what we are doing now is that Rover is going down in that crater. As I told you, geologists love craters. And the reason is, many of you went to the Grand Canyon, and you see in the wall of the Grand Canyon, you see these layers. And what these layers — that's what the surface used to be a million years ago, 10 million years ago, 100 million years ago, and you get deposits on top of them. So if you can read the layers it's like reading your book, and you can learn the history of what happened in the past in that location. So what you are seeing here are the layers on the wall of that crater, and the Rover is going down now, measuring, you know, the properties and analyzing the rocks as it's going down, you know, that canyon. Now, it's kind of a little bit of a challenge driving down a slope like this. If you were there you wouldn't do it yourself. But we really made sure we tested those Rovers before we got them down — or that Rover — and made sure that it's all working well. Now, when I came last time, shortly after the landing — I think it was, like, a hundred days after the landing — I told you I was surprised that those Rovers are lasting even a hundred days. Well, here we are four years later, and they're still working. Now you say, Charles, you are really lying to us, and so on, but that's not true. We really believed they were going to last 90 days or 100 days, because they are solar powered, and Mars is a dusty planet, so we expected the dust would start accumulating on the surface, and after a while we wouldn't have enough power, you know, to keep them warm. Well, I always say it's important that you are smart, but every once in a while it's good to be lucky. And that's what we found out. It turned out that every once in a while there are dust devils which come by on Mars, as you are seeing here, and when the dust devil comes over the Rover, it just cleans it up. It is like a brand new car that you have, and that's literally why they have lasted so long. And now we designed them reasonably well, but that's exactly why they are lasting that long and still providing all the science data. Now, the two Rovers, each one of them is, kind of, getting old. You know, one of them, one of the wheels is stuck, is not working, one of the front wheels, so what we are doing, we are driving it backwards. And the other one has arthritis of the shoulder joint, you know, it's not working very well, so it's walking like this, and we can move the arm, you know, that way. But still they are producing a lot of scientific data. Now, during that whole period, a number of people got excited, you know, outside the science community about these Rovers, so I thought I'd show you a video just to give you a reflection about how these Rovers are being viewed by people other than the science community. So let me go on the next short video. By the way, this video is pretty accurate of how the landing took place, you know, about four years ago. Video: Okay, we have parachute aligned. Okay, deploy the airbags. Open. Camera. We have a picture right now. Yeah! CE: That's about what happened in the Houston operation room. It's exactly like this. Video: Now, if there is life, the Dutch will find it. What is he doing? What is that? CE: Not too bad. So anyway, let me continue on showing you a little bit about the beauty of that planet. As I said earlier, it looked very much like Earth, so you see sand dunes. It looks like I could have told you these are pictures taken from the Sahara Desert or somewhere, and you'd have believed me, but these are pictures taken from Mars. But one area which is particularly intriguing for us is the northern region, you know, of Mars, close to the North Pole, because we see ice caps, and we see the ice caps shrinking and expanding, so it's very much like you have in northern Canada. And we wanted to find out — and we see all kinds of glacial features on it. So, we wanted to find out, actually, what is that ice made of, and could that have embedded in it some organic, you know, material. So we have a spacecraft which is heading towards Mars, called Phoenix, and that spacecraft will land 17 days, seven hours and 20 seconds from now, so you can adjust your watch. So it's on May 25 around just before five o'clock our time here on the West Coast, actually we will be landing on another planet. And as you can see, this is a picture of the spacecraft put on Mars, but I thought that just in case you're going to miss that show, you know, in 17 days, I'll show you, kind of, a little bit of what's going to happen. Video: That's what we call the seven minutes of terror. So the plan is to dig in the soil and take samples that we put them in an oven and actually heat them and look what gases will come from it. So this was launched about nine months ago. We'll be coming in at 12,000 miles per hour, and in seven minutes we have to stop and touch the surface very softly so we don't break that lander. Ben Cichy: Phoenix is the first Mars Scout mission. It's the first mission that's going to try to land near the North Pole of Mars, and it's the first mission that's actually going to try and reach out and touch water on the surface of another planet. Lynn Craig: Where there tends to be water, at least on Earth, there tends to be life, and so it's potentially a place where life could have existed on the planet in the past. Erik Bailey: The main purpose of EDL is to take a spacecraft that is traveling at 12,500 miles an hour and bring it to a screeching halt in a soft way in a very short amount of time. BC: We enter the Martian atmosphere. We're 70 miles above the surface of Mars. And our lander is safely tucked inside what we call an aeroshell. EB: Looks kind of like an ice cream cone, more or less. BC: And on the front of it is this heat shield, this saucer-looking thing that has about a half-inch of essentially what's cork on the front of it, which is our heat shield. Now, this is really special cork, and this cork is what's going to protect us from the violent atmospheric entry that we're about to experience. Rob Grover: Friction really starts to build up on the spacecraft, and we use the friction when it's flying through the atmosphere to our advantage to slow us down. BC: From this point, we're going to decelerate from 12,500 miles an hour down to 900 miles an hour. EB: The outside can get almost as hot as the surface of the Sun. RG: The temperature of the heat shield can reach 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit. EB: The inside doesn't get very hot. It probably gets about room temperature. Richard Kornfeld: There is this window of opportunity within which we can deploy the parachute. EB: If you fire the 'chute too early, the parachute itself could fail. The fabric and the stitching could just pull apart. And that would be bad. BC: In the first 15 seconds after we deploy the parachute, we'll decelerate from 900 miles an hour to a relatively slow 250 miles an hour. We no longer need the heat shield to protect us from the force of atmospheric entry, so we jettison the heat shield, exposing for the first time our lander to the atmosphere of Mars. LC: After the heat shield has been jettisoned and the legs are deployed, the next step is to have the radar system begin to detect how far Phoenix really is from the ground. BC: We've lost 99 percent of our entry velocity. So, we're 99 percent of the way to where we want to be. But that last one percent, as it always seems to be, is the tricky part. EB: Now the spacecraft actually has to decide when it's going to get rid of its parachute. BC: We separate from the lander going 125 miles an hour at roughly a kilometer above the surface of Mars: 3,200 feet. That's like taking two Empire State Buildings and stacking them on top of one another. EB: That's when we separate from the back shell, and we're now in free-fall. It's a very scary moment; a lot has to happen in a very short amount of time. LC: So it's in a free-fall, but it's also trying to use all of its actuators to make sure that it's in the right position to land. EB: And then it has to light up its engines, right itself, and then slowly slow itself down and touch down on the ground safely. BC: Earth and Mars are so far apart that it takes over ten minutes for a signal from Mars to get to Earth. And EDL itself is all over in a matter of seven minutes. So by the time you even hear from the lander that EDL has started it'll already be over. EB: We have to build large amounts of autonomy into the spacecraft so that it can land itself safely. BC: EDL is this immense, technically challenging problem. It's about getting a spacecraft that's hurtling through deep space and using all this bag of tricks to somehow figure out how to get it down to the surface of Mars at zero miles an hour. It's this immensely exciting and challenging problem. CE: Hopefully it all will happen the way you saw it in here. So it will be a very tense moment, you know, as we are watching that spacecraft landing on another planet. So now let me talk about the next things that we are doing. So we are in the process, as we speak, of actually designing the next Rover that we are going to be sending to Mars. So I thought I would go a little bit and tell you, kind of, the steps we go through. It's very similar to what you do when you design your product. As you saw a little bit earlier, when we were doing the Phoenix one, we have to take into account the heat that we are going to be facing. So we have to study all kinds of different materials, the shape that we want to do. In general we don't try to please the customer here. What we want to do is to make sure we have an effective, you know, an efficient kind of machine. First we start by we want to have our employees to be as imaginative as they can. And we really love being close to the art center, because we have, as a matter of fact, one of the alumni from the art center, Eric Nyquist, had put a series of displays, far-out displays, you know, in our what we call mission design or spacecraft design room, just to get people to think wildly about things. We have a bunch of Legos. So, as I said, this is a playground for adults, where they sit down and try to play with different shapes and different designs. Then we get a little bit more serious, so we have what we call our CAD/CAMs and all the engineers who are involved, or scientists who are involved, who know about thermal properties, know about design, know about atmospheric interaction, parachutes, all of these things, which they work in a team effort and actually design a spacecraft in a computer to some extent, so to see, does that meet the requirement that we need. On the right, also, we have to take into account the environment of the planet where we are going. If you are going to Jupiter, you have a very high-radiation, you know, environment. It's about the same radiation environment close by Jupiter as inside a nuclear reactor. So just imagine: you take your P.C. and throw it into a nuclear reactor and it still has to work. So these are kind of some of the little challenges, you know, that we have to face. If we are doing entry, we have to do tests of parachutes. You saw in the video a parachute breaking. That would be a bad day, you know, if that happened, so we have to test, because we are deploying this parachute at supersonic speeds. We are coming at extremely high speeds, and we are deploying them to slow us down. So we have to do all kinds of tests. To give you an idea of the size, you know, of that parachute relative to the people standing there. Next step, we go and actually build some kind of test models and actually test them, you know, in the lab at JPL, in what we call our Mars Yard. We kick them, we hit them, we drop them, just to make sure we understand how, where would they break. And then we back off, you know, from that point. And then we actually do the actual building and the flight. And this next Rover that we're flying is about the size of a car. That big shield that you see outside, that's a heat shield which is going to protect it. And that will be basically built over the next year, and it will be launched June a year from now. Now, in that case, because it was a very big Rover, we couldn't use airbags. And I know many of you, kind of, last time afterwards said well, that was a cool thing to have — those airbags. Unfortunately this Rover is, like, ten times the size of the, you know, mass-wise, of the other Rover, or three times the mass. So we can't use airbags. So we have to come up with another ingenious idea of how do we land it. And we didn't want to take it propulsively all the way to the surface because we didn't want to contaminate the surface; we wanted the Rover to immediately land on its legs. So we came up with this ingenious idea, which is used here on Earth for helicopters. Actually, the lander will come down to about 100 feet and hover above that surface for 100 feet, and then we have a sky crane which will take that Rover and land it down on the surface. Hopefully it all will work, you know, it will work that way. And that Rover will be more kind of like a chemist. What we are going to be doing with that Rover as it drives around, it's going to go and analyze the chemical composition of rocks. So it will have an arm which will take samples, put them in an oven, crush and analyze them. But also, if there is something that we cannot reach because it is too high on a cliff, we have a little laser system which will actually zap the rock, evaporate some of it, and actually analyze what's coming from that rock. So it's a little bit like "Star Wars," you know, but it's real. It's real stuff. And also to help you, to help the community so you can do ads on that Rover, we are going to train that Rover to actually in addition to do this, to actually serve cocktails, you know, also on Mars. So that's kind of giving you an idea of the kind of, you know, fun things we are doing on Mars. I thought I'd go to "The Lord of the Rings" now and show you some of the things we have there. Now, "The Lord of the Rings" has two things played through it. One, it's a very attractive planet — it just has the beauty of the rings and so on. But for scientists, also the rings have a special meaning, because we believe they represent, on a small scale, how the Solar System actually formed. Some of the scientists believe that the way the Solar System formed, that the Sun when it collapsed and actually created the Sun, a lot of the dust around it created rings and then the particles in those rings accumulated together, and they formed bigger rocks, and then that's how the planets, you know, were formed. So, the idea is, by watching Saturn we're actually watching our solar system in real time being formed on a smaller scale, so it's like a test bed for it. So, let me show you a little bit on what that Saturnian system looks like. First, I'm going to fly you over the rings. By the way, all of this is real stuff. This is not animation or anything like this. This is actually taken from the satellite that we have in orbit around Saturn, the Cassini. And you see the amount of detail that is in those rings, which are the particles. Some of them are agglomerating together to form larger particles. So that's why you have these gaps, is because a small satellite, you know, is being formed in that location. Now, you think that those rings are very large objects. Yes, they are very large in one dimension; in the other dimension they are paper thin. Very, very thin. What you are seeing here is the shadow of the ring on Saturn itself. And that's one of the satellites which was actually formed on that one. So, think about it as a paper-thin, huge area of many hundreds of thousands of miles, which is rotating. And we have a wide variety of kind of satellites which will form, each one looking very different and very odd, and that keeps scientists busy for tens of years trying to explain this, and telling NASA we need more money so we can explain what these things look like, or why they formed that way. Well, there were two satellites which were particularly interesting. One of them is called Enceladus. It's a satellite which was all made of ice, and we measured it from orbit. Made of ice. But there was something bizarre about it. If you look at these stripes in here, what we call tiger stripes, when we flew over them, all of a sudden we saw an increase in the temperature, which said that those stripes are warmer than the rest of the planet. So as we flew by away from it, we looked back. And guess what? We saw geysers coming out. So this is a Yellowstone, you know, of Saturn. We are seeing geysers of ice which are coming out of that planet, which indicate that most likely there is an ocean, you know, below the surface. And somehow, through some dynamic effect, we're having these geysers which are being, you know, emitted from it. And the reason I showed the little arrow there, I think that should say 30 miles, we decided a few months ago to actually fly the spacecraft through the plume of that geyser so we can actually measure the material that it is made of. That was [unclear] also — you know, because we were worried about the risk of it, but it worked pretty well. We flew at the top of it, and we found that there is a fair amount of organic material which is being emitted in combination with the ice. And over the next few years, as we keep orbiting, you know, Saturn, we are planning to get closer and closer down to the surface and make more accurate measurements. Now, another satellite also attracted a lot of attention, and that's Titan. And the reason Titan is particularly interesting, it's a satellite bigger than our moon, and it has an atmosphere. And that atmosphere is very — as dense as our own atmosphere. So if you were on Titan, you would feel the same pressure that you feel in here. Except it's a lot colder, and that atmosphere is heavily made of methane. Now, methane gets people all excited, because it's organic material, so immediately people start thinking, could life have evolved in that location, when you have a lot of organic material. So people believe now that Titan is most likely what we call a pre-biotic planet, because it's so cold organic material did not get to the stage of becoming biological material, and therefore life could have evolved on it. So it could be Earth, frozen three billion years ago before life actually started on it. So that's getting a lot of interest, and to show you some example of what we did in there, we actually dropped a probe, which was developed by our colleagues in Europe, we dropped a probe as we were orbiting Saturn. We dropped a probe in the atmosphere of Titan. And this is a picture of an area as we were coming down. Just looked like the coast of California for me. You see the rivers which are coming along the coast, and you see that white area which looks like Catalina Island, and that looks like an ocean. And then with an instrument we have on board, a radar instrument, we found there are lakes like the Great Lakes in here, so it looks very much like Earth. It looks like there are rivers on it, there are oceans or lakes, we know there are clouds. We think it's raining also on it. So it's very much like the cycle on Earth except because it's so cold, it could not be water, you know, because water would have frozen. What it turned out, that all that we are seeing, all this liquid, [is made of] hydrocarbon and ethane and methane, similar to what you put in your car. So here we have a cycle of a planet which is like our Earth, but is all made of ethane and methane and organic material. So if you were on Mars — sorry, on Titan, you don't have to worry about four-dollar gasoline. You just drive to the nearest lake, stick your hose in it, and you've got your car filled up. On the other hand, if you light a match the whole planet will blow up. So in closing, I said I want to close by a couple of pictures. And just to kind of put us in perspective, this is a picture of Saturn taken with a spacecraft from behind Saturn, looking towards the Sun. The Sun is behind Saturn, so we see what we call "forward scattering," so it highlights all the rings. And I'm going to zoom. There is a — I'm not sure you can see it very well, but on the top left, around 10 o'clock, there is a little teeny dot, and that's Earth. You barely can see ourselves. So what I did, I thought I'd zoom on it. So as you zoom in, you know, you can see Earth, you know, just in the middle here. So we zoomed all the way on the art center. So thank you very much.

Tidying up art

Ursus Wehrli

{0: 'Ursus Wehrli'}

{0: ['comedian']}

{0: 'Comedian and cabaret artist Ursus Wehrli is on a crusade to tidy up art.'}

2006-02-02

2008-11-13

TED2006

en

['ar', 'az', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fil', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'lt', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'th', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['art', 'design', 'entertainment', 'humor', 'performance', 'simplicity', 'comedy']

{87: 'Nerdcore comedy', 279: 'Turning powerful stats into art', 182: 'The illustrated woman', 455: 'Using design to make ideas new', 1747: 'Embrace the shake', 1613: '4 lessons in creativity'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/ursus_wehrli_tidying_up_art/

Ursus Wehrli shares his vision for a cleaner, more organized, tidier form of art -- by deconstructing the paintings of modern masters into their component pieces, sorted by color and size.

My name is Ursus Wehrli, and I would like to talk to you this morning about my project, Tidying Up Art. First of all — any questions so far? First of all, I have to say I'm not from around here. I'm from a completely different cultural area, maybe you noticed? I mean, I'm wearing a tie, first. And then secondly, I'm a little bit nervous because I'm speaking in a foreign language, and I want to apologize in advance, for any mistakes I might make. Because I'm from Switzerland, and I just don't hope you think this is Swiss German I'm speaking now here. This is just what it sounds like if we Swiss try to speak American. But don't worry — I don't have trouble with English, as such. I mean, it's not my problem, it's your language after all. (Laughter) I am fine. After this presentation here at TED, I can simply go back to Switzerland, and you have to go on talking like this all the time. (Laughter) So I've been asked by the organizers to read from my book. It's called "Tidying Up Art" and it's, as you can see, it's more or less a picture book. So the reading would be over very quickly. But since I'm here at TED, I decided to hold my talk here in a more modern way, in the spirit of TED here, and I managed to do some slides here for you. I'd like to show them around so we can just, you know — (Laughter) Actually, I managed to prepare for you some enlarged pictures — even better. So Tidying Up Art, I mean, I have to say, that's a relatively new term. You won't be familiar with it. I mean, it's a hobby of mine that I've been indulging in for the last few years, and it all started out with this picture of the American artist, Donald Baechler I had hanging at home. I had to look at it every day and after a while I just couldn't stand the mess anymore this guy was looking at all day long. Yeah, I kind of felt sorry for him. And it seemed to me even he felt really bad facing these unorganized red squares day after day. So I decided to give him a little support, and brought some order into neatly stacking the blocks on top of each other. (Laughter) Yeah. And I think he looks now less miserable. And it was great. With this experience, I started to look more closely at modern art. Then I realized how, you know, the world of modern art is particularly topsy-turvy. And I can show here a very good example. It's actually a simple one, but it's a good one to start with. It's a picture by Paul Klee. And we can see here very clearly, it's a confusion of color. (Laughter) Yeah. The artist doesn't really seem to know where to put the different colors. The various pictures here of the various elements of the picture — the whole thing is unstructured. We don't know, maybe Mr. Klee was probably in a hurry, I mean — (Laughter) — maybe he had to catch a plane, or something. We can see here he started out with orange, and then he already ran out of orange, and here we can see he decided to take a break for a square. And I would like to show you here my tidied up version of this picture. (Laughter) We can see now what was barely recognizable in the original: 17 red and orange squares are juxtaposed with just two green squares. Yeah, that's great. So I mean, that's just tidying up for beginners. I would like to show you here a picture which is a bit more advanced. (Laughter) What can you say? What a mess. I mean, you see, everything seems to have been scattered aimlessly around the space. If my room back home had looked like this, my mother would have grounded me for three days. So I'd like to — I wanted to reintroduce some structure into that picture. And that's really advanced tidying up. (Applause) Yeah, you're right. Sometimes people clap at this point, but that's actually more in Switzerland. (Laughter) We Swiss are famous for chocolate and cheese. Our trains run on time. We are only happy when things are in order. But to go on, here is a very good example to see. This is a picture by Joan Miro. And yeah, we can see the artist has drawn a few lines and shapes and dropped them any old way onto a yellow background. And yeah, it's the sort of thing you produce when you're doodling on the phone. (Laughter) And this is my — (Laughter) — you can see now the whole thing takes up far less space. It's more economical and also more efficient. With this method Mr. Miro could have saved canvas for another picture. But I can see in your faces that you're still a little bit skeptical. So that you can just appreciate how serious I am about all this, I brought along the patents, the specifications for some of these works, because I've had my working methods patented at the Eidgenössische Amt für Geistiges Eigentum in Bern, Switzerland. (Laughter) I'll just quote from the specification. "Laut den Kunstprüfer Dr. Albrecht —" It's not finished yet. "Laut den Kunstprüfer Dr. Albrecht Götz von Ohlenhusen wird die Verfahrensweise rechtlich geschützt welche die Kunst durch spezifisch aufgeräumte Regelmässigkeiten des allgemeinen Formenschatzes neue Wirkungen zu erzielen möglich wird." Ja, well I could have translated that, but you would have been none the wiser. I'm not sure myself what it means but it sounds good anyway. I just realized it's important how one introduces new ideas to people, that's why these patents are sometimes necessary. I would like to do a short test with you. Everyone is sitting in quite an orderly fashion here this morning. So I would like to ask you all to raise your right hand. Yeah. The right hand is the one we write with, apart from the left-handers. And now, I'll count to three. I mean, it still looks very orderly to me. Now, I'll count to three, and on the count of three I'd like you all to shake hands with the person behind you. OK? One, two, three. (Laughter) You can see now, that's a good example: even behaving in an orderly, systematic way can sometimes lead to complete chaos. So we can also see that very clearly in this next painting. This is a painting by the artist, Niki de Saint Phalle. And I mean, in the original it's completely unclear to see what this tangle of colors and shapes is supposed to depict. But in the tidied up version, it's plain to see that it's a sunburnt woman playing volleyball. (Laughter) Yeah, it's a — this one here, that's much better. That's a picture by Keith Haring. (Laughter) I think it doesn't matter. So, I mean, this picture has not even got a proper title. It's called "Untitled" and I think that's appropriate. So, in the tidied-up version we have a sort of Keith Haring spare parts shop. (Laughter) This is Keith Haring looked at statistically. One can see here quite clearly, you can see we have 25 pale green elements, of which one is in the form of a circle. Or here, for example, we have 27 pink squares with only one pink curve. I mean, that's interesting. One could extend this sort of statistical analysis to cover all Mr. Haring's various works, in order to establish in which period the artist favored pale green circles or pink squares. And the artist himself could also benefit from this sort of listing procedure by using it to estimate how many pots of paint he's likely to need in the future. (Laughter) One can obviously also make combinations. For example, with the Keith Haring circles and Kandinsky's dots. You can add them to all the squares of Paul Klee. In the end, one has a list with which one then can arrange. Then you categorize it, then you file it, put that file in a filing cabinet, put it in your office and you can make a living doing it. (Laughter) Yeah, from my own experience. So I'm — (Laughter) Actually, I mean, here we have some artists that are a bit more structured. It's not too bad. This is Jasper Johns. We can see here he was practicing with his ruler. (Laughter) But I think it could still benefit from more discipline. And I think the whole thing adds up much better if you do it like this. (Laughter) And here, that's one of my favorites. Tidying up Rene Magritte — this is really fun. You know, there is a — (Laughter) I'm always being asked what inspired me to embark on all this. It goes back to a time when I was very often staying in hotels. So once I had the opportunity to stay in a ritzy, five-star hotel. And you know, there you had this little sign — I put this little sign outside the door every morning that read, "Please tidy room." I don't know if you have them over here. So actually, my room there hasn't been tidied once daily, but three times a day. So after a while I decided to have a little fun, and before leaving the room each day I'd scatter a few things around the space. Like books, clothes, toothbrush, etc. And it was great. By the time I returned everything had always been neatly returned to its place. But then one morning, I hang the same little sign onto that picture by Vincent van Gogh. (Laughter) And you have to say this room hadn't been tidied up since 1888. And when I returned it looked like this. (Laughter) Yeah, at least it is now possible to do some vacuuming. (Laughter) OK, I mean, I can see there are always people that like reacting that one or another picture hasn't been properly tidied up. So we can make a short test with you. This is a picture by Rene Magritte, and I'd like you all to inwardly — like in your head, that is — to tidy that up. So it's possible that some of you would make it like this. (Laughter) Yeah? I would actually prefer to do it more this way. Some people would make apple pie out of it. But it's a very good example to see that the whole work was more of a handicraft endeavor that involved the very time-consuming job of cutting out the various elements and sticking them back in new arrangements. And it's not done, as many people imagine, with the computer, otherwise it would look like this. (Laughter) So now I've been able to tidy up pictures that I've wanted to tidy up for a long time. Here is a very good example. Take Jackson Pollock, for example. It's — oh, no, it's — that's a really hard one. But after a while, I just decided here to go all the way and put the paint back into the cans. (Applause) Or you could go into three-dimensional art. Here we have the fur cup by Meret Oppenheim. Here I just brought it back to its original state. (Laughter) But yeah, and it's great, you can even go, you know — Or we have this pointillist movement for those of you who are into art. The pointillist movement is that kind of paintings where everything is broken down into dots and pixels. And then I — this sort of thing is ideal for tidying up. (Laughter) So I once applied myself to the work of the inventor of that method, Georges Seurat, and I collected together all his dots. And now they're all in here. (Laughter) You can count them afterwards, if you like. You see, that's the wonderful thing about the tidy up art idea: it's new. So there is no existing tradition in it. There is no textbooks, I mean, not yet, anyway. I mean, it's "the future we will create." (Laughter) But to round things up I would like to show you just one more. This is the village square by Pieter Bruegel. That's how it looks like when you send everyone home. (Laughter) Yeah, maybe you're asking yourselves where old Bruegel's people went? Of course, they're not gone. They're all here. (Laughter) I just piled them up. (Laughter) So I'm — yeah, actually I'm kind of finished at that moment. And for those who want to see more, I've got my book downstairs in the bookshop. And I'm happy to sign it for you with any name of any artist. (Laughter) But before leaving I would like to show you, I'm working right now on another — in a related field with my tidying up art method. I'm working in a related field. And I started to bring some order into some flags. Here — that's just my new proposal here for the Union Jack. (Laughter) And then maybe before I leave you ... yeah, I think, after you have seen that I have to leave anyway. (Laughter) Yeah, that was a hard one. I couldn't find a way to tidy that up properly, so I just decided to make it a little bit more simpler. (Laughter) Thank you very much. (Applause)

The Long Now

Stewart Brand

{0: 'Stewart Brand'}

{0: ['environmentalist', 'futurist']}

{0: "Since the counterculture '60s, Stewart Brand has been creating our internet-worked world. Now, with biotech accelerating four times faster than digital technology, Stewart Brand has a bold new plan ..."}

2004-02-02

2008-11-17

TED2004

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['architecture', 'art', 'design', 'future', 'technology']

{123: 'What squatter cities can teach us', 19: 'How technology evolves', 38: 'The accelerating power of technology', 948: "The world's oldest living things", 219: 'Building uniqueness', 791: 'Medical miracle on Everest'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/stewart_brand_the_long_now/

Stewart Brand works on the Clock of the Long Now, a timepiece that counts down the next 10,000 years. It's a beautiful project that asks us to think about the far, far future. Here, he discusses a tricky side problem with the Clock: Where can we put it?

Welcome to 10,000 feet. Let me explain why we are here and why some of you have a pine cone close to you. Once upon a time, I did a book called "How Buildings Learn." Today's event you might call "How Mountains Teach." A little background: For 10 years I've been trying to figure out how to hack civilization so that we can get long-term thinking to be automatic and common instead of difficult and rare — or in some cases, non-existent. It would be helpful if humanity got into the habit of thinking of the now not just as next week or next quarter, but you know, next 10,000 years and the last 10,000 years — basically civilization's story so far. So we have the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco. It's an incubator for about a dozen projects, all having to do with continuity over the long term. Our core project is a rather ambitious folly — I suppose, a mythic undertaking: to build a 10,000-year clock that can really keep good time for that long a period. And the design problems of a project like that are just absolutely delicious. Go to the clock. And what we have here is something many of you saw here three years ago. It's the first working prototype of the clock. It's about nine feet high. Designed by Danny Hillis and Alexander Rose. It's presently in London, and is ticking away very deliberately at the science museum there. So the design problem for today is going to be, how do you house an eventual monumental clock like this so it can really tick, save time beautifully for 100 centuries? Well, this was the first solution. Alexander Rose came up with this idea of a spiraloid tower with continuous sloping ramps. And it looked like a way to go, until you start thinking about, what does deep time do to a building? Well, this is what deep time does to a building. This is the Parthenon. It's only 2,450 years old, and look what happened to it. Here's a beautiful project. They really knew it'd last forever, because they'd build it out of absolutely huge stones. And now it's a pathetic ruin and no one even knows what it was used for. That's what happens to buildings. They're vulnerable. Even the most durable and intactable buildings, like the pyramids of Giza, are in bad shape when you look up close. They've been looted inside and out. And they're built to protect things but they don't protect things. So we got to thinking, if you can't put things safely in a building, where can you safely put them? We thought, OK, underground. How about underground with a view? Underground in a place that's really solid. So the obvious answer was, we need a mountain. You don't want just any mountain. You need absolutely the right mountain if you're going to have a clock for 10,000 years. So here's an image of the long view of the search problem. And we got to thinking for various reasons it ought to be a desert mountain, so we got looking in the dry areas of the Southwest. We looked at mesas in New Mexico. We were looking at dead volcanoes in Arizona. Then Roger Kennedy, who was the director of the National Parks Service, led us to Eastern Nevada, to America's newest and oldest national park, which is called Great Basin National Park. It's right on the eastern border of Nevada. It's the highest range in the state — over 13,000 feet. And you'll notice that on the left, on the left, on the west, it's very steep, and on the right it's gentle. This place is remote. It's over 200 miles from any major city. It's nowhere near any Interstate or railroad. And it's — the only thing that goes by is what's called America's loneliest highway, U.S. 50. Now, inside the yellow line here, on the right is — that's all national park. Inside the green line is national forest. And then over to the left is Bureau of Land Management land and some private land. Now, as it happened, that two-mile-long strip right in the middle, this vertical, was available because it was private land. And thanks to Jay Walker who was here and Mitch Kapor who was here, who started the process, Long Now was able to get that two-mile-long strip of land. And now let's look at the grand truth of what's there. We're in Pole Canyon, looking west up the western escarpment of Mount Washington, which is 11,600 feet on top. Those white cliffs are a dense Cambrian limestone. That's a 2,000-foot thick formation, and it might be a beautiful place to hide a clock. It would be a pilgrimage to get to it; it would be a serious hike to get up to where the clock is. So last June, the Long Now board, some staff and some donors and advisors, made a two-week expedition to the mountain to explore it and investigate, one, if it's the right mountain, and two, if it's the right mountain, how it might actually work for us. Now Danny Hillis sort of framed the problem. He has a theory of how the overall clock experience should work. It's what he calls the seven stages of a mythic adventure. It starts with the image. The image is a picture you have in your mind of the goal at the end of the journey. In this case it might well be an image of the clock. Then there's the point of embarkation, that is, the point of transition from ordinary life to being a pilgrim on a quest. Then — this is a nice image of it, there's the labyrinth. The labyrinth is a concept, it's like a twilight zone, it's a place where it's difficult, where you get disoriented, maybe you get scared — but you have to go through it if you're going to get to some kind of deep reintegration. Then there should always be in sight the draw — a kind of a beacon that draws you on through the labyrinth to finish the process of getting there. Now Brian Eno, who's been in the thick of the Long Now process, spent two years making a C.D. called "January 7003," and it's "Bell Studies for the Clock of the Long Now." Based on — parts of it are based on an algorithm that Danny Hillis developed, so that a peal of 10 bells makes a different peal every day for 10,000 years. The Hillis algorithm. 10 factorial gives you that number. And in fact, pretty soon we'll hear the sound. January 7003. There it is. OK, back to Danny's list. Number five of the seven is the payoff. This is it. The climax. The goal. The main thing that you're trying to get to. And then Danny says a really great journey will have a secret payoff. Something you didn't expect that caps what you did expect. Then there's the return. You've got to have a gradual return to the ordinary world, so you have time to assimilate what you've learned. And then, how about a memento? Number seven. At the end of it there's something physical, a kind of reward that you take away. It might be a piece of a core drill of the mountain. Something that's just yours. How do you study a mountain for the kinds of things we're talking about? This is not a normal building project. What do you look for? What are the elements that will most affect your ideas and decisions? Start with borders. If you look on the left side of the cliffs here, that's national park. That's sacrosanct — you can't do anything with that. To the right of it is national forest. There's possibilities. The borders are important. Other elements were mines, weather, approaches and elevation. And especially trees. Look at those things up on top there. It turns out that Mount Washington is covered with bristlecone pines. They're the world's oldest living thing. People think they're just the size of shrubs, but that's not actually true. There are trees on that mountain that are 5,000 years old and still living. The wood is so solid it's like stone, and it lasts for a long time. So when you do tree ring studies of trunks that are on the mountain, some of them go back 10,000 years. The stone itself is absolutely beautiful, sculpted by millennia of very tough winters up there. We had tree ring analysts from the University of Arizona join us on the expedition. Now, if you guys have a pine cone handy, now's a good time to put it in your hand and feel it, especially on the end. That's interesting. You'll find out why it's called a bristlecone pine. A little sensory experience. Here's Danny Hillis in the midst of a bristlecone pine forest on Long Now land. I should say that the age of bristlecones was discovered, led by a theory. Edmund Schulman in the 1950s had been studying trees under great stress at Timberline, and came to the realization that he put in an article in Science magazine called, "Longevity under Adversity in Conifers." And then, based on that principle, he started looking around at the various trees at Timberline, and realized that the bristlecone pines — he found some in the White Mountains that were over 4,000 years old. Longevity under adversity is a pretty interesting design principle in its own right. OK, onto the mines. The first asking price for the property when we looked at it in 1998 was one billion dollars for 180 acres and a couple of mines. Because the owner said, "There's one billion dollars of beryllium in that mountain." And we said, "Wow, that's great. Listen, we'll counter. How about zero? (Laughter) And we're a non-profit foundation, you can give us the property and take a hell of a tax deduction. (Laughter) All you have to do is prove to the government it's worth a billion dollars." Well, a few years went by and there was some kind of back and forth, and by and by, thanks to Mitch and Jay, we were able to buy the whole property for 140,000 dollars. This is one of the mines. It doesn't have any beryllium in it. It's called the Pole Adit. And it does have tungsten, a little bit of tungsten, left over, that's the kind of mine it was. But it goes a mile-and-a-half in a straight line, due east into the range, into very interesting territory — except that, as you'll see when we go inside in a minute, we were hoping for limestone but in there is just shale. And shale is not quite completely competent rock. Competent rock is rock that will hold itself up without any shoring. The shale would like some shoring, and so parts of it are caved in in there. That's Ben Roberts from — he's the bat specialist from the National Park. But there are many wonders back in there, like this weird fungus on some of the collapsed timbers. OK, here's another mine that's up on top of the property, and it dates back to 1870. That's what the property was originally built around — it was a set of mining claims. It was a very productive silver mine. In fact, it was the highest-operating mine in Nevada, and it ran year round. You can imagine what it was like in the winter at 10,000 feet. You may recognize a couple of the miners there. There's Jeff Bezos on the right and Paul Saville on the left looking for galena, which is the lead-silver thing. They didn't find any. They both kept their day jobs. Here's the last mine. It's called the Bonanza Adit. It's down in a canyon. And Alexander Rose on the left there worked with a bunch of people from the National Park to survey the whole mine. It's a mile deep. And they also found four species of bats in there. Now, almost all those mines, by the way, meet underneath the mountain. They don't quite, but it's something to think about. They don't quite meet. Let's go to weather. Mountains specialize in interesting weather. Way more interesting than Monterey even today. And so one Tuesday morning last June, there we were. Woke up in the morning — the mountain was covered with snow. That was a great time to go up and visit our weather station which again, thanks to Mitch Kapor, we're building up there. And it's a pretty interesting scene. This is, on the left there, the joyful lady is Pat Irwin, who's the regional head of the National Forest Service, and they gave us the temporary use permit to be there. We want a temporary use permit for the clock, eventually — 10,000-year temporary use permit. (Laughter) The weather station's pretty interesting. Kurt Bollacker and Alexander Rose designed a radically wireless station. It runs on solar, and it sends a signal with that antenna and bounces it off of micrometeorite trails in the atmosphere to a place in Bozeman, Montana, where the data is taken down and then sent through landlines to San Francisco, where we put the data in real time up on our website. And there you see a week of weather at 9,400 feet on Mount Washington. Let's go to approaches. As it happens, there are no trails anywhere on Mount Washington, just a few old mining roads like this, so you have to bushwhack everywhere. But there's no bears, and there's no poison oak, and there's basically no people because this place has been empty for a long time. You can hike for days and not encounter anybody. Well, here's a potential approach. You need to come up the Lincoln Canyon. It's this beautiful world all of its own, surrounded by cliffs, and it's an easy hike to stroll up the canyon bottom, until you get to this barrier, and it actually presents a problem. So you can scratch Lincoln Canyon as an approach. Another possible approach is right up the western front of the mountain. You can see why we sometimes call it Long Mountain. And from where you're standing at 6,000 feet in the valley, it's an easy hike up to the mature pinyon and juniper forest through that knoll at the front at 7,600 feet. And you can carry right on up through meadows and steepening forest to the high base of the cliffs at 10,500 feet, where there's a bit of a problem. Now, Jeff Bezos advised us when he left at the end of the expedition, "Make the clock inaccessible. The harder it is to get to, the more people will value it." And check — those are 600-foot vertical walls there. So Alexander Rose wanted to explore this route, and he started over here on the left from his pickup truck at 8,900 feet and headed up the mountain. Now, as you gain elevation your IQ goes down — (Laughter) but your emotional affect goes up, which is great for having a mythic experience, whether you want to or not. In fact, Danny Hillis can estimate altitude by how much math he can't do in his head. (Laughter) Now, I happened to be on the radio with Alexander when he got to this point at the base of the cliffs, and he said, quote, "There's a hidden notch. I think I can get up a ways." Now, he's a rock climber, but you know, he's our executive director. I don't want him killed. I know he's going to love cliffs. I'm saying, "Be careful, be careful, be careful." Then he starts going up, and the next thing I hear is, "I'm half-way up. It's like climbing stairs. I'm going up 60 degrees. It's a secret passage. It's like something from Tolkien." And I'm going, "Careful, careful. Please be careful." And then, of course, the next thing I hear is, "I've made it to the top. You can see all of creation from up here." And he dashed across the top of the mountains. In fact, there he is. That's Alexander Rose. First ascent of the western face to Mount Washington, and a solo ascent at that. This discovery changed everything about our sense of these cliffs and what to do with them. We realized that we had to name this thing that Alexander discovered. How about Zander's Crevice? No. (Laughter) So we finally decided on Alexander's Siq. Zander's Siq is named after — some of you have been to Petra, there's this wonderful slot canyon that leads into Petra called the Siq, and so this is the Siq. And it really is hidden. I can't find it in this image, and I'm not sure you can. Only when you get fresh snow can you see just along the rim there, and that brings it out. Now, Danny and I were up at this same area one day, and Danny looked over to the right and noticed something halfway up the cliffs, which is a kind of a porch or a cliff shelf with bristlecones on it, and supposed that people going up to the clock inside the mountain could come out onto that shelf and look down at the view. And the people toiling up the mountain could see them, these tiny little people up there, incredibly halfway up the cliff. How did they get there? Do I have to do that? And so that maybe becomes part of the draw and part of the labyrinth. You can get another angle on Danny's porch by going around to the south and looking north at the whole formation there. And you need to know that Danny's clock is to be kept accurate by a ray of sunshine, that perfect noon hitting it every sunny day, and the pulse of heat from that sets off a solar trigger which resets the clock to make it perfectly accurate. So even with the slowing of the rotation of the earth and so on, the clock will keep perfectly good time. So here we're looking from the south, look north. This is all Forest Service land. If you go up on top of those cliffs, that's some of the Long Now land in those trees. And if you go up there and look back, then you'll get a sense of what the view starts to be like from the top of the mountain. That's the long view. That's 80 miles to the horizon. And that's also timberline and those bristlecones really are shrubs. That's a different place to be. It's 11,400 feet and it's exquisite. Now, if you go over to the right from this image to looking at the edge of the cliffs, it's 600 foot, just about a yard to the left of Kurt Bollacker's foot, there is a 600-foot drop. He's ambling on over to Zander's Siq. That's what it looks like looking down it. We should probably put in a rail or something. Over on the eastern side it's gentle, as you can see. And that's not snow — that's what the white limestone looks like. You also see there a bighorn sheep. Their herd was reintroduced from Wyoming. And they're doing pretty well, but they've got a bit of trouble. This is Danny Hillis, and he's figuring out a design problem. he's trying to determine if where he is on a bit of Long Now land would appear from down in the valley to be the actual peak of the mountain. because the real peak is hidden around the corner. This is what in the infantry we used to call the military crest. And as it turned out the answer is, yes, that is from down below in the valley it does look like the peak, and that might be conjured with. We gradually realized we have three serious design domains to work on with this. One is the experience of the mountain. Another is the experience in the mountain. And the third is the experience from the mountain, which is really dominated by the view shed of the spring valley there behind Danny, and if you look off to the right, out there, 15 miles across to the Schell Creek range. In the front, there are 10 ranches strung right along the base of the mountains using the water from the mountains. In fact, there are artesian wells where water springs right into the air. One of the ranches is called the Kirkeby Ranch, and I'll take you there for a minute. It's a very nice ranch. Alfalfa and cattle, run by Paul and Ronnie Brenham, and it's pretty idyllic. It's also hard work. And most of these ranches are having trouble keeping going. This is their view to the west of the Schell Creek range. And if you go out to that line of trees at the far end, you'll see what the valley used to look like. This is Rocky Mountain junipers that have been there for thousands of years. And a scheme emerged that Long Now is looking to see if it might be possible to buy up the whole valley, because those 10 ranches with their 17,000 acres dominate a 500 square mile valley with their grazing allotments and so on, and there's a possibility that you could get the whole thing for five million dollars and gradually restore it to its wild condition, and somewhere in the process turn it back over to the National Park, and it would double the size of Great Basin National Park. That would be swell. OK, let's take one more look at the mountain itself. The clock experience should be profound, but from the outside it should be invisible. Now, at the base of the high cliffs there's this natural cave. It's only about 12 feet deep, but what if it were deepened from inside? You excavated from somewhere, came up from inside and deepened it. And then you could have an entrance which was very rough and narrow as you first went in, that gradually becomes more refined and then actually quite exquisite. And this stone takes a perfect polish. You'd have a polished set of passages and chambers in there eventually leading to the 10,000 year clock. And it's not a mine. This would be a nuanced evocation of the basic structure of the mountain, and you would be appreciating it as much from inside as you do from outside. This is architecture not made by building, but by what you very carefully take away. So that's what the mountain taught us. Most of the amazingness of the clock we can borrow from the amazingness of the mountain. All we have to do is highlight its spectacular features and blend in with them. It's not a clock in a mountain — it's a mountain clock. Now, the Tewa Indians in the Southwest have a saying for what you need to do when you want to think long term about anything. They say, "pin peya obe" — welcome to the mountain. Thank you. (Applause)

Fashion and creativity

Isaac Mizrahi

{0: 'Isaac Mizrahi'}

{0: ['fashion designer']}

{0: 'Fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi mixes high fashion and the mass market, with a line of haute couture and a line for Target. Plus a talk show, a cabaret act, a movie, a new book ...'}

2008-02-02

2008-11-18

TED2008

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['business', 'creativity', 'design', 'entertainment', 'fashion', 'humor', 'media']

{205: 'The mystery box', 250: 'Where does creativity hide?', 162: 'My creations, a new form of life', 1479: 'Pop an ollie and innovate!', 1347: 'The secret structure of great talks', 2332: 'How to find work you love'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/isaac_mizrahi_fashion_and_creativity/

Fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi spins through a dizzying array of inspirations -- from '50s pinups to a fleeting glimpse of a woman on the street who makes him shout "Stop the cab!" Inside this rambling talk are real clues to living a happy, creative life.

I have, like, a thing about sleeping. I don't sleep that much, and I've come to this thing about, like, not sleeping much as being a great virtue, after years of kind of battling it as being a terrible detriment or something. And now I really like sort of sitting up. You know, but for years, I've been sitting up, and I think my creativity is greatly motivated by this kind of insomnia. I lie awake. I think thoughts. I walk aimlessly sometimes. I used to walk more at night. I walk during the day, and I follow people who I think look interesting. (Laughter) And sometimes — actually, once it was on "Page Six" in the "Post" that I was cruising this guy, like, sort of, whatever, but I was actually just following because he had these great shoes on — (Laughter) so I was following this guy. And I took a picture of his shoes, and we thanked each other and just went on our way. But I do that all the time. As a matter of fact, I think a lot of my design ideas come from mistakes and tricks of the eye. Because I feel like, you know, there are so many images out there, so many clothes out there. And the only ones that look interesting to me are the ones that look slightly mistaken, of course, or very, very surprising. And often, I'm driving in a taxi, and I see a hole in a shirt or something that looks very interesting or pretty or functional in some way that I'd never seen happen before. And so I'd make the car stop, and I'd get out of the car and walk and see that, in fact, there wasn't a hole, but it was a trick of my eye; it was a shadow, you know. Or if there was a hole, I'd think like, "Oh, damn. Actually, someone thought of that thought already. Someone made that mistake already, so I can't do it anymore." I don't know where inspiration comes from. It does not come, for me, from research. I don't get necessarily inspired by research. As a matter of fact, one of the most fun things I've ever done in my whole life was this Christmas season at the Guggenheim in New York. I read "Peter and the Wolf" with this beautiful band from Juilliard, and I did, like, you know, the narrator, and I read it. And I saw this really smart critic who I love, this woman Joan Acocella, who's a friend of mine. And she came backstage and said, "Oh, Isaac, did you know that — talk to me about Stalinism and talk to me about, you know, like, the '30s in Russia." And I thought, "How do I know about Stalinism?" I know about a wolf and a bird, and, you know, he ate the bird, and then in the end, you know, you hear the bird squeaking or something. (Laughter) So I don't really know that, I don't really — actually, I do my own kind of research, you know? If I'm commissioned to do the costumes for an 18th-century opera or something like that, I will do a lot of research, because it's interesting, not because it's what I'm supposed to do. I'm very, very, very inspired by movies. The color of movies and the way light makes the colors. Light from behind the projection or light from the projection makes the colors look so impossible. Anyway, roll this little clip. I'll just show you. I sit up at night, and I watch movies, and I watch women in movies a lot. And I think about, you know, their roles and about how you have to, like, watch what your daughters look at. Because I look at the way women are portrayed all the time, whether they're kind of glorified in this way, or whether they're kind of, you know, ironically glorified, or whether they're sort of denigrated or ironically denigrated. I go back to color all the time. Color is something that motivates me a lot. It's rarely color that I find in nature, although, you know, juxtaposed next to artificial color, natural color is so beautiful. So that's what I do. I study color a lot. But for the most part, I think, like, how can I ever make anything that is as beautiful as that image of Natalie Wood? How can I ever make anything as beautiful as Greta Garbo? I mean, that's just not possible. You know? And so that's what makes me lie awake at night, I guess. I'm also like a big — I go to astrologers and tarot card readers often, and that's another thing that motivates me a lot. People say, "Do that" — an astrologer tells me to do something, so I do it. (Laughter) When I was about 21, an astrologer told me that I was going to meet the man of my dreams, and that his name was going to be Eric, right? So, you know, for years I would go to bars and, sort of, anyone I met whose name was Eric, I was humping immediately or something. (Laughter) There were times when I was so desperate, I would just walk into a room and go, "Eric?" And anybody who would turn around, I would make a beeline for. (Laughter) And I had this really interesting tarot reading a long time ago. The last card he pulled, which was representing my destiny, was this guy in, like, a straw boater with a cane and, you know, sort of spats and this, you know, a minstrel singer, right? I want to show you this clip, because I do this kind of crazy thing where I do a cabaret act. So actually, check this out. Very embarrassing. (Video) (Applause) Thank you. We'll do anything you ask. The name of the show is based on this story that I have to tell you, about my mother. It's sort of an excerpt from a quote of hers. I was dating this guy, right? And this has to do with being happy, I swear. I was dating this guy, and it was going on for about a year, and we were getting serious, so we decided to invite them all to dinner, our parents. We introduced them to each other. My mother was, sort of, very sensitive to his mother, who, it seemed, was a little bit skeptical about the whole "alternative lifestyle" thing — you know, homosexuality. So my mother was a little offended, and turned to her and said, "Are you kidding? They have the greatest life together. They eat out, they see shows ..." They eat out, they see shows. (Laughter) That's the name of the show, "They eat out, they —" That's on my tombstone when I die: "He ate out, he saw shows." Right? (Laughter) So in editing these clips, I didn't have the audacity to edit a clip of me singing at Joe's Pub. So you'll have to go check it out and come see me or something, because it's mortifying. And yet, it feels — I don't know how to put this. I feel as little comfort as possible is a good thing. You know? And at least, you know, in my case, because if I just do one thing all the time, I don't know, I get very, very bored. I bore very easily. And you know, I don't say that I do everything well. I just say that I do a lot of things, that's all. And I kind of try not to look back, you know? Except, I guess that's what staying up every night is about — like, looking back and thinking, "What a fool you made of yourself." You know? But I guess that's OK. Right? (Laughter) Because if you do many things, you get to feel lousy about everything, and not just one, you know? You don't master feeling lousy about one thing. Yeah, exactly. I will show you this next thing, speaking of costumes for operas. I do work with different choreographers. I work with Twyla Tharp a lot and I work with Mark Morris a lot, who is one of my best friends. And I designed three operas with him — the most recent one, "King Arthur." I've been very ingrained in the dance world since I was a teenager. I went to a performing arts high school, where I was an actor, and many of my friends were ballet dancers. Again, I don't know where inspiration comes from. I don't know where it comes from. I started making puppets when I was a kid. Maybe that's where the whole inspiration thing started from: puppets. (Laughter) And then performing arts high school. There I was in high school, meeting dancers and acting. And somehow, from there, I got interested in design. I went to Parsons School of Design, and then I began my career as a designer. I don't really think of myself as a designer, and I don't really think of myself necessarily as a fashion designer. And frankly, I don't really know what to call myself. I think of myself as ... I don't know what I think of myself as, so ... That's just that. (Laughter) But I must say, this whole thing about being slightly bored all the time, I think that is a very important thing for a fashion designer. You always have to be, like, slightly bored with everything. And if you're not, you have to pretend to be slightly bored with everything. (Laughter) But I am really a little bored with everything. I always say to my partner, Marisa Gardini, who books everything — books everything and makes everything happen and makes all the deals. And I always tell her that I find myself with a lot of time on the computer bridge program. Too much time on computer bridge, which is, you know, like, that's — So, somehow, like, about 10 years ago, I thought that the most unboring place in the world would be, like, a TV studio, like for a day show, some kind of day talk show, because it's all of these things that I love kind of in one place. And if you ever get bored, you can look at another thing and do another thing and talk about it, right? And so I had this TV show. And that was a very, very, very big part of my process. Actually, could you roll the clip, please? This is one of my favorite clips of Rosie O'Donnell. (Video) Isaac Mizrahi: We're back on the set. Hi, Ben! Rosie O'Donnell: Hello, Ben. IM: Look how cute she looks with just a slick back. Ben: As my grandmother says, "Delish!" RO: Delish! IM: Wow, delish. All right. So where should I position myself? I want to stay out of the way. I don't want to be — OK, here we go. RO: Do you get nervous, Ashley? Ashley: Doing what? RO: Cutting hair. A: Never. I don't think there was ever a day when I cut hair I was nervous. IM: You look so cute already. RO: You like it? All right. IM: Do you have a problem looking cute? RO: Of course I want to look cute. IM: Just checking, because some people want to look, you know, aggressively ugly. RO: No, not me, no. IM: You read about people who have a lot of money and they have kids and the kids always end up somehow, really messed up, you know? And there's got to be some way to do that, Rosie. Just because you're fabulously rich and fabulously famous, does that mean you shouldn't have kids, because you know they're going to end up messed up? RO: No, but it means your priority has to be their well-being first, I think. But you have to make the decision for yourself. My kids are seven, who the hell knows? They're going to be like 14 and in rehab. And they're going to be playing this clip. "I'm such a good mother." My God, this is the shortest I've ever had! IM: It looks good, yeah? A: Has your hair ever been this short? RO: No! But it's all right — go crazy. IM: I feel like it needs to be closer down here. A: It's just a stage. RO: We're just staging it. IM: Are you freaking out? It's so cute. RO: No, I love it. It's the new me. IM: It's so fabulous! RO: Flock of Rosie. Wooo! (Laughter) IM: By the way, of all the most unboring things in the world, right? I mean, like, making someone who's already cute look terrible like that — (Laughter) That is not boring. That is nothing if it's not boring. (Laughter) Actually, I read this great quote the other day, which was, "Style makes you feel great, because it takes your mind off the fact that you're going to die." Right? (Laughter) And then I realized that was on my website, and it said, you know, the quote was attributed to me. And I thought, "Oh, I said something in an interview. I forgot I said that." But it's really true. I want to show you this last clip because it's going to be my last goodbye. I'll tell you that I cook a lot also. I love to cook. And I often look at things as though they're food. Like, I say, "Would you serve a rotten chicken? Then how could you serve a beat-up old dress or something? How could you show a beat-up old dress?" I always relate things to kitchen-ry. (Laughter) And so I think that's what it all boils down to. Everything boils down to that. So check this out. This is what I've been doing, because I think it's the most fun thing in the world. It's, like, this website with a lot of different things on it. It's a polymathematical website. We actually shoot segments, like TV show segments. And it's kind of my favorite thing in the world. And it just began, like, in the beginning of February. So who knows? Again, I don't say it's good, I just think it's not boring, right? And here's the last bit. (Music) IM: I make buttermilk pancakes or buttermilk waffles all the time. Sara Moulton: Do you? IM: Yeah, but I can never find buttermilk, ever. You can't find it at Citarella, you can't find it. SM: You can't? IM: It's always low-fat. SM: But that's all it is. IM: It is? OK. SM: You don't know? Let me tell you something interesting. IM: You know what? Stop laughing! It's not funny. Just because I don't know there's no such thing as whole buttermilk. Sorry. What? SM: Here's the deal: in the old days, when they used to make butter — You know how you make butter? IM: Churn. SM: From cream. IM: Yeah, exactly. SM: So you take heavy, high-fat milk, which is cream, and you churn it until it separates into these curds and water. The liquid is actually — if you've ever overbeaten your whipped cream, it's actually buttermilk. That's what it was in the early days. And that's what people used for baking and all sorts of things. Now the buttermilk that you get is actually low-fat or skim milk. IM: Excuse me, I didn't know. Alright? SM: The reason he thought that is because buttermilk is so wonderfully thick and delicious. IM: Yeah, it is. Exactly. SM: So who would think that it was low-fat? IM: Well, that's it. Thank you very much. Happy TED. It's so wonderful here. I love it. I love it. I love it. Thanks. Bye.

A tour of Nollywood, Nigeria's booming film industry

Franco Sacchi

{0: 'Franco Sacchi'}

{0: ['filmmaker']}

{0: "Franco Sacchi is the director of This Is Nollywood, the story of Nigeria's massive homegrown film industry."}

2007-06-06

2008-11-19

TEDGlobal 2007

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['Africa', 'creativity', 'culture', 'entertainment', 'film', 'global issues', 'media', 'technology', 'movies']

{205: 'The mystery box', 386: 'The story of Ezra', 155: 'Telling stories from Africa', 1476: 'The shared wonder of film', 170: 'My journey into movies that matter', 2694: "The data behind Hollywood's sexism"}

https://www.ted.com/talks/franco_sacchi_a_tour_of_nollywood_nigeria_s_booming_film_industry/

Zambia-born filmmaker Franco Sacchi tours us through Nollywood, Nigeria's booming film industry (the world's 3rd largest). Guerrilla filmmaking and brilliance under pressure from crews that can shoot a full-length feature in a week.

I have a story, a story that I would like to share with you. And it's an African story. It is a story of hope, resilience and glamour. There was Hollywood. Then came Bollywood. Today we have Nollywood, the third-largest film industry in the world. In 2006 alone, almost 2,000 films were made in Nigeria. Now, try to imagine 40, 50 films wrapped, distributed, every week in the streets of Lagos, Nigeria and West Africa. Some estimates put the value of this industry at 250 million dollars. It has created thousands, if not tens of thousands of jobs. And it's expanding. But keep in mind that this was a grassroots movement. This is something that happened without foreign investment, without government aid, and actually, it happened against all odds, in one of the most difficult moments in Nigerian economy. The industry is 15 years old. And so maybe you're thinking now, why, how, an Italian filmmaker based in Boston is so interested in this story? And so I think I have to tell you just a few words, a few things about my personal life, because I think there is a connection. My grandfather lived most of his life and is buried in Zambia. My father also lived most of his adult life in East Africa. And I was born in Zambia. Even though I left when I was only three years old, I really felt that Africa was this big part of my life. And it really was a place where I learned to walk. I think I uttered the first words, and my family bought their first home. So when we came back to Italy, and one of the things that I remember the most is my family having this hard time to share stories. It seemed that for our neighbors and friends, Africa was either this exotic place, this imaginary land that probably exists only in their imagination, or the place of horror, famine. And so we were always caught in this stereotype. And I remember really this desire to talk about Africa as a place where we lived and people live and go about their lives, and have dreams like we all have. So when I read in a newspaper in the business page the story of Nollywood, I really felt this is an incredible opportunity to tell a story that goes against all these preconceived notions. Here I can tell a story of Africans making movies like I do, and actually I felt this was an inspiration for me. I have the good fortune of being a filmmaker-in-residence at the Center of Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University. And we really look how digital technology is changing, and how young, independent filmmakers can make movies at a fraction of the cost. So when I proposed the story, I really had all the support to make this film. And not only had the support, I found two wonderful partners in crime in this adventure. Aimee Corrigan, a very talented and young photographer, and Robert Caputo, a friend and a mentor, who is a veteran of National Geographic, and told me, "You know, Franco, in 25 years of covering Africa, I don't know if I have come across a story that is so full of hope and so fun." So we went to Lagos in October 2005. And we went to Lagos to meet Bond Emeruwa, a wonderful, talented film director who is with us tonight. The plan was to give you a portrait of Nollywood, of this incredible film industry, following Bond in his quest to make an action movie that deals with the issue of corruption, called "Checkpoint." Police corruption. And he had nine days to make it. We thought this was a good story. In the meantime, we had to cover Nollywood, and we talked to a lot of filmmakers. But I don't want to create too many expectations. I would like to show you six minutes. And these are six minutes they really prepared for the TED audience. There are several themes from the documentary, but they are re-edited and made for you, OK? So I guess it's a world premier. (Video) Man: Action. Milverton Nwokedi: You cut a nice movie with just 10,000 dollars in Nigeria here. And you shoot in seven days. Peace Piberesima: We're doing films for the masses. We're not doing films for the elite and the people in their glass houses. They can afford to watch their "Robocop" and whatever. Mahmood Ali Balogun: I think filmmaking in Nigeria, for those who work in it, is a kind of subsistence filmmaking — what they do to make a living. It's not the fancy filmmaking where you say, oh, you want to put all the razzmatazz of Hollywood, and where you have big budgets. Here is that you make these films, it sells, you jump onto the location again to make another film, because if you don't make the next film, you're not going to feed. Bond Emeruwa: So while we're entertaining, we should be able to educate. I believe in the power of audiovisuals. I mean, 90 percent of the population will watch Nollywood. I think it's the most viable vehicle right now to pass information across a dedicated cable. So if you're making a movie, no matter what your topic is, put in a message in there. Woman: You still have to report the incident. He needs proper medical attention. PP: I keep trying to explain to people, it's not about the quality at the moment — the quality is coming. I mean, there are those films that people are making for quality, but the first thing you have to remember about this society is that Africa still has people that live on one dollar a day, and these are the people that really watch these films. Sonny McDon W: Nollywood is a fantastic industry that has just been born in this part of the world. Because nobody believed that Nollywood can come out of Africa. Lancelot Imasen: But our films, they are stories that our people can relate to themselves. They are stories about our people, for our people. And consistently, they are glued to their screen whenever they see the story. Narrator: Suspense, fun and intrigue. It's the blockbuster comedy. You'll crack your ribs. Bernard Pinayon Agbaosi: We have been so deep into the foreign movies. It's all about the foreign movies. But we can do something too. We can do something, something that when the world sees it, they say, wow, this is Nigeria. Man: Just arrest yourself, sergeant. Don't embarrass yourself. Come on. Don't run away. Come back. Come back. SMW: You can now walk the street and see a role model. It’s not just what you see in picture. You see the person live. You see how he talks. You see how he lives. He influences you really good, you know. It’s not just what you see in the picture. It is not what you hear, you know, from the Western press. Man: See you. Bye. Action. Saint Obi: I was so fascinated, you know, with those cowboy movies. But then when I discovered the situation in my country, at that time there was so much corruption. For a young man to really make it out here, you got to think of some negative things and all that, or some kind of vices. And I didn't want that, you know. And I discovered that I could be successful in life as an actor, without doing crime, without cheating nobody, without telling no lies. Just me and God-given talent. Man: Let's go. OK, it's time to kick some ass. Cover this. It's your own. Move it. Roboger Animadu: In big countries, when they do the movies, they have all these things in place. But here, we improvise these items, like the gunshots. Like they go, here, now, now, you see the gun there, but you won't see any guns shot, we use knock-out. Kevin Books Ikeduba: What I'm scared of is just the explosion will come up in my face. Woman: That's why I use enough masking tape. The masking tape will hold it. Wat, wait. Just hold this for me. KBI: I'm just telling her to make sure she places it well so that it won't affect my face — the explosion, you know. But she's a professional. She knows what she’s doing. I'm trying to protect my face too. This ain't going to be my last movie. You know, this is Nollywood, where the magic lives. RA: So now you're about to see how we do our own movies here, with or without any assistance from anybody. Man: Action. Cut. (Applause) Franco Sacchi: So many things to say, so little time. So many themes in this story. I just can't tell you — there’s one thing I want to tell you. I spent, you know, several weeks with all these actors, producers, and the problems they have to go through are unimaginable for, you know, a Westerner, a filmmaker who works in America or in Europe. But always with a smile, always with an enthusiasm, that is incredible. Werner Herzog, the German filmmaker said, "I need to make movies like you need oxygen." And I think they’re breathing. The Nigerian filmmakers really, really, are doing what they like. And so it's a very, very important thing for them, and for their audiences. A woman told me, "When I see a Nollywood film, I can relax, I really — I can breathe better." There is also another very important thing that I hope will resonate with this audience. It’s technology. I’m very interested in it and I really think that the digital non-linear editing has slashed, you know, the cost now is a fraction of what it used to be. Incredible cameras cost under 5,000 dollars. And this has unleashed tremendous energy. And guess what? We didn’t have to tell to the Nigerian filmmakers. They understood it, they embraced the technology and they run with it, and they’re successful. I hope that the Nollywood phenomenon will go both ways. I hope it will inspire other African nations to embrace the technology, look at the Nigerian model, make their films, create jobs, create a narrative for the population, something to identify, something positive, something that really is psychological relief and it's part of the culture. But I really think this is a phenomenon that can inspire us. I really think it goes both ways. Filmmakers, friends of mine, they look at Nollywood and they say, "Wow, they are doing what we really want to do, and make a buck and live with this job." So I really think it’s a lesson that we're actually learning from them. And there's one thing, one small challenge that I have for you, and should make us reflect on the importance of storytelling. And I think this is really the theme of this session. Try to imagine a world where the only goal is food and a shelter, but no stories. No stories around the campfire. No legends, no fairytales. Nothing. No novels. Difficult, eh? It's meaningless. So this is what I really think. I think that the key to a healthy society is a thriving community of storytellers, and I think that the Nigerian filmmakers really have proved this. I would like you to hear their voices. Just a few moments. It’s not an added sequence, just some voices from Nollywood. (Video) Toyin Alousa: Nollywood is the best thing that can happen to them. If you have an industry that puts a smile on people's face, that’s Nollywood. SO: I believe very soon, we’re not only going to have better movies, we'll have that original Nigerian movie. BE: It’s still the same basic themes. Love, action. But we're telling it our own way, our own Nigerian way, African way. We have diverse cultures, diverse cultures, there are so many, that in the natal lifetimes, I don't see us exhausting the stories we have. FS: My job ends here, and the Nollywood filmmakers really have now to work. And I really hope that there will be many, many collaborations, where we teach each other things. And I really hope that this will happen. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Stop. I've got two questions. Franco, you described this as the world's third largest film industry. What does that translate to in terms of numbers of films, really? FS: Oh, yes. I think I mentioned briefly — it's close to 2,000 films. There is scientific data on this. CA: 2,000 films a year? FS: 2,000 films a year. 2005 or 6, the censor board has censored 1,600 films alone. And we know that there are more. So it’s safe to say that there are 2,000 films. So imagine 45 films per week. There are challenges. There are challenges. There is a glut of film, the quality has to be raised, they need to go to the next level, but I’m optimistic. CA: And these aren’t films that are primarily seen in cinemas? FS: Oh yes, of course. This is very important. Maybe, you know, for you to try to imagine this, these are films that are distributed directly in markets. They are bought in video shops. They can be rented for pennies. CA: On what format? FS: Oh, the format — thank you for the question. Yes, it's VCDs. It's a CD, it's a little bit more compressed image. They started with VHS. They actually didn't wait for, you know, the latest technology. They started in '92, '94. So there are 57 million VCRs in Nigeria that play, you know, VHS and these VCDs. It's a CD basically. It's a compact disc. CA: So on the streets, are film casts ... ? FS: You can be in a Lagos traffic jam and you can buy a movie or some bananas or some water. Yes. (Laughter) And I have to say, this really proves that storytelling, it's a commodity, it's a staple. There is no life without stories. CA: Franco, thank you so much.

The design of the universe

George Smoot

{0: 'George Smoot'}

{0: ['astrophysicist']}

{0: 'Astrophysicist, cosmologist and Nobel Prize winner George Smoot studies the cosmic microwave background radiation -- the afterglow of the Big Bang. His pioneering research into deep space and time is uncovering the structure of the universe itself.'}

2008-05-08

2008-11-20

Serious Play 2008

en

['ar', 'az', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hi', 'hr', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['astronomy', 'culture', 'dark matter', 'design', 'physics', 'science', 'space', 'technology', 'time', 'telescopes', 'Best of the Web']

{1951: 'What I learned from going blind in space', 9473: '6 space technologies we can use to improve life on Earth', 15531: 'How we can turn the cold of outer space into a renewable resource', 1936: 'What we can learn from galaxies far, far away', 326: 'Shedding light on dark matter', 20753: "A rare galaxy that's challenging our understanding of the universe"}

https://www.ted.com/talks/george_smoot_the_design_of_the_universe/

At Serious Play 2008, astrophysicist George Smoot shows stunning new images from deep-space surveys, and prods us to ponder how the cosmos -- with its giant webs of dark matter and mysterious gaping voids -- got built this way.

I thought I would think about changing your perspective on the world a bit, and showing you some of the designs that we have in nature. And so, I have my first slide to talk about the dawning of the universe and what I call the cosmic scene investigation, that is, looking at the relics of creation and inferring what happened at the beginning, and then following it up and trying to understand it. And so one of the questions that I asked you is, when you look around, what do you see? Well, you see this space that's created by designers and by the work of people, but what you actually see is a lot of material that was already here, being reshaped in a certain form. And so the question is: how did that material get here? How did it get into the form that it had before it got reshaped, and so forth? It's a question of what's the continuity? So one of the things I look at is, how did the universe begin and shape? What was the whole process in the creation and the evolution of the universe to getting to the point that we have these kinds of materials? So that's sort of the part, and let me move on then and show you the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. If you look at this picture, what you will see is a lot of dark with some light objects in it. And everything but — four of these light objects are stars, and you can see them there — little pluses. This is a star, this is a star, everything else is a galaxy, OK? So there's a couple of thousand galaxies you can see easily with your eye in here. And when I look out at particularly this galaxy, which looks a lot like ours, I wonder if there's an art design college conference going on, and intelligent beings there are thinking about, you know, what designs they might do, and there might be a few cosmologists trying to understand where the universe itself came from, and there might even be some in that galaxy looking at ours trying to figure out what's going on over here. But there's a lot of other galaxies, and some are nearby, and they're kind of the color of the Sun, and some are further away and they're a little bluer, and so forth. But one of the questions is — this should be, to you — how come there are so many galaxies? Because this represents a very clean fraction of the sky. This is only 1,000 galaxies. We think there's on the order — visible to the Hubble Space Telescope, if you had the time to scan it around — about 100 billion galaxies. Right? It's a very large number of galaxies. And that's roughly how many stars there are in our own galaxy. But when you look at some of these regions like this, you'll see more galaxies than stars, which is kind of a conundrum. So the question should come to your mind is, what kind of design, you know, what kind of creative process and what kind of design produced the world like that? And then I'm going to show you it's actually a lot more complicated. We're going to try and follow it up. We have a tool that actually helps us out in this study, and that's the fact that the universe is so incredibly big that it's a time machine, in a certain sense. We draw this set of nested spheres cut away so you see it. Put the Earth at the center of the nested spheres, just because that's where we're making observations. And the moon is only two seconds away, so if you take a picture of the moon using ordinary light, it's the moon two seconds ago, and who cares. Two seconds is like the present. The Sun is eight minutes ago. That's not such a big deal, right, unless there's solar flares coming then you want to get out the way. You'd like to have a little advance warning. But you get out to Jupiter and it's 40 minutes away. It's a problem. You hear about Mars, it's a problem communicating to Mars because it takes light long enough to go there. But if you look out to the nearest set of stars, to the nearest 40 or 50 stars, it's about 10 years. So if you take a picture of what's going on, it's 10 years ago. But you go and look to the center of the galaxy, it's thousands of years ago. If you look at Andromeda, which is the nearest big galaxy, and it's two million years ago. If you took a picture of the Earth two million years ago, there'd be no evidence of humans at all, because we don't think there were humans yet. I mean, it just gives you the scale. With the Hubble Space Telescope, we're looking at hundreds of millions of years to a billion years. But if we were capable to come up with an idea of how to look even further — there's some things even further, and that was what I did in a lot of my work, was to develop the techniques — we could look out back to even earlier epochs before there were stars and before there were galaxies, back to when the universe was hot and dense and very different. And so that's the sort of sequence, and so I have a more artistic impression of this. There's the galaxy in the middle, which is the Milky Way, and around that are the Hubble — you know, nearby kind of galaxies, and there's a sphere that marks the different times. And behind that are some more modern galaxies. You see the whole big picture? The beginning of time is funny — it's on the outside, right? And then there's a part of the universe we can't see because it's so dense and so hot, light can't escape. It's like you can't see to the center of the Sun; you have to use other techniques to know what's going on inside the Sun. But you can see the edge of the Sun, and the universe gets that way, and you can see that. And then you see this sort of model area around the outside, and that is the radiation coming from the Big Bang, which is actually incredibly uniform. The universe is almost a perfect sphere, but there are these very tiny variations which we show here in great exaggeration. And from them in the time sequence we're going to have to go from these tiny variations to these irregular galaxies and first stars to these more advanced galaxies, and eventually the solar system, and so forth. So it's a big design job, but we'll see about how things are going on. So the way these measurements were done, there's been a set of satellites, and this is where you get to see. So there was the COBE satellite, which was launched in 1989, and we discovered these variations. And then in 2000, the MAP satellite was launched — the WMAP — and it made somewhat better pictures. And later this year — this is the cool stealth version, the one that actually has some beautiful design features to it, and you should look — the Planck satellite will be launched, and it will make very high-resolution maps. And that will be the sequence of understanding the very beginning of the universe. And what we saw was, we saw these variations, and then they told us the secrets, both about the structure of space-time, and about the contents of the universe, and about how the universe started in its original motions. So we have this picture, which is quite a spectacular picture, and I'll come back to the beginning, where we're going to have some mysterious process that kicks the universe off at the beginning. And we go through a period of accelerating expansion, and the universe expands and cools until it gets to the point where it becomes transparent, then to the Dark Ages, and then the first stars turn on, and they evolve into galaxies, and then later they get to the more expansive galaxies. And somewhere around this period is when our solar system started forming. And it's maturing up to the present time. And there's some spectacular things. And this wastebasket part, that's to represent what the structure of space-time itself is doing during this period. And so this is a pretty weird model, right? What kind of evidence do we have for that? So let me show you some of nature's patterns that are the result of this. I always think of space-time as being the real substance of space, and the galaxies and the stars just like the foam on the ocean. It's a marker of where the interesting waves are and whatever went on. So here is the Sloan Digital Sky Survey showing the location of a million galaxies. So there's a dot on here for every galaxy. They go out and point a telescope at the sky, take a picture, identify what are stars and throw them away, look at the galaxies, estimate how far away they are, and plot them up. And just put radially they're going out that way. And you see these structures, this thing we call the Great Wall, but there are voids and those kinds of stuff, and they kind of fade out because the telescope isn't sensitive enough to do it. Now I'm going to show you this in 3D. What happens is, you take pictures as the Earth rotates, you get a fan across the sky. There are some places you can't look because of our own galaxy, or because there are no telescopes available to do it. So the next picture shows you the three-dimensional version of this rotating around. Do you see the fan-like scans made across the sky? Remember, every spot on here is a galaxy, and you see the galaxies, you know, sort of in our neighborhood, and you sort of see the structure. And you see this thing we call the Great Wall, and you see the complicated structure, and you see these voids. There are places where there are no galaxies and there are places where there are thousands of galaxies clumped together, right. So there's an interesting pattern, but we don't have enough data here to actually see the pattern. We only have a million galaxies, right? So we're keeping, like, a million balls in the air but, what's going on? There's another survey which is very similar to this, called the Two-degree Field of View Galaxy Redshift Survey. Now we're going to fly through it at warp a million. And every time there's a galaxy — at its location there's a galaxy — and if we know anything about the galaxy, which we do, because there's a redshift measurement and everything, you put in the type of galaxy and the color, so this is the real representation. And when you're in the middle of the galaxies it's hard to see the pattern; it's like being in the middle of life. It's hard to see the pattern in the middle of the audience, it's hard to see the pattern of this. So we're going to go out and swing around and look back at this. And you'll see, first, the structure of the survey, and then you'll start seeing the structure of the galaxies that we see out there. So again, you can see the extension of this Great Wall of galaxies showing up here. But you can see the voids, you can see the complicated structure, and you say, well, how did this happen? Suppose you're the cosmic designer. How are you going to put galaxies out there in a pattern like that? It's not just throwing them out at random. There's a more complicated process going on here. How are you going to end up doing that? And so now we're in for some serious play. That is, we have to seriously play God, not just change people's lives, but make the universe, right. So if that's your responsibility, how are you going to do that? What's the kind of technique? What's the kind of thing you're going to do? So I'm going to show you the results of a very large-scale simulation of what we think the universe might be like, using, essentially, some of the play principles and some of the design principles that, you know, humans have labored so hard to pick up, but apparently nature knew how to do at the beginning. And that is, you start out with very simple ingredients and some simple rules, but you have to have enough ingredients to make it complicated. And then you put in some randomness, some fluctuations and some randomness, and realize a whole bunch of different representations. So what I'm going to do is show you the distribution of matter as a function of scales. We're going to zoom in, but this is a plot of what it is. And we had to add one more thing to make the universe come out right. It's called dark matter. That is matter that doesn't interact with light the typical way that ordinary matter does, the way the light's shining on me or on the stage. It's transparent to light, but in order for you to see it, we're going to make it white. OK? So the stuff that's in this picture that's white, that is the dark matter. It should be called invisible matter, but the dark matter we've made visible. And the stuff that is in the yellow color, that is the ordinary kind of matter that's turned into stars and galaxies. So I'll show you the next movie. So this — we're going to zoom in. Notice this pattern and pay attention to this pattern. We're going to zoom in and zoom in. And you'll see there are all these filaments and structures and voids. And when a number of filaments come together in a knot, that makes a supercluster of galaxies. This one we're zooming in on is somewhere between 100,000 and a million galaxies in that small region. So we live in the boonies. We don't live in the center of the solar system, we don't live in the center of the galaxy and our galaxy's not in the center of the cluster. So we're zooming in. This is a region which probably has more than 100,000, on the order of a million galaxies in that region. We're going to keep zooming in. OK. And so I forgot to tell you the scale. A parsec is 3.26 light years. So a gigaparsec is three billion light years — that's the scale. So it takes light three billion years to travel over that distance. Now we're into a distance sort of between here and here. That's the distance between us and Andromeda, right? These little specks that you're seeing in here, they're galaxies. Now we're going to zoom back out, and you can see this structure that, when we get very far out, looks very regular, but it's made up of a lot of irregular variations. So they're simple building blocks. There's a very simple fluid to begin with. It's got dark matter, it's got ordinary matter, it's got photons and it's got neutrinos, which don't play much role in the later part of the universe. And it's just a simple fluid and it, over time, develops into this complicated structure. And so you know when you first saw this picture, it didn't mean quite so much to you. Here you're looking across one percent of the volume of the visible universe and you're seeing billions of galaxies, right, and nodes, but you realize they're not even the main structure. There's a framework, which is the dark matter, the invisible matter, that's out there that's actually holding it all together. So let's fly through it, and you can see how much harder it is when you're in the middle of something to figure this out. So here's that same end result. You see a filament, you see the light is the invisible matter, and the yellow is the stars or the galaxies showing up. And we're going to fly around, and we'll fly around, and you'll see occasionally a couple of filaments intersect, and you get a large cluster of galaxies. And then we'll fly in to where the very large cluster is, and you can see what it looks like. And so from inside, it doesn't look very complicated, right? It's only when you look at it at a very large scale, and explore it and so forth, you realize it's a very intricate, complicated kind of a design, right? And it's grown up in some kind of way. So the question is, how hard would it be to assemble this, right? How big a contractor team would you need to put this universe together, right? That's the issue, right? And so here we are. You see how the filament — you see how several filaments are coming together, therefore making this supercluster of galaxies. And you have to understand, this is not how it would actually look if you — first, you can't travel this fast, everything would be distorted, but this is using simple rendering and graphic arts kind of stuff. This is how, if you took billions of years to go around, it might look to you, right? And if you could see invisible matter, too. And so the idea is, you know, how would you put together the universe in a very simple way? We're going to start and realize that the entire visible universe, everything we can see in every direction with the Hubble Space Telescope plus our other instruments, was once in a region that was smaller than an atom. It started with tiny quantum mechanical fluctuations, but expanding at a tremendous rate. And those fluctuations were stretched to astronomical sizes, and those fluctuations eventually are the things we see in the cosmic microwave background. And then we needed some way to turn those fluctuations into galaxies and clusters of galaxies and make these kinds of structures go on. So I'm going to show you a smaller simulation. This simulation was run on 1,000 processors for a month in order to make just this simple visible one. So I'm going to show you one that can be run on a desktop in two days in the next picture. So you start out with teeny fluctuations when the universe was at this point, now four times smaller, and so forth. And you start seeing these networks, this cosmic web of structure forming. And this is a simple one, because it doesn't have the ordinary matter and it just has the dark matter in it. And you see how the dark matter lumps up, and the ordinary matter just trails along behind. So there it is. At the beginning it's very uniform. The fluctuations are a part in 100,000. There are a few peaks that are a part in 10,000, and then over billions of years, gravity just pulls in. This is light over density, pulls the material around in. That pulls in more material and pulls in more material. But the distances on the universe are so large and the time scales are so large that it takes a long time for this to form. And it keeps forming until the universe is roughly about half the size it is now, in terms of its expansion. And at that point, the universe mysteriously starts accelerating its expansion and cuts off the formation of larger-scale structure. So we're just seeing as large a scale structure as we can see, and then only things that have started forming already are going to form, and then from then on it's going to go on. So we're able to do the simulation, but this is two days on a desktop. We need, you know, 30 days on 1,000 processors to do the kind of simulation that I showed you before. So we have an idea of how to play seriously, creating the universe by starting with essentially less than an eyedrop full of material, and we create everything we can see in any direction, right, from almost nothing — that is, something extremely tiny, extremely small — and it is almost perfect, except it has these tiny fluctuations at a part in 100,000 level, which turn out to produce the interesting patterns and designs we see, that is, galaxies and stars and so forth. So we have a model, and we can calculate it, and we can use it to make designs of what we think the universe really looks like. And that design is sort of way beyond what our original imagination ever was. So this is what we started with 15 years ago, with the Cosmic Background Explorer — made the map on the upper right, which basically showed us that there were large-scale fluctuations, and actually fluctuations on several scales. You can kind of see that. Since then we've had WMAP, which just gives us higher angular resolution. We see the same large-scale structure, but we see additional small-scale structure. And on the bottom right is if the satellite had flipped upside down and mapped the Earth, what kind of a map we would have got of the Earth. You can see, well, you can, kind of pick out all the major continents, but that's about it. But what we're hoping when we get to Planck, we'll have resolution about equivalent to the resolution you see of the Earth there, where you can really see the complicated pattern that exists on the Earth. And you can also tell, because of the sharp edges and the way things fit together, there are some non-linear processes. Geology has these effects, which is moving the plates around and so forth. You can see that just from the map alone. We want to get to the point in our maps of the early universe we can see whether there are any non-linear effects that are starting to move, to modify, and are giving us a hint about how space-time itself was actually created at the beginning moments. So that's where we are today, and that's what I wanted to give you a flavor of. Give you a different view about what the design and what everything else looks like. Thank you. (Applause)

What I'm worried about, what I'm excited about

Bill Joy

{0: 'Bill Joy'}

{0: ['technologist and futurist']}

{0: "The co-founder of Sun Microsystems, Bill Joy has, in recent years, turned his attention to the biggest questions facing humanity: Where are we going? What could go wrong? What's the next great thing?"}

2006-02-02

2008-11-24

TED2006

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['business', 'future', 'health', 'science', 'technology']

{42: 'Is this our final century?', 19: 'How technology evolves', 167: '10 ways the world could end', 38: 'The accelerating power of technology', 247: 'The new open-source economics', 72: "Technology's long tail"}

https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_joy_what_i_m_worried_about_what_i_m_excited_about/

Technologist and futurist Bill Joy talks about several big worries for humanity -- and several big hopes in the fields of health, education and future tech.

What technology can we really apply to reducing global poverty? And what I found was quite surprising. We started looking at things like death rates in the 20th century, and how they'd been improved, and very simple things turned out. You'd think maybe antibiotics made more difference than clean water, but it's actually the opposite. And so very simple things — off-the-shelf technologies that we could easily find on the then-early Web — would clearly make a huge difference to that problem. But I also, in looking at more powerful technologies and nanotechnology and genetic engineering and other new emerging kind of digital technologies, became very concerned about the potential for abuse. If you think about it, in history, a long, long time ago we dealt with the problem of an individual abusing another individual. We came up with something — the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt not kill. That's a, kind of a one-on-one thing. We organized into cities. We had many people. And to keep the many from tyrannizing the one, we came up with concepts like individual liberty. And then, to have to deal with large groups, say, at the nation-state level, and we had to have mutual non-aggression, or through a series of conflicts, we eventually came to a rough international bargain to largely keep the peace. But now we have a new situation, really what people call an asymmetric situation, where technology is so powerful that it extends beyond a nation-state. It's not the nation-states that have potential access to mass destruction, but individuals. And this is a consequence of the fact that these new technologies tend to be digital. We saw genome sequences. You can download the gene sequences of pathogens off the Internet if you want to, and clearly someone recently — I saw in a science magazine — they said, well, the 1918 flu is too dangerous to FedEx around. If people want to use it in their labs for working on research, just reconstruct it yourself, because, you know, it might break in FedEx. So that this is possible to do this is not deniable. So individuals in small groups super-empowered by access to these kinds of self-replicating technologies, whether it be biological or other, are clearly a danger in our world. And the danger is that they can cause roughly what's a pandemic. And we really don't have experience with pandemics, and we're also not very good as a society at acting to things we don't have direct and sort of gut-level experience with. So it's not in our nature to pre-act. And in this case, piling on more technology doesn't solve the problem, because it only super-empowers people more. So the solution has to be, as people like Russell and Einstein and others imagine in a conversation that existed in a much stronger form, I think, early in the 20th century, that the solution had to be not just the head but the heart. You know, public policy and moral progress. The bargain that gives us civilization is a bargain to not use power. We get our individual rights by society protecting us from others not doing everything they can do but largely doing only what is legal. And so to limit the danger of these new things, we have to limit, ultimately, the ability of individuals to have access, essentially, to pandemic power. We also have to have sensible defense, because no limitation is going to prevent a crazy person from doing something. And you know, and the troubling thing is that it's much easier to do something bad than to defend against all possible bad things, so the offensive uses really have an asymmetric advantage. So these are the kind of thoughts I was thinking in 1999 and 2000, and my friends told me I was getting really depressed, and they were really worried about me. And then I signed a book contract to write more gloomy thoughts about this and moved into a hotel room in New York with one room full of books on the Plague, and you know, nuclear bombs exploding in New York where I would be within the circle, and so on. And then I was there on September 11th, and I stood in the streets with everyone. And it was quite an experience to be there. I got up the next morning and walked out of the city, and all the sanitation trucks were parked on Houston Street and ready to go down and start taking the rubble away. And I walked down the middle, up to the train station, and everything below 14th Street was closed. It was quite a compelling experience, but not really, I suppose, a surprise to someone who'd had his room full of the books. It was always a surprise that it happened then and there, but it wasn't a surprise that it happened at all. And everyone then started writing about this. Thousands of people started writing about this. And I eventually abandoned the book, and then Chris called me to talk at the conference. I really don't talk about this anymore because, you know, there's enough frustrating and depressing things going on. But I agreed to come and say a few things about this. And I would say that we can't give up the rule of law to fight an asymmetric threat, which is what we seem to be doing because of the present, the people that are in power, because that's to give up the thing that makes civilization. And we can't fight the threat in the kind of stupid way we're doing, because a million-dollar act causes a billion dollars of damage, causes a trillion dollar response which is largely ineffective and arguably, probably almost certainly, has made the problem worse. So we can't fight the thing with a million-to-one cost, one-to-a-million cost-benefit ratio. So after giving up on the book — and I had the great honor to be able to join Kleiner Perkins about a year ago, and to work through venture capital on the innovative side, and to try to find some innovations that could address what I saw as some of these big problems. Things where, you know, a factor of 10 difference can make a factor of 1,000 difference in the outcome. I've been amazed in the last year at the incredible quality and excitement of the innovations that have come across my desk. It's overwhelming at times. I'm very thankful for Google and Wikipedia so I can understand at least a little of what people are talking about who come through the doors. But I wanted to share with you three areas that I'm particularly excited about and that relate to the problems that I was talking about in the Wired article. The first is this whole area of education, and it really relates to what Nicholas was talking about with a $100 computer. And that is to say that there's a lot of legs left in Moore's Law. The most advanced transistors today are at 65 nanometers, and we've seen, and I've had the pleasure to invest in, companies that give me great confidence that we'll extend Moore's Law all the way down to roughly the 10 nanometer scale. Another factor of, say, six in dimensional reduction, which should give us about another factor of 100 in raw improvement in what the chips can do. And so, to put that in practical terms, if something costs about 1,000 dollars today, say, the best personal computer you can buy, that might be its cost, I think we can have that in 2020 for 10 dollars. Okay? Now, just imagine what that $100 computer will be in 2020 as a tool for education. I think the challenge for us is — I'm very certain that that will happen, the challenge is, will we develop the kind of educational tools and things with the net to let us take advantage of that device? I'd argue today that we have incredibly powerful computers, but we don't have very good software for them. And it's only in retrospect, after the better software comes along, and you take it and you run it on a ten-year-old machine, you say, God, the machine was that fast? I remember when they took the Apple Mac interface and they put it back on the Apple II. The Apple II was perfectly capable of running that kind of interface, we just didn't know how to do it at the time. So given that we know and should believe — because Moore's Law's been, like, a constant, I mean, it's just been very predictable progress over the last 40 years or whatever. We can know what the computers are going to be like in 2020. It's great that we have initiatives to say, let's go create the education and educate people in the world, because that's a great force for peace. And we can give everyone in the world a $100 computer or a $10 computer in the next 15 years. The second area that I'm focusing on is the environmental problem, because that's clearly going to put a lot of pressure on this world. We'll hear a lot more about that from Al Gore very shortly. The thing that we see as the kind of Moore's Law trend that's driving improvement in our ability to address the environmental problem is new materials. We have a challenge, because the urban population is growing in this century from two billion to six billion in a very short amount of time. People are moving to the cities. They all need clean water, they need energy, they need transportation, and we want them to develop in a green way. We're reasonably efficient in the industrial sectors. We've made improvements in energy and resource efficiency, but the consumer sector, especially in America, is very inefficient. But these new materials bring such incredible innovations that there's a strong basis for hope that these things will be so profitable that they can be brought to the market. And I want to give you a specific example of a new material that was discovered 15 years ago. If we take carbon nanotubes, you know, Iijima discovered them in 1991, they just have incredible properties. And these are the kinds of things we're going to discover as we start to engineer at the nano scale. Their strength: they're almost the strongest material, tensile strength material known. They're very, very stiff. They stretch very, very little. In two dimensions, if you make, like, a fabric out of them, they're 30 times stronger than Kevlar. And if you make a three-dimensional structure, like a buckyball, they have all sorts of incredible properties. If you shoot a particle at them and knock a hole in them, they repair themselves; they go zip and they repair the hole in femtoseconds, which is not — is really quick. (Laughter) If you shine a light on them, they produce electricity. In fact, if you flash them with a camera they catch on fire. If you put electricity on them, they emit light. If you run current through them, you can run 1,000 times more current through one of these than through a piece of metal. You can make both p- and n-type semiconductors, which means you can make transistors out of them. They conduct heat along their length but not across — well, there is no width, but not in the other direction if you stack them up; that's a property of carbon fiber also. If you put particles in them, and they go shooting out the tip — they're like miniature linear accelerators or electron guns. The inside of the nanotubes is so small — the smallest ones are 0.7 nanometers — that it's basically a quantum world. It's a strange place inside a nanotube. And so we begin to see, and we've seen business plans already, where the kind of things Lisa Randall's talking about are in there. I had one business plan where I was trying to learn more about Witten's cosmic dimension strings to try to understand what the phenomenon was going on in this proposed nanomaterial. So inside of a nanotube, we're really at the limit here. So what we see is with these and other new materials that we can do things with different properties — lighter, stronger — and apply these new materials to the environmental problems. New materials that can make water, new materials that can make fuel cells work better, new materials that catalyze chemical reactions, that cut pollution and so on. Ethanol — new ways of making ethanol. New ways of making electric transportation. The whole green dream — because it can be profitable. And we've dedicated — we've just raised a new fund, we dedicated 100 million dollars to these kinds of investments. We believe that Genentech, the Compaq, the Lotus, the Sun, the Netscape, the Amazon, the Google in these fields are yet to be found, because this materials revolution will drive these things forward. The third area that we're working on, and we just announced last week — we were all in New York. We raised 200 million dollars in a specialty fund to work on a pandemic in biodefense. And to give you an idea of the last fund that Kleiner raised was a $400 million fund, so this for us is a very substantial fund. And what we did, over the last few months — well, a few months ago, Ray Kurzweil and I wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about how publishing the 1918 genome was very dangerous. And John Doerr and Brook and others got concerned, [unclear], and we started looking around at what the world was doing about being prepared for a pandemic. And we saw a lot of gaps. And so we asked ourselves, you know, can we find innovative things that will go fill these gaps? And Brooks told me in a break here, he said he's found so much stuff he can't sleep, because there's so many great technologies out there, we're essentially buried. And we need them, you know. We have one antiviral that people are talking about stockpiling that still works, roughly. That's Tamiflu. But Tamiflu — the virus is resistant. It is resistant to Tamiflu. We've discovered with AIDS we need cocktails to work well so that the viral resistance — we need several anti-virals. We need better surveillance. We need networks that can find out what's going on. We need rapid diagnostics so that we can tell if somebody has a strain of flu which we have only identified very recently. We've got to be able to make the rapid diagnostics quickly. We need new anti-virals and cocktails. We need new kinds of vaccines. Vaccines that are broad spectrum. Vaccines that we can manufacture quickly. Cocktails, more polyvalent vaccines. You normally get a trivalent vaccine against three possible strains. We need — we don't know where this thing is going. We believe that if we could fill these 10 gaps, we have a chance to help really reduce the risk of a pandemic. And the difference between a normal flu season and a pandemic is about a factor of 1,000 in deaths and certainly enormous economic impact. So we're very excited because we think we can fund 10, or speed up 10 projects and see them come to market in the next couple years that will address this. So if we can address, use technology, help address education, help address the environment, help address the pandemic, does that solve the larger problem that I was talking about in the Wired article? And I'm afraid the answer is really no, because you can't solve a problem with the management of technology with more technology. If we let an unlimited amount of power loose, then we will — a very small number of people will be able to abuse it. We can't fight at a million-to-one disadvantage. So what we need to do is, we need better policy. And for example, some things we could do that would be policy solutions which are not really in the political air right now but perhaps with the change of administration would be — use markets. Markets are a very strong force. For example, rather than trying to regulate away problems, which probably won't work, if we could price into the cost of doing business, the cost of catastrophe, so that people who are doing things that had a higher cost of catastrophe would have to take insurance against that risk. So if you wanted to put a drug on the market you could put it on. But it wouldn't have to be approved by regulators; you'd have to convince an actuary that it would be safe. And if you apply the notion of insurance more broadly, you can use a more powerful force, a market force, to provide feedback. How could you keep the law? I think the law would be a really good thing to keep. Well, you have to hold people accountable. The law requires accountability. Today scientists, technologists, businessmen, engineers don't have any personal responsibility for the consequences of their actions. So if you tie that — you have to tie that back with the law. And finally, I think we have to do something that's not really — it's almost unacceptable to say this — which, we have to begin to design the future. We can't pick the future, but we can steer the future. Our investment in trying to prevent pandemic flu is affecting the distribution of possible outcomes. We may not be able to stop it, but the likelihood that it will get past us is lower if we focus on that problem. So we can design the future if we choose what kind of things we want to have happen and not have happen, and steer us to a lower-risk place. Vice President Gore will talk about how we could steer the climate trajectory into a lower probability of catastrophic risk. But above all, what we have to do is we have to help the good guys, the people on the defensive side, have an advantage over the people who want to abuse things. And what we have to do to do that is we have to limit access to certain information. And growing up as we have, and holding very high the value of free speech, this is a hard thing for us to accept — for all of us to accept. It's especially hard for the scientists to accept who still remember, you know, Galileo essentially locked up, and who are still fighting this battle against the church. But that's the price of having a civilization. The price of retaining the rule of law is to limit the access to the great and kind of unbridled power. Thank you. (Applause)

A foie gras parable

Dan Barber

{0: 'Dan Barber'}

{0: ['chef']}

{0: 'Dan Barber is a chef and a scholar -- relentlessly pursuing the stories and reasons behind the foods we grow and eat. '}

2008-07-18

2008-11-24

Taste3 2008

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fi', 'fr', 'he', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sv', 'tr', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['entertainment', 'food', 'global issues', 'sustainability', 'Best of the Web']

{214: "A plant's-eye view", 650: 'How food shapes our cities', 790: 'How I fell in love with a fish', 1565: 'The global food waste scandal', 1016: "What's wrong with our food system", 1304: 'Cooking as alchemy'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_barber_a_foie_gras_parable/

At the Taste3 conference, chef Dan Barber tells the story of a small farm in Spain that has found a humane way to produce foie gras. Raising his geese in a natural environment, farmer Eduardo Sousa embodies the kind of food production Barber believes in.

I went to Spain a few months ago and I had the best foie gras of my life. The best culinary experience of my life. Because what I saw, I'm convinced, is the future of cooking. Ridiculous, right? Foie gras and the future of cooking. There's not a food today that's more maligned than foie gras, right? I mean, it's crucified. It was outlawed in Chicago for a while. It's pending here in California, and just recently in New York. It's like if you're a chef and you put it on your menu, you risk being attacked. Really, it happened here in San Francisco to a famous chef. I'm not saying that there's not a rationale for being opposed to foie gras. The reasons usually just boil down to the gavage, which is the force feeding. Basically you take a goose or a duck and you force feed a ton of grain down its throat. More grain in a couple of weeks than it would ever get in a lifetime. Its liver expands by eight times. Suffice to say it's like — it's not the prettiest picture of sustainable farming. The problem for us chefs is that it's so freakin' delicious. (Laughter) I mean, I love the stuff. It is fatty, it's sweet, it's silky, it's unctuous. It makes everything else you put it with taste incredible. Can we produce a menu that's delicious without foie gras? Yes, sure. You can also bike the Tour de France without steroids, right? (Laughter) Not a lot of people are doing it. And for good reason. (Laughter) So several months ago, a friend of mine sent me this link to this guy, Eduardo Sousa. Eduardo is doing what he calls natural foie gras. Natural foie gras. What's natural about foie gras? To take advantage of when the temperature drops in the fall, geese and ducks gorge on food to prepare for the harsh realities of winter. And the rest of the year they're free to roam around Eduardo's land and eat what they want. So no gavage, no force feeding, no factory-like conditions, no cruelty. And it's shockingly not a new idea. His great-granddad started — Patería de Sousa — in 1812. And they've been doing it quietly ever since. That is until last year, when Eduardo won the Coup de Coeur, the coveted French gastronomic prize. It's like the Olympics of food products. He placed first for his foie gras. Big, big problem. As he said to me, that really pissed the French off. (Laughter) He said it sort of gleefully. It was all over the papers. I read about it. It was in Le Monde. "Spanish chef accused ... " — and the French accused him. "Spanish chef accused of cheating." They accused him of paying off the judges. They implicated actually, the Spanish government, amazingly. Huh, amazing. A huge scandal for a few weeks. Couldn't find a shred of evidence. Now, look at the guy. He doesn't look like a guy who's paying off French judges for his foie gras. So that died down, and very soon afterward, new controversy. He shouldn't win because it's not foie gras. It's not foie gras because it's not gavage. There's no force feeding. So by definition, he's lying and should be disqualified. As funny as it sounds, articulating it now and reading about it — actually, if we had talked about it before this controversy, I would have said, "That's kind of true." You know, foie gras by definition, force feeding, it's gavage, and that's what you get when you want foie gras. That is, until I went to Eduardo's farm in Extremadura, 50 miles north of Seville, right on the Portugal border. I saw first-hand a system that is incredibly complex and then at the same time, like everything beautiful in nature, is utterly simple. And he said to me, really from the first moment, my life's work is to give the geese what they want. He repeated that about 50 times in the two days I was with him. I'm just here to give the geese what they want. Actually, when I showed up he was lying down with the geese with his cell phone taking pictures of them like his children in the grass. Amazing. He's really just in love with — he's at one with — he's the goose whisperer. (Laughter) And when I was speaking to him, you know, I thought, like I'm speaking to you now, right, but sort of in the middle of my questions, my excited questions, because the more I got to know him and his system, the more exciting this whole idea became. He kept going like this to me. And I thought, OK, excited Jew from New York, right? I'm talking a little too aggressively, whatever, so you know, I slowed down. And finally, by the end of the day I was like, Ed-uar-do, you know like this? But he was still going like this. I figured it out. I was speaking too loudly. So I hushed my voice. I kind of like asked these questions and chatted with him through a translator in kind of a half whisper. And he stopped doing this. And amazingly, the geese who were on the other side of the paddock when I was around — "Get the hell away from this kid!" — when I lowered my voice, they all came right up to us. Right up to us, like right up to here. Right along the fence line. And fence line was amazing in itself. The fence — like this conception of fence that we have it's totally backward with him. The electricity on this fiberglass fence is only on the outside. He rewired it. He invented it. I've never seen it. Have you? You fence in animals. You electrify the inside. He doesn't. He electrifies only the outside. Why? Because he said to me that he felt like the geese — and he proved this actually, not just a conceit, he proved this — the geese felt manipulated when they were imprisoned in their little paddocks. Even though they were imprisoned in this Garden of Eden with figs and everything else. He felt like they felt manipulated. So he got rid of the electricity, he got rid of current on the inside and kept it on the outside, so it would protect them against coyotes and other predators. Now, what happened? They ate, and he showed me on a chart, how they ate about 20 percent more feed to feed their livers. The landscape is incredible. I mean, his farm is incredible. It really is the Garden of Eden. There's figs and everything else there for the taking. And the irony of ironies is because Extremadura, the area — what does Extremadura mean? Extra hard land, right? Extra difficult. Extra hard. But over four generations, he and his family have literally transformed this extra hard land into a tasting menu. Upgrades the life for these geese. And they are allowed to take whatever they want. Another irony, the double irony is that on the figs and the olives, Eduardo can make more money selling those than he can on the foie gras. He doesn't care. He lets them take what they want and he says, "Usually, it's about 50 percent. They're very fair." The other 50 percent, he takes and he sells and he makes money on them. Part of the income for his farm. A big part of his income for his farm. But he never controls it. They get what they want, they leave the rest for me and I sell it. His biggest obstacle, really, was the marketplace, which demands these days bright yellow foie gras. That's how I've been trained. You want to look and see what good foie gras is, it's got to be bright yellow. It's the indication that it's the best foie gras. Well, because he doesn't force feed, because he doesn't gavage tons of corn, his livers were pretty grey. Or they were. But he found this wild plant called the Lupin bush. The Lupin bush, it's all around Extremadura. He let it go to seed, he took the seeds, he planted it on his 30 acres, all around. And the geese love the Lupin bush. Not for the bush, but for the seeds. And when they eat the seeds, their foie gras turns yellow. Radioactive yellow. Bright yellow. Of the highest quality foie gras yellow I've ever seen. (Laughter) So I'm listening to all this, you know, and I'm like, is this guy for real? Is he making some of this up? Is he like, you know — because he seemed to have an answer for everything, and it was always nature. It was never him. And I was like, you know, I always get a little, like, weirded out by people who deflect everything away from themselves. Because, really, they want you to look at themselves, right? But he deflected everything away from his ingenuity into working with his landscape. So it's like, here I am, I'm on the fence about this guy, but increasingly, eating up his every word. And we're sitting there, and I hear [clapping] from a distance, so I look over. And he grabs my arm and the translator's, and ducks us under a bush and says, "Watch this." "Shush," he says again for the 500th time to me. "Shush, watch this." And this squadron of geese come over. [Clapping] And they're getting louder, louder, louder, like really loud, right over us. And like airport traffic control, as they start to go past us they're called back — and they're called back and back and back. And then they circle around. And his geese are calling up now to the wild geese. [Clapping] And the wild geese are calling down. [Clapping] And it's getting louder and louder and they circle and circle and they land. And I'm just saying, "No way." (Laughter) No way. And I look at Eduardo, who's near tears looking at this, and I say, "You're telling me that your geese are calling to the wild geese to say come for a visit?" And he says, "No, no, no. They've come to stay." They've come to stay? (Laughter) It's like the DNA of a goose is to fly south in the winter, right? I said that. I said "Isn't that what they're put on this Earth for? To fly south in the winter and north when it gets warm?" He said, "No, no, no. Their DNA is to find the conditions that are conducive to life. To happiness. They find it here. They don't need anything more." They stop. They mate with his domesticated geese, and his flock continues. Think about that for a minute. It's brilliant, right? Imagine — I don't know, imagine a hog farm in, like, North Carolina, and a wild pig comes upon a factory farm and decides to stay. (Laughter) So how did it taste? I finally got to taste it before I left. He took me to his neighborhood restaurant and he served me some of his foie gras, confit de foie gras. It was incredible. And the problem with saying that, of course, is that you know, at this point it risks hyperbole really easily. And I'd like to make a metaphor, but I don't have one really. I was drinking this guy's Kool-Aid so much, he could have served me goose feathers and I would have been like, this guy's a genius, you know? I'm really in love with him at this point. But it truly was the best foie gras of my life. So much so that I don't think I had ever really had foie gras until that moment. I'd had something that was called foie gras. But this was transformative. Really transformative. And I say to you, I might not stick to this, but I don't think I'll ever serve foie gras on my menu again because of that taste experience with Eduardo. It was sweet, it was unctuous. It had all the qualities of foie gras, but its fat had a lot of integrity and a lot of honesty. And you could taste herbs, you could taste spices. And I kept — I said, you know, I swear to God I tasted star anise. I was sure of it. And I'm not like some super taster, you know? But I can taste things. There's 100 percent star anise in there. And he says, "No." And I ended up like going down the spices, and finally, it was like, OK, salt and pepper, thinking he's salted and peppered his liver. But no. He takes the liver when he harvests the foie gras, he sticks them in this jar and he confits it. No salt, no pepper, no oil, no spices. What? We went back out for the final tour of the farm, and he showed me the wild pepper plants and the plants that he made sure existed on his farm for salinity. He doesn't need salt and pepper. And he doesn't need spices, because he's got this potpourri of herbs and flavors that his geese love to gorge on. I turned to him at the end of the meal, and it's a question I asked several times, and he hadn't, kind of, answered me directly, but I said, "Now look, you're in Spain, some of the greatest chefs in the world are — Ferran Adria, the preeminent chef of the world today, not that far from you. How come you don't give him this? How come no one's really heard of you?" And it may be because of the wine, or it may be because of my excitement, he answered me directly and he said, "Because chefs don't deserve my foie gras." (Laughter) And he was right. He was right. Chefs take foie gras and they make it their own. They create a dish where all the vectors point at us. With Eduardo it's about the expression of nature. And as he said, I think fittingly, it's a gift from God, with God saying, you've done good work. Simple. I flew home, I'm on the flight with my little black book and I took, you know, pages and pages of notes about it. I really was moved. And in the corner of one of these — one of my notes, is this note that says, when asked, what do you think of conventional foie gras? What do you think of foie gras that 99.99999 percent of the world eats? He said, "I think it's an insult to history." And I wrote, insult to history. I'm on the plane and I'm just tearing my hair out. It's like, why didn't I follow up on that? What the hell does that mean? Insult to history. So I did some research when I got back, and here's what I found. The history of foie gras. Jews invented foie gras. True story. True story. By accident. They were looking for an alternative to schmaltz. Gotten sick of the chicken fat. They were looking for an alternative. And they saw in the fall that there was this natural, beautiful, sweet, delicious fat from geese. And they slaughtered them, used the fat throughout the winter for cooking. The Pharaoh got wind of this — This is true, right off the Internet. The Pharaoh got — (Laughter) I swear to God. (Laughter) The Pharaoh got wind of this and wanted to taste it. He tasted it and fell in love with it. He started demanding it. And he didn't want it just in the fall, he wanted it all year round. And he demanded that the Jews supply enough for everyone. And the Jews, fearing for their life, had to come up with an ingenious idea, or at least try and satisfy the Pharaoh's wishes, of course. And they invented, what? Gavage. They invented gavage in a great moment of fear for their lives, and they provided the Pharaoh with gavage liver, and the good stuff they kept for themselves. Supposedly, anyway. I believe that one. That's the history of foie gras. And if you think about it, it's the history of industrial agriculture. It's the history of what we eat today. Most of what we eat today. Mega-farms, feed lots, chemical amendments, long-distance travel, food processing. All of it, our food system. That's also an insult to history. It's an insult to the basic laws of nature and of biology. Whether we're talking about beef cattle or we're talking about chickens, or we're talking about broccoli or Brussels sprouts, or in the case of this morning's New York Times, catfish — which wholesale are going out of business. Whatever it is, it's a mindset that is reminiscent of General Motors. It's rooted in extraction. Take more, sell more, waste more. And for the future it won't serve us. Jonas Salk has a great quote. He said, "If all the insects disappeared, life on Earth as we know it would disappear within 50 years. If human beings disappeared, life on Earth as we know it would flourish." And he's right. We need now to adopt a new conception of agriculture. Really new. One in which we stop treating the planet as if it were some kind of business in liquidation. And stop degrading resources under the guise of cheap food. We can start by looking to farmers like Eduardo. Farmers that rely on nature for solutions, for answers, rather than imposing solutions on nature. Listening as Janine Benyus, one of my favorite writers and thinkers about this topic says, "Listening to nature's operating instructions." That's what Eduardo does, and does so brilliantly. And what he showed me and what he can show all of us, I think, is that the great thing for chefs, the great blessing for chefs, and for people that care about food and cooking, is that the most ecological choice for food is also the most ethical choice for food. Whether we're talking about Brussels sprouts or foie gras. And it's also almost always, and I haven't found an example otherwise, but almost always, the most delicious choice. That's serendipitous. Thank you. (Applause)

Do the green thing

Andy Hobsbawm

{0: 'Andy Hobsbawm'}

{0: ['internet entrepreneur']}

{0: 'Andy Hobsbawm is the founder and CMO of Evrythng.com and the founder of\r\nthe website Do The Green Thing.'}

2008-02-02

2008-11-26

TED2008

en

['ar', 'as', 'bg', 'ca', 'cs', 'da', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fi', 'fr', 'he', 'hi', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'ku', 'mr', 'my', 'nb', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sl', 'sq', 'sr', 'sv', 'ta', 'th', 'tr', 'uk', 'uz', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['business', 'climate change', 'design', 'entertainment', 'global issues', 'humor', 'media', 'sex']

{74: 'The route to a sustainable future', 243: 'New thinking on the climate crisis', 192: 'A critical look at geoengineering against climate change', 1580: 'Smart failure for a fast-changing world', 250: 'Where does creativity hide?', 1613: '4 lessons in creativity'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/andy_hobsbawm_do_the_green_thing/

Andy Hobsbawm shares a fresh ad campaign about going green -- and some of the fringe benefits.

Great creativity. In times of need, we need great creativity. Discuss. Great creativity is astonishingly, absurdly, rationally, irrationally powerful. Great creativity can spread tolerance, champion freedom, make education seem like a bright idea. (Laughter) Great creativity can turn a spotlight on deprivation, or show that deprivation ain't necessarily so. Great creativity can make politicians electable, or parties unelectable. It can make war seem like tragedy or farce. Creativity is the meme-maker that puts slogans on our t-shirts and phrases on our lips. It's the pathfinder that shows us a simple road through an impenetrable moral maze. Science is clever, but great creativity is something less knowable, more magical. And now we need that magic. This is a time of need. Our climate is changing quickly, too quickly. And great creativity is needed to do what it does so well: to provoke us to think differently with dramatic creative statements. To tempt us to act differently with delightful creative scraps. Here is one such scrap from an initiative I'm involved in using creativity to inspire people to be greener. (Video) Man: You know, rather than drive today, I'm going to walk. Narrator: And so he walked, and as he walked he saw things. Strange and wonderful things he would not otherwise have seen. A deer with an itchy leg. A flying motorcycle. A father and daughter separated from a bicycle by a mysterious wall. And then he stopped. Walking in front of him was her. The woman who as a child had skipped with him through fields and broken his heart. Sure, she had aged a little. In fact, she had aged a lot. But he felt all his old passion for her return. "Ford," he called softly. For that was her name. "Don't say another word, Gusty," she said, for that was his name. "I know a tent next to a caravan, exactly 300 yards from here. Let's go there and make love. In the tent." Ford undressed. She spread one leg, and then the other. Gusty entered her boldly and made love to her rhythmically while she filmed him, because she was a keen amateur pornographer. The earth moved for both of them. And they lived together happily ever after. And all because he decided to walk that day. (Applause) Andy Hobsbawm: We've got the science, we've had the debate. The moral imperative is on the table. Great creativity is needed to take it all, make it simple and sharp. To make it connect. To make it make people want to act. So this is a call, a plea, to the incredibly talented TED community. Let's get creative against climate change. And let's do it soon. Thank you. (Applause)

The coming neurological epidemic

Gregory Petsko

{0: 'Gregory Petsko'}

{0: ['bioengineer']}

{0: "Gregory Petsko is a biochemist who studies the proteins of the body and their biochemical function. Working with Dagmar Ringe, he's doing pioneering work in the way we look at proteins and what they do."}

2008-02-02

2008-11-30

TED2008

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'da', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'eu', 'fa', 'fi', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'ku', 'lt', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sl', 'sq', 'sr', 'sv', 'tr', 'uk', 'uz', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['aging', 'brain', 'business', 'health', 'public health', 'science', 'social change', 'technology', "Alzheimer's"]

{189: 'How electroshock therapy changed me', 184: '3 clues to understanding your brain', 10: "The killer American diet that's sweeping the planet", 2340: "Alzheimer's is not normal aging — and we can cure it", 2004: 'The hunt for "unexpected genetic heroes"', 50637: 'The medical potential of AI and metabolites'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/gregory_petsko_the_coming_neurological_epidemic/

Biochemist Gregory Petsko makes a convincing argument that, in the next 50 years, we'll see an epidemic of neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer's, as the world population ages. His solution: more research into the brain and its functions.

Unless we do something to prevent it, over the next 40 years we’re facing an epidemic of neurologic diseases on a global scale. A cheery thought. On this map, every country that’s colored blue has more than 20 percent of its population over the age of 65. This is the world we live in. And this is the world your children will live in. For 12,000 years, the distribution of ages in the human population has looked like a pyramid, with the oldest on top. It’s already flattening out. By 2050, it’s going to be a column and will start to invert. This is why it’s happening. The average lifespan’s more than doubled since 1840, and it’s increasing currently at the rate of about five hours every day. And this is why that’s not entirely a good thing: because over the age of 65, your risk of getting Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease will increase exponentially. By 2050, there’ll be about 32 million people in the United States over the age of 80, and unless we do something about it, half of them will have Alzheimer’s disease and three million more will have Parkinson’s disease. Right now, those and other neurologic diseases — for which we have no cure or prevention — cost about a third of a trillion dollars a year. It will be well over a trillion dollars by 2050. Alzheimer’s disease starts when a protein that should be folded up properly misfolds into a kind of demented origami. So one approach we’re taking is to try to design drugs that function like molecular Scotch tape, to hold the protein into its proper shape. That would keep it from forming the tangles that seem to kill large sections of the brain when they do. Interestingly enough, other neurologic diseases which affect very different parts of the brain also show tangles of misfolded protein, which suggests that the approach might be a general one, and might be used to cure many neurologic diseases, not just Alzheimer’s disease. There’s also a fascinating connection to cancer here, because people with neurologic diseases have a very low incidence of most cancers. And this is a connection that most people aren’t pursuing right now, but which we’re fascinated by. Most of the important and all of the creative work in this area is being funded by private philanthropies. And there’s tremendous scope for additional private help here, because the government has dropped the ball on much of this, I’m afraid. In the meantime, while we’re waiting for all these things to happen, here’s what you can do for yourself. If you want to lower your risk of Parkinson’s disease, caffeine is protective to some extent; nobody knows why. Head injuries are bad for you. They lead to Parkinson’s disease. And the Avian Flu is also not a good idea. As far as protecting yourself against Alzheimer’s disease, well, it turns out that fish oil has the effect of reducing your risk for Alzheimer’s disease. You should also keep your blood pressure down, because chronic high blood pressure is the biggest single risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease. It’s also the biggest risk factor for glaucoma, which is just Alzheimer’s disease of the eye. And of course, when it comes to cognitive effects, "use it or lose it" applies, so you want to stay mentally stimulated. But hey, you’re listening to me. So you’ve got that covered. And one final thing. Wish people like me luck, okay? Because the clock is ticking for all of us. Thank you.

The mysterious lives of giant trees

Richard Preston

{0: 'Richard Preston'}

{0: ['writer']}

{0: 'Richard Preston wrote The Hot Zone, a classic look at the Ebola virus and the scientists who fight it. His wide-ranging curiosity about science and people has led him to cover a dizzying list of topics, with a lapidary attention to detail and an ear for the human voice.'}

2008-02-02

2008-12-02

TED2008

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['complexity', 'exploration', 'nature', 'science', 'trees', 'writing', 'fungi']

{264: 'The astonishing hidden world of the deep ocean', 40: 'The story of life in photographs', 299: 'A hero of the Congo forest', 948: "The world's oldest living things", 476: 'Conserving the canopy', 475: 'How to restore a rainforest'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_preston_the_mysterious_lives_of_giant_trees/

Science writer Richard Preston talks about some of the most enormous living beings on the planet, the giant trees of the US Pacific Northwest. Growing from a tiny seed, they support vast ecosystems -- and are still, largely, a mystery.

The north coast of California has rainforests — temperate rainforests — where it can rain more than 100 inches a year. This is the realm of the Coast Redwood tree. Its species name is Sequoia sempervirens. Sequoia sempervirens is the tallest living organism on Earth. The range of the species goes up to as much as 380 feet tall. That's 38 stories tall. These are trees that would stand out in midtown Manhattan. Nobody knows how old the oldest living Coast Redwoods are because nobody has ever drilled into any of them to count their annual growth rings, and, in any case, the centers of the oldest individuals appear to be hollow. But it's believed that the oldest living Redwoods are perhaps 2,500 years old — roughly the age of the Parthenon — although it's also suspected that there may be individual trees that are older than that. You can see the range of the Coast Redwoods. It's here, in red. The largest individuals of this species, the dreadnoughts of their kind, live just on the north coast of California, where the rain is really intense. In recent historic times, about 96 percent of the Coast Redwood forest was cut down, especially in a series of bursts of intense liquidation logging, clear-cutting that took place in the 1970s through the early 1990s. Even so, about four percent of the primeval Redwood rainforest remains intact, wild and now protected — entirely protected — in a chain of small parks strung out like pearls along the north coast of California, including Redwood National Park. But curiously, Redwood rainforests, the fragments that we have left, to this day remain under-explored. Redwood rainforest is incredibly difficult to move through, and even today, individual trees are being discovered that have never been seen before, including, in the summer of 2006, Hyperion, the world's tallest tree. I'm going to do a little Gedanken experiment. I'm going to ask you to imagine what a Redwood really is as a living organism. And, Chris, if I could have you up here? I have a tape measure. It's a kind loaner from TED. And Chris, if you could take the end of that tape measure? We're going to show you what the diameter at breast height of a big Redwood is. Unfortunately, this tape isn't long enough — it's only a 25-foot tape. Chris, could you extend your arm out that way? There we go. OK. And maybe about here, about 30 feet, is the diameter of a big Redwood. Now, let your imagination go upward into space. Think about this tree, rising upward into Redwood space, 325 feet, 32 stories, an individual living organism articulating its forms upward into space over long periods of time. The Redwood species seems to exist in another kind of time: not human time, but what we might call Redwood time. Redwood time moves at a more stately pace than human time. To us, when we look at a Redwood tree, it seems to be motionless and still, and yet Redwoods are constantly in motion, moving upward into space, articulating themselves and filling Redwood space over Redwood time, over thousands of years. Plant this small seed, wait 2,000 years, and you get this: the Lost Monarch. It dwells in the Grove of Titans on the north coast, and was discovered in 1998. And yet, when you look at the base of a Redwood tree, you're not seeing the organism. You're like a mouse looking at the foot of an elephant, and most of the organism is overhead, unseen. I became very interested, and I wrote about a couple. Steve Sillett and Marie Antoine are the principal explorers of the Redwood forest canopy. They're world-class athletes, and they also are world-class forest ecology scientists. Steve Sillett, when he was a 19-year-old college student at Reed College, had heard that the Redwood forest canopy is considered to be a so-called Redwood desert. That is to say, at that time it was believed that there was nothing up there except the branches of Redwood trees. And with a friend of his, he took it upon himself to free-climb a Redwood without ropes or any equipment to see what was up there. He climbed up a small tree next to this giant Redwood, and then he leaped through space and grabbed a branch with his hands, and ended up hanging, like catching a bar of a trapeze. And then, from there, he climbed directly up the bark until he got to the top of the tree. His friend, a guy named Marwood Harris, was following behind. Neither one of them had noticed that there was a Yellow Jacket wasp's nest the size of a bowling ball hanging from the branch that Steve had jumped into. And when Marwood made the jump, he was covered with wasps stinging him in the face and eyes. He nearly let go. He would have fallen to his death, being 75 feet above the ground. But they made it to the top, and what they found was not a Redwood desert, but a lost world — a kind of three-dimensional labyrinth in the air, filled with unknown life. Now, I had been working on other topics: the emergence of infectious diseases, which come out of the natural ecosystems of the Earth, make a trans-species jump, and get into humans. After three books on this, it got to be a bit much, in a way. My wife and I adore our children. And I began climbing trees with my kids as just something to do with them, using the so-called arborist climbing technique, with ropes. You use ropes to get yourself up into the crown of a tree. Children are incredibly adept at climbing trees. That's my son, Oliver. They don't seem to suffer from the same fear of heights that humans do. (Laughter) If ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, then children are somewhat closer to our roots as primates in the arboreal forest. Humans appear to be the only primates that I know of that are afraid of heights. All other primates, when they're scared, they run up a tree, where they feel safe. We camped overnight in the trees, in tree boats. This is my daughter Laura, then 15, looking out of a tree boat. She's, by the way, tied in with a rope so she can't fall. Looking out of a tree boat in the morning and hearing birdsong coming in three dimensions around us. We had been visited in the night by flying squirrels, who don't seem to recognize humans for what they are because they've never seen them in the canopy before. And we practiced advanced techniques like sky-walking, where you can move from tree to tree through space, rather like Spiderman. It became a writing project. When Steve Sillett gets up into a big Redwood, he fires an arrow, which trails a fishing line, which gets over a branch in the tree, and then you ascend up a rope which has been dragged into the tree by the line. You ascend 30 stories. There are two people climbing this tree, Gaya, which is thought to be one of the oldest Redwoods. There they are. They are only one-seventh of the way up that tree. You do feel a sense of exposure. There is a small person right down there on the ground. You feel like you're climbing a wall of wood. But then you enter the Redwood canopy, and it's like coming through a layer of clouds. And all of a sudden, you lose sight of the ground, and you also lose sight of the sky, and you're in a three-dimensional labyrinth in the air filled with hanging gardens of ferns growing out of soil, which is populated with all kinds of small organisms. There are epiphytes, plants that grow on trees. These are huckleberry bushes. Many species of mosses, and then all sorts of lichens just plastering the tree. When you get near the top of the tree, you feel like you can't fall — in fact, it's difficult to move. You're worming your way through branches which are crowded with living things that don't occur near the ground. It's like scuba diving into a coral reef, except you're going upward instead of downward. And then the trees tend to flare out into platform-like areas at the top. Maria's sitting on one of them. These limbs could be five to six hundred years old. Redwoods grow very slowly in their tops. They also have a feature: thickets of huckleberry bushes that grow out of the tops of Redwood trees that are technically known as huckleberry afros, and you can sit there and snack on the berries while you're resting. Redwoods have an enormous surface area that extends upward into space because they have a propensity to do something called reiteration. A Redwood is a fractal. And as they put out limbs, the limbs burst into small trees, copies of the Redwood. Now, here we see a reiteration in Chronos, one of the older Redwoods. This reiteration is a huge flying buttress that comes out the tree itself. This buttress is less than halfway up the tree. And then it bursts into a forest of Redwoods. This particular extra trunk is a meter across at the base and extends upward for 150 feet. It's as big as any of the biggest trees east of the Mississippi River, and yet it's only a minor feature on Chronos. This three-dimensional map of the crown structure of a Redwood named Iluvatar, made by Steve Sillett, Marie Antoine and their colleagues, gives you an idea. What you're seeing here is a hierarchical schematic development of the trunks of this tree as it has elaborated itself over time into six layers of fractal, of trunks springing from trunks springing from trunks. I asked Steve to put a human being in this to give a sense of scale. There's the person, right there. The person is waving to us. I've wanted to ask Craig Venter if it would be possible to insert a synthetic chromosome into a human so that we could reiterate ourselves if we wanted to. And if we were able to reiterate, then the fingers of our hand would be people who looked like us, and they would have people on their hands and so on. And if we had Redwood-like biology, we would have six layers of people on our hands, as it were. And it would be a lovely thing to be able to wave to someone and have all our reiterations wave at the same time. (Laughter) To reiterate the point, let's go closer into Iluvatar. We're looking at that yellow box. And this hallucinatory drawing shows you — everything you see in this drawing is Iluvatar. These are millennial structures — portions of the tree that are believed to be more than 1,000 years old. There are four humans in this shot — one, two, three, four. And there's also something that I want to show you. This is a flying buttress. Redwoods grow back into themselves as they expand into space, and this flying buttress is a limb shot out of that small trunk, going back into the main trunk and fusing with it. Flying buttresses, just as in a cathedral, help strengthen the crown of the tree and help the tree exist longer through time. The scientists are doing all kinds of experiments in these trees. They've wired them like patients in an ICU. They're finding out that Redwoods can move moisture out of the air and down into their trunks, possibly all the way into their root systems. They also have the ability to put roots anywhere in the tree itself. If a portion of a Redwood is rotting, the Redwood will send roots into its own form and draw nutrients out of itself as it falls apart. If we had Redwood-like biology, if we got a touch of gangrene in our arm then we could just, you know, extract the nutrients extract the nutrients and the moisture out of it until it fell off. Canopy soil can occur up to a meter deep, hundreds of feet above the ground, and there are organisms in this soil that have, as yet, no names. This is an unnamed species of copepod. A copepod is a crustacean. These copepods are a major constituent of the oceans, and they are a major part of the diet of grazing baleen whales. What they're doing in the Redwood forest canopy soil hundreds of feet above the ocean, or how they got there, is completely unknown. There are some interesting theories that, if I had time, I would tell you about. But as you go and you look closer at a tree, what you see is, you see increasing complexity. We're looking at the very top of Gaya, which is thought to be the oldest Redwood. Gaya may be 3,000 to 5,000 years old, no one really knows, but its top has broken off and it's been rotting back now. This little Japanese garden-like creation probably took 700 years to form in its complexity that we see right now. As you look at a tree, it takes a magnifying glass to see a giant tree. I have to show you something unfortunately very sad at the conclusion of this talk. The Eastern Hemlock tree has often been described as the Redwood of the East. And we're moving in a full circle now. In the 1950s, a small organism appeared in Richmond, Virginia, called the Hemlock woolly adelgid. It made a trans-species jump out of some other organism in Asia, where it was living on Hemlock trees in Asia. When it moved into its new host, the Eastern Hemlock tree, it escaped its predators, and the new tree had no resistance to it. The Eastern Hemlock forest is being considered in some ways the last fragments of primeval rainforest east of the Mississippi River. I hadn't even known that there were rainforests in the east, but in Great Smoky Mountains National Park it can rain up to 100 inches of rain a year. And in the last two to three summers, these invasive organisms, this kind of Ebola of the trees, as it were, has swept through the primeval Hemlock forest of the east, and has absolutely wiped it out. I climbed there this past summer. This is Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and the Hemlocks are dead as far as the eye can see. And what we're seeing is not just the potential death of the Eastern Hemlock species — that is to say, its extinction from nature due to this invading parasite — but we're also seeing the death of an incredibly complex ecosystem for which these trees are merely the substrate for the aerial labyrinth of the sky that exists in their crowns. It's absolutely heartbreaking to see. One of the things that is just — I almost can't conceive it — is the idea that the national news media hasn't picked this up at all, and this is the devastation of one of the most important ecosystems in North America. What can the Redwoods tell us about ourselves? Well, I think they can tell us something about human time. The flickering, transitory quality of human time and the brevity of human life — the necessity to love. But we're different from trees, and they can also teach us something about ourselves in the differences that we have. We are human, and we have the capacity to love, we have the capacity to wonder, and we have a sort of boundless curiosity, a restless inquisitiveness that so suits us as primates, I think. And at least for me, personally, the trees have taught me an entirely new way of loving my children. Exploring with them the forest canopy has been one of the most lovely things of my existence on Earth. And I think that one of the happiest things is the sense that with my children I've been able to introduce them into the very small circle of humans who are lucky enough, or possibly stupid enough, to still climb trees. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: I think at a previous TED, I think it was Nathan Myhrvold who told me that it was thought that because these trees are like, 2,000 years and older, on many of them there are ecosystems where there are species that are not found anywhere on the Earth except on that one tree. Is that correct? Richard Preston: Yes, that is correct. I mentioned Hyperion, the world's tallest tree. And I was a member of a climbing team that made the first climb of it, in 2006. And while we were climbing Hyperion, Marie Antoine spotted an unknown species of golden-brown ant about halfway up the trunk. Ants are not known to occur in Redwood trees, curiously enough, and we wondered whether this ant, this species of ant, was only endemic to that one tree, or possibly to that grove. And in subsequent climbs they could never find that ant again, and so no specimens have ever been collected. We don't know what it is — we just know it's there. CA: So, you have to wonder when, you know, if some other species than us was recording the stories that mattered on Earth, you know, our stories are about Iraq and war and politics and celebrity gossip. You've just told us a different story of this tragic arms race that's happening, and maybe whole ecosystems gone forever. It's an amazing sense of wonder you've given me, and a sense of just how fragile this whole thing is. RP: It is fragile, and you know, I think about emerging human diseases — parasites that move into the human species. But that's just a very small facet of a much greater problem of invasions of species worldwide, all through the ecosystems, and you know, the Earth itself — CA: Partly caused by us, inadvertently. RP: Caused by humans. Caused by the movement of humans. You can think of the Earth's biosphere as a palace, and the continents are rooms in the palace, and the islands are small rooms. But lately, the doors of the palace have been flung open, and the walls are coming down. CA: Richard Preston, thank you very much, I think. RP: Thank you.

Life in Second Life

Philip Rosedale

{0: 'Philip Rosedale'}

{0: ['entrepreneur']}

{0: 'Philip Rosedale (avatar "Philip Linden") is founder of Second Life, an online 3D virtual world inhabited by millions. He\'s chair of Linden Labs, the company behind the digital society.'}

2008-05-08

2008-12-03

Serious Play 2008

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['cities', 'communication', 'community', 'computers', 'entertainment', 'entrepreneur', 'life', 'technology', 'virtual reality', 'Best of the Web']

{2459: 'A glimpse of the future through an augmented reality headset', 361: 'Are games better than life?', 2461: 'A futuristic vision of the age of holograms', 139: "Tour Microsoft's Virtual Earth", 872: 'Pointing to the future of UI', 247: 'The new open-source economics'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/philip_rosedale_life_in_second_life/

Why build a virtual world? Philip Rosedale talks about the virtual society he founded, Second Life, and its underpinnings in human creativity. It's a place so different that anything could happen.

You know, we're going to do things a little differently. I'm not going to show you a presentation. I'm going to talk to you. And at the same time, we're going to look at just images from a photo stream that is pretty close to live of things that — snapshots from Second Life. So hopefully this will be fascinating. You can — I can compete for your attention with the strange pictures that you see on screen that come from there. I thought I'd talk a little bit about some just big ideas about this, and then get John back out here so we can talk interactively a little bit more and think and ask questions. You know, I guess the first question is, why build a virtual world at all? And I think the answer to that is always going to be at least driven to a certain extent by the people initially crazy enough to start the project, you know. So I can give you a little bit of first background just on me and what moved me as a — really going back as far as a teenager and then an adult, to actually try and build this kind of thing. I was a very creative kid who read a lot, and got into electronics first, and then later, programming computers, when I was really young. I was just always trying to make things. I was just obsessed with taking things apart and building things, and just anything I could do with my hands or with wood or electronics or metal or anything else. And so, for example — and it's a great Second Life thing — I had a bedroom. And every kid, you know, as a teenager, has got his bedroom he retreats to — but I wanted my door, I thought it would be cool if my door went up rather than opened, like on Star Trek. I thought it would be neat to do that. And so I got up in the ceiling and I cut through the ceiling joists, much to my parents' delight, and put the door, you know, being pulled up through the ceiling. I built — I put a garage-door opener up in the attic that would pull this door up. You can imagine the amount of time that it took me to do this to the house and the displeasure of my parents. The thing that was always striking to me was that we as people could have so many really amazing ideas about things we'd like to do, but are so often unable, in the real world, to actually do those things — to actually cobble together the materials and go through the actual execution phase of building something that you imagine from a design perspective. And so for me, I know that when the Internet came around and I was doing computer programming and just, you know, just generally trying to run my own little company and figure out what to do with the Internet and with computers, I was just immediately struck by how the ultimate thing that you would really want to do with the Internet and with computers would be to use the Internet and connected computers to simulate a world to sort of recreate the laws of physics and the rules of how things went together — the sort of — the idea of atoms and how to make things, and do that inside a computer so that we could all get in there and make stuff. And so for me that was the thing that was so enticing. I just wanted this place where you could build things. And so I think you see that in the genesis of what has happened with Second Life, and I think it's important. I also think that more generally, the use of the Internet and technology as a kind of a space between us for creativity and design is a general trend. It is a — sort of a great human progress. Technology is just generally being used to allow us to create in as shared and social a way as possible. And I think that Second Life and virtual worlds more generally represent the best we can do to achieve that right now. You know, another way to look at that, and related to the content and, you know, thinking about space, is to connect sort of virtual worlds to space. I thought that might be a fun thing to talk about for a second. If you think about going into space, it's a fascinating thing. So many movies, so many kids, we all sort of dream about exploring space. Now, why is that? Stop for a moment and ask, why that conceit? Why do we as people want to do that? I think there's a couple of things. It's what we see in the movies — you know, it's this dream that we all share. One is that if you went into space you'd be able to begin again. In some sense, you would become someone else in that journey, because there wouldn't be — you'd leave society and life as you know it, behind. And so inevitably, you would transform yourself — irreversibly, in all likelihood — as you began this exploration. And then the second thing is that there's this tangible sense that if you travel far enough, you can find out there — oh, yeah — you have no idea what you're going to find once you get there, into space. It's going to be different than here. And in fact, it's going to be so different than what we see here on earth that anything is going to be possible. So that's kind of the idea — we as humans crave the idea of creating a new identity and going into a place where anything is possible. And I think that if you really sit and think about it, virtual worlds, and where we're going with more and more computing technology, represent essentially the likely, really tactically possible version of space exploration. We are moved by the idea of virtual worlds because, like space, they allow us to reinvent ourselves and they contain anything and everything, and probably anything could happen there. You know, to give you a size idea about scale, you know, comparing space to Second Life, most people don't realize, kind of — and then this is just like the Internet in the early '90s. In fact, Second Life virtual worlds are a lot like the Internet in the early '90s today: everybody's very excited, there's a lot of hype and excitement about one idea or the next from moment to moment, and then there's despair and everybody thinks the whole thing's not going to work. Everything that's happening with Second Life and more broadly with virtual worlds, all happened in the early '90s. We always play a game at the office where you can take any article and find the same article where you just replace the words "Second Life" with "Web," and "virtual reality" with "Internet." You can find exactly the same articles written about everything that people are observing. To give you an idea of scale, Second Life is about 20,000 CPUs at this point. It's about 20,000 computers connected together in three facilities in the United States right now, that are simulating this virtual space. And the virtual space itself — there's about 250,000 people a day that are wandering around in there, so the kind of, active population is something like a smallish city. The space itself is about 10 times the size of San Francisco, and it's about as densely built out. So it gives you an idea of scale. Now, it's expanding very rapidly — about five percent a month or so right now, in terms of new servers being added. And so of course, radically unlike the real world, and like the Internet, the whole thing is expanding very, very quickly, and historically exponentially. So that sort of space exploration thing is matched up here by the amount of content that's in there, and I think that amount is critical. It was critical with the virtual world that it be this space of truly infinite possibility. We're very sensitive to that as humans. You know, you know when you see it. You know when you can do anything in a space and you know when you can't. Second Life today is this 20,000 machines, and it's about 100 million or so user-created objects where, you know, an object would be something like this, possibly interactive. Tens of millions of them are thinking all the time; they have code attached to them. So it's a really large world already, in terms of the amount of stuff that's there and that's very important. If anybody plays, like, World of Warcraft, World of Warcraft comes on, like, four DVDs. Second Life, by comparison, has about 100 terabytes of user-created data, making it about 25,000 times larger. So again, like the Internet compared to AOL, and the sort of chat rooms and content on AOL at the time, what's happening here is something very different, because the sheer scale of what people can do when they're enabled to do anything they want is pretty amazing. The last big thought is that it is almost certainly true that whatever this is going to evolve into is going to be bigger in total usage than the Web itself. And let me justify that with two statements. Generically, what we use the Web for is to organize, exchange, create and consume information. It's kind of like Irene talking about Google being data-driven. I'd say I kind of think about the world as being information. Everything that we interact with, all the experiences that we have, is kind of us flowing through a sea of information and interacting with it in different ways. The Web puts information in the form of text and images. The topology, the geography of the Web is text-to-text links for the most part. That's one way of organizing information, but there are two things about the way you access information in a virtual world that I think are the important ways that they're very different and much better than what we've been able to do to date with the Web. The first is that, as I said, the — well, the first difference for virtual worlds is that information is presented to you in the virtual world using the most powerful iconic symbols that you can possibly use with human beings. So for example, C-H-A-I-R is the English word for that, but a picture of this is a universal symbol. Everybody knows what it means. There's no need to translate it. It's also more memorable if I show you that picture, and I show you C-H-A-I-R on a piece of paper. You can do tests that show that you'll remember that I was talking about a chair a couple of days later a lot better. So when you organize information using the symbols of our memory, using the most common symbols that we've been immersed in all our lives, you maximally both excite, stimulate, are able to remember, transfer and manipulate data. And so virtual worlds are the best way for us to essentially organize and experience information. And I think that's something that people have talked about for 20 years — you know, that 3D, that lifelike environments are really important in some magical way to us. But the second thing — and I think this one is less obvious — is that the experience of creating, consuming, exploring that information is in the virtual world implicitly and inherently social. You are always there with other people. And we as humans are social creatures and must, or are aided by, or enjoy more, the consumption of information in the presence of others. It's essential to us. You can't escape it. When you're on Amazon.com and you're looking for digital cameras or whatever, you're on there right now, when you're on the site, with like 5,000 other people, but you can't talk to them. You can't just turn to the people that are browsing digital cameras on the same page as you, and ask them, "Hey, have you seen one of these before? Because I'm thinking about buying it." That experience of like, shopping together, just as a simple example, is an example of how as social creatures we want to experience information in that way. So that second point, that we inherently experience information together or want to experience it together, is critical to essentially, kind of, this trend of where we're going to use technology to connect us. And so I think, again, that it's likely that in the next decade or so these virtual worlds are going to be the most common way as human beings that we kind of use the electronics of the Internet, if you will, to be together, to consume information. You know, mapping in India — that's such a great example. Maybe the solution there involves talking to other people in real time. Asking for advice, rather than any possible way that you could just statically organize a map. So I think that's another big point. I think that wherever this is all going, whether it's Second Life or its descendants, or something broader that happens all around the world at a lot of different points — this is what we're going to see the Internet used for, and total traffic and total unique users is going to invert, so that the Web and its bibliographic set of text and graphical information is going to become a tool or a part of that consumption pattern, but the pattern itself is going to happen mostly in this type of an environment. Big idea, but I think highly defensible. So let me stop there and bring John back, and maybe we can just have a longer conversation. Thank you. John. That's great. (Applause) John Hockenberry: Why is the creation, the impulse to create Second Life, not a utopian impulse? Like for example, in the 19th century, any number of works of literature that imagined alternative worlds were explicitly utopian. Philip Rosedale: I think that's great. That's such a deep question. Yeah. Is a virtual world likely to be a utopia, would be one way I'd say it. The answer is no, and I think the reason why is because the Web itself as a good example is profoundly bottoms-up. That idea of infinite possibility, that magic of anything can happen, only happens in an environment where you really know that there's a fundamental freedom at the level of the individual actor, at the level of the Lego blocks, if you will, that make up the virtual world. You have to have that level of freedom, and so I'm often asked that, you know, is there a, kind of, utopian or, is there a utopian tendency to Second Life and things like it, that you would create a world that has a grand scheme to it? Those top-down schemes are alienating to just about everybody, even if you mean well when you build them. And what's more, human society, when it's controlled, when you set out a grand scheme of rules, a new way of people interacting, or a new way of laying out a city, or whatever, that stuff historically has never scaled much beyond, you know — I always laughingly say — the Mall of America, you know, which is like, the largest piece of centrally designed architecture that, you know, has been built. JH: The Kremlin was pretty big. PR: The Kremlin, yeah. That's true. The whole complex. JH: Give me a story of a tool you created at the beginning in Second Life that you were pretty sure people would want to use in the creation of their avatars or in communicating that people actually in practice said, no, I'm not interested in that at all, and name something that you didn't come up with that almost immediately people began to demand. PR: I'm sure I can think of multiple examples of both of those. One of my favorites. I had this feature that I built into Second Life — I was really passionate about it. It was an ability to kind of walk up close to somebody and have a more private conversation, but it wasn't instant messaging because you had to sort of befriend somebody. It was just this idea that you could kind of have a private chat. I just remember it was one of those examples of data-driven design. I thought it was such a good idea from my perspective, and it was just absolutely never used, and we ultimately — I think we've now turned it off, if I remember. We finally gave up, took it out of the code. But more generally, you know, one other example I think about this, which is great relative to the utopian idea. Second Life originally had 16 simulators. It now has 20,000. So when it only had 16, it was only about as big as this college campus. And we had — we zoned it, you know: we put a nightclub, we put a disco where you could dance, and then we had a place where you could fight with guns if you wanted to, and we had another place that was like a boardwalk, kind of a Coney Island. And we laid out the zoning, but of course, people could build all around it however they wanted to. And what was so amazing right from the start was that the idea that we had put out in the zoning concept, basically, was instantly and thoroughly ignored, and like, two months into the whole thing, — which is really a small amount of time, even in Second Life time — I remember the users, the people who were then using Second Life, the residents came to me and said, we want to buy the disco — because I had built it — we want to buy that land and raze it and put houses on it. And I sold it to them — I mean, we transferred ownership and they had a big party and blew up the entire building. And I remember that that was just so telling, you know, that you didn't know exactly what was going to happen. When you think about stuff that people have built that's popular — JH: CBGB's has to close eventually, you know. That's the rule. PR: Exactly. And it — but it closed on day one, basically, in Internet time. You know, an example of something — pregnancy. You can have a baby in Second Life. This is done entirely using, kind of, the tools that are built into Second Life, so the innate concept of becoming pregnant and having a baby, of course — Second Life is, at the platform level, at the level of the company — at Linden Lab — Second Life has no game properties to it whatsoever. There is no attempt to structure the experience, to make it utopian in that sense that we put into it. So of course, we never would have put a mechanism for having babies or, you know, taking two avatars and merging them, or something. But people built the ability to have babies and care for babies as a purchasable experience that you can have in Second Life and so — I mean, that's a pretty fascinating example of, you know, what goes on in the overall economy. And of course, the existence of an economy is another idea. I didn't talk about it, but it's a critical feature. When people are given the opportunity to create in the world, there's really two things they want. One is fair ownership of the things they create. And then the second one is — if they feel like it, and they're not going to do it in every case, but in many they are — they want to actually be able to sell that creation as a way of providing for their own livelihood. True on the Web — also true in Second Life. And so the existence of an economy is critical. JH: Questions for Philip Rosedale? Right here. (Audience: Well, first an observation, which is that you look like a character.) JH: The observation is, Philip has been accused of looking like a character, an avatar, in Second Life. Respond, and then we'll get the rest of your question. PR: But I don't look like my avatar. (Laughter) How many people here know what my avatar looks like? That's probably not very many. JH: Are you ripping off somebody else's avatar with that, sort of — PR: No, no. I didn't. One of the other guys at work had a fantastic avatar — a female avatar — that I used to be once in a while. But my avatar is a guy wearing chaps. Spiky hair — spikier than this. Kind of orange hair. Handlebar mustache. Kind of a Village People sort of a character. So, very cool. JH: And your question? (Audience: [Unclear].) JH: The question is, there appears to be a lack of cultural fine-tuning in Second Life. It doesn't seem to have its own culture, and the sort of differences that exist in the real world aren't translated into the Second Life map. PR: Well, first of all, we're very early, so this has only been going on for a few years. And so part of what we see is the same evolution of human behavior that you see in emerging societies. So a fair criticism — is what it is — of Second Life today is that it's more like the Wild West than it is like Rome, from a cultural standpoint. That said, the evolution of, and the nuanced interaction that creates culture, is happening at 10 times the speed of the real world, and in an environment where, if you walk into a bar in Second Life, 65 percent of the people there are not in the United States, and in fact are speaking their, you know, various and different languages. In fact, one of the ways to make money in Second Life is to make really cool translators that you drag onto your body and they basically, kind of, pop up on your screen and allow you to use Google or Babel Fish or one of the other online text translators to on-the-fly translate spoken — I'm sorry — typed text between individuals. And so, the multicultural nature and the sort of cultural melting pot that's happening inside Second Life is quite — I think, quite remarkable relative to what in real human terms in the real world we've ever been able to achieve. So, I think that culture will fine-tune, it will emerge, but we still have some years to wait while that happens, as you would naturally expect. JH: Other questions? Right here. (Audience: What's your demographic?) JH: What's your demographic? PR: So, the question is, what's the demographic. So, the average age of a person in Second Life is 32, however, the use of Second Life increases dramatically as your physical age increases. So as you go from age 30 to age 60 — and there are many people in their sixties using Second Life — this is also not a sharp curve — it's very, very distributed — usage goes up in terms of, like, hours per week by 40 percent as you go from age 30 to age 60 in real life, so there's not — many people make the mistake of believing that Second Life is some kind of an online game. Actually it's generally unappealing — I'm just speaking broadly and critically — it's not very appealing to people that play online video games, because the graphics are not yet equivalent to — I mean, these are very nice pictures, but in general the graphics are not quite equivalent to the fine-tuned graphics that you see in a Grand Theft Auto 4. So average age: 32. I mentioned 65 percent of the users are not in the United States. The distribution amongst countries is extremely broad. There's users from, you know, virtually every country in the world now in Second Life. The dominant ones are — if you take the UK and Europe, together they make up about 55 percent of the usage base in Second Life. In terms of psychographic — oh, men and women: men and women are almost equally matched in Second Life, so about 45 percent of the people online right now on Second Life are women. Women use Second Life, though, about 30 to 40 percent more, on an hours basis, than men do, meaning that more men sign up than women, and more women stay and use it than men. So that's another demographic fact. In terms of psychographic, you know, the people in Second Life are remarkably dissimilar relative to what you might think, when you go in and talk to them and meet them, and I would, you know, challenge you to just do this and find out. But it's not a bunch of programmers. It's not easy to describe as a demographic. If I had to just sort of paint a broad picture, I'd say, remember the people who were really getting into eBay in the first few years of eBay? Maybe a little bit like that: in other words, people who are early adopters. They tend to be creative. They tend to be entrepreneurial. A lot of them — about 55,000 people so far — are cash-flow positive: they're making money from what — I mean, real-world money — from what they're doing in Second Life, so it's a very build — still a creative, building things, build-your-own-business type of an orientation. So, that's it. JH: You describe yourself, Philip, as someone who was really creative when you were young and, you know, liked to make things. I mean, it's not often that you hear somebody describe themselves as really creative. I suspect that's possibly a euphemism for C student who spent a lot of time in his room? Is it possible? (Laughter) PR: I was a — there were times I was a C student. You know, it's funny. When I got to college — I studied physics in college — and I got really — it was funny, because I was definitely a more antisocial kid. I read all the time. I was shy. I don't seem like it now, but I was very shy. Moved around a bunch — had that experience too. So I did, kind of, I think, live in my own world, and obviously that helps, you know, engage your real interest in something. JH: So you're on your fifth life at this point? PR: If you count, yeah, cities. So — but I did — and I didn't do — I think I didn't do as well in school as I could have. I think you're right. I wasn't, like, an obsessed — you know, get A's kind of guy. I was going to say, I had a great social experience when I went to college that I hadn't had before, a more fraternal experience, where I met six or seven other guys who I studied physics with, and I was very competitive with them, so then I started to get A's. But you're right: I wasn't an A student. JH: Last question. Right here. (Audience: In the pamphlet, there's a statement — ) JH: You want to paraphrase that? PR: Yeah, so let me restate that. So, you're saying that in the pamphlet there's a statement that we may come to prefer our digital selves to our real ones — our more malleable or manageable digital identities to our real identities — and that in fact, much of human life and human experience may move into the digital realm. And then that's kind of a horrifying thought, of course. That's a frightening change, frightening disruption. I guess, and you're asking, what do I think about that? How do I — JH: What's your response to the people who would say, that's horrifying? (Audience: If someone would say to you, I find that disturbing, what would be your response?) PR: Well, I'd say a couple of things. One is, it's disturbing like the Internet or electricity was. That is to say, it's a big change, but it isn't avoidable. So, no amount of backpedaling or intentional behavior or political behavior is going to keep these technology changes from connecting us together, because the basic motive that people have — to be creative and entrepreneurial — is going to drive energy into these virtual worlds in the same way that it has with the Web. So this change, I believe, is a huge disruptive change. Obviously, I'm the optimist and a big believer in what's going on here, but I think that as — even a sober, you know, the most sober, disconnected thinker about this, looking at it from the side, has to conclude, based on the data, that with those kinds of economic forces at play, there is definitely going to be a sea change, and that change is going to be intensely disruptive relative to our concept of our very lives and being, and our identities, as well. I don't think we can get away from those changes. I think generally, we were talking about this — I think that generally being present in a virtual world and being challenged by it, being — surviving there, having a good life there, so to speak, is a challenge because of the multiculturality of it, because of the languages, because of the entrepreneurial richness of it, the sort of flea market nature, if you will, of the virtual world today. It puts challenges on us to rise to. We must be better than ourselves, in many ways. We must learn things and, you know, be more tolerant, and be smarter and learn faster and be more creative, perhaps, than we are typically in our real lives. And I think that if that is true of virtual worlds, then these changes, though scary — and, I say, inevitable — are ultimately for the better, and therefore something that we should ride out. But I would say that — and many other authors and speakers about this, other than me, have said, you know, fasten your seat belts because the change is coming. There are going to be big changes. JH: Philip Rosedale, thank you very much. (Applause)

The future of cars

Larry Burns

{0: 'Larry Burns'}

{0: ['automotive researcher']}

{0: 'Larry Burns is the vice president of R&D for GM. His job? Find a new way to power cars. '}

2005-02-28

2008-12-04

TED2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'ku', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sq', 'sr', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['alternative energy', 'cars', 'design', 'energy', 'future', 'green', 'technology']

{2774: "The future we're building -- and boring", 2443: "Uber's plan to get more people into fewer cars", 2291: 'How a driverless car sees the road', 1559: 'Brilliant designs to fit more people in every city', 27: 'Organic design, inspired by nature', 6379: 'A vehicle built in Africa, for Africa'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/larry_burns_the_future_of_cars/

General Motors veep Larry Burns previews cool next-gen car design: sleek, customizable (and computer-enhanced) vehicles that run clean on hydrogen -- and pump energy back into the electrical grid when they're idle.

People love their automobiles. They allow us to go where we want to when we want to. They're a form of entertainment, they're a form of art, a pride of ownership. Songs are written about cars. Prince wrote a great song: "Little Red Corvette." He didn't write "Little Red Laptop Computer" or "Little Red Dirt Devil." He wrote about a car. One of my favorites has always been: "Make Love to Your Man in a Chevy Van," because that was my vehicle when I was in college. The fact is, when we do our market research around the world, we see there's a nearly universal aspiration on the part of people to own an automobile — 750 million people in the world today own a car. And you say, boy, that's a lot. But you know what? That's just 12 percent of the population. We really have to ask the question: Can the world sustain that number of automobiles? And if you look at projections over the next 10 to 15 to 20 years, it looks like the world car park could grow to on the order of 1.1 billion vehicles. If you park those end to end and wrap them around the Earth, that would stretch around the Earth 125 times. Now, we've made great progress with automobile technology over the last 100 years. Cars are dramatically cleaner, dramatically safer, more efficient and radically more affordable than they were 100 years ago. But the fact remains: the fundamental DNA of the automobile has stayed pretty much the same. If we were to reinvent the automobile today, rather than 100 years ago, knowing what we know about the issues associated with our product and about the technologies that exist today, what would we do? We wanted something that was really affordable. The fuel cell looked great: one-tenth as many moving parts, a fuel-cell propulsion system as an internal combustion engine, and it emits just water. And we wanted to take advantage of Moore's Law with electronic controls and software, and we absolutely wanted our car to be connected. So we embarked upon the reinvention around an electrochemical engine, the fuel cell, and hydrogen as the energy carrier. First was Autonomy. Autonomy really set the vision for where we wanted to head. We embodied all of the key components of a fuel-cell propulsion system. We then had Autonomy drivable with Hy-Wire, and we showed Hy-Wire here at this conference last year. Hy-Wire is the world's first drivable fuel cell, and we have followed up that now with Sequel. And Sequel truly is a real car. So if we could run the video — (Futuristic music) [Reinventing the Automobile] (Video) It truly is my great pleasure to introduce Sequel. [Acceleration] [Cruising] [Steering] [Braking] But the real key question I'm sure that's on your mind: Where is the hydrogen going to come from? And secondly, when are these kinds of cars going to be available? So let me talk about hydrogen first. The beauty of hydrogen is it can come from so many different sources: it can come from fossil fuels, it can come from any way that you can create electricity, including renewables. And it can come from biofuels. And that's quite exciting. The vision here is to have each local community play to its natural strength in creating the hydrogen. A lot of hydrogen is produced today in the world. It's produced to get sulfur out of gasoline — which I find is somewhat ironic. It's produced in the fertilizer industry; it's produced in the chemical manufacturing industry. That hydrogen is being made because there's a good business reason for its use. But it tells us that we know how to create it, we know how to create it cost-effectively, we know how to handle it safely. We did an analysis where you would have a station in each city with each of the 100 largest cities in the United States, and located the stations so you'd be no more than two miles from a station at any time. We put one every 25 miles on the freeway, and it turns out that translates into about 12,000 stations. And at a million dollars each, that would be about 12 billion dollars. That's a lot of money. But if you built the Alaskan pipeline today, that's half of what the Alaskan pipeline would cost. But the real exciting vision that we see, truly, is home refueling, much like recharging your laptop or recharging your cell phone. So we're pretty excited about the future of hydrogen. We think it's a question of not whether, but a question of when. What we've targeted for ourselves — and we're making great progress toward this goal — is to have a propulsion system based on hydrogen and fuel cells, designed and validated, that can go head-to-head with the internal combustion engine. We're talking about obsoleting the internal combustion engine, and doing it in terms of affordability at scale volumes, its performance and its durability. So that's what we're driving to for 2010. We haven't seen anything yet in our development work that says that isn't possible. We actually think the future is going to be event-driven. So since we can't predict the future, we want to spend a lot of our time trying to create that future. I'm very, very intrigued by the fact that our cars and trucks sit idle 90 percent of the time: they're parked all around us. They're usually parked within 100 feet of the people that own them. Now, if you take the power-generating capability of an automobile and you compare that to the electric grid in the United States, it turns out that the power in four percent of the automobiles equals that of the electric grid of the US. That's a huge power-generating capability, a mobile power-generating capability. And hydrogen and fuel cells give us that opportunity to actually use our cars and trucks when they're parked to generate electricity for the grid. We talked about swarm networks earlier. Talk about the ultimate swarm — having all of the processors and all of the cars when they're sitting idle being part of a global grid for computing capability. We find that premise quite exciting. The automobile becomes, then, an appliance — not in a commodity sense, but an appliance, mobile power, mobile platform for information and computing and communication, as well as a form of transportation. And the key to all of this is to make it affordable, to make it exciting, to get it on a pathway where there's a way to make money doing it. And again, this is a pretty big march to take here. A lot of people say: How do you sleep at night when you're wrestling with a problem of that magnitude? I tell them I sleep like a baby: I wake up crying every two hours. (Laughter) Actually, the theme of this conference, I think, has hit on one of the major keys to pull that off, and that's relationships and working together. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Larry, Larry — wait, wait, wait. Larry, wait one sec. I've got so many questions I could ask you. I just want to ask one. You know, I could be wrong about this, but my sense is that in the public mind today, GM is not viewed as as serious about some of these environmental ideas as some of your Japanese competitors, maybe even as Ford. Are you serious about it, and not just, you know, when the consumers want it, when the regulators force us to do it, we will go there? Will you guys really try and show leadership on this? Larry Burns: Absolutely. We're absolutely serious. We're into this over a billion dollars already, so I would hope people would think we're serious when we're spending that kind of money. And secondly, it's a fundamental business proposition. I'll be honest with you; we're into it for business growth opportunities. We can't grow our business unless we solve these problems. The growth of the auto industry will be capped by sustainability issues if we don't solve the problems. And there's a simple principle of strategy that says: Do unto yourself before others do unto you. If we can see this possible future, others can, too. And we want to be the first one to create it, Chris.

Demo: The Orb

Nick Sears

{0: 'Nick Sears'}

{0: ['inventor']}

{0: 'Working with his father, Ron Sears, Nick Sears is designing and building the Orb, a rotating LED display that uses persistence of vision to produce moving images in 3D space.'}

2007-03-03

2008-12-05

TED2007

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sq', 'sr', 'sv', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['demo', 'design', 'entertainment', 'invention', 'technology', 'animation']

{131: 'Rethink the desktop with BumpTop', 129: "How PhotoSynth can connect the world's images", 872: 'Pointing to the future of UI', 122: 'Human-centered design', 534: 'Anti-gravity sculpture', 57924: 'How volumetric video brings a new dimension to filmmaking'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_sears_demo_the_orb/

Inventor Nick Sears demos the first generation of the Orb, a rotating persistence-of-vision display that creates glowing 3D images. A short, cool tale of invention.

In 1962, Buckminster Fuller presented the particularly audacious proposal for the Geoscope. It was a 200-foot diameter geodesic sphere to be suspended over the East River in New York City, in full view of the United Nations. It was a big idea, for sure, and it was one that he felt could truly inform and deeply affect the decision making of this body through animations of global data, trends and other information regarding the globe, on this sphere. And today, 45 years later, we clearly have no less need for this kind of clarity and perspective, but what we do have is improved technology. Today we don't need one million light bulbs to create a spherical display. We can use LEDs. LEDs are smaller, they're cheaper, they're longer lasting, they're more efficient. Most importantly for this, they're faster. And this speed, combined with today's high-performance micro-controllers, allows us to actually simulate, in this piece, over 17,000 LEDs — using just 64. And the way this happens is through the phenomenon of persistence of vision. But as this ring rotates at about 1,700 rpm — that's 28 times per second. The equator's speed is actually about 60 miles per hour. There are four on-board micro-controllers that, each time this ring rotates it, as it passes the rear of the display, it picks up a position signal. And from that, the on-board micro-controllers can extrapolate the position of the ring at all points around the revolution and display arbitrary bitmap images and animations. But this is really just the beginning. In addition to higher resolution versions of this display, my father and I are working on a new patent-pending design for a fully volumetric display using the same phenomenon. It achieves this by rotating LEDs about two axes. So as you can see here, this is a, eleven-inch diameter circuit board. These blocks represent LEDs. And so you could see that as this disc rotates about this axis, it will create a disc of light that we can control. That's nothing new: that's a propeller clock; that's the rims that you can buy for your car. But what is new is that, when we rotate this disc about this axis, this disc of light actually becomes a sphere of light. And so we can control that with micro-controllers and create a fully volumetric, three-dimensional display with just 256 LEDs. Now this piece is currently in process — due out in May — but what we've done is we've put together a small demo, just to show the geometric translation of points into a sphere. I've got a little video to show you, but keep in mind that this is with no electronic control, and this is also with only four LEDs. This is actually only about 1.5 percent of what the final display will be in May. So, take a look. And here you can see it's rotating about the vertical axis only, creating circles. And then, as the other axis kicks in, those actually blur into a volume. And the shutter speed of the camera actually makes it slightly less effective in this case. But this piece is due out in May. It'll be on display at the Interactive Telecommunications Spring Show in Greenwich Village in New York City — that's open to the public, definitely invite you all to come and attend — it's a fantastic show. There are hundreds of student innovators with fantastic projects. This piece, actually, will be on display down in the Sierra Simulcast Lounge in the breaks between now and the end of the show. So I'd love to talk to you all, and invite you to come down and take a closer look. It's an honor to be here. Thanks very much. (Applause)

The joyful tradition of mountain music

David Holt

{0: 'David Holt'}

{0: ['folk musician']}

{0: 'Four-time Grammy Award-winning folk musician David Holt is a born troubadour. Behind his energizing musicianship (often featuring unusual instruments like "the paper bag") is a deep love of hidden Appalachian wisdom and storytelling that shines on every stage he takes. '}

2004-03-01

2008-12-07

TED2004

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['culture', 'entertainment', 'invention', 'music', 'storytelling', 'live music', 'demo']

{447: 'Fiddling in reel time', 123: 'What squatter cities can teach us', 325: '"The Dog Song"', 2345: "Home is a song I've always remembered", 37382: '"East Virginia" / "John Brown\'s Dream"', 1782: 'Bluegrass virtuosity from ... New Jersey?'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/david_holt_the_joyful_tradition_of_mountain_music/

Folk musician and storyteller David Holt plays the banjo and shares photographs and old wisdom from the Appalachian Mountains. He also demonstrates some unusual instruments like the mouth bow -- and a surprising electric drum kit he calls "thunderwear."

This is Aunt Zip from Sodom, North Carolina. She was 105 years old when I took this picture. She was always saying things that made me stop and think, like, "Time may be a great healer, but it ain't no beauty specialist." (Laughter) She said, "Be good to your friends. Why, without them, you'd be a total stranger." (Laughter) This is one of her songs. Let's see if we can get into the flow here and all do this one together. And I'm going to have Michael Manring play bass with me. Give him a big old hand. (Applause) One, two, three, four. (Music) Well, my true love's a black-eyed daisy; if I don't see her, I go crazy. My true love lives up the river; a few more jumps and I'll be with her. Hey, hey, black-eyed Susie! Hey, hey, black-eyed Susie! Hey, hey black-eyed Susie, hey. Now you've got to picture Aunt Zip at 105 years old in Sodom, North Carolina. I'd go up and learn these old songs from her. She couldn't sing much, couldn't play anymore. And I'd pull her out on the front porch. Down below, there was her grandson plowing the tobacco field with a mule. A double outhouse over here on the side. And we'd sing this old song. She didn't have a whole lot of energy, so I'd sing, "Hey, hey!" and she'd just answer back with, "Black-eyed Susie." Oh, hey, hey, black-eyed Susie! Hey, hey, black-eyed Susie! Hey, hey, black-eyed Susie, hey. Well, she and I went blackberry picking. She got mad; I took a licking. Ducks on the millpond, geese in the ocean, Devil in the pretty girl when she takes a notion. Hey, hey, black-eyed Susie! Hey, hey, black-eyed Susie! Hey, hey black-eyed Susie, hey. Let's have the banjo. Well, we'll get married next Thanksgiving. I'll lay around; she'll make a living. She'll cook blackjacks, I'll cook gravy; we'll have chicken someday, maybe. Hey, hey, hey, hey. Hey, hey, black-eyed Susie, hey! One more time now. Oh, hey, hey, black-eyed Susie! Hey, hey, black-eyed Susie! Hey, hey, black-eyed Susie, hey. (Applause) Thank you, Michael. This is Ralph Stanley. When I was going to college at University of California at Santa Barbara in the College of Creative Studies, taking majors in biology and art, he came to the campus. This was in 1968, I guess it was. And he played his bluegrass style of music, but near the end of the concert, he played the old timing style of banjo picking that came from Africa, along with the banjo. It's called claw-hammer style, that he had learned from his mother and grandmother. I fell in love with that. I went up to him and said, how can I learn that? He said, well, you can go back to Clinch Mountain, where I'm from, or Asheville or Mount Airy, North Carolina — some place that has a lot of music. Because there's a lot of old people still living that play that old style. So I went back that very summer. I just fell in love with the culture and the people. And you know, I came back to school, I finished my degrees and told my parents I wanted to be a banjo player. You can imagine how excited they were. So I thought I would just like to show you some of the pictures I've taken of some of my mentors. Just a few of them, but maybe you'll get just a little hint of some of these folks. And play a little banjo. Let's do a little medley. (Music) (Applause) Those last few pictures were of Ray Hicks, who just passed away last year. He was one of the great American folk tale-tellers. The Old Jack tales that he had learned — he talked like this, you could hardly understand him. But it was really wonderful. And he lived in that house that his great-grandfather had built. No running water, no electricity. A wonderful, wonderful guy. And you can look at more pictures. I've actually got a website that's got a bunch of photos that I've done of some of the other folks I didn't get a chance to show you. This instrument came up in those pictures. It's called the mouth bow. It is definitely the first stringed instrument ever in the world, and still played in the Southern mountains. Now, the old timers didn't take a fancy guitar string and make anything like this. They would just take a stick and a catgut and string it up. It was hard on the cats, but it made a great little instrument. It sounds something like this. (Music) Well, have you heard the many stories told by young and old with joy about the many deeds of daring that were done by the Johnson boys? You take Kate, I'll take Sal; we'll both have a Johnson gal. You take Kate, I'll take Sal; we'll both have a Johnson gal. Now, they were scouts in the rebels' army, they were known both far and wide. When the Yankees saw them coming, they'd lay down their guns and hide. You take Kate, I'll take Sal; we'll both have a Johnson gal. You take Kate, I'll take Sal; we'll both have a Johnson gal. Ain't that a sound? (Applause) Well, it was 1954, I guess it was. We were driving in the car outside of Gatesville, Texas, where I grew up in the early part of my life. Outside of Gatesville we were coming back from the grocery store. My mom was driving; my brother and I were in the back seat. We were really mad at my mom. We looked out the window. We were surrounded by thousands of acres of cotton fields. You see, we'd just been to the grocery store, and my mom refused to buy us the jar of Ovaltine that had the coupon for the Captain Midnight decoder ring in it. And, buddy, that made us mad. Well, my mom didn't put up with much either, and she was driving, and she said, "You boys! You think you can have anything you want. You don't know how hard it is to earn money. Your dad works so hard. You think money grows on trees. You've never worked a day in your lives. You boys make me so mad. You're going to get a job this summer." She pulled the car over; she said, "Get out of the car." My brother and I stepped out of the car. We were standing on the edge of thousands of acres of cotton. There were about a hundred black folks out there picking. My mom grabbed us by the shoulders. She marched us out in the field. She went up to the foreman; she said, "I've got these two little boys never worked a day in their lives." Of course, we were just eight and 10. (Laughter) She said, "Would you put them to work?" Well, that must have seemed like a funny idea to that foreman: put these two middle-class little white boys out in a cotton field in August in Texas — it's hot. So he gave us each a cotton sack, about 10 feet long, about that big around, and we started picking. Now, cotton is soft but the outside of the plant is just full of stickers. And if you don't know what you're doing, your hands are bleeding in no time. And my brother and I started to pick it, and our hands were startin' to bleed, and then — "Mom!" And Mom was just sitting by the car like this. She wasn't going to give up. Well, the foreman could see he was in over his head, I guess. He kind of just snuck up behind us and he sang out in a low voice. He just sang: "Well, there's a long white robe in heaven, I know. Don't want it to leave me behind. Well, there's a long white robe in heaven, I know. Don't want it to leave me behind." And from all around as people started singing and answering back, he sang: "Good news, good news: Chariot's coming. Good news: Chariot's coming. Good news: Chariot's coming. And I don't want it to leave me behind." Now, my brother and I had never heard anything like that in our whole lives. It was so beautiful. We sat there all day picking cotton, without complaining, without crying, while they sang things like: "Oh, Mary, don't you weep, don't you moan" and "Wade in the water," and "I done done," "This little light of mine." Finally, by the end of the day, we'd each picked about a quarter of a bag of cotton. But the foreman was kind enough to give us each a check for a dollar, but my mother would never let us cash it. I'm 57; still have the check. Now, my mother hoped that we learned from that the value of hard work. But if you have children, you know it doesn't often work that way. No, we learned something else. The first thing I learned that day was that I never ever wanted to work that hard again. (Laughter) And pretty much never did. But I also learned that some people in this world do have to work that hard every day, and that was an eye-opener. And I also learned that a great song can make hard work go a little easier. And it also can bring the group together in a way that nothing else can. Now, I was just a little eight-year-old boy that day when my mama put me out of the car in that hot Texas cotton field. I wasn't even aware of music — not even aware of it. But that day in the cotton field out there picking, when those people started singing, I realized I was in the very heart of real music, and that's where I've wanted to be ever since. Try this old song with me. I sing: Well, there's a long white robe in heaven, I know. You sing: Don't want it to leave me behind. Well, there's a long white robe in heaven, I know. Don't want it to leave me behind. Good news, good news: Chariot's coming. Good news: Chariot's coming. Good news: Chariot's coming. And I don't want it to leave me — It's been a while since you guys have been picking your last bale of cotton, isn't it? Let's try it one more time. There's a starry crown in heaven, I know. Don't want it to leave me behind. There's a starry crown in heaven, I know. Don't want it to leave me behind. Good news: Chariot's coming. Good news: Chariot's coming. Good news: Chariot's coming. And I don't want it to leave me behind. It was a few years ago, but I sort of remembered this story, and I told it at a concert. My mom was in the audience. After the — she was glad to have a story about herself, of course, but after the concert she came up and she said, "David, I've got to tell you something. I set that whole thing up. I set it up with the foreman. I set it up with the owner of the land. I just wanted you boys to learn the value of hard work. I didn't know it was going to make you fall in love with music though." Let's try. Good news: Chariot's coming. Good news: Chariot's coming. Good news: Chariot's coming. And I don't want it to leave me behind. (Applause) Well, this is the steel guitar. It's an American-made instrument. It was originally made by the Dopyera Brothers, who later on made the Dobro, which is a wood-bodied instrument with a metal cone for — where the sound comes from. It's usually played flat on your lap. It was made to play Hawaiian music back in the 1920s, before they had electric guitars, trying to make a loud guitar. And then African-American folks figured out you could take a broken bottle neck, just like that — a nice Merlot works very well. That wine we had yesterday would have been perfect. Break it off, put it on your finger, and slide into the notes. This instrument pretty much saved my life. Fifteen years ago, 14 years ago, I guess, this year, my wife and I lost our daughter, Sarah Jane, in a car accident, and it was the most — it almost took me out — it almost took me out of this world. And I think I learned a lot about what happiness was by going through such unbelievable grief, just standing on the edge of that abyss and just wanting to jump in. I had to make lists of reasons to stay alive. I had to sit down and make lists, because I was ready to go; I was ready to check out of this world. And you know, at the top of the list, of course, were Jenny, and my son, Zeb, my parents — I didn't want to hurt them. But then, when I thought about it beyond that, it was very simple things. I didn't care about — I had a radio show, I have a radio show on public radio, "Riverwalk," I didn't care about that. I didn't care about awards or money or anything. Nothing. Nothing. On the list it would be stuff like, seeing the daffodils bloom in the spring, the smell of new-mown hay, catching a wave and bodysurfing, the touch of a baby's hand, the sound of Doc Watson playing the guitar, listening to old records of Muddy Waters and Uncle Dave Macon. And for me, the sound of a steel guitar, because one of my parents' neighbors just gave me one of these things. And I would sit around with it, and I didn't know how to play it, but I would just play stuff as sad as I could play. And it was the only instrument that, of all the ones that I play, that would really make that connection. This is a song that came out of that. (Music) Well, I hear you're having trouble. Lord, I hate to hear that news. If you want to talk about it, you know, I will listen to you through. Words no longer say it; let me tell you what I always do. I just break off another bottleneck and play these steel guitar blues. People say, "Oh, snap out of it!" Oh yeah, that's easier said than done. While you can hardly move, they're running around having all kinds of fun. Sometimes I think it's better just to sink way down in your funky mood 'til you can rise up humming these steel guitar blues. Now, you can try to keep it all inside with drink and drugs and cigarettes, but you know that's not going to get you where you want to get. But I got some medicine here that just might shake things loose. Call me in the morning after a dose of these steel guitar blues. Open up now. (Applause) Oh, I think I've got time to tell you about this. My dad was an inventor. We moved to California when Sputnik went up, in 1957. And he was working on gyroscopes; he has a number of patents for that kind of thing. And we moved across the street from Michael and John Whitney. They were about my age. John went on, and Michael did too, to become some of the inventors of computer animation. Michael's dad was working on something called the computer. This was 1957, I was a little 10-year-old kid; I didn't know what that was. But he took me down to see one, you know, what they were making. It was like a library, just full of vacuum tubes as far as you could see, just floors and floors of these things, and one of the engineers said, some day you're going to be able to put this thing in your pocket. I thought, damn, those are going to be some big pants! (Laughter) So that Christmas — maybe I've got time for this — that Christmas I got the Mister Wizard Fun-o-Rama chemistry set. Well, I wanted to be an inventor just like my dad; so did Michael. His great-granddad had been Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton gin. So we looked in that — this was a commercial chemistry set. It had three chemicals we were really surprised to see: sulfur, potassium nitrate and charcoal. Man, we were only 10, but we knew that made gunpowder. We made up a little batch and we put it on the driveway and we threw a match and phew, it flared up. Ah, it was great. Well, obviously the next thing to do was build a cannon. So we went over into Michael's garage — his dad had all kinds of stuff, and we put a pipe in the vice there, and screwed a cap on the end of the pipe, drilled a hole in the back of the pipe, took some of our firecrackers, pulled out the fuses, tied them together, put them in the back there, and — down in that hole — and then stuffed some of our gunpowder down that pipe and put three ball bearings on the top, in the garage. (Laughter) We weren't stupid: we put up a sheet of plywood about five feet in front of it. We stood back, we lit that thing, and they flew out of there — they went through that plywood like it was paper. Through the garage. Two of them landed in the side door of his new Citroen. (Laughter) We tore everything down and buried it in his backyard. That was Pacific Palisades; it probably is still there, back there. Well, my brother heard that we had made gunpowder. He and his buddies, they were older, and they were pretty mean. They said they were going to beat us up if we didn't make some gunpowder for them. We said, well, what are you going to do with it? They said, we're going to melt it down and make rocket fuel. (Laughter) Sure. We'll make you a big batch. (Laughter) So we made them a big batch, and it was in my — now, we'd just moved here. We'd just moved to California. Mom had redone the kitchen; Mom was gone that day. We had a pie tin. It became Chris Berquist's job to do the melting down. Michael and I were standing way at the side of the kitchen. He said, "Yeah, hey, it's melting. Yeah, the sulfur's melting. No problem. Yeah, you know." It just flared up, and he turned around, and he looked like this. No hair, no eyelashes, no nothing. There were big welts all over my mom's kitchen cabinet; the air was the just full of black smoke. She came home, she took that chemistry set away, and we never saw it again. But we thought of it often, because every time she'd cook tuna surprise it made — tasted faintly of gunpowder. So I like to invent things too, and I think I'll close out my set with something I invented a good while back. When drum machines were new, I got to thinking, why couldn't you take the oldest form of music, the hambone rhythms, and combine it with the newest technology? I call this Thunderwear. At that time, drum triggers were new. And so I put them all together and sewed 12 of them in this suit. I showed you some of the hambone rhythms yesterday; I'm going to be doing some of the same ones. I have a trigger here, trigger here, here, here. Right there. It's going to really hurt if I don't take that off. Okay. Now, the drum triggers go out my tail here, into the drum machine, and they can make various sounds, like drums. So let me put them all together. And also, I can change the sounds by stepping on this pedal right here, and — let me just close out here by doing you a little hambone solo or something like this. Thank you, folks. (Applause)

The playful search for beauty

Eva Zeisel

{0: 'Eva Zeisel'}

{0: ['designer']}

{0: 'The legendary Eva Zeisel worked as a ceramics designer -- whose curvy, sensual pieces bring delight and elegance to tabletops around the world.'}

2001-02-02

2008-12-09

TED2001

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'lt', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['creativity', 'design', 'exploration', 'play', 'art']

{60: 'Four American characters', 1435: 'Sculpting waves in wood and time', 1364: '2600 years of history in one object', 1579: 'Weaving narratives in museum galleries', 207: 'Treat design as art', 1956: "To create for the ages, let's combine art and engineering"}

https://www.ted.com/talks/eva_zeisel_the_playful_search_for_beauty/

The ceramics designer Eva Zeisel looks back on a 75-year career. What keeps her work as fresh today (her latest line debuted in 2008) as in 1926? Her sense of play and beauty, and her drive for adventure. Listen for stories from a rich, colorful life.

So I understand that this meeting was planned, and the slogan was From Was to Still. And I am illustrating Still. Which, of course, I am not agreeing with because, although I am 94, I am not still working. And anybody who asks me, "Are you still doing this or that?" I don't answer because I'm not doing things still, I'm doing it like I always did. I still have — or did I use the word still? I didn't mean that. (Laughter) I have my file which is called To Do. I have my plans. I have my clients. I am doing my work like I always did. So this takes care of my age. I want to show you my work so you know what I am doing and why I am here. This was about 1925. All of these things were made during the last 75 years. (Laughter) (Applause) But, of course, I'm working since 25, doing more or less what you see here. This is Castleton China. This was an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. This is now for sale at the Metropolitan Museum. This is still at the Metropolitan Museum now for sale. This is a portrait of my daughter and myself. (Applause) These were just some of the things I've made. I made hundreds of them for the last 75 years. I call myself a maker of things. I don't call myself an industrial designer because I'm other things. Industrial designers want to make novel things. Novelty is a concept of commerce, not an aesthetic concept. The industrial design magazine, I believe, is called "Innovation." Innovation is not part of the aim of my work. Well, makers of things: they make things more beautiful, more elegant, more comfortable than just the craftsmen do. I have so much to say. I have to think what I am going to say. Well, to describe our profession otherwise, we are actually concerned with the playful search for beauty. That means the playful search for beauty was called the first activity of Man. Sarah Smith, who was a mathematics professor at MIT, wrote, "The playful search for beauty was Man's first activity — that all useful qualities and all material qualities were developed from the playful search for beauty." These are tiles. The word, "playful" is a necessary aspect of our work because, actually, one of our problems is that we have to make, produce, lovely things throughout all of life, and this for me is now 75 years. So how can you, without drying up, make things with the same pleasure, as a gift to others, for so long? The playful is therefore an important part of our quality as designer. Let me tell you some about my life. As I said, I started to do these things 75 years ago. My first exhibition in the United States was at the Sesquicentennial exhibition in 1926 — that the Hungarian government sent one of my hand-drawn pieces as part of the exhibit. My work actually took me through many countries, and showed me a great part of the world. This is not that they took me — the work didn't take me — I made the things particularly because I wanted to use them to see the world. I was incredibly curious to see the world, and I made all these things, which then finally did take me to see many countries and many cultures. I started as an apprentice to a Hungarian craftsman, and this taught me what the guild system was in Middle Ages. The guild system: that means when I was an apprentice, I had to apprentice myself in order to become a pottery master. In my shop where I studied, or learned, there was a traditional hierarchy of master, journeyman and learned worker, and apprentice, and I worked as the apprentice. The work as an apprentice was very primitive. That means I had to actually learn every aspect of making pottery by hand. We mashed the clay with our feet when it came from the hillside. After that, it had to be kneaded. It had to then go in, kind of, a mangle. And then finally it was prepared for the throwing. And there I really worked as an apprentice. My master took me to set ovens because this was part of oven-making, oven-setting, in the time. And finally, I had received a document that I had accomplished my apprenticeship successfully, that I had behaved morally, and this document was given to me by the Guild of Roof-Coverers, Rail-Diggers, Oven-Setters, Chimney Sweeps and Potters. (Laughter) I also got at the time a workbook which explained my rights and my working conditions, and I still have that workbook. First I set up a shop in my own garden, and made pottery which I sold on the marketplace in Budapest. And there I was sitting, and my then-boyfriend — I didn't mean it was a boyfriend like it is meant today — but my boyfriend and I sat at the market and sold the pots. My mother thought that this was not very proper, so she sat with us to add propriety to this activity. (Laughter) However, after a while there was a new factory being built in Budapest, a pottery factory, a large one. And I visited it with several ladies, and asked all sorts of questions of the director. Then the director asked me, why do you ask all these questions? I said, I also have a pottery. So he asked me, could he please visit me, and then finally he did, and explained to me that what I did now in my shop was an anachronism, that the industrial revolution had broken out, and that I rather should join the factory. There he made an art department for me where I worked for several months. However, everybody in the factory spent his time at the art department. The director there said there were several women casting and producing my designs now in molds, and this was sold also to America. I remember that it was quite successful. However, the director, the chemist, model maker — everybody — concerned himself much more with the art department — that means, with my work — than making toilets, so finally they got a letter from the center, from the bank who owned the factory, saying, make toilet-setting behind the art department, and that was my end. So this gave me the possibility because now I was a journeyman, and journeymen also take their satchel and go to see the world. So as a journeyman, I put an ad into the paper that I had studied, that I was a down-to-earth potter's journeyman and I was looking for a job as a journeyman. And I got several answers, and I accepted the one which was farthest from home and practically, I thought, halfway to America. And that was in Hamburg. Then I first took this job in Hamburg, at an art pottery where everything was done on the wheel, and so I worked in a shop where there were several potters. And the first day, I was coming to take my place at the turntable — there were three or four turntables — and one of them, behind where I was sitting, was a hunchback, a deaf-mute hunchback, who smelled very bad. So I doused him in cologne every day, which he thought was very nice, and therefore he brought bread and butter every day, which I had to eat out of courtesy. The first day I came to work in this shop there was on my wheel a surprise for me. My colleagues had thoughtfully put on the wheel where I was supposed to work a very nicely modeled natural man's organs. (Laughter) After I brushed them off with a hand motion, they were very — I finally was now accepted, and worked there for some six months. This was my first job. If I go on like this, you will be here till midnight. (Laughter) (Applause) So I will try speed it up a little (Laughter) Moderator: Eva, we have about five minutes. (Laughter) Eva Zeisel: Are you sure? Moderator: Yes, I am sure. EZ: Well, if you are sure, I have to tell you that within five minutes I will talk very fast. And actually, my work took me to many countries because I used my work to fill my curiosity. And among other things, other countries I worked, was in the Soviet Union, where I worked from '32 to '37 — actually, to '36. I was finally there, although I had nothing to do — I was a foreign expert. I became art director of the china and glass industry, and eventually under Stalin's purges — at the beginning of Stalin's purges, I didn't know that hundreds of thousands of innocent people were arrested. So I was arrested quite early in Stalin's purges, and spent 16 months in a Russian prison. The accusation was that I had successfully prepared an Attentat on Stalin's life. This was a very dangerous accusation. And if this is the end of my five minutes, I want to tell you that I actually did survive, which was a surprise. But since I survived and I'm here, and since this is the end of the five minutes, I will — Moderator: Tell me when your last trip to Russia was. Weren't you there recently? EZ: Oh, this summer, in fact, the Lomonosov factory was bought by an American company, invited me. They found out that I had worked in '33 at this factory, and they came to my studio in Rockland County, and brought the 15 of their artists to visit me here. And they invited myself to come to the Russian factory last summer, in July, to make some dishes, design some dishes. And since I don't like to travel alone, they also invited my daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter, so we had a lovely trip to see Russia today, which is not a very pleasant and happy view. Here I am now, if this is the end? Thank you. (Applause)

A plea for bees

Dennis vanEngelsdorp

{0: 'Dennis vanEngelsdorp'}

{0: ['bee expert']}

{0: "Dennis vanEngelsdorp is Acting State Apiarist for Pennsylvania's Department of Agriculture, studying colony collapse disorder -- the alarming, worldwide disappearance of worker bees and Western honey bees."}

2008-07-19

2008-12-10

Taste3 2008

en

['ar', 'bg', 'da', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fi', 'fr', 'he', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'ku', 'lv', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['animals', 'bees', 'disease', 'food', 'insects', 'life', 'nature', 'Best of the Web']

{1822: 'Why bees are disappearing', 1522: 'Every city needs healthy honey bees', 1628: 'The dance of the dung beetle', 2249: "The first 21 days of a bee's life", 24044: 'The case of the vanishing honeybees', 37225: 'How you can help save the bees, one hive at a time'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/dennis_vanengelsdorp_a_plea_for_bees/

Bees are dying in droves. Why? Leading apiarist Dennis vanEngelsdorp looks at the gentle, misunderstood creature's important place in nature and the mystery behind its alarming disappearance.

What I'd like you to do is, just really quickly, is just, sort of, nod to the person on your right, and then nod to the person on your left. (Laughter) Now, chances are that over the last winter, if you had been a beehive, either you or one of the two people you just nodded at would have died. Now, that's an awful lot of bees. And this is the second year in a row we have lost over 30 percent of the colonies, or we estimate we've lost 30 percent of the colonies over the winter. Now, that's a lot, a lot of bees, and that's really important. And most of those losses are because of things we know. We know that there are these varroa mites that have introduced and caused a lot of losses, and we also have this new phenomenon, which I talked about last year, Colony Collapse Disorder. And here we see a picture on top of a hill in Central Valley last December. And below, you can see all these out yards, or temporary yards, where the colonies are brought in until February, and then they're shipped out to the almonds. And one documentary writer, who was here and looked at this two months after I was here, described this not as beehives but as a graveyard, with these empty white boxes with no bees left in them. Now, I'm going to sum up a year's worth of work in two sentences to say that we have been trying to figure out what the cause of this is. And what we know is that it's as if the bees have caught a flu. And this flu has wiped through the population of bees. In some cases, and in fact in most cases in one year, this flu was caused by a new virus to us, or newly identified by us, called Israeli Acute Paralysis virus. It was called that because a guy in Israel first found it, and he now regrets profoundly calling it that disease, because, of course, there's the implication. But we think this virus is pretty ubiquitous. It's also pretty clear that the bees sometimes catch other viruses or other flus, and so the question we're still struggling with, and the question that keeps us up at night, is why have the bees suddenly become so susceptible to this flu, and why are they so susceptible to these other diseases? And we don't have the answer to that yet, and we spend a lot of time trying to figure that out. We think perhaps it's a combination of factors. We know from the work of a very large and dynamic working team that, you know, we're finding a lot of different pesticides in the hive, and surprisingly, sometimes the healthiest hives have the most pesticides. And so we discover all these very strange things that we can't begin to understand. And so this opens up the whole idea of looking at colony health. Now of course, if you lose a lot of colonies, beekeepers can replace them very quickly. And that's why we've been able to recover from a lot of loss. If we lost one in every three cows in the winter, you know, the National Guard would be out. But what beekeepers can do is, if they have one surviving colony, they can split that colony in two. And then the one half that doesn't have a queen, they can buy a queen. It comes in the mail; it can come from Australia or Hawaii or Florida, and you can introduce that queen. And in fact, America was the first country that ever did mail-delivery queens and in fact, it's part of the postal code that you have to deliver queens by mail in order to make sure that we have enough bees in this country. If you don't just want a queen, you can buy, actually, a three-pound package of bees, which comes in the mail, and of course, the Postal Office is always very concerned when they get, you know, your three-pound packages of bees. And you can install this in your hive and replace that dead-out. So it means that beekeepers are very good at replacing dead-outs, and so they've been able to cover those losses. So even though we've lost 30 percent of the colonies every year, the same number of colonies have existed in the country, at about 2.4 million colonies. Now, those losses are tragic on many fronts, and one of those fronts is for the beekeeper. And it's really important to talk about beekeepers first, because beekeepers are among the most fascinating people you'll ever meet. If this was a group of beekeepers, you would have everyone from the card-carrying NRA member who's, you know, live free or die, to the, you know, the self-expressed quirky San Francisco backyard pig farmer. (Laughter) And you get all of these people in the same room, and they're all engaged and they're getting along, and they're all there because of the passion for bees. Now, there's another part of that community which are the commercial beekeepers, the ones who make their livelihood from beekeeping alone. And these tend to be some of the most independent, tenacious, intuitive, you know, inventive people you will ever meet. They're just fascinating. And they're like that all over the world. I had the privilege of working in Haiti just for two weeks earlier this year. And Haiti, if you've ever been there, is just a tragedy. I mean, there may be 100 explanations for why Haiti is the impoverished nation it is, but there is no excuse to see that sort of squalor. But you meet this beekeeper, and I met this beekeeper here, and he is one of the most knowledgeable beekeepers I've ever met. No formal education, but very knowledgeable. We needed beeswax for a project we were working on; he was so capable, he was able to render the nicest block of beeswax I have ever seen from cow dung, tin cans and his veil, which he used as a screening, right in this meadow. And so that ingenuity is inspiring. We also have Dave Hackenberg, who is the poster child of CCD. He's the one who first identified this condition and raised the alarm bells. And he has a history of these trucks, and he's moved these bees up and down the coast. And a lot of people talk about trucks and moving bees, and that being bad, but we've done that for thousands of years. The ancient Egyptians used to move bees up and down the Nile on rafts, so this idea of a movable bee force is not new at all. And one of our real worries with Colony Collapse Disorder is the fact that it costs so much money to replace those dead-out colonies. And you can do that one year in a row, you may be able to do it two years in a row. But if you're losing 50 percent to 80 percent of your colonies, you can't survive three years in a row. And we're really worried about losing this segment of our industry. And that's important for many fronts, and one of them is because of that culture that's in agriculture. And these migratory beekeepers are the last nomads of America. You know, they pick up their hives; they move their families once or twice in a year. And if you look at Florida, in Dade City, Florida, that's where all the Pennsylvania beekeepers go. And then 20 miles down the road is Groveland, and that's where all the Wisconsin beekeepers go. And if you're ever in Central Valley in February, you go to this café at 10 o'clock in the morning, Kathy and Kate's. And that's where all the beekeepers come after a night of moving bees into the almond groves. They all have their breakfast and complain about everyone right there. And it's a great experience, and I really encourage you to drop in at that diner during that time, because that's quite essential American experience. And we see these families, these nomadic families, you know, father to son, father to son, and these guys are hurting. And they're not people who like to ask for help, although they are the most helpful people ever. If there's one guy who loses all his bees because of a truck overhaul, everyone pitches in and gives 20 hives to help him replace those lost colonies. And so, it's a very dynamic, and I think, historic and exciting community to be involved with. Of course, the real importance for bees is not the honey. And although I highly encourage you, all use honey. I mean, it's the most ethical sweetener, and you know, it's a dynamic and fun sweetener. But we estimate that about one in three bites of food we eat is directly or indirectly pollinated by honeybees. Now, I want to just illustrate that in the fact that if we look at the breakfast I had yesterday morning — a little cranberry juice, some fruits, some granola, I should have had whole wheat bread, I realized, but you know, jam on my Wonderbread, and some coffee — and had we taken out all those ingredients, — except for the almonds I wasn't going to pick out from the granola — if we had taken out all those ingredients the bees had indirectly or directly pollinated, we wouldn't have much on our plate. So if we did not have bees, it's not like we would starve, but clearly our diet would be diminished. It's said that for bees, the flower is the fountain of life, and for flowers bees are the messengers of love. And that's a really great expression, because really, bees are the sex workers for flowers. They are, you know — they get paid for their services. They get paid by pollen and nectar, to move that male sperm, the pollen, from flower to flower. And there are flowers that are self-infertile. That means they can't — the pollen in their bloom can't fertilize themselves. So in an apple orchard, for instance, you'll have rows of 10 apples of one variety, and then you have another apple tree that's a different type of pollen. And bees are very faithful. When they're out pollinating or gathering pollen from one flower, they stay to that crop exclusively, in order to help generate. And of course, they're made to carry this pollen. They build up a static electric charge and the pollen jumps on them and helps spread that pollen from bloom to bloom. However, honeybees are a minority. Honeybees are not native to America; they were introduced with the colonialists. And there are actually more species of bees than there are mammals and birds combined. In Pennsylvania alone, we have been surveying bees for 150 years, and very intensely in the last three years. We have identified over 400 species of bees in Pennsylvania. Thirty-two species have not been identified or found in the state since 1950. Now, that could be because we haven't been sampling right, but it does, I think, suggest that something's wrong with the pollinator force. And these bees are fascinating. We have bumblebees on the top. And bumblebees are what we call eusocial: they're not truly social, because only the queen is, over winter. We also have the sweat bees, and these are little gems flying around. They're like tiny little flies and they fly around. And then you have another type of bee, which we call kleptoparasites, which is a very fancy way of saying, bad-minded, murdering — what's the word I'm looking for? Murdering — Audience: Bee? Dennis vanEngelsdorp: Bee. Okay, thanks. (Laughter) What these bees do is, they sit there. These solitary bees, they drill a hole in the ground or drill a hole in a branch, and they collect pollen and make it into a ball, and they lay an egg on it. Well, these bees hang out at that hole, and they wait for that mother to fly away, they go in, eat the egg, and lay their own egg there. So they don't do any work. And so, in fact, if you know you have these kleptoparasitic bees, you know that your environment is healthy, because they're top-of-the-food-chain bees. And in fact, there is now a red list of pollinators that we're worried have disappeared, and on top of that list are a lot of these kleptoparasites, but also these bumblebees. And in fact, if you guys live on the West Coast, go to these websites here, and they're really looking for people to look for some of these bumblebees, because we think some have gone extinct. Or some, the population has declined. And so it's not just honeybees that are in trouble, but we don't understand these native pollinators or all those other parts of our community. And of course, bees are not the only important factor here. There are other animals that pollinate, like bats, and bats are in trouble too. And I'm glad I'm a bee man and not a bat man, because there's no money to research the bat problems. And bats are dying at an extraordinary rate. White-nose syndrome has wiped out populations of bats. If there's a cave in New York that had 15,000 bats in it, and there are 1,000 left. That's like San Francisco becoming the population of half of this county in three years. And so that's incredible. And there's no money to do that. But I'm glad to say that I think we know the cause of all these conditions, and that cause is NDD: Nature Deficit Disorder. And that is that I think that what we have in our society is, we forgot our connection with nature. And I think if we reconnect to nature, we'll be able to have the resources and that interest to solve these problems. And I think that there is an easy cure for NDD. And that is, make meadows and not lawns. And I think we have lost our connection, and this is a wonderful way of reconnecting to our environment. I've had the privilege of living by a meadow for the last little while, and it is terribly engaging. And if we look at the history of lawns, it's actually rather tragic. It used to be, two, three hundred years ago, that a lawn was a symbol of prestige, and so it was only the very rich that could keep these green actually, deserts: they're totally sterile. Americans spent, in 2001 — 11 percent of all pesticide use was done on lawns. Five percent of our greenhouse gases are produced by mowing our lawns. And so it's incredible the amount of resources we've spent keeping our lawns, which are these useless biosystems. And so we need to rethink this idea. In fact, you know, the White House used to have sheep in front in order to help fund the war effort in World War I, which probably is not a bad idea; it wouldn't be a bad idea. I want to say this not because I'm opposed completely to mowing lawns. I think that there is perhaps some advantage to keeping lawns at a limited scale, and I think we're encouraged to do that. But I also want to reinforce some of the ideas we've heard here, because having a meadow or living by a meadow is transformational. That it is amazing that connection we can have with what's there. These milkweed plants have grown up in my meadow over the last four years. Add to watch the different plants, or insects, that come to these flowers, to watch that — and we've heard about, you know, this relationship you can have with wine, this companion you can have as it matures and as it has these different fragrances. And this is a companion, and this is a relationship that never dries up. You never run out of that companion as you drink this wine, too. And I encourage you to look at that. Now, not all of us have meadows, or lawns that we can convert, and so you can always, of course, grow a meadow in a pot. Bees apparently, can be the gateway to, you know, other things. So I'm not saying that you should plant a meadow of pot, but a pot in a meadow. But you can also have this great community of city or building-top beekeepers, these beekeepers that live — This is in Paris where these beekeepers live. And everyone should open a beehive, because it is the most amazing, incredible thing. And if we want to cure ourselves of NDD, or Nature Deficit Disorder, I think this is a great way of doing it. Get a beehive and grow a meadow, and watch that life come back into your life. And so with that, I think that what we can do, if we do this, we can make sure that our future — our more perfect future — includes beekeepers and it includes bees and it includes those meadows. And that journey — that journey of transformation that occurs as you grow your meadow and as you keep your bees or you watch those native bees there — is an extremely exciting one. And I hope that you experience it and I hope you tell me about it one day. So thank you very much for being here. Thank you very much.

My library of human imagination

Jay Walker

{0: 'Jay Walker'}

{0: ['entrepreneur']}

{0: "Jay Walker is fascinated by intellectual property in all its forms. His firm, Walker Digital, created Priceline and many other businesses that reframe old problems with new IT. In his private life, he's a bibliophile and collector on an epic scale."}

2008-02-29

2008-12-14

TED2008

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'lt', 'mk', 'my', 'nb', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sr', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['business', 'culture', 'design', 'entertainment', 'entrepreneur', 'innovation', 'invention', 'library', 'technology', 'books', '3D printing']

{278: 'The birth of the computer', 235: 'The search for the true face of Leonardo', 271: 'Archeology, animal photography, BBQ ...', 346: 'A free digital library', 57918: 'Why books are here to stay', 1410: 'Designing books is no laughing matter. OK, it is.'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/jay_walker_my_library_of_human_imagination/

Jay Walker, curator of the Library of Human Imagination, conducts a surprising show-and-tell session highlighting a few of the intriguing artifacts that backdropped the 2008 TED stage.

These rocks have been hitting our earth for about three billion years, and are responsible for much of what’s gone on on our planet. This is an example of a real meteorite, and you can see all the melting of the iron from the speed and the heat when a meteorite hits the earth, and just how much of it survives and melts. From a meteorite from space, we’re over here with an original Sputnik. This is one of the seven surviving Sputniks that was not launched into space. This is not a copy. The space age began 50 years ago in October, and that’s exactly what Sputnik looked like. And it wouldn’t be fun to talk about the space age without seeing a flag that was carried to the moon and back, on Apollo 11. The astronauts each got to carry about ten silk flags in their personal kits. They would bring them back and mount them. So this has actually been carried to the moon and back. So that’s for fun. The dawn of books is, of course, important. And it wouldn’t be interesting to talk about the dawn of books without having a copy of a Guttenberg Bible. You can see how portable and handy it was to have your own Guttenberg in 1455. But what’s interesting about the Guttenberg Bible, and the dawn of this technology, is not the book. You see, the book was not driven by reading. In 1455, nobody could read. So why did the printing press succeed? This is an original page of a Guttenberg Bible. So you’re looking here at one of the first printed books using movable type in the history of man, 550 years ago. We are living at the age here at the end of the book, where electronic paper will undoubtedly replace it. But why is this so interesting? Here’s the quick story. It turns out that in the 1450s, the Catholic Church needed money, and so they actually hand-wrote these things called indulgences, which were forgiveness’s on pieces of paper. They traveled all around Europe and sold by the hundreds or by the thousands. They got you out of purgatory faster. And when the printing press was invented what they found was they could print indulgences, which was the equivalent of printing money. And so all of Western Europe started buying printing presses in 1455 — to print out thousands, and then hundreds of thousands, and then ultimately millions of single, small pieces of paper that got you out of middle hell and into heaven. That is why the printing press succeeded, and that is why Martin Luther nailed his 90 theses to the door: because he was complaining that the Catholic Church had gone amok in printing out indulgences and selling them in every town and village and city in all of Western Europe. So the printing press, ladies and gentlemen, was driven entirely by the printing of forgivenesses and had nothing to do with reading. More tomorrow. I also have pictures coming of the library for those of you that have asked for pictures. We’re going to have some tomorrow. (Applause) Instead of showing an object from the stage I’m going to do something special for the first time. We are going to show, actually, what the library looks like, OK? So, I am married to the most wonderful woman in the world. You’re going to find out why in a minute, because when I went to see Eileen, this is what I said I wanted to build. This is the Library of Human Imagination. The room itself is three stories tall. In the glass panels are 5,000 years of human imagination that are computer controlled. The room is a theatre. It changes colors. And all throughout the library are different objects, different spaces. It’s designed like an Escher print. Here is some of the lower level of the library, where the exhibits constantly change. You can walk through. You can touch. You can see exactly how many of these types of items would fit in a room. There’s my very own Saturn V. Everybody should have one, OK? (Laughter) So you can see here in the lower level of the library the books and the objects. In the glass panels all along is sort of the history of imagination. There is a glass bridge that you walk across that’s suspended in space. So it’s a leap of imagination. How do we create? Part of the question that I have answered is, is we create by surrounding ourselves with stimuli: with human achievement, with history, with the things that drive us and make us human — the passionate discovery, the bones of dinosaurs long gone, the maps of space that we’ve experienced, and ultimately the hallways that stimulate our mind and our imagination. So hopefully tomorrow I’ll show one or two more objects from the stage, but for today I just wanted to say thank you for all the people that came and talked to us about it. And Eileen and I are thrilled to open our home and share it with the TED community. (Applause) TED is all about patterns in the clouds. It’s all about connections. It’s all about seeing things that everybody else has seen before but thinking about them in ways that nobody has thought of them before. And that’s really what discovery and imagination is all about. For example, we can look at a DNA molecule model here. None of us really have ever seen one, but we know it exists because we’ve been taught to understand this molecule. But we can also look at an Enigma machine from the Nazis in World War II that was a coding and decoding machine. Now, you might say, what does this have to do with this? Well, this is the code for life, and this is a code for death. These two molecules code and decode. And yet, looking at them, you would see a machine and a molecule. But once you’ve seen them in a new way, you realize that both of these things really are connected. And they’re connected primarily because of this here. You see, this is a human brain model, OK? And it’s rare, because we never really get to see a brain. We get to see a skull. But there it is. All of imagination — everything that we think, we feel, we sense — comes through the human brain. And once we create new patterns in this brain, once we shape the brain in a new way, it never returns to its original shape. And I’ll give you a quick example. We think about the Internet; we think about information that goes across the Internet. And we never think about the hidden connection. But I brought along here a lump of coal — right here, one lump of coal. And what does a lump of coal have to do with the Internet? You see, it takes the energy in one lump of coal to move one megabyte of information across the net. So every time you download a file, each megabyte is a lump of coal. What that means is, a 200-megabyte file looks like this, ladies and gentlemen. OK? So the next time you download a gigabyte, or two gigabytes, it’s not for free, OK? The connection is the energy it takes to run the web , and to make everything we think possible, possible. Thanks, Chris. (Applause)

Why we make bad decisions

Dan Gilbert

{0: 'Dan Gilbert'}

{0: ['psychologist; happiness expert']}

{0: 'Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert says our beliefs about what will make us happy are often wrong -- a premise he supports with intriguing research, and explains in his accessible and unexpectedly funny book, <em>Stumbling on Happiness.</em>'}

2005-07-07

2008-12-16

TEDGlobal 2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'ca', 'cs', 'da', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'hy', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'lt', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sr', 'th', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['brain', 'choice', 'culture', 'entertainment', 'goal-setting', 'happiness', 'psychology', 'self', 'society']

{191: 'The habits of happiness', 97: 'The surprising science of happiness', 307: 'The brain in love', 1367: 'Saving for tomorrow, tomorrow', 2012: 'The psychology of your future self', 880: 'Sweat the small stuff'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_why_we_make_bad_decisions/

Dan Gilbert presents research and data from his exploration of happiness -- sharing some surprising tests and experiments that you can also try on yourself. Watch through to the end for a sparkling Q&amp;A with some familiar TED faces.

We all make decisions every day; we want to know what the right thing is to do — in domains from the financial to the gastronomic to the professional to the romantic. And surely, if somebody could really tell us how to do exactly the right thing at all possible times, that would be a tremendous gift. It turns out that, in fact, the world was given this gift in 1738 by a Dutch polymath named Daniel Bernoulli. And what I want to talk to you about today is what that gift is, and I also want to explain to you why it is that it hasn't made a damn bit of difference. Now, this is Bernoulli's gift. This is a direct quote. And if it looks like Greek to you, it's because, well, it's Greek. But the simple English translation — much less precise, but it captures the gist of what Bernoulli had to say — was this: The expected value of any of our actions — that is, the goodness that we can count on getting — is the product of two simple things: the odds that this action will allow us to gain something, and the value of that gain to us. In a sense, what Bernoulli was saying is, if we can estimate and multiply these two things, we will always know precisely how we should behave. Now, this simple equation, even for those of you who don't like equations, is something that you're quite used to. Here's an example: if I were to tell you, let's play a little coin toss game, and I'm going to flip a coin, and if it comes up heads, I'm going to pay you 10 dollars, but you have to pay four dollars for the privilege of playing with me, most of you would say, sure, I'll take that bet. Because you know that the odds of you winning are one half, the gain if you do is 10 dollars, that multiplies to five, and that's more than I'm charging you to play. So, the answer is, yes. This is what statisticians technically call a damn fine bet. Now, the idea is simple when we're applying it to coin tosses, but in fact, it's not very simple in everyday life. People are horrible at estimating both of these things, and that's what I want to talk to you about today. There are two kinds of errors people make when trying to decide what the right thing is to do, and those are errors in estimating the odds that they're going to succeed, and errors in estimating the value of their own success. Now, let me talk about the first one first. Calculating odds would seem to be something rather easy: there are six sides to a die, two sides to a coin, 52 cards in a deck. You all know what the likelihood is of pulling the ace of spades or of flipping a heads. But as it turns out, this is not a very easy idea to apply in everyday life. That's why Americans spend more — I should say, lose more — gambling than on all other forms of entertainment combined. The reason is, this isn't how people do odds. The way people figure odds requires that we first talk a bit about pigs. Now, the question I'm going to put to you is whether you think there are more dogs or pigs on leashes observed in any particular day in Oxford. And of course, you all know that the answer is dogs. And the way that you know that the answer is dogs is you quickly reviewed in memory the times you've seen dogs and pigs on leashes. It was very easy to remember seeing dogs, not so easy to remember pigs. And each one of you assumed that if dogs on leashes came more quickly to your mind, then dogs on leashes are more probable. That's not a bad rule of thumb, except when it is. So, for example, here's a word puzzle. Are there more four-letter English words with R in the third place or R in the first place? Well, you check memory very briefly, make a quick scan, and it's awfully easy to say to yourself, Ring, Rang, Rung, and very hard to say to yourself, Pare, Park: they come more slowly. But in fact, there are many more words in the English language with R in the third than the first place. The reason words with R in the third place come slowly to your mind isn't because they're improbable, unlikely or infrequent. It's because the mind recalls words by their first letter. You kind of shout out the sound, S — and the word comes. It's like the dictionary; it's hard to look things up by the third letter. So, this is an example of how this idea that the quickness with which things come to mind can give you a sense of their probability — how this idea could lead you astray. It's not just puzzles, though. For example, when Americans are asked to estimate the odds that they will die in a variety of interesting ways — these are estimates of number of deaths per year per 200 million U.S. citizens. And these are just ordinary people like yourselves who are asked to guess how many people die from tornado, fireworks, asthma, drowning, etc. Compare these to the actual numbers. Now, you see a very interesting pattern here, which is first of all, two things are vastly over-estimated, namely tornadoes and fireworks. Two things are vastly underestimated: dying by drowning and dying by asthma. Why? When was the last time that you picked up a newspaper and the headline was, "Boy dies of Asthma?" It's not interesting because it's so common. It's very easy for all of us to bring to mind instances of news stories or newsreels where we've seen tornadoes devastating cities, or some poor schmuck who's blown his hands off with a firework on the Fourth of July. Drownings and asthma deaths don't get much coverage. They don't come quickly to mind, and as a result, we vastly underestimate them. Indeed, this is kind of like the Sesame Street game of "Which thing doesn't belong?" And you're right to say it's the swimming pool that doesn't belong, because the swimming pool is the only thing on this slide that's actually very dangerous. The way that more of you are likely to die than the combination of all three of the others that you see on the slide. The lottery is an excellent example, of course — an excellent test-case of people's ability to compute probabilities. And economists — forgive me, for those of you who play the lottery — but economists, at least among themselves, refer to the lottery as a stupidity tax, because the odds of getting any payoff by investing your money in a lottery ticket are approximately equivalent to flushing the money directly down the toilet — which, by the way, doesn't require that you actually go to the store and buy anything. Why in the world would anybody ever play the lottery? Well, there are many answers, but one answer surely is, we see a lot of winners. Right? When this couple wins the lottery, or Ed McMahon shows up at your door with this giant check — how the hell do you cash things that size, I don't know. We see this on TV; we read about it in the paper. When was the last time that you saw extensive interviews with everybody who lost? Indeed, if we required that television stations run a 30-second interview with each loser every time they interview a winner, the 100 million losers in the last lottery would require nine-and-a-half years of your undivided attention just to watch them say, "Me? I lost." "Me? I lost." Now, if you watch nine-and-a-half years of television — no sleep, no potty breaks — and you saw loss after loss after loss, and then at the end there's 30 seconds of, "and I won," the likelihood that you would play the lottery is very small. Look, I can prove this to you: here's a little lottery. There's 10 tickets in this lottery. Nine of them have been sold to these individuals. It costs you a dollar to buy the ticket and, if you win, you get 20 bucks. Is this a good bet? Well, Bernoulli tells us it is. The expected value of this lottery is two dollars; this is a lottery in which you should invest your money. And most people say, "OK, I'll play." Now, a slightly different version of this lottery: imagine that the nine tickets are all owned by one fat guy named Leroy. Leroy has nine tickets; there's one left. Do you want it? Most people won't play this lottery. Now, you can see the odds of winning haven't changed, but it's now fantastically easy to imagine who's going to win. It's easy to see Leroy getting the check, right? You can't say to yourself, "I'm as likely to win as anybody," because you're not as likely to win as Leroy. The fact that all those tickets are owned by one guy changes your decision to play, even though it does nothing whatsoever to the odds. Now, estimating odds, as difficult as it may seem, is a piece of cake compared to trying to estimate value: trying to say what something is worth, how much we'll enjoy it, how much pleasure it will give us. I want to talk now about errors in value. How much is this Big Mac worth? Is it worth 25 dollars? Most of you have the intuition that it's not — you wouldn't pay that for it. But in fact, to decide whether a Big Mac is worth 25 dollars requires that you ask one, and only one question, which is: What else can I do with 25 dollars? If you've ever gotten on one of those long-haul flights to Australia and realized that they're not going to serve you any food, but somebody in the row in front of you has just opened the McDonald's bag, and the smell of golden arches is wafting over the seat, you think, I can't do anything else with this 25 dollars for 16 hours. I can't even set it on fire — they took my cigarette lighter! Suddenly, 25 dollars for a Big Mac might be a good deal. On the other hand, if you're visiting an underdeveloped country, and 25 dollars buys you a gourmet meal, it's exorbitant for a Big Mac. Why were you all sure that the answer to the question was no, before I'd even told you anything about the context? Because most of you compared the price of this Big Mac to the price you're used to paying. Rather than asking, "What else can I do with my money," comparing this investment to other possible investments, you compared to the past. And this is a systematic error people make. What you knew is, you paid three dollars in the past; 25 is outrageous. This is an error, and I can prove it to you by showing the kinds of irrationalities to which it leads. For example, this is, of course, one of the most delicious tricks in marketing, is to say something used to be higher, and suddenly it seems like a very good deal. When people are asked about these two different jobs: a job where you make 60K, then 50K, then 40K, a job where you're getting a salary cut each year, and one in which you're getting a salary increase, people like the second job better than the first, despite the fact they're all told they make much less money. Why? Because they had the sense that declining wages are worse than rising wages, even when the total amount of wages is higher in the declining period. Here's another nice example. Here's a $2,000 Hawaiian vacation package; it's now on sale for 1,600. Assuming you wanted to go to Hawaii, would you buy this package? Most people say they would. Here's a slightly different story: $2,000 Hawaiian vacation package is now on sale for 700 dollars, so you decide to mull it over for a week. By the time you get to the ticket agency, the best fares are gone — the package now costs 1,500. Would you buy it? Most people say, no. Why? Because it used to cost 700, and there's no way I'm paying 1,500 for something that was 700 last week. This tendency to compare to the past is causing people to pass up the better deal. In other words, a good deal that used to be a great deal is not nearly as good as an awful deal that was once a horrible deal. Here's another example of how comparing to the past can befuddle our decisions. Imagine that you're going to the theater. You're on your way to the theater. In your wallet you have a ticket, for which you paid 20 dollars. You also have a 20-dollar bill. When you arrive at the theater, you discover that somewhere along the way you've lost the ticket. Would you spend your remaining money on replacing it? Most people answer, no. Now, let's just change one thing in this scenario. You're on your way to the theater, and in your wallet you have two 20-dollar bills. When you arrive you discover you've lost one of them. Would you spend your remaining 20 dollars on a ticket? Well, of course, I went to the theater to see the play. What does the loss of 20 dollars along the way have to do? Now, just in case you're not getting it, here's a schematic of what happened, OK? (Laughter) Along the way, you lost something. In both cases, it was a piece of paper. In one case, it had a U.S. president on it; in the other case it didn't. What the hell difference should it make? The difference is that when you lost the ticket you say to yourself, I'm not paying twice for the same thing. You compare the cost of the play now — 40 dollars — to the cost that it used to have — 20 dollars — and you say it's a bad deal. Comparing with the past causes many of the problems that behavioral economists and psychologists identify in people's attempts to assign value. But even when we compare with the possible, instead of the past, we still make certain kinds of mistakes. And I'm going to show you one or two of them. One of the things we know about comparison: that when we compare one thing to the other, it changes its value. So in 1992, this fellow, George Bush, for those of us who were kind of on the liberal side of the political spectrum, didn't seem like such a great guy. Suddenly, we're almost longing for him to return. (Laughter) The comparison changes how we evaluate him. Now, retailers knew this long before anybody else did, of course, and they use this wisdom to help you — spare you the undue burden of money. And so a retailer, if you were to go into a wine shop and you had to buy a bottle of wine, and you see them here for eight, 27 and 33 dollars, what would you do? Most people don't want the most expensive, they don't want the least expensive. So, they will opt for the item in the middle. If you're a smart retailer, then, you will put a very expensive item that nobody will ever buy on the shelf, because suddenly the $33 wine doesn't look as expensive in comparison. So I'm telling you something you already knew: namely, that comparison changes the value of things. Here's why that's a problem: the problem is that when you get that $33 bottle of wine home, it won't matter what it used to be sitting on the shelf next to. The comparisons we make when we are appraising value, where we're trying to estimate how much we'll like things, are not the same comparisons we'll be making when we consume them. This problem of shifting comparisons can bedevil our attempts to make rational decisions. Let me just give you an example. I have to show you something from my own lab, so let me sneak this in. These are subjects coming to an experiment to be asked the simplest of all questions: How much will you enjoy eating potato chips one minute from now? They're sitting in a room with potato chips in front of them. For some of the subjects, sitting in the far corner of a room is a box of Godiva chocolates, and for others is a can of Spam. In fact, these items that are sitting in the room change how much the subjects think they're going to enjoy the potato chips. Namely, those who are looking at Spam think potato chips are going to be quite tasty; those who are looking at Godiva chocolate think they won't be nearly so tasty. Of course, what happens when they eat the potato chips? Well, look, you didn't need a psychologist to tell you that when you have a mouthful of greasy, salty, crispy, delicious snacks, what's sitting in the corner of the room makes not a damn bit of difference to your gustatory experience. Nonetheless, their predictions are perverted by a comparison that then does not carry through and change their experience. You've all experienced this yourself, even if you've never come into our lab to eat potato chips. So here's a question: You want to buy a car stereo. The dealer near your house sells this particular stereo for 200 dollars, but if you drive across town, you can get it for 100 bucks. So would you drive to get 50 percent off, saving 100 dollars? Most people say they would. They can't imagine buying it for twice the price when, with one trip across town, they can get it for half off. Now, let's imagine instead you wanted to buy a car that had a stereo, and the dealer near your house had it for 31,000. But if you drove across town, you could get it for 30,900. Would you drive to get it? At this point, 0.003 savings — the 100 dollars. Most people say, no, I'm going to schlep across town to save 100 bucks on the purchase of a car? This kind of thinking drives economists crazy, and it should. Because this 100 dollars that you save — hello! — doesn't know where it came from. It doesn't know what you saved it on. When you go to buy groceries with it, it doesn't go, I'm the money saved on the car stereo, or, I'm the dumb money saved on the car. It's money. And if a drive across town is worth 100 bucks, it's worth 100 bucks no matter what you're saving it on. People don't think that way. That's why they don't know whether their mutual fund manager is taking 0.1 percent or 0.15 percent of their investment, but they clip coupons to save one dollar off of toothpaste. Now, you can see, this is the problem of shifting comparisons, because what you're doing is, you're comparing the 100 bucks to the purchase that you're making, but when you go to spend that money you won't be making that comparison. You've all had this experience. If you're an American, for example, you've probably traveled in France. And at some point you may have met a couple from your own hometown, and you thought, "Oh, my God, these people are so warm. They're so nice to me. I mean, compared to all these people who hate me when I try to speak their language and hate me more when I don't, these people are just wonderful." And so you tour France with them, and then you get home and you invite them over for dinner, and what do you find? Compared to your regular friends, they are boring and dull, right? Because in this new context, the comparison is very, very different. In fact, you find yourself disliking them enough almost to qualify for French citizenship. Now, you have exactly the same problem when you shop for a stereo. You go to the stereo store, you see two sets of speakers — these big, boxy, monoliths, and these little, sleek speakers, and you play them, and you go, you know, I do hear a difference: the big ones sound a little better. And so you buy them, and you bring them home, and you entirely violate the décor of your house. And the problem, of course, is that this comparison you made in the store is a comparison you'll never make again. What are the odds that years later you'll turn on the stereo and go, "Sounds so much better than those little ones," which you can't even remember hearing. The problem of shifting comparisons is even more difficult when these choices are arrayed over time. People have a lot of trouble making decisions about things that will happen at different points in time. And what psychologists and behavioral economists have discovered is that by and large people use two simple rules. So let me give you one very easy problem, a second very easy problem and then a third, hard, problem. Here's the first easy problem: You can have 60 dollars now or 50 dollars now. Which would you prefer? This is what we call a one-item IQ test, OK? All of us, I hope, prefer more money, and the reason is, we believe more is better than less. Here's the second problem: You can have 60 dollars today or 60 dollars in a month. Which would you prefer? Again, an easy decision, because we all know that now is better than later. What's hard in our decision-making is when these two rules conflict. For example, when you're offered 50 dollars now or 60 dollars in a month. This typifies a lot of situations in life in which you will gain by waiting, but you have to be patient. What do we know? What do people do in these kinds of situations? Well, by and large people are enormously impatient. That is, they require interest rates in the hundred or thousands of percents in order to delay gratification and wait until next month for the extra 10 dollars. Maybe that isn't so remarkable, but what is remarkable is how easy it is to make this impatience go away by simply changing when the delivery of these monetary units will happen. Imagine that you can have 50 dollars in a year — that's 12 months — or 60 dollars in 13 months. What do we find now? People are gladly willing to wait: as long as they're waiting 12, they might as well wait 13. What makes this dynamic inconsistency happen? Comparison. Troubling comparison. Let me show you. This is just a graph showing the results that I just suggested you would show if I gave you time to respond, which is, people find that the subjective value of 50 is higher than the subjective value of 60 when they'll be delivered in now or one month, respectively — a 30-day delay — but they show the reverse pattern when you push the entire decision off into the future a year. Now, why in the world do you get this pattern of results? These guys can tell us. What you see here are two lads, one of them larger than the other: the fireman and the fiddler. They are going to recede towards the vanishing point in the horizon, and I want you to notice two things. At no point will the fireman look taller than the fiddler. No point. However, the difference between them seems to be getting smaller. First it's an inch in your view, then it's a quarter-inch, then a half-inch, and then finally they go off the edge of the earth. Here are the results of what I just showed you. This is the subjective height — the height you saw of these guys at various points. And I want you to see that two things are true. One, the farther away they are, the smaller they look; and two, the fireman is always bigger than the fiddler. But watch what happens when we make some of them disappear. Right. At a very close distance, the fiddler looks taller than the fireman, but at a far distance their normal, their true, relations are preserved. As Plato said, what space is to size, time is to value. These are the results of the hard problem I gave you: 60 now or 50 in a month? And these are subjective values, and what you can see is, our two rules are preserved. People always think more is better than less: 60 is always better than 50, and they always think now is better than later: the bars on this side are higher than the bars on this side. Watch what happens when we drop some out. Suddenly we have the dynamic inconsistency that puzzled us. We have the tendency for people to go for 50 dollars now over waiting a month, but not if that decision is far in the future. Notice something interesting that this implies — namely, that when people get to the future, they will change their minds. That is, as that month 12 approaches, you will say, what was I thinking, waiting an extra month for 60 dollars? I'll take the 50 dollars now. Well, the question with which I'd like to end is this: If we're so damn stupid, how did we get to the moon? Because I could go on for about two hours with evidence of people's inability to estimate odds and inability to estimate value. The answer to this question, I think, is an answer you've already heard in some of the talks, and I dare say you will hear again: namely, that our brains were evolved for a very different world than the one in which we are living. They were evolved for a world in which people lived in very small groups, rarely met anybody who was terribly different from themselves, had rather short lives in which there were few choices and the highest priority was to eat and mate today. Bernoulli's gift, Bernoulli's little formula, allows us, it tells us how we should think in a world for which nature never designed us. That explains why we are so bad at using it, but it also explains why it is so terribly important that we become good, fast. We are the only species on this planet that has ever held its own fate in its hands. We have no significant predators, we're the masters of our physical environment; the things that normally cause species to become extinct are no longer any threat to us. The only thing — the only thing — that can destroy us and doom us are our own decisions. If we're not here in 10,000 years, it's going to be because we could not take advantage of the gift given to us by a young Dutch fellow in 1738, because we underestimated the odds of our future pains and overestimated the value of our present pleasures. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: That was remarkable. We have time for some questions for Dan Gilbert. One and two. Bill Lyell: Would you say that this mechanism is in part how terrorism actually works to frighten us, and is there some way that we could counteract that? Dan Gilbert: I actually was consulting recently with the Department of Homeland Security, which generally believes that American security dollars should go to making borders safer. I tried to point out to them that terrorism was a name based on people's psychological reaction to a set of events, and that if they were concerned about terrorism they might ask what causes terror and how can we stop people from being terrified, rather than — not rather than, but in addition to stopping the atrocities that we're all concerned about. Surely the kinds of play that at least American media give to — and forgive me, but in raw numbers these are very tiny accidents. We already know, for example, in the United States, more people have died as a result of not taking airplanes — because they were scared — and driving on highways, than were killed in 9/11. OK? If I told you that there was a plague that was going to kill 15,000 Americans next year, you might be alarmed if you didn't find out it was the flu. These are small-scale accidents, and we should be wondering whether they should get the kind of play, the kind of coverage, that they do. Surely that causes people to overestimate the likelihood that they'll be hurt in these various ways, and gives power to the very people who want to frighten us. CA: Dan, I'd like to hear more on this. So, you're saying that our response to terror is, I mean, it's a form of mental bug? Talk more about it. DG: It's out-sized. I mean, look. If Australia disappears tomorrow, terror is probably the right response. That's an awful large lot of very nice people. On the other hand, when a bus blows up and 30 people are killed, more people than that were killed by not using their seatbelts in the same country. Is terror the right response? CA: What causes the bug? Is it the drama of the event — that it's so spectacular? Is it the fact that it's an intentional attack by, quote, outsiders? What is it? DG: Yes. It's a number of things, and you hit on several of them. First, it's a human agent trying to kill us — it's not a tree falling on us by accident. Second, these are enemies who may want to strike and hurt us again. People are being killed for no reason instead of good reason — as if there's good reason, but sometimes people think there are. So there are a number of things that together make this seem like a fantastic event, but let's not play down the fact that newspapers sell when people see something in it they want to read. So there's a large role here played by the media, who want these things to be as spectacular as they possibly can. CA: I mean, what would it take to persuade our culture to downplay it? DG: Well, go to Israel. You know, go to Israel. And a mall blows up, and then everybody's unhappy about it, and an hour-and-a-half later — at least when I was there, and I was 150 feet from the mall when it blew up — I went back to my hotel and the wedding that was planned was still going on. And as the Israeli mother said, she said, "We never let them win by stopping weddings." I mean, this is a society that has learned — and there are others too — that has learned to live with a certain amount of terrorism and not be quite as upset by it, shall I say, as those of us who have not had many terror attacks. CA: But is there a rational fear that actually, the reason we're frightened about this is because we think that the Big One is to come? DG: Yes, of course. So, if we knew that this was the worst attack there would ever be, there might be more and more buses of 30 people — we would probably not be nearly so frightened. I don't want to say — please, I'm going to get quoted somewhere as saying, "Terrorism is fine and we shouldn't be so distressed." That's not my point at all. What I'm saying is that, surely, rationally, our distress about things that happen, about threats, should be roughly proportional to the size of those threats and threats to come. I think in the case of terrorism, it isn't. And many of the things we've heard about from our speakers today — how many people do you know got up and said, Poverty! I can't believe what poverty is doing to us. People get up in the morning; they don't care about poverty. It's not making headlines, it's not making news, it's not flashy. There are no guns going off. I mean, if you had to solve one of these problems, Chris, which would you solve? Terrorism or poverty? (Laughter) (Applause) That's a tough one. CA: There's no question. Poverty, by an order of magnitude, a huge order of magnitude, unless someone can show that there's, you know, terrorists with a nuke are really likely to come. The latest I've read, seen, thought is that it's incredibly hard for them to do that. If that turns out to be wrong, we all look silly, but with poverty it's a bit — DG: Even if that were true, still more people die from poverty. CA: We've evolved to get all excited about these dramatic attacks. Is that because in the past, in the ancient past, we just didn't understand things like disease and systems that cause poverty and so forth, and so it made no sense for us as a species to put any energy into worrying about those things? People died; so be it. But if you got attacked, that was something you could do something about. And so we evolved these responses. Is that what happened? DG: Well, you know, the people who are most skeptical about leaping to evolutionary explanations for everything are the evolutionary psychologists themselves. My guess is that there's nothing quite that specific in our evolutionary past. But rather, if you're looking for an evolutionary explanation, you might say that most organisms are neo-phobic — that is, they're a little scared of stuff that's new and different. And there's a good reason to be, because old stuff didn't eat you. Right? Any animal you see that you've seen before is less likely to be a predator than one that you've never seen before. So, you know, when a school bus is blown up and we've never seen this before, our general tendency is to orient towards that which is new and novel is activated. I don't think it's quite as specific a mechanism as the one you alluded to, but maybe a more fundamental one underlying it. Jay Walker: You know, economists love to talk about the stupidity of people who buy lottery tickets. But I suspect you're making the exact same error you're accusing those people of, which is the error of value. I know, because I've interviewed about 1,000 lottery buyers over the years. It turns out that the value of buying a lottery ticket is not winning. That's what you think it is. All right? The average lottery buyer buys about 150 tickets a year, so the buyer knows full well that he or she is going to lose, and yet she buys 150 tickets a year. Why is that? It's not because she is stupid or he is stupid. It's because the anticipation of possibly winning releases serotonin in the brain, and actually provides a good feeling until the drawing indicates you've lost. Or, to put it another way, for the dollar investment, you can have a much better feeling than flushing the money down the toilet, which you cannot have a good feeling from. Now, economists tend to — (Applause) — economists tend to view the world through their own lenses, which is: this is just a bunch of stupid people. And as a result, many people look at economists as stupid people. And so fundamentally, the reason we got to the moon is, we didn't listen to the economists. Thank you very much. (Applause) DG: Well, no, it's a great point. It remains to be seen whether the joy of anticipation is exactly equaled by the amount of disappointment after the lottery. Because remember, people who didn't buy tickets don't feel awful the next day either, even though they don't feel great during the drawing. I would disagree that people know they're not going to win. I think they think it's unlikely, but it could happen, which is why they prefer that to the flushing. But certainly I see your point: that there can be some utility to buying a lottery ticket other than winning. Now, I think there's many good reasons not to listen to economists. That isn't one of them, for me, but there's many others. CA: Last question. Aubrey de Grey: My name's Aubrey de Grey, from Cambridge. I work on the thing that kills more people than anything else kills — I work on aging — and I'm interested in doing something about it, as we'll all hear tomorrow. I very much resonate with what you're saying, because it seems to me that the problem with getting people interested in doing anything about aging is that by the time aging is about to kill you it looks like cancer or heart disease or whatever. Do you have any advice? (Laughter) DG: For you or for them? AdG: In persuading them. DG: Ah, for you in persuading them. Well, it's notoriously difficult to get people to be farsighted. But one thing that psychologists have tried that seems to work is to get people to imagine the future more vividly. One of the problems with making decisions about the far future and the near future is that we imagine the near future much more vividly than the far future. To the extent that you can equalize the amount of detail that people put into the mental representations of near and far future, people begin to make decisions about the two in the same way. So, would you like to have an extra 100,000 dollars when you're 65 is a question that's very different than, imagine who you'll be when you're 65: will you be living, what will you look like, how much hair will you have, who will you be living with. Once we have all the details of that imaginary scenario, suddenly we feel like it might be important to save so that that guy has a little retirement money. But these are tricks around the margins. I think in general you're battling a very fundamental human tendency, which is to say, "I'm here today, and so now is more important than later." CA: Dan, thank you. Members of the audience, that was a fantastic session. Thank you. (Applause)

The price of happiness

Benjamin Wallace

{0: 'Benjamin Wallace'}

{0: ['author']}

{0: "Benjamin Wallace is a journalist and author of <i>The Billionaire's Vinegar</i>, the true story of the world's most expensive bottle of (possibly phony?) wine. He's been a contributor to <i>GQ</i>, <i>Details</i>, <i>Salon</i> and <i>The Washington Post</i>."}

2008-07-19

2008-12-17

Taste3 2008

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'da', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'fr-ca', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ka', 'ko', 'lv', 'mk', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sl', 'sq', 'sr', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['business', 'culture', 'entertainment', 'food', 'happiness', 'writing', 'books', 'Best of the Web']

{420: 'Why we make bad decisions', 406: 'A foie gras parable', 87: 'Nerdcore comedy', 51: 'Winning the oil endgame', 1437: 'Perspective is everything'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/benjamin_wallace_the_price_of_happiness/

Can happiness be bought? To find out, author Benjamin Wallace sampled the world's most expensive products, including a bottle of 1947 Chateau Cheval Blanc, 8 ounces of Kobe beef and the fabled (notorious) Kopi Luwak coffee. His critique may surprise you.

I'm just going to play a brief video clip. Video: On the fifth of December 1985, a bottle of 1787 Lafitte was sold for 105,000 pounds — nine times the previous world record. The buyer was Kip Forbes, son of one of the most flamboyant millionaires of the 20th century. The original owner of the bottle turned out to be one of the most enthusiastic wine buffs of the 18th century. Château Lafitte is one of the greatest wines in the world, the prince of any wine cellar. Benjamin Wallace: Now, that's about all the videotape that remains of an event that set off the longest-running mystery in the modern wine world. And the mystery existed because of a gentleman named Hardy Rodenstock. In 1985, he announced to his friends in the wine world that he had made this incredible discovery. Some workmen in Paris had broken through a brick wall, and happened upon this hidden cache of wines — apparently the property of Thomas Jefferson. 1787, 1784. He wouldn't reveal the exact number of bottles, he would not reveal exactly where the building was and he would not reveal exactly who owned the building. The mystery persisted for about 20 years. It finally began to get resolved in 2005 because of this guy. Bill Koch is a Florida billionaire who owns four of the Jefferson bottles, and he became suspicious. And he ended up spending over a million dollars and hiring ex-FBI and ex-Scotland Yard agents to try to get to the bottom of this. There's now ample evidence that Hardy Rodenstock is a con man, and that the Jefferson bottles were fakes. But for those 20 years, an unbelievable number of really eminent and accomplished figures in the wine world were sort of drawn into the orbit of these bottles. I think they wanted to believe that the most expensive bottle of wine in the world must be the best bottle of wine in the world, must be the rarest bottle of wine in the world. I became increasingly, kind of voyeuristically interested in the question of you know, why do people spend these crazy amounts of money, not only on wine but on lots of things, and are they living a better life than me? So, I decided to embark on a quest. With the generous backing of a magazine I write for sometimes, I decided to sample the very best, or most expensive, or most coveted item in about a dozen categories, which was a very grueling quest, as you can imagine. (Laughter) This was the first one. A lot of the Kobe beef that you see in the U.S. is not the real thing. It may come from Wagyu cattle, but it's not from the original, Appalachian Hyogo Prefecture in Japan. There are very few places in the U.S. where you can try real Kobe, and one of them is Wolfgang Puck's restaurant, Cut, in Los Angeles. I went there, and I ordered the eight-ounce rib eye for 160 dollars. And it arrived, and it was tiny. And I was outraged. It was like, 160 dollars for this? And then I took a bite, and I wished that it was tinier, because Kobe beef is so rich. It's like foie gras — it's not even like steak. I almost couldn't finish it. I was really happy when I was done. (Laughter) Now, the photographer who took the pictures for this project for some reason posed his dog in a lot of them, so that's why you're going to see this recurring character. Which, I guess, you know, communicates to you that I did not think that one was really worth the price. White truffles. One of the most expensive luxury foods by weight in the world. To try this, I went to a Mario Batali restaurant in Manhattan — Del Posto. The waiter, you know, came out with the white truffle knob and his shaver, and he shaved it onto my pasta and he said, you know, "Would Signore like the truffles?" And the charm of white truffles is in their aroma. It's not in their taste, really. It's not in their texture. It's in the smell. These white pearlescent flakes hit the noodles, this haunting, wonderful, nutty, mushroomy smell wafted up. 10 seconds passed and it was gone. And then I was left with these little ugly flakes on my pasta that, you know, their purpose had been served, and so I'm afraid to say that this was also a disappointment to me. There were several — several of these items were disappointments. (Laughter) Yeah. The magazine wouldn't pay for me to go there. (Laughter) They did give me a tour, though. And this hotel suite is 4,300 square feet. It has 360-degree views. It has four balconies. It was designed by the architect I.M. Pei. It comes with its own Rolls Royce and driver. It comes with its own wine cellar that you can draw freely from. When I took the tour, it actually included some Opus One, I was glad to see. 30,000 dollars for a night in a hotel. This is soap that's made from silver nanoparticles, which have antibacterial properties. I washed my face with this this morning in preparation for this. And it, you know, tickled a little bit and it smelled good, but I have to say that nobody here has complimented me on the cleanliness of my face today. (Laughter) But then again, nobody has complimented me on the jeans I'm wearing. These ones GQ did spring for — I own these — but I will tell you, not only did I not get a compliment from any of you, I have not gotten a compliment from anybody in the months that I have owned and worn these. I don't think that whether or not you're getting a compliment should be the test of something's value, but I think in the case of a fashion item, an article of clothing, that's a reasonable benchmark. That said, a lot of work goes into these. They are made from handpicked organic Zimbabwean cotton that has been shuttle loomed and then hand-dipped in natural indigo 24 times. But no compliments. (Laughter) Thank you. Armando Manni is a former filmmaker who makes this olive oil from an olive that grows on a single slope in Tuscany. And he goes to great lengths to protect the olive oil from oxygen and light. He uses tiny bottles, the glass is tinted, he tops the olive oil off with an inert gas. And he actually — once he releases a batch of it, he regularly conducts molecular analyses and posts the results online, so you can go online and look at your batch number and see how the phenolics are developing, and, you know, gauge its freshness. I did a blind taste test of this with 20 people and five other olive oils. It tasted fine. It tasted interesting. It was very green, it was very peppery. But in the blind taste test, it came in last. The olive oil that came in first was actually a bottle of Whole Foods 365 olive oil which had been oxidizing next to my stove for six months. (Laughter) A recurring theme is that a lot of these things are from Japan — you'll start to notice. I don't play golf, so I couldn't actually road test these, but I did interview a guy who owns them. Even the people who market these clubs — I mean, they'll say these have four axis shafts which minimize loss of club speed and thereby drive the ball farther — but they'll say, look, you know, you're not getting 57,000 dollars worth of performance from these clubs. You're paying for the bling, that they're encrusted with gold and platinum. The guy who I interviewed who owns them did say that he's gotten a lot of pleasure out of them, so ... Oh, yeah, you know this one? This is a coffee made from a very unusual process. The luwak is an Asian Palm Civet. It's a cat that lives in trees, and at night it comes down and it prowls the coffee plantations. And apparently it's a very picky eater and it, you know, hones in on only the ripest coffee cherries. And then an enzyme in its digestive tract leeches into the beans, and people with the unenviable job of collecting these cats' leavings then go through the forest collecting the, you know, results and processing it into coffee — although you actually can buy it in the unprocessed form. That's right. Unrelatedly — (Laughter) Japan is doing crazy things with toilets. (Laughter) There is now a toilet that has an MP3 player in it. There's one with a fragrance dispenser. There's one that actually analyzes the contents of the bowl and transmits the results via email to your doctor. It's almost like a home medical center — and that is the direction that Japanese toilet technology is heading in. This one does not have those bells and whistles, but for pure functionality it's pretty much the best — the Neorest 600. And to try this — I couldn't get a loaner, but I did go into the Manhattan showroom of the manufacturer, Toto, and they have a bathroom off of the showroom that you can use, which I used. It's fully automated — you walk towards it, and the seat lifts. The seat is preheated. There's a water jet that cleans you. There's an air jet that dries you. You get up, it flushes by itself. The lid closes, it self-cleans. Not only is it a technological leap forward, but I really do believe it's a bit of a cultural leap forward. I mean, a no hands, no toilet paper toilet. And I want to get one of these. (Laughter) This was another one I could not get a loaner of. Tom Cruise supposedly owns this bed. There's a little plaque on the end that, you know, each buyer gets their name engraved on it. (Laughter) To try this one, the maker of it let me and my wife spend the night in the Manhattan showroom. Lights glaring in off the street, and we had to hire a security guard and all these things. But anyway, we had a great night's sleep. And you spend a third of your life in bed. I don't think it's that bad of a deal. (Laughter) This was a fun one. This is the fastest street-legal car in the world and the most expensive production car. I got to drive this with a chaperone from the company, a professional race car driver, and we drove around the canyons outside of Los Angeles and down on the Pacific Coast Highway. And, you know, when we pulled up to a stoplight the people in the adjacent cars kind of gave us respectful nods. And it was really amazing. It was such a smooth ride. Most of the cars that I drive, if I get up to 80 they start to rattle. I switched lanes on the highway and the driver, this chaperone, said, "You know, you were just going 110 miles an hour." And I had no idea that I was one of those obnoxious people you occasionally see weaving in and out of traffic, because it was just that smooth. And if I was a billionaire, I would get one. (Laughter) This is a completely gratuitous video I'm just going to show of one of the pitfalls of advanced technology. This is Tom Cruise arriving at the "Mission: Impossible III" premiere. When he tries to open the door, you could call it "Mission: Impossible IV." There was one object that I could not get my hands on, and that was the 1947 Cheval Blanc. The '47 Cheval Blanc is probably the most mythologized wine of the 20th century. And Cheval Blanc is kind of an unusual wine for Bordeaux in having a significant percentage of the Cabernet Franc grape. And 1947 was a legendary vintage, especially in the right bank of Bordeaux. And just together, that vintage and that chateau took on this aura that eventually kind of gave it this cultish following. But it's 60 years old. There's not much of it left. What there is of it left you don't know if it's real — it's considered to be the most faked wine in the world. Not that many people are looking to pop open their one remaining bottle for a journalist. So, I'd about given up trying to get my hands on one of these. I'd put out feelers to retailers, to auctioneers, and it was coming up empty. And then I got an email from a guy named Bipin Desai. Bipin Desai is a U.C. Riverside theoretical physicist who also happens to be the preeminent organizer of rare wine tastings, and he said, "I've got a tasting coming up where we're going to serve the '47 Cheval Blanc." And it was going to be a double vertical — it was going to be 30 vintages of Cheval Blanc, and 30 vintages of Yquem. And it was an invitation you do not refuse. I went. It was three days, four meals. And at lunch on Saturday, we opened the '47. And you know, it had this fragrant softness, and it smelled a little bit of linseed oil. And then I tasted it, and it, you know, had this kind of unctuous, porty richness, which is characteristic of that wine — that it sort of resembles port in a lot of ways. There were people at my table who thought it was, you know, fantastic. There were some people who were a little less impressed. And I wasn't that impressed. And I don't — call my palate a philistine palate — so it doesn't necessarily mean something that I wasn't impressed, but I was not the only one there who had that reaction. And it wasn't just to that wine. Any one of the wines served at this tasting, if I'd been served it at a dinner party, it would have been, you know, the wine experience of my lifetime, and incredibly memorable. But drinking 60 great wines over three days, they all just blurred together, and it became almost a grueling experience. And I just wanted to finish by mentioning a very interesting study which came out earlier this year from some researchers at Stanford and Caltech. And they gave subjects the same wine, labeled with different price tags. A lot of people, you know, said that they liked the more expensive wine more — it was the same wine, but they thought it was a different one that was more expensive. But what was unexpected was that these researchers did MRI brain imaging while the people were drinking the wine, and not only did they say they enjoyed the more expensively labeled wine more — their brain actually registered as experiencing more pleasure from the same wine when it was labeled with a higher price tag. Thank you.

There might just be life on Mars

Penelope Boston

{0: 'Penelope Boston'}

{0: ['cave scientist']}

{0: 'Penelope Boston studies caves and karst formations, and the special biology that lives in them -- both here on Earth and possibly on other planets.'}

2006-02-02

2008-12-17

TED2006

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['Planets', 'exploration', 'extraterrestrial life', 'geology', 'life', 'science', 'technology', 'universe', 'Mars', 'solar system']

{141: "Inside the world's deepest caves", 178: 'This is Saturn', 399: 'The story behind the Mars Rovers', 2869: 'The most Martian place on Earth', 2476: "Your kids might live on Mars. Here's how they'll survive", 2235: 'How Mars might hold the secret to the origin of life'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/penelope_boston_there_might_just_be_life_on_mars/

So the Mars Rovers didn't scoop up any alien lifeforms. Scientist Penelope Boston thinks there's a good chance -- a 25 to 50 percent chance, in fact -- that life might exist on Mars, deep inside the planet's caves. She details how we should look and why.

The career that I started early on in my life was looking for exotic life forms in exotic places, and at that time I was working in the Antarctic and the Arctic, and high deserts and low deserts. Until about a dozen years ago, when I was really captured by caves, and I really re-focused most of my research in that direction. So I have a really cool day job— I get to do some really amazing stuff. I work in some of the most extreme cave environments on the planet. Many of them are trying to kill us from the minute we go into them, but nevertheless, they're absolutely gripping, and contain unbelievable biological wonders that are very, very different from those that we have on the planet. Apart from the intrinsic value of the biology and mineralogy and geo-microbiology that we do there, we're also using these as templates for figuring out how to go look for life on other planets. Particularly Mars, but also Europa, the small, icy moon around Jupiter. And perhaps, someday, far beyond our solar system itself. I'm very passionately interested in the human future, on the Moon and Mars particularly, and elsewhere in the solar system. I think it's time that we transitioned to a solar system-going civilization and species. And, as an outgrowth of all of this then, I wonder about whether we can, and whether we even should, think about transporting Earth-type life to other planets. Notably Mars, as a first example. Something I never talk about in scientific meetings is how I actually got to this state and why I do the work that I do. Why don't I have a normal job, a sensible job? And then of course, I blame the Soviet Union. Because in the mid-1950s, when I was a tiny child, they had the audacity to launch a very primitive little satellite called Sputnik, which sent the Western world into a hysterical tailspin. And a tremendous amount of money went into the funding of science and mathematics skills for kids. And I'm a product of that generation, like so many other of my peers. It really caught hold of us, and caught fire, and it would be lovely if we could reproduce that again now. Of course, refusing to grow up — — even though I impersonate a grown-up in daily life, but I do a fairly good job of that — but really retaining that childlike quality of not caring what other people think about what you're interested in, is really critical. The next element is the fact that I have applied a value judgment and my value judgment is that the presence of life is better than no life. And so, life is more valuable than no life. And so I think that that holds together a great deal of the work that people in this audience approach. I'm very interested in Mars, of course, and that was a product of my being a young undergraduate when the Viking Landers landed on Mars. And that took what had been a tiny little astronomical object in the sky, that you would see as a dot, and turned it completely into a landscape, as that very first primitive picture came rastering across the screen. And when it became a landscape, it also became a destination, and altered, really, the course of my life. In my graduate years I worked with my colleague and mentor and friend, Steve Schneider, at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, working on global change issues. We've written a number of things on the role of Gaia hypothesis — whether or not you could consider Earth as a single entity in any meaningful scientific sense, and then, as an outgrowth of that, I worked on the environmental consequences of nuclear war. So, wonderful things and grim things. But what it taught me was to look at Earth as a planet with external eyes, not just as our home. And that is a wonderful stepping away in perspective, to try to then think about the way our planet behaves, as a planet, and with the life that's on it. And all of this seems to me to be a salient point in history. We're getting ready to begin to go through the process of leaving our planet of origin and out into the wider solar system and beyond. So, back to Mars. How hard is it going to be to find life on Mars? Well, sometimes it's really very hard for us to find each other, even on this planet. So, finding life on another planet is a non-trivial occupation and we spend a lot of time trying to think about that. Whether or not you think it's likely to be successful sort of depends on what you think about the chances of life in the universe. I think, myself, that life is a natural outgrowth of the increasing complexification of matter over time. So, you start with the Big Bang and you get hydrogen, and then you get helium, and then you get more complicated stuff, and you get planets forming — and life is a common, planetary-based phenomenon, in my view. Certainly, in the last 15 years, we've seen increasing numbers of planets outside of our solar system being confirmed, and just last month, a couple of weeks ago, a planet in the size-class of Earth has actually been found. And so this is very exciting news. So, my first bold prediction is that, is that in the universe, life is going to be everywhere. It's going to be everywhere we look — where there are planetary systems that can possibly support it. And those planetary systems are going to be very common. So, what about life on Mars? Well, if somebody had asked me about a dozen years ago what I thought the chances of life on Mars would be, I would've probably said, a couple of percent. And even that was considered outrageous at the time. I was once sneeringly introduced by a former NASA official, as the only person on the planet who still thought there was life on Mars. Of course, that official is now dead, and I'm not, so there's a certain amount of glory in outliving your adversaries. But things have changed greatly over the last dozen years. And the reason that they have changed is because we now have new information. The amazing Pathfinder mission that went in '97, and the MER Rover missions that are on Mars as we speak now and the European Space Agency's Mars Express, has taught us a number of amazing things. There is sub-surface ice on that planet. And so where there is water, there is a very high chance of our kind of life. There's clearly sedimentary rocks all over the place – one of the landers is sitting in the middle of an ancient seabed, and there are these amazing structures called blueberries, which are these little, rocky concretions that we are busy making biologically in my lab right now. So, with all of these things put together, I think that the chances of life are much greater than I would've ever thought. I think that the chance of life having arisen on Mars, sometime in its past, is maybe one in four to maybe even half and half. So this is a very bold statement. I think it's there, and I think we need to go look for it, and I think it's underground. So the game's afoot, and this is the game that we play in astro-biology. How do you try to get a handle on extraterrestrial life? How do you plan to look for it? How do you know it when you find it? Because if it's big and obvious, we would've already found it — it would've already bitten us on the foot, and it hasn't. So, we know that it's probably quite cryptic. Very critically, how do we protect it, if we find it, and not contaminate it? And also, even perhaps more critically, because this is the only home planet we have, how do we protect us from it, while we study it? So why might it be hard to find? Well, it's probably microscopic, and it's never easy to study microscopic things, although the amazing tools that we now have to do that allow us to study things in much greater depth, at much smaller scales than ever before. But it's probably hiding, because if you are out sequestering resources from your environment, that makes you yummy, and other things might want to eat you, or consume you. And so, there's a game of predator-prey that's going to be, essentially, universal, really, in any kind of biological system. It also may be very, very different in its fundamental properties – its chemistry, or its size. We say small, but what does that mean? Is it virus-sized? Is it smaller than that? Is it bigger than the biggest bacterium? We don't know. And speed of activity, which is something that we face in our work with sub-surface organisms, because they grow very, very slowly. If I were to take a swab off your teeth and plate it on a Petri plate, within about four or five hours, I would have to see growth. But the organisms that we work with, from the sub-surface of Earth, very often it's months — and in many cases, years — before we see any growth whatsoever. So they are, intrinsically, a slower life-form. But the real issue is that we are guided by our limited experience, and until we can think out of the box of our cranium and what we know, then we can't recognize what to look for, or how to plan for it. So, perspective is everything and, because of the history that I've just briefly talked to you about, I have learned to think about Earth as an extraterrestrial planet. And this has been invaluable in our approach to try to study these things. This is my favorite game on airplanes: where you're in an airplane and you look out the window, you see the horizon. I always turn my head on the side, and that simple change makes me go from seeing this planet as home, to seeing it as a planet. It's a very simple trick, and I never fail to do it when I'm sitting in a window seat. Well, this is what we apply to our work. This shows one of the most extreme caves that we work in. This is Cueva de Villa Luz in Tabasco, in Mexico, and this cave is saturated with sulfuric acid. There is tremendous amounts of hydrogen sulfide coming into this cave from volcanic sources and from the breakdown of evaporite — minerals below the carbonates in which this cave is formed — and it is a completely hostile environment for us. We have to go in with protective suits and breathing gear, and 30 parts per million of H2S will kill you. This is regularly several hundred parts per million. So, it's a very hazardous environment, with CO as well, and many other gases. These extreme physical and chemical parameters make the biology that grows in these places very special. Because contrary to what you might think, this is not devoid of life. This is one of the richest caves that we have found on the planet, anywhere. It's bursting with life. The extremes on Earth are interesting in their own right, but one of the reasons that we're interested in them is because they represent, really, the average conditions that we may expect on other planets. So, this is part of the ability that we have, to try to stretch our imagination, in terms of what we may find in the future. There's so much life in this cave, and I can't even begin to scratch the surface of it with you. But one of the most famous objects out of this are what we call Snottites, for obvious reasons. This stuff looks like what comes out of your two-year-old's nose when he has a cold. And this is produced by bacteria who are actually making more sulfuric acid, and living at pHs right around zero. And so, this stuff is like battery acid. And yet, everything in this cave has adapted to it. In fact, there's so much energy available for biology in this cave, that there's actually a huge number of cavefish. And the local Zoque Indians harvest this twice a year, as part of their Easter week celebration and Holy Week celebration. This is very unusual for caves. In some of the other amazing caves that we work in — this is in Lechuguilla cave in New Mexico near Carlsbad, and this is one of the most famous caves in the world. It's 115 miles of mapped passage, it's pristine, it has no natural opening and it's a gigantic biological, geo-microbiological laboratory. In this cave, great areas are covered by this reddish material that you see here, and also these enormous crystals of selenite that you can see dangling down. This stuff is produced biologically. This is the breakdown product of the bedrock, that organisms are busy munching their way through. They take iron and manganese minerals within the bedrock and they oxidize them. And every time they do that, they get a tiny little packet of energy. And that tiny little packet of energy is what they use, then, to run their life processes. Interestingly enough, they also do this with uranium and chromium, and various other toxic metals. And so, the obvious avenue for bio-remediation comes from organisms like this. These organisms we now bring into the lab, and you can see some of them growing on Petri plates, and get them to reproduce the precise biominerals that we find on the walls of these caves. So, these are signals that they leave in the rock record. Well, even in basalt surfaces in lava-tube caves, which are a by-product of volcanic activity, we find these walls totally covered, in many cases, by these beautiful, glistening silver walls, or shiny pink or shiny red or shiny gold. And these are mineral deposits that are also made by bacteria. And you can see in these central images here, scanning electron micrographs of some of these guys — these are gardens of these bacteria. One of the interesting things about these particular guys is that they're in the actinomycete and streptomycete groups of the bacteria, which is where we get most of our antibiotics. The sub-surface of Earth contains a vast biodiversity. And these organisms, because they're very separate from the surface, make a vast array of novel compounds. And so, the potential for exploiting this for pharmaceutical and industrial chemical uses is completely untapped, but probably exceeds most of the rest of the biodiversity of the planet. So, lava-tube caves— I've just told you about organisms that live here on this planet. We know that on Mars and the Moon there are tons of these structures. We can see them. On the left you can see a lava tube forming at a recent eruption — Mount Etna in Sicily — and this is the way these tubes form. And when they hollow out, then they become habitats for organisms. These are all over the planet Mars, and we're busy cataloguing them now. And so, there's very interesting cave real estate on Mars, at least of that type. In order to access these sub-surface environments that we're interested in, we're very interested in developing the tools to do this. You know, it's not easy to get into these caves. It requires crawling, climbing, rope-work, technical rope-work and many other complex human motions in order to access these. We face the problem of, how can we do this robotically? Why would we want to do it robotically? Well, we're going to be sending robotic missions to Mars long in advance of human missions. And then, secondly, getting back to that earlier point that I made about the preciousness of any life that we may find on Mars, we don't want to contaminate it. And one of the best ways to study something without contaminating it is to have an intermediary. And in this case, we're imagining intermediary robotic devices that can actually do some of that front-end work for us, to protect any potential life that we find. I'm not going to go through all of these projects now, but we're involved in about half-a-dozen robotic development projects, in collaboration with a number of different groups. I want to talk specifically about the array that you see on the top. These are hopping microbot swarms. I'm working on this with the Field and Space Robotics Laboratory and my friend Steve Dubowsky at MIT, and we have come up with the idea of having little, jumping bean-like robots that are propelled by artificial muscle, which is one of the Dubowsky Lab's specialties — are the EPAMs, or artificial muscles. And these allow them to hop. They behave with a swarm behavior, where they relate to each other, modeled after insect swarm behavior, and they could be made very numerous. And so, one can send a thousand of them, as you can see in this upper left-hand picture, a thousand of them could fit into the payload bay that was used for one of the current MER Rovers. And these little guys — you could lose many of them. If you send a thousand of them, you could probably get rid of 90 percent of them and still have a mission. And so, that allows you the flexibility to go into very challenging terrain and actually make your way where you want to go. Now, to wrap this up, I want to talk for two seconds about caves and the human expansion beyond Earth as a natural outgrowth of the work that we do in caves. It occurred to us a number of years ago that caves have many properties that people have used and other organisms have used as habitat in the past. And perhaps it's time we started to explore those, in the context of future Mars and the Moon exploration. So, we have just finished a NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts Phase II study, looking at the irreducible set of technologies that you would need in order to actually allow people to inhabit lava tubes on the Moon or Mars. It turns out to be a fairly simple and small list, and we have gone in the relatively primitive technology direction. So, we're talking about things like inflatable liners that can conform to the complex topological shape on the inside of a cave, foamed-in-place airlocks to deal with this complex topology, various ways of getting breathing gases made from the intrinsic materials of these bodies. And the future is there for us to use these lava-tube caves on Mars. And right now we're in caves, and we're doing science and recreation, but I think in the future we'll be using them for habitat and science on these other bodies. Now, my view of what the current status of potential life on Mars is that it's probably been on the planet, maybe one in two chances. The question as to whether there is life on Mars that is related to life on Earth has now been very muddied, because we now know, from Mars meteorites that have made it to Earth, that there's material that can be exchanged between those two planets. One of the burning questions, of course, is if we go there and find life in the sub-surface, as I fully expect that we will, is that a second genesis of life? Did life start here and was it transported there? Did it start there and get transported here? This will be a fascinating puzzle as we go into the next half-century, and where I expect that we will have more and more Mars missions to answer these questions. Thank you.

Taking OLPC to Colombia

Nicholas Negroponte

{0: 'Nicholas Negroponte'}

{0: ['tech visionary']}

{0: "The founder of the MIT Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte pushed the edge of the information revolution as an inventor, thinker and angel investor. He's the driving force behind One Laptop per Child, building computers for children in the developing world. "}

2008-12-04

2008-12-22

TED in the Field

en

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['children', 'computers', 'design', 'global issues', 'philanthropy', 'technology']

{41: 'One Laptop per Child', 228: 'A powerful idea about ideas', 266: 'Designing objects that tell stories', 809: 'Teaching one child at a time', 45972: 'A new way to get every child ready for kindergarten', 735: 'Kids, take charge'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_negroponte_taking_olpc_to_colombia/

TED follows Nicholas Negroponte to Colombia as he delivers laptops inside territory once controlled by guerrillas. His partner? Colombia's Defense Department, who see One Laptop per Child as an investment in the region. (And you too can get involved.)

It's amazing, when you meet a head of state and you say, "What is your most precious natural resource?" — they will not say children at first. And then when you say children, they will pretty quickly agree with you. (Video): We're traveling today with the Minister of Defense of Colombia, head of the army and the head of the police, and we're dropping off 650 laptops today to children who have no television, no telephone and have been in a community cut off from the rest of the world for the past 40 years. The importance of delivering laptops to this region is connecting kids who have otherwise been unconnected because of the FARC, the guerrillas that started off 40 years ago as a political movement and then became a drug movement. There are one billion children in the world, and 50 percent of them don't have electricity at home or at school. And in some countries — let me pick Afghanistan — 75 percent of the little girls don't go to school. And I don't mean that they drop out of school in the third or fourth grade — they don't go. So in the three years since I talked at TED and showed a prototype, it's gone from an idea to a real laptop. We have half a million laptops today in the hands of children. We have about a quarter of a million in transit to those and other children, and then there are another quarter of a million more that are being ordered at this moment. So, in rough numbers, there are a million laptops. That's smaller than I predicted — I predicted three to 10 million — but is still a very large number. In Colombia, we have about 3,000 laptops. It's the Minister of Defense with whom we're working, not the Minister of Education, because it is seen as a strategic defense issue in the sense of liberating these zones that had been completely closed off, in which the people who had been causing, if you will, 40 years' worth of bombings and kidnappings and assassinations lived. And suddenly, the kids have connected laptops. They've leapfrogged. The change is absolutely monumental, because it's not just opening it up, but it's opening it up to the rest of the world. So yes, they're building roads, yes, they're putting in telephone, yes, there will be television. But the kids six to 12 years old are surfing the Internet in Spanish and in local languages, so the children grow up with access to information, with a window into the rest of the world. Before, they were closed off. Interestingly enough, in other countries, it will be the Minister of Finance who sees it as an engine of economic growth. And that engine is going to see the results in 20 years. It's not going to happen, you know, in one year, but it's an important, deeply economic and cultural change that happens through children. Thirty-one countries in total are involved, and in the case of Uruguay, half the children already have them, and by the middle of 2009, every single child in Uruguay will have a laptop — a little green laptop. Now what are some of the results? Some of the results that go across every single country include teachers saying they have never loved teaching so much, and reading comprehension measured by third parties — not by us — skyrockets. Probably the most important thing we see is children teaching parents. They own the laptops. They take them home. And so when I met with three children from the schools, who had traveled all day to come to Bogota, one of the three children brought her mother. And the reason she brought her mother is that this six-year-old child had been teaching her mother how to read and write. Her mother had not gone to primary school. And this is such an inversion, and such a wonderful example of children being the agents of change. So now, in closing, people say, now why laptops? Laptops are a luxury; it's like giving them iPods. No. The reason you want laptops is that the word is education, not laptop. This is an education project, not a laptop project. They need to learn learning. And then, just think — they can have, let's say, 100 books. In a village, you have 100 laptops, each with a different set of 100 books, and so that village suddenly has 10,000 books. You and I didn't have 10,000 books when we went to primary school. Sometimes school is under a tree, or in many cases, the teacher has only a fifth-grade education, so you need a collaborative model of learning, not just building more schools and training more teachers, which you have to do anyway. So we're once again doing "Give One, Get One." Last year, we ran a "Give One, Get One" program, and it generated over 100,000 laptops that we were then able to give free. And by being a zero-dollar laptop, we can go to countries that can't afford it at all. And that's what we did. We went to Haiti, we went to Rwanda, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Mongolia. Places that are not markets, seeding it with the principles of saturation, connectivity, low ages, etc. And then we can actually roll out large numbers. So think of it this way: think of it as inoculating children against ignorance. And think of the laptop as a vaccine. You don't vaccinate a few children. You vaccinate all the children in an area.

The science of sync

Steven Strogatz

{0: 'Steven Strogatz'}

{0: ['mathematician']}

{0: 'In his work in applied mathematics, Steven Strogatz studies the way math and biology intersect.'}

2004-02-02

2008-12-22

TED2004

en

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['biology', 'biomechanics', 'math', 'science', 'society', 'technology']

{198: 'The fractals at the heart of African designs', 18: "Biomimicry's surprising lessons from nature's engineers", 145: 'The emergent genius of ant colonies', 18592: 'Bridges should be beautiful', 58787: 'Epic Engineering: Building the Brooklyn Bridge ', 1997: 'The bridge between suicide and life'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_strogatz_the_science_of_sync/

Mathematician Steven Strogatz shows how flocks of creatures (like birds, fireflies and fish) manage to synchronize and act as a unit -- when no one's giving orders. The powerful tendency extends into the realm of objects, too.

I was trying to think, how is sync connected to happiness, and it occurred to me that for some reason we take pleasure in synchronizing. We like to dance together, we like singing together. And so, if you'll put up with this, I would like to enlist your help with a first experiment today. The experiment is — and I notice, by the way, that when you applauded, that you did it in a typical North American way, that is, you were raucous and incoherent. You were not organized. It didn't even occur to you to clap in unison. Do you think you could do it? I would like to see if this audience would — no, you haven't practiced, as far as I know — can you get it together to clap in sync? (Clapping) Whoa! Now, that's what we call emergent behavior. (Laughter) So I didn't expect that, but — I mean, I expected you could synchronize. It didn't occur to me you'd increase your frequency. It's interesting. (Laughter) So what do we make of that? First of all, we know that you're all brilliant. This is a room full of intelligent people, highly sensitive. Some trained musicians out there. Is that what enabled you to synchronize? So to put the question a little more seriously, let's ask ourselves what are the minimum requirements for what you just did, for spontaneous synchronization. Do you need, for instance, to be as smart as you are? Do you even need a brain at all just to synchronize? Do you need to be alive? I mean, that's a spooky thought, right? Inanimate objects that might spontaneously synchronize themselves. It's real. In fact, I'll try to explain today that sync is maybe one of, if not one of the most, perhaps the most pervasive drive in all of nature. It extends from the subatomic scale to the farthest reaches of the cosmos. It's a deep tendency toward order in nature that opposes what we've all been taught about entropy. I mean, I'm not saying the law of entropy is wrong — it's not. But there is a countervailing force in the universe — the tendency towards spontaneous order. And so that's our theme. Now, to get into that, let me begin with what might have occurred to you immediately when you hear that we're talking about synchrony in nature, which is the glorious example of birds that flock together, or fish swimming in organized schools. So these are not particularly intelligent creatures, and yet, as we'll see, they exhibit beautiful ballets. This is from a BBC show called "Predators," and what we're looking at here are examples of synchrony that have to do with defense. When you're small and vulnerable, like these starlings, or like the fish, it helps to swarm to avoid predators, to confuse predators. Let me be quiet for a second because this is so gorgeous. For a long time, biologists were puzzled by this behavior, wondering how it could be possible. We're so used to choreography giving rise to synchrony. These creatures are not choreographed. They're choreographing themselves. And only today is science starting to figure out how it works. I'll show you a computer model made by Iain Couzin, a researcher at Oxford, that shows how swarms work. There are just three simple rules. First, all the individuals are only aware of their nearest neighbors. Second, all the individuals have a tendency to line up. And third, they're all attracted to each other, but they try to keep a small distance apart. And when you build those three rules in, automatically you start to see swarms that look very much like fish schools or bird flocks. Now, fish like to stay close together, about a body length apart. Birds try to stay about three or four body lengths apart. But except for that difference, the rules are the same for both. Now, all this changes when a predator enters the scene. There's a fourth rule: when a predator's coming, get out of the way. Here on the model you see the predator attacking. The prey move out in random directions, and then the rule of attraction brings them back together again, so there's this constant splitting and reforming. And you see that in nature. Keep in mind that, although it looks as if each individual is acting to cooperate, what's really going on is a kind of selfish Darwinian behavior. Each is scattering away at random to try to save its scales or feathers. That is, out of the desire to save itself, each creature is following these rules, and that leads to something that's safe for all of them. Even though it looks like they're thinking as a group, they're not. You might wonder what exactly is the advantage to being in a swarm, so you can think of several. As I say, if you're in a swarm, your odds of being the unlucky one are reduced as compared to a small group. There are many eyes to spot danger. And you'll see in the example with the starlings, with the birds, when this peregrine hawk is about to attack them, that actually waves of panic can propagate, sending messages over great distances. You'll see — let's see, it's coming up possibly at the very end — maybe not. Information can be sent over half a kilometer away in a very short time through this mechanism. Yes, it's happening here. See if you can see those waves propagating through the swarm. It's beautiful. The birds are, we sort of understand, we think, from that computer model, what's going on. As I say, it's just those three simple rules, plus the one about watch out for predators. There doesn't seem to be anything mystical about this. We don't, however, really understand at a mathematical level. I'm a mathematician. We would like to be able to understand better. I mean, I showed you a computer model, but a computer is not understanding. A computer is, in a way, just another experiment. We would really like to have a deeper insight into how this works and to understand, you know, exactly where this organization comes from. How do the rules give rise to the patterns? There is one case that we have begun to understand better, and it's the case of fireflies. If you see fireflies in North America, like so many North American sorts of things, they tend to be independent operators. They ignore each other. They each do their own thing, flashing on and off, paying no attention to their neighbors. But in Southeast Asia — places like Thailand or Malaysia or Borneo — there's a beautiful cooperative behavior that occurs among male fireflies. You can see it every night along the river banks. The trees, mangrove trees, are filled with fireflies communicating with light. Specifically, it's male fireflies who are all flashing in perfect time together, in perfect synchrony, to reinforce a message to the females. And the message, as you can imagine, is "Come hither. Mate with me." (Music) In a second I'm going to show you a slow motion of a single firefly so that you can get a sense. This is a single frame. Then on, and then off — a 30th of a second, there. And then watch this whole river bank, and watch how precise the synchrony is. On, more on and then off. The combined light from these beetles — these are actually tiny beetles — is so bright that fishermen out at sea can use them as navigating beacons to find their way back to their home rivers. It's stunning. For a long time it was not believed when the first Western travelers, like Sir Francis Drake, went to Thailand and came back with tales of this unbelievable spectacle. No one believed them. We don't see anything like this in Europe or in the West. And for a long time, even after it was documented, it was thought to be some kind of optical illusion. Scientific papers were published saying it was twitching eyelids that explained it, or, you know, a human being's tendency to see patterns where there are none. But I hope you've convinced yourself now, with this nighttime video, that they really were very well synchronized. Okay, well, the issue then is, do we need to be alive to see this kind of spontaneous order, and I've already hinted that the answer is no. Well, you don't have to be a whole creature. You can even be just a single cell. Like, take, for instance, your pacemaker cells in your heart right now. They're keeping you alive. Every beat of your heart depends on this crucial region, the sinoatrial node, which has about 10,000 independent cells that would each beep, have an electrical rhythm — a voltage up and down — to send a signal to the ventricles to pump. Now, your pacemaker is not a single cell. It's this democracy of 10,000 cells that all have to fire in unison for the pacemaker to work correctly. I don't want to give you the idea that synchrony is always a good idea. If you have epilepsy, there is an instance of billions of brain cells, or at least millions, discharging in pathological concert. So this tendency towards order is not always a good thing. You don't have to be alive. You don't have to be even a single cell. If you look, for instance, at how lasers work, that would be a case of atomic synchrony. In a laser, what makes laser light so different from the light above my head here is that this light is incoherent — many different colors and different frequencies, sort of like the way you clapped initially — but if you were a laser, it would be rhythmic applause. It would be all atoms pulsating in unison, emitting light of one color, one frequency. Now comes the very risky part of my talk, which is to demonstrate that inanimate things can synchronize. Hold your breath for me. What I have here are two empty water bottles. This is not Keith Barry doing a magic trick. This is a klutz just playing with some water bottles. I have some metronomes here. Can you hear that? All right, so, I've got a metronome, and it's the world's smallest metronome, the — well, I shouldn't advertise. Anyway, so this is the world's smallest metronome. I've set it on the fastest setting, and I'm going to now take another one set to the same setting. We can try this first. If I just put them on the table together, there's no reason for them to synchronize, and they probably won't. Maybe you'd better listen to them. I'll stand here. What I'm hoping is that they might just drift apart because their frequencies aren't perfectly the same. Right? They did. They were in sync for a while, but then they drifted apart. And the reason is that they're not able to communicate. Now, you might think that's a bizarre idea. How can metronomes communicate? Well, they can communicate through mechanical forces. So I'm going to give them a chance to do that. I also want to wind this one up a bit. How can they communicate? I'm going to put them on a movable platform, which is the "Guide to Graduate Study at Cornell." Okay? So here it is. Let's see if we can get this to work. My wife pointed out to me that it will work better if I put both on at the same time because otherwise the whole thing will tip over. All right. So there we go. Let's see. OK, I'm not trying to cheat — let me start them out of sync. No, hard to even do that. (Applause) All right. So before any one goes out of sync, I'll just put those right there. (Laughter) Now, that might seem a bit whimsical, but this pervasiveness of this tendency towards spontaneous order sometimes has unexpected consequences. And a clear case of that, was something that happened in London in the year 2000. The Millennium Bridge was supposed to be the pride of London — a beautiful new footbridge erected across the Thames, first river crossing in over 100 years in London. There was a big competition for the design of this bridge, and the winning proposal was submitted by an unusual team — in the TED spirit, actually — of an architect — perhaps the greatest architect in the United Kingdom, Lord Norman Foster — working with an artist, a sculptor, Sir Anthony Caro, and an engineering firm, Ove Arup. And together they submitted a design based on Lord Foster's vision, which was — he remembered as a kid reading Flash Gordon comic books, and he said that when Flash Gordon would come to an abyss, he would shoot what today would be a kind of a light saber. He would shoot his light saber across the abyss, making a blade of light, and then scamper across on this blade of light. He said, "That's the vision I want to give to London. I want a blade of light across the Thames." So they built the blade of light, and it's a very thin ribbon of steel, the world's — probably the flattest and thinnest suspension bridge there is, with cables that are out on the side. You're used to suspension bridges with big droopy cables on the top. These cables were on the side of the bridge, like if you took a rubber band and stretched it taut across the Thames — that's what's holding up this bridge. Now, everyone was very excited to try it out. On opening day, thousands of Londoners came out, and something happened. And within two days the bridge was closed to the public. So I want to first show you some interviews with people who were on the bridge on opening day, who will describe what happened. Man: It really started moving sideways and slightly up and down, rather like being on the boat. Woman: Yeah, it felt unstable, and it was very windy, and I remember it had lots of flags up and down the sides, so you could definitely — there was something going on sideways, it felt, maybe. Interviewer: Not up and down? Boy: No. Interviewer: And not forwards and backwards? Boy: No. Interviewer: Just sideways. About how much was it moving, do you think? Boy: It was about — Interviewer: I mean, that much, or this much? Boy: About the second one. Interviewer: This much? Boy: Yeah. Man: It was at least six, six to eight inches, I would have thought. Interviewer: Right, so, at least this much? Man: Oh, yes. Woman: I remember wanting to get off. Interviewer: Oh, did you? Woman: Yeah. It felt odd. Interviewer: So it was enough to be scary? Woman: Yeah, but I thought that was just me. Interviewer: Ah! Now, tell me why you had to do this? Boy: We had to do this because, to keep in balance because if you didn't keep your balance, then you would just fall over about, like, to the left or right, about 45 degrees. Interviewer: So just show me how you walk normally. Right. And then show me what it was like when the bridge started to go. Right. So you had to deliberately push your feet out sideways and — oh, and short steps? Man: That's right. And it seemed obvious to me that it was probably the number of people on it. Interviewer: Were they deliberately walking in step, or anything like that? Man: No, they just had to conform to the movement of the bridge. Steven Strogatz: All right, so that already gives you a hint of what happened. Think of the bridge as being like this platform. Think of the people as being like metronomes. Now, you might not be used to thinking of yourself as a metronome, but after all, we do walk like — I mean, we oscillate back and forth as we walk. And especially if we start to walk like those people did, right? They all showed this strange sort of skating gait that they adopted once the bridge started to move. And so let me show you now the footage of the bridge. But also, after you see the bridge on opening day, you'll see an interesting clip of work done by a bridge engineer at Cambridge named Allan McRobie, who figured out what happened on the bridge, and who built a bridge simulator to explain exactly what the problem was. It was a kind of unintended positive feedback loop between the way the people walked and the way the bridge began to move, that engineers knew nothing about. Actually, I think the first person you'll see is the young engineer who was put in charge of this project. Okay. (Video) Interviewer: Did anyone get hurt? Engineer: No. Interviewer: Right. So it was quite small — Engineer: Yes. Interviewer: — but real? Engineer: Absolutely. Interviewer: You thought, "Oh, bother." Engineer: I felt I was disappointed about it. We'd spent a lot of time designing this bridge, and we'd analyzed it, we'd checked it to codes — to heavier loads than the codes — and here it was doing something that we didn't know about. Interviewer: You didn't expect. Engineer: Exactly. Narrator: The most dramatic and shocking footage shows whole sections of the crowd — hundreds of people — apparently rocking from side to side in unison, not only with each other, but with the bridge. This synchronized movement seemed to be driving the bridge. But how could the crowd become synchronized? Was there something special about the Millennium Bridge that caused this effect? This was to be the focus of the investigation. Interviewer: Well, at last the simulated bridge is finished, and I can make it wobble. Now, Allan, this is all your fault, isn't it? Allan McRobie: Yes. Interviewer: You designed this, yes, this simulated bridge, and this, you reckon, mimics the action of the real bridge? AM: It captures a lot of the physics, yes. Interviewer: Right. So if we get on it, we should be able to wobble it, yes? Allan McRobie is a bridge engineer from Cambridge who wrote to me, suggesting that a bridge simulator ought to wobble in the same way as the real bridge — provided we hung it on pendulums of exactly the right length. AM: This one's only a couple of tons, so it's fairly easy to get going. Just by walking. Interviewer: Well, it's certainly going now. AM: It doesn't have to be a real dangle. Just walk. It starts to go. Interviewer: It's actually quite difficult to walk. You have to be careful where you put your feet down, don't you, because if you get it wrong, it just throws you off your feet. AM: It certainly affects the way you walk, yes. You can't walk normally on it. Interviewer: No. If you try and put one foot in front of another, it's moving your feet away from under you. AM: Yes. Interviewer: So you've got to put your feet out sideways. So already, the simulator is making me walk in exactly the same way as our witnesses walked on the real bridge. AM: ... ice-skating gait. There isn't all this sort of snake way of walking. Interviewer: For a more convincing experiment, I wanted my own opening-day crowd, the sound check team. Their instructions: just walk normally. It's really intriguing because none of these people is trying to drive it. They're all having some difficulty walking. And the only way you can walk comfortably is by getting in step. But then, of course, everyone is driving the bridge. You can't help it. You're actually forced by the movement of the bridge to get into step, and therefore to drive it to move further. SS: All right, well, with that from the Ministry of Silly Walks, maybe I'd better end. I see I've gone over. But I hope that you'll go outside and see the world in a new way, to see all the amazing synchrony around us. Thank you. (Applause)

The hunt for General Tso

Jennifer 8. Lee

{0: 'Jennifer 8. Lee'}

{0: ['reporter']}

{0: 'Jennifer 8. Lee reports on culture and city life.'}

2008-07-07

2008-12-24

Taste3 2008

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['business', 'culture', 'exploration', 'food', 'global issues', 'history', 'Best of the Web']

{1018: 'Why not eat insects?', 650: 'How food shapes our cities', 3671: 'The future of good food in China', 2226: 'Are China and the US doomed to conflict?', 61302: "What the world can learn from China's response to the coronavirus", 57917: 'Why 1.5 billion people eat with chopsticks'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/jennifer_8_lee_the_hunt_for_general_tso/

Reporter Jennifer 8. Lee talks about her hunt for the origins of familiar Chinese-American dishes -- exploring the hidden spots where these two cultures have (so tastily) combined to form a new cuisine.

There are more Chinese restaurants in this country than McDonald's, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Wendy's, combined — 40,000, actually. Chinese restaurants have played an important role in American history, as a matter of fact. The Cuban missile crisis was resolved in a Chinese restaurant called Yenching Palace in Washington, DC, which unfortunately is closed now, and about to be turned into Walgreen's. And the house where John Wilkes Booth planned the assassination of Abraham Lincoln is also now a Chinese restaurant called Wok and Roll, on H Street in Washington. (Laughter) And it's not completely gratuitous, because "wok" and "roll" — Chinese food and Japanese foods, so it kind of works out. And Americans love their Chinese food so much, they've actually brought it into space. NASA, for example, serves thermostabilized sweet-and-sour pork on its shuttle menu for its astronauts. So, let me present the question to you: If our benchmark for Americanness is apple pie, you should ask yourself: how often do you eat apple pie, versus how often do you eat Chinese food? (Laughter) And if you think about it, a lot of the foods that we or Americans think of as Chinese food are barely recognizable to Chinese. For example: beef with broccoli, egg rolls, General Tso's Chicken, fortune cookies, chop suey, the take-out boxes. For example, I took a whole bunch of fortune cookies back to China, gave them to Chinese to see how they would react. [What is this?] [Should I try it?] [Try it!] [What is this called?] [Fortune cookie.] (Laughter) [There's a piece of paper inside!] (Laughter) [What is this?] [You've won a prize!] [What is this?] [It's a fortune!] [Tasty!] So where are they from? The short answer is, actually, they're from Japan. And in Kyoto, outside, there are still small family-run bakeries that make fortune cookies, as they did over 100 years ago, 30 years before fortune cookies were introduced in the United States. If you see them side by side, there's yellow and brown. Theirs are actually flavored with miso and sesame paste, so they're not as sweet as our version. So how did they get to the US? Well, the short answer is, the Japanese immigrants came over, and a bunch of the bakers introduced them — including at least one in Los Angeles, and one here in San Francisco, called Benkyodo, which is on the corner of Sutter and Buchanan. Back then, they made fortune cookies using very much the similar kind of irons that we saw back in Kyoto. The interesting question is: How do you go from fortune cookies being something that is Japanese to being something that is Chinese? Well, we locked up all the Japanese during World War II, including those that made fortune cookies. So that's when the Chinese moved in, saw a market opportunity and took over. (Laughter) So, fortune cookies: invented by the Japanese, popularized by the Chinese, but ultimately consumed by Americans. They're more American than anything else. Another of my favorite dishes: General Tso's Chicken — which, by the way, in the US Naval Academy is called Admiral Tso's Chicken. (Laughter) I love this dish. The original name of my book was "The Long March of General Tso." And he has marched very far indeed, because he is sweet, he is fried, and he is chicken — all things that Americans love. (Laughter) He has marched so far, actually, that the chef who originally invented the dish doesn't recognize it; he's kind of horrified. Video: (In Chinese) Audience: (Laughter) He's in Taiwan right now. He's retired, deaf and plays a lot of mah–jongg. After I showed him this, he got up, and says, "mòmíngqímiào," which means, "This is all nonsense," and goes back to play his mah-jongg game during the afternoon. Another dish, one of my favorites: beef with broccoli. Broccoli is not a Chinese vegetable; in fact, it is originally an Italian vegetable. It was introduced into the United States in the 1800s, but became popularized in the 1920s and the 1930s. The Chinese have their own version of broccoli, called Chinese broccoli, but they've now discovered American broccoli, and are importing it as a sort of exotic delicacy. I guarantee you, General Tso never saw a stalk of broccoli in his life. That was a picture of General Tso. I went to his home town. This is a billboard that says: "Welcome to the birthplace of General Tso." And I went looking for chicken. Finally found a cow — and did find chicken. Believe it or not, these guys were actually crossing the road. (Laughter) And I found a whole bunch of General Tso's relatives who are still in the town. This guy is now five generations removed from the General; this guy is about seven. I showed them the pictures of General Tso Chicken, and they were like, "We don't know this dish. Is this Chinese food?" Because it doesn't look like Chinese food to them. But they weren't surprised I traveled around the world to visit them, because in their eyes he is, after all, a famous Qing dynasty military hero. He played an important role in the Taiping Rebellion, a war started by a guy who thought he was the son of God and baby brother of Jesus Christ. He caused a war that killed 20 million people — still the deadliest civil war in the world to this day. So, you know, I realized when I was there, General Tso is kind of a lot like Colonel Sanders in America, in that he's known for chicken and not war. But in China, this guy's actually known for war and not chicken. But the granddaddy of all the Chinese American dishes we probably ought to talk about is chop suey, which was introduced around the turn of the 20th century. According to the New York Times in 1904, there was an outbreak of Chinese restaurants all over town, and "... the city has gone 'chop suey' mad." So it took about 30 years before the Americans realized that chop suey is actually not known in China, and as this article points out, "The average native of any city in China knows nothing of chop suey." Back then it was a way to show you were sophisticated and cosmopolitan; a guy who wanted to impress a girl could take her on a chop suey date. I like to say chop suey is the biggest culinary joke one culture ever played on another, because "chop suey," translated into Chinese, means "jaahp-seui," which, translated back, means "odds and ends." So, these people are going around China asking for chop suey, which is sort of like a Japanese guy coming here and saying, "I understand you have a very popular dish in your country called 'leftovers.'" (Laughter) Right? (Laughter) And not only that: "This dish is particularly popular after that holiday you call 'Thanksgiving.'" (Laughter) So, why and where did chop suey come from? Let's go back to the mid-1800s, when the Chinese first came to America. Back then, Americans were not clamoring to eat Chinese food. In fact, they saw these people who landed at their shores as alien. These people weren't eating dogs, they were eating cats. If they weren't eating cats, they were eating rats. In fact, The New York Times, my esteemed employer, in 1883 ran an article that asked, "Do Chinese eat rats?" Not the most PC question to be asked today, but if you look at the popular imagery of the time, not so outlandish. This is actually a real advertisement for rat poison from the late 1800s. And if you see under the word "Clears" — very small — it says, "They must go," which refers not only to the rats, but to the Chinese in their midst, because the way that the food was perceived was that these people who ate foods different from us must be different from us. Another way that you saw this antipathy towards the Chinese is through documents like this. This is in the Library of Congress. It's a pamphlet published by Samuel Gompers, hero of our American labor movement. It's called, "Some Reason for Chinese Exclusion: Meat versus Rice: American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism: Which shall survive?" And it basically made the argument that Chinese men who ate rice would necessarily bring down the standard of living for American men who ate meat. And as a matter of fact, then, this is one of the reasons we must exclude them from this country. So, with sentiments like these, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed between 1882 and 1902, the only time in American history when a group was specifically excluded for its national origin or ethnicity. So in a way, because the Chinese were attacked, chop suey was created as a defense mechanism. Who came up with the idea of chop suey? There's a lot of different mysteries and legends, but of the ones I've found, the most interesting is this article from 1904. A Chinese guy named Lem Sen shows up in Chinatown, New York City, and says, "I want you all to stop making chop suey, because I am the original creator and sole proprietor of chop suey. And the way he tells it, there was a famous Chinese diplomat that showed up, and he was told to make a dish that looked very popular and could, quote, "pass" as Chinese. And as he said — we would never print this today — but basically, the American man has become very rich. Lem Sen: "I would've made this money, too, but I spent all this time looking for the American man who stole my recipe. Now I've found him and I want my recipe back, and I want everyone to stop making chop suey, or pay me for the right to do the same. So it was an early exercise of intellectual property rights. The thing is, this idea of Chinese-American food doesn't exist only in America. In fact, Chinese food is the most pervasive food on the planet, served on all seven continents, even Antarctica, because Monday night is Chinese food night at McMurdo Station, which is the main scientific station in Antarctica. You see different varieties of Chinese food. For example, there is French Chinese food, where they serve salt and pepper frog legs. There is Italian Chinese food, where they don't have fortune cookies, so they serve fried gelato. My neighbor, Alessandra, was shocked when I told her, "Dude, fried gelato is not Chinese." She's like, "It's not? But they serve it in all the Chinese restaurants in Italy." (Laughter) Even the Brits have their own version. This is a dish called "crispy shredded beef," which has a lot of crisp, a lot of shred, and not a lot of beef. There is West Indian Chinese food, there's Jamaican Chinese food, Middle Eastern Chinese food, Mauritian Chinese food. This is a dish called "Magic Bowl," that I discovered. There's Indian Chinese food, Korean Chinese food, Japanese Chinese food, where they take the bao, the little buns, and make them into pizza versions. (Laughter) And they totally randomly take Chinese noodle dishes, and just ramenize them. This is something that, in the Chinese version, has no soup. So, there's Peruvian Chinese food, which should not be mixed with Mexican Chinese food, where they basically take things and make it look like fajitas. (Laughter) And they have things like risotto chop suey. My personal favorite of all the restaurants I've encountered around the world was this one in Brazil, called "Kung Food." (Laughter) So, let's take a step back and understand what is to be appreciated in America. McDonald's has garnered a lot of attention, a lot of respect, for basically standardizing the menu, decor and dining experience in post-World War II America. But you know what? They did so through a centralized headquarters out of Illinois. Chinese restaurants have done largely the same thing, I would argue, with the menu and the decor, even the restaurant name, but without a centralized headquarters. So, this actually became very clear to me with the March 30, 2005 Powerball drawing, where they expected, based on the number of ticket sales they had, to have three or four second-place winners, people who match five or six Powerball numbers. Instead, they had 110, and they were completely shocked. They looked all across the country and discovered it couldn't be fraud, since it happened in different states, across different computer systems. Whatever it was, it caused people to behave in a mass-synchronized way. So, OK, maybe it had to do with the patterns on the pieces of paper, like it was a diamond, or diagonal. It wasn't that, so they're like, OK, let's look at television. So they looked at an episode of "Lost." Now, I don't have a TV, which makes me a freak, but very productive — (Laughter) And there's an episode of "Lost" where one guy has a lucky number, but it's not a lucky number, it's why he's on the island, but they looked and the numbers did not match. They looked at "The Young and The Restless." It wasn't that, either. It wasn't until the first guy shows up the next day and they ask him, "Where did you get your number?" He said, "I got it from a fortune cookie." This is a slip one of the winners had, because the Tennessee lottery security officials were like, "Oh, no, this can't be true." But it was true. Basically, of those 110 people, 104 of them or so had gotten their number from a fortune cookie. (Laughter) Yeah. So I went and started looking. I went across the country, looking for these restaurants where these people had gotten their fortune cookies from. There are a bunch of them, including Lee's China in Omaha — which is actually run by Koreans, but that's another point, and a bunch of them named "China Buffet." What's interesting is that their stories were similar, but different. It was lunch, it was take-out, it was sit-down, it was buffet, it was three weeks ago, it was three months ago. But at some point, all these people had a very similar experience that converged at a fortune cookie and a Chinese restaurant. And all these restaurants were serving fortune cookies, which, of course, aren't even Chinese to begin with. It's part of the phenomenon I called "spontaneous self-organization," where, like in ant colonies, little decisions made on the micro level actually have a big impact on the macro level. A good contrast is Chicken McNuggets. McDonald's actually spent 10 years coming out with a chicken-like product. They did chicken pot pie, fried chicken, and finally introduced Chicken McNuggets. And the great innovation of Chicken McNuggets was not nuggifying them, that's kind of an easy concept. The trick was, they were able to remove the chicken from the bone in a cost-efficient manner, which is why it took so long for people to copy them — 10 years, then within a couple months, it was such a hit, they introduced it across the entire McDonald's system in the country. In contrast is General Tso's Chicken, which actually started in New York City in the early 1970s, as I was also started in this universe in New York City in the early 1970s. (Laughter) And this logo! So me, General Tso's Chicken and this logo are all karmicly related. But that dish also took about 10 years to spread across America from a restaurant in New York City. Someone's like, "It's sweet, it's fried, it's chicken — Americans will love this." So what I like to say, this being Bay Area, Silicon Valley, is that we think of McDonald's as sort of the Microsoft of dining experiences. We can think of Chinese restaurants perhaps as Linux, sort of an open-source thing, right? (Laughter) Where ideas from one person can be copied and propagated across the entire system, that there can be specialized versions of Chinese food, depending on the region. For example, in New Orleans we have Cajun Chinese food, where they serve Sichuan alligator and sweet and sour crawfish. And in Philadelphia, you have Philadelphia cheesesteak roll, which is like an egg roll on the outside and cheesesteak on the inside. I was surprised to discover that not only in Philadelphia, but also in Atlanta. What had happened was, a Chinese family had moved from Philadelphia to Atlanta, and brought that with them. So the thing is, our historical lore, because of the way we like narratives, is full of vast characters, such as Howard Schultz of Starbucks and Ray Kroc with McDonald's and Asa Candler with Coca-Cola. But, you know, it's very easy to overlook the smaller characters. For example, Lem Sen, who introduced chop suey, Chef Peng, who introduced General Tso's Chicken, and all the Japanese bakers who introduced fortune cookies. So, the point of my presentation is to make you think twice; that those whose names are forgotten in history can often have had as much, if not more, impact on what we eat today. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Play! Experiment! Discover!

Kary Mullis

{0: 'Kary Mullis'}

{0: ['biochemist']}

{0: "Kary Mullis won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing a way to copy a strand of DNA. (His technique, called PCR, jump-started the 1990s' biorevolution.) He's known for his wide-ranging interests -- and strong opinions."}

2002-02-02

2009-01-05

TED2002

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['DNA', 'biology', 'curiosity', 'history', 'microbiology', 'science', 'technology']

{237: 'The call to learn', 197: 'Design and destiny', 306: "Let's look for life in the outer solar system", 22: 'Why people believe weird things', 477: 'Learning from dirty jobs', 605: 'A kinder, gentler philosophy of success'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/kary_mullis_play_experiment_discover/

Biochemist Kary Mullis talks about the basis of modern science: the experiment. Sharing tales from the 17th century and from his own backyard-rocketry days, Mullis celebrates the curiosity, inspiration and rigor of good science in all its forms.

I'll just start talking about the 17th century. I hope nobody finds that offensive. I — you know, when I — after I had invented PCR, I kind of needed a change. And I moved down to La Jolla and learned how to surf. And I started living down there on the beach for a long time. And when surfers are out waiting for waves, you probably wonder, if you've never been out there, what are they doing? You know, sometimes there's a 10-, 15-minute break out there when you're waiting for a wave to come in. They usually talk about the 17th century. You know, they get a real bad rap in the world. People think they're sort of lowbrows. One day, somebody suggested I read this book. It was called — it was called "The Air Pump," or something like "The Leviathan and The Air Pump." It was a real weird book about the 17th century. And I realized, the roots of the way I sort of thought was just the only natural way to think about things. That — you know, I was born thinking about things that way, and I had always been like a little scientist guy. And when I went to find out something, I used scientific methods. I wasn't real surprised, you know, when they first told me how — how you were supposed to do science, because I'd already been doing it for fun and whatever. But it didn't — it never occurred to me that it had to be invented and that it had been invented only 350 years ago. You know, it was — like it happened in England, and Germany, and Italy sort of all at the same time. And the story of that, I thought, was really fascinating. So I'm going to talk a little bit about that, and what exactly is it that scientists are supposed to do. And it's, it's a kind of — You know, Charles I got beheaded somewhere early in the 17th century. And the English set up Cromwell and a whole bunch of Republicans or whatever, and not the kind of Republicans we had. They changed the government, and it didn't work. And Charles II, the son, was finally put back on the throne of England. He was really nervous, because his dad had been, you know, beheaded for being the King of England And he was nervous about the fact that conversations that got going in, like, bars and stuff would turn to — this is kind of — it's hard to believe, but people in the 17th century in England were starting to talk about, you know, philosophy and stuff in bars. They didn't have TV screens, and they didn't have any football games to watch. And they would get really pissy, and all of a sudden people would spill out into the street and fight about issues like whether or not it was okay if Robert Boyle made a device called the vacuum pump. Now, Boyle was a friend of Charles II. He was a Christian guy during the weekends, but during the week he was a scientist. (Laughter) Which was — back then it was sort of, you know, well, you know — if you made this thing — he made this little device, like kind of like a bicycle pump in reverse that could suck all the air out of — you know what a bell jar is? One of these things, you pick it up, put it down, and it's got a seal, and you can see inside of it, so you can see what's going on inside this thing. But what he was trying to do was to pump all the air out of there, and see what would happen inside there. I mean, the first — I think one of the first experiments he did was he put a bird in there. And people in the 17th century, they didn't really understand the same way we do about you know, this stuff is a bunch of different kinds of molecules, and we breathe it in for a purpose and all that. I mean, fish don't know much about water, and people didn't know much about air. But both started exploring it. One thing, he put a bird in there, and he pumped all the air out, and the bird died. So he said, hmm... He said — he called what he'd done as making — they didn't call it a vacuum pump at the time. Now you call it a vacuum pump; he called it a vacuum. Right? And immediately, he got into trouble with the local clergy who said, you can't make a vacuum. Ah, uh — (Laughter) Aristotle said that nature abhors one. I think it was a poor translation, probably, but people relied on authorities like that. And you know, Boyle says, well, shit. I make them all the time. I mean, whatever that is that kills the bird — and I'm calling it a vacuum. And the religious people said that if God wanted you to make — I mean, God is everywhere, that was one of their rules, is God is everywhere. And a vacuum — there's nothing in a vacuum, so you've — God couldn't be in there. So therefore the church said that you can't make a vacuum, you know. And Boyle said, bullshit. I mean, you want to call it Godless, you know, you call it Godless. But that's not my job. I'm not into that. I do that on the weekend. And like — what I'm trying to do is figure out what happens when you suck everything out of a compartment. And he did all these cute little experiments. Like he did one with — he had a little wheel, like a fan, that was sort of loosely attached, so it could spin by itself. He had another fan opposed to it that he had like a — I mean, the way I would have done this would be, like, a rubber band, and, you know, around a tinker toy kind of fan. I know exactly how he did it; I've seen the drawings. It's two fans, one which he could turn from outside after he got the vacuum established, and he discovered that if he pulled all the air out of it, the one fan would no longer turn the other one, right? Something was missing, you know. I mean, these are — it's kind of weird to think that someone had to do an experiment to show that, but that was what was going on at the time. And like, there was big arguments about it in the — you know, the gin houses and in the coffee shops and stuff. And Charles started not liking that. Charles II was kind of saying, you know, you should keep that — let's make a place where you can do this stuff where people don't get so — you know, we don't want the — we don't want to get the people mad at me again. And so — because when they started talking about religion and science and stuff like that, that's when it had sort of gotten his father in trouble. And so, Charles said, I'm going to put up the money give you guys a building, come here and you can meet in the building, but just don't talk about religion in there. And that was fine with Boyle. He said, OK, we're going to start having these meetings. And anybody who wants to do science is — this is about the time that Isaac Newton was starting to whip out a lot of really interesting things. And there was all kind of people that would come to the Royal Society, they called it. You had to be dressed up pretty well. It wasn't like a TED conference. That was the only criteria, was that you be — you looked like a gentleman, and they'd let anybody could come. You didn't have to be a member then. And so, they would come in and you would do — Anybody that was going to show an experiment, which was kind of a new word at the time, demonstrate some principle, they had to do it on stage, where everybody could see it. So they were — the really important part of this was, you were not supposed to talk about final causes, for instance. And God was out of the picture. The actual nature of reality was not at issue. You're not supposed to talk about the absolute nature of anything. You were not supposed to talk about anything that you couldn't demonstrate. So if somebody could see it, you could say, here's how the machine works, here's what we do, and then here's what happens. And seeing what happens, it was OK to generalize, and say, I'm sure that this will happen anytime we make one of these things. And so you can start making up some rules. You say, anytime you have a vacuum state, you will discover that one wheel will not turn another one, if the only connection between them is whatever was there before the vacuum. That kind of thing. Candles can't burn in a vacuum, therefore, probably sparklers wouldn't either. It's not clear; actually sparklers will, but they didn't know that. They didn't have sparklers. But, they — (Laughter) — you can make up rules, but they have to relate only to the things that you've been able to demonstrate. And most the demonstrations had to do with visuals. Like if you do an experiment on stage, and nobody can see it, they can just hear it, they would probably think you were freaky. I mean, reality is what you can see. That wasn't an explicit rule in the meeting, but I'm sure that was part of it, you know. If people hear voices, and they can't see and associate it with somebody, that person's probably not there. But the general idea that you could only — you could only really talk about things in that place that had some kind of experimental basis. It didn't matter what Thomas Hobbes, who was a local philosopher, said about it, you know, because you weren't going to be talking final causes. What's happening here, in the middle of the 17th century, was that what became my field — science, experimental science — was pulling itself away, and it was in a physical way, because we're going to do it in this room over here, but it was also what — it was an amazing thing that happened. Science had been all interlocked with theology, and philosophy, and — and — and mathematics, which is really not science. But experimental science had been tied up with all those things. And the mathematics part and the experimental science part was pulling away from philosophy. And — things — we never looked back. It's been so cool since then. I mean, it just — it just — untangled a thing that was really impeding technology from being developed. And, I mean, everybody in this room — now, this is 350 short years ago. Remember, that's a short time. It was 300,000, probably, years ago that most of us, the ancestors of most of us in this room came up out of Africa and turned to the left. You know, the ones that turned to the right, there are some of those in the Japanese translation. But that happened very — a long time ago compared to 350 short years ago. But in that 350 years, the place has just undergone a lot of changes. In fact, everybody in this room probably, especially if you picked up your bag — some of you, I know, didn't pick up your bags — but if you picked up your bag, everybody in this room has got in their pocket, or back in their room, something that 350 years ago, kings would have gone to war to have. I mean, if you can think how important — If you have a GPS system and there are no satellites, it's not going to be much use. But, like — but, you know, if somebody had a GPS system in the 17th century some king would have gotten together an army and gone to get it, you know. If that person — Audience: For the teddy bear? The teddy bear? Kary Mullis: They might have done it for the teddy bear, yeah. But — all of us own stuff. I mean, individuals own things that kings would have definitely gone to war to get. And this is just 350 years. Not a whole lot of people doing this stuff. You know, the important people — you can almost read about their lives, about all the really important people that made advances, you know. And, I mean — this kind of stuff, you know, all this stuff came from that separation of this little sort of thing that we do — now I, when I was a boy was born sort of with this idea that if you want to know something — you know, maybe it's because my old man was gone a lot, and my mother didn't really know much science, but I thought if you want to know something about stuff, you do it — you make an experiment, you know. You get — you get, like — I just had a natural feeling for science and setting up experiments. I thought that was the way everybody had always thought. I thought that anybody with any brains will do it that way. It isn't true. I mean, there's a lot of people — You know, I was one of those scientists that was — got into trouble the other night at dinner because of the post-modernism thing. And I didn't mean, you know — where is that lady? Audience: Here. (Laughter) KM: I mean, I didn't really think of that as an argument so much as just a lively discussion. I didn't take it personally, but — I just — I had — I naively had thought, until this surfing experience started me into the 17th century, I'd thought that's just the way people thought, and everybody did, and they recognized reality by what they could see or touch or feel or hear. At any rate, when I was a boy, I, like, for instance, I had this — I got this little book from Fort Sill, Oklahoma — This is about the time that George Dyson's dad was starting to blow nuclear — thinking about blowing up nuclear rockets and stuff. I was thinking about making my own little rockets. And I knew that frogs — little frogs — had aspirations of space travel, just like people. And I — (Laughter) I was looking for a — a propulsion system that would like, make a rocket, like, maybe about four feet high go up a couple of miles. And, I mean, that was my sort of goal. I wanted it to go out of sight and then I wanted this little parachute to come back with the frog in it. And — I — I — I got this book from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where there's a missile base. They send it out for amateur rocketeers, and it said in there do not ever heat a mixture of potassium perchlorate and sugar. (Laughter) You know, that's what you call a lead. (Laughter) You sort of — now you say, well, let's see if I can get hold of some potassium chlorate and sugar, perchlorate and sugar, and heat it; it would be interesting to see what it is they don't want me to do, and what it is going to — and how is it going to work. And we didn't have — like, my mother presided over the back yard from an upstairs window, where she would be ironing or something like that. And she was usually just sort of keeping an eye on, and if there was any puffs of smoke out there, she'd lean out and admonish us all not to blow our eyes out. That was her — You know, that was kind of the worst thing that could happen to us. That's why I thought, as long as I don't blow my eyes out... I may not care about the fact that it's prohibited from heating this solution. I'm going to do it carefully, but I'll do it. It's like anything else that's prohibited: you do it behind the garage. (Laughter) So, I went to the drug store and I tried to buy some potassium perchlorate and it wasn't unreasonable then for a kid to walk into a drug store and buy chemicals. Nowadays, it's no ma'am, check your shoes. And like — (Laughter) But then it wasn't — they didn't have any, but the guy had — I said, what kind of salts of potassium do you have? You know. And he had potassium nitrate. And I said, that might do the same thing, whatever it is. I'm sure it's got to do with rockets or it wouldn't be in that manual. And so I — I did some experiments. You know, I started off with little tiny amounts of potassium nitrate and sugar, which was readily available, and I mixed it in different proportions, and I tried to light it on fire. Just to see what would happen, if you mixed it together. And it — they burned. It burned kind of slow, but it made a nice smell, compared to other rocket fuels I had tried, that all had sulfur in them. And, it smelt like burnt candy. And then I tried the melting business, and I melted it. And then it melted into a little sort of syrupy liquid, brown. And then it cooled down to a brick-hard substance, that when you lit that, it went off like a bat. I mean, the little bowl of that stuff that had cooled down — you'd light it, and it would just start dancing around the yard. And I said, there is a way to get a frog up to where he wants to go. (Laughter) So I started developing — you know, George's dad had a lot of help. I just had my brother. But I — it took me about — it took me about, I'd say, six months to finally figure out all the little things. There's a lot of little things involved in making a rocket that it will actually work, even after you have the fuel. But you do it, by — what I just— you know, you do experiments, and you write down things sometimes, you make observations, you know. And then you slowly build up a theory of how this stuff works. And it was — I was following all the rules. I didn't know what the rules were, I'm a natural born scientist, I guess, or some kind of a throwback to the 17th century, whatever. But at any rate, we finally did have a device that would reproduceably put a frog out of sight and get him back alive. And we had not — I mean, we weren't frightened by it. We should have been, because it made a lot of smoke and it made a lot of noise, and it was powerful, you know. And once in a while, they would blow up. But I wasn't worried, by the way, about, you know, the explosion causing the destruction of the planet. I hadn't heard about the 10 ways that we should be afraid of the — By the way, I could have thought, I'd better not do this because they say not to, you know. And I'd better get permission from the government. If I'd have waited around for that, I would have never — the frog would have died, you know. At any rate, I bring it up because it's a good story, and he said, tell personal things, you know, and that's a personal — I was going to tell you about the first night that I met my wife, but that would be too personal, wouldn't it. So, so I've got something else that's not personal. But that... process is what I think of as science, see, where you start with some idea, and then instead of, like, looking up, every authority that you've ever heard of I — sometimes you do that, if you're going to write a paper later, you want to figure out who else has worked on it. But in the actual process, you get an idea — like, when I got the idea one night that I could amplify DNA with two oligonucleotides, and I could make lots of copies of some little piece of DNA, you know, the thinking for that was about 20 minutes while I was driving my car, and then instead of going — I went back and I did talk to people about it, but if I'd listened to what I heard from all my friends who were molecular biologists — I would have abandoned it. You know, if I had gone back looking for an authority figure who could tell me if it would work or not, he would have said, no, it probably won't. Because the results of it were so spectacular that if it worked it was going to change everybody's goddamn way of doing molecular biology. Nobody wants a chemist to come in and poke around in their stuff like that and change things. But if you go to authority, and you always don't — you don't always get the right answer, see. But I knew, you'd go into the lab and you'd try to make it work yourself. And then you're the authority, and you can say, I know it works, because right there in that tube is where it happened, and here, on this gel, there's a little band there that I know that's DNA, and that's the DNA I wanted to amplify, so there! So it does work. You know, that's how you do science. And then you say, well, what can make it work better? And then you figure out better and better ways to do it. But you always work from, from like, facts that you have made available to you by doing experiments: things that you could do on a stage. And no tricky shit behind the thing. I mean, it's all — you've got to be very honest with what you're doing if it really is going to work. I mean, you can't make up results, and then do another experiment based on that one. So you have to be honest. And I'm basically honest. I have a fairly bad memory, and dishonesty would always get me in trouble, if I, like — so I've just sort of been naturally honest and naturally inquisitive, and that sort of leads to that kind of science. Now, let's see... I've got another five minutes, right? OK. All scientists aren't like that. You know — and there is a lot — (Laughter) There is a lot — a lot has been going on since Isaac Newton and all that stuff happened. One of the things that happened right around World War II in that same time period before, and as sure as hell afterwards, government got — realized that scientists aren't strange dudes that, you know, hide in ivory towers and do ridiculous things with test tube. Scientists, you know, made World War II as we know it quite possible. They made faster things. They made bigger guns to shoot them down with. You know, they made drugs to give the pilots if they were broken up in the process. They made all kinds of — and then finally one giant bomb to end the whole thing, right? And everybody stepped back a little and said, you know, we ought to invest in this shit, because whoever has got the most of these people working in the places is going to have a dominant position, at least in the military, and probably in all kind of economic ways. And they got involved in it, and the scientific and industrial establishment was born, and out of that came a lot of scientists who were in there for the money, you know, because it was suddenly available. And they weren't the curious little boys that liked to put frogs up in the air. They were the same people that later went in to medical school, you know, because there was money in it, you know. I mean, later, then they all got into business — I mean, there are waves of — going into your high school, person saying, you want to be rich, you know, be a scientist. You know, not anymore. You want to be rich, you be a businessman. But a lot of people got in it for the money and the power and the travel. That's back when travel was easy. And those people don't think — they don't — they don't always tell you the truth, you know. There is nothing in their contract, in fact, that makes it to their advantage always, to tell you the truth. And the people I'm talking about are people that like — they say that they're a member of the committee called, say, the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change. And they — and they have these big meetings where they try to figure out how we're going to — how we're going to continually prove that the planet is getting warmer, when that's actually contrary to most people's sensations. I mean, if you actually measure the temperature over a period — I mean, the temperature has been measured now pretty carefully for about 50, 60 years — longer than that it's been measured, but in really nice, precise ways, and records have been kept for 50 or 60 years, and in fact, the temperature hadn't really gone up. It's like, the average temperature has gone up a tiny little bit, because the nighttime temperatures at the weather stations have come up just a little bit. But there's a good explanation for that. And it's that the weather stations are all built outside of town, where the airport was, and now the town's moved out there, there's concrete all around and they call it the skyline effect. And most responsible people that measure temperatures realize you have to shield your measuring device from that. And even then, you know, because the buildings get warm in the daytime, and they keep it a little warmer at night. So the temperature has been, sort of, inching up. It should have been. But not a lot. Not like, you know — the first guy — the first guy that got the idea that we're going to fry ourselves here, actually, he didn't think of it that way. His name was Sven Arrhenius. He was Swedish, and he said, if you double the CO2 level in the atmosphere, which he thought might — this is in 1900 — the temperature ought to go up about 5.5 degrees, he calculated. He was thinking of the earth as, kind of like, you know, like a completely insulated thing with no stuff in it, really, just energy coming down, energy leaving. And so he came up with this theory, and he said, this will be cool, because it'll be a longer growing season in Sweden, you know, and the surfers liked it, the surfers thought, that's a cool idea, because it's pretty cold in the ocean sometimes, and — but a lot of other people later on started thinking it would be bad, you know. But nobody actually demonstrated it, right? I mean, the temperature as measured — and you can find this on our wonderful Internet, you just go and look for all NASAs records, and all the Weather Bureau's records, and you'll look at it yourself, and you'll see, the temperature has just — the nighttime temperature measured on the surface of the planet has gone up a tiny little bit. So if you just average that and the daytime temperature, it looks like it went up about .7 degrees in this century. But in fact, it was just coming up — it was the nighttime; the daytime temperatures didn't go up. So — and Arrhenius' theory — and all the global warmers think — they would say, yeah, it should go up in the daytime, too, if it's the greenhouse effect. Now, people like things that have, like, names like that, that they can envision it, right? I mean — but people don't like things like this, so — most — I mean, you don't get all excited about things like the actual evidence, you know, which would be evidence for strengthening of the tropical circulation in the 1990s. It's a paper that came out in February, and most of you probably hadn't heard about it. "Evidence for Large Decadal Variability in the Tropical Mean Radiative Energy Budget." Excuse me. Those papers were published by NASA, and some scientists at Columbia, and Viliki and a whole bunch of people, Princeton. And those two papers came out in Science Magazine, February the first, and these — the conclusion in both of these papers, and in also the Science editor's, like, descriptions of these papers, for, you know, for the quickie, is that our theories about global warming are completely wrong. I mean, what these guys were doing, and this is what — the NASA people have been saying this for a long time. They say, if you measure the temperature of the atmosphere, it isn't going up — it's not going up at all. We've doing it very carefully now for 20 years, from satellites, and it isn't going up. And in this paper, they show something much more striking, and that was that they did what they call a radiation — and I'm not going to go into the details of it, actually it's quite complicated, but it isn't as complicated as they might make you think it is by the words they use in those papers. If you really get down to it, they say, the sun puts out a certain amount of energy — we know how much that is — it falls on the earth, the earth gives back a certain amount. When it gets warm it generates — it makes redder energy — I mean, like infra-red, like something that's warm gives off infra-red. The whole business of the global warming — trash, really, is that — if the — if there's too much CO2 in the atmosphere, the heat that's trying to escape won't be able to get out. But the heat coming from the sun, which is mostly down in the — it's like 350 nanometers, which is where it's centered — that goes right through CO2. So you still get heated, but you don't dissipate any. Well, these guys measured all of those things. I mean, you can talk about that stuff, and you can write these large reports, and you can get government money to do it, but these — they actually measured it, and it turns out that in the last 10 years — that's why they say "decadal" there — that the energy — that the level of what they call "imbalance" has been way the hell over what was expected. Like, the amount of imbalance — meaning, heat's coming in and it's not going out that you would get from having double the CO2, which we're not anywhere near that, by the way. But if we did, in 2025 or something, have double the CO2 as we had in 1900, they say it would be increase the energy budget by about — in other words, one watt per square centimeter more would be coming in than going out. So the planet should get warmer. Well, they found out in this study — these two studies by two different teams — that five and a half watts per square meter had been coming in from 1998, 1999, and the place didn't get warmer. So the theory's kaput — it's nothing. These papers should have been called, "The End to the Global Warming Fiasco," you know. They're concerned, and you can tell they have very guarded conclusions in these papers, because they're talking about big laboratories that are funded by lots of money and by scared people. You know, if they said, you know what? There isn't a problem with global warming any longer, so we can — you know, they're funding. And if you start a grant request with something like that, and say, global warming obviously hadn't happened... if they — if they — if they actually — if they actually said that, I'm getting out. (Laughter) I'll stand up too, and — (Laughter) (Applause) They have to say that. They had to be very cautious. But what I'm saying is, you can be delighted, because the editor of Science, who is no dummy, and both of these fairly professional — really professional teams, have really come to the same conclusion and in the bottom lines in their papers they have to say, what this means is, that what we've been thinking, was the global circulation model that we predict that the earth is going to get overheated that it's all wrong. It's wrong by a large factor. It's not by a small one. They just — they just misinterpreted the fact that the earth — there's obviously some mechanisms going on that nobody knew about, because the heat's coming in and it isn't getting warmer. So the planet is a pretty amazing thing, you know, it's big and horrible — and big and wonderful, and it does all kinds of things we don't know anything about. So I mean, the reason I put those things all together, OK, here's the way you're supposed to do science — some science is done for other reasons, and just curiosity. And there's a lot of things like global warming, and ozone hole and you know, a whole bunch of scientific public issues, that if you're interested in them, then you have to get down the details, and read the papers called, "Large Decadal Variability in the..." You have to figure out what all those words mean. And if you just listen to the guys who are hyping those issues, and making a lot of money out of it, you'll be misinformed, and you'll be worrying about the wrong things. Remember the 10 things that are going to get you. The — one of them — (Laughter) And the asteroids is the one I really agree with there. I mean, you've got to watch out for asteroids. OK, thank you for having me here. (Applause)

My journey in design

John Maeda

{0: 'John Maeda'}

{0: ['artist']}

{0: 'John Maeda, the former president of the Rhode Island School of Design, is dedicated to linking design and technology. Through the software tools, web pages and books he creates, he spreads his philosophy of elegant simplicity.'}

2008-05-05

2009-01-06

Serious Play 2008

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'lv', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['computers', 'curiosity', 'design', 'technology', 'programming', 'code', 'personal growth', 'Best of the Web']

{172: 'Designing for simplicity', 480: '3 ways good design makes you happy', 1571: 'How art, technology and design inform creative leaders', 430: 'Organic algorithms in architecture', 2332: 'How to find work you love'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/john_maeda_my_journey_in_design/

Designer John Maeda talks about his path from a Seattle tofu factory to the Rhode Island School of Design, where he became president in 2008. Maeda, a tireless experimenter and a witty observer, explores the crucial moment when design met computers.

I'm kind of tired of talking about simplicity, actually, so I thought I'd make my life more complex, as a serious play. So, I'm going to, like, go through some slides from way back when, and walk through them to give you a sense of how I end up here. So, basically it all began with this whole idea of a computer. Who has a computer? Yeah. O.K., so, everyone has a computer. Even a mobile phone, it's a computer. And — anyone remember this workbook, "Instant Activities for Your Apple" — free poster in each book? This was how computing began. Don't forget: a computer came out; it had no software. You'd buy that thing, you'd bring it home, you'd plug it in, and it would do absolutely nothing at all. So, you had to program it, and there were great programming, like, tutorials, like this. I mean, this was great. It's, like, you know, Herbie the Apple II. It's such a great way to — I mean, they should make Java books like this, and we've have no problem learning a program. But this was a great, grand time of the computer, when it was just a raw, raw, what is it? kind of an era. And, you see, this era coincided with my own childhood. I grew up in a tofu factory in Seattle. Who of you grew up in a family business, suffered the torture? Yes, yes. The torture was good. Wasn't it good torture? It was just life-changing, you know. And so, in my life, you know, I was in the tofu; it was a family business. And my mother was a kind of a designer, also. She'd make this kind of, like, wall of tofu cooking, and it would confuse the customers, because they all thought it was a restaurant. A bad sort of branding thing, or whatever. But, anyway, that's where I grew up, in this little tofu factory in Seattle, and it was kind of like this: a small room where I kind of grew up. I'm big there in that picture. That's my dad. My dad was kind of like MacGyver, really: he would invent, like, ways to make things heavy. Like back here, there's like, concrete block technology here, and he would need the concrete blocks to press the tofu, because tofu is actually kind of a liquidy type of thing, and so you have to have heavy stuff to push out the liquid and make it hard. Tofu comes out in these big batches, and my father would sort of cut them by hand. I can't tell you — family business story: you'd understand this — my father was the most sincere man possible. He walked into a Safeway once on a rainy day, slipped, broke his arm, rushed out: he didn't want to inconvenience Safeway. So, instead, you know, my father's, like, arm's broken for two weeks in the store, and that week — now, those two weeks were when my older brother and I had to do everything. And that was torture, real torture. Because, you see, we'd seen my father taking the big block of tofu and cutting it, like, knife in, zap, zap, zap. We thought, wow. So, the first time I did that, I went, like, whoa! Like this. Bad blocks. But anyways, the tofu to me was kind of my origin, basically. And because working in a store was so hard, I liked going to school; it was like heaven. And I was really good at school. So, when I got to MIT, you know, as most of you who are creatives, your parents all told you not to be creative, right? So, same way, you know, I was good at art and good at math, and my father says, he's — John's good at math. I went to MIT, did my math, but I had this wonderful opportunity, because computers had just become visual. The Apple — Macintosh just came out; I had a Mac in hand when I went to MIT. And it was a time when a guy who, kind of, could cross the two sides — it was a good time. And so, I remember that my first major piece of software was on a direct copy of then-Aldus PageMaker. I made a desktop publishing system way back when, and that was, kind of, my first step into figuring out how to — oh, these two sides are kind of fun to mix. And the problem when you're younger — for all you students out there — is, your head gets kind of big really easy. And when I was making icons, I was, like, the icon master, and I was, like, yeah, I'm really good at this, you know. And then luckily, you know, I had the fortune of going to something called a library, and in the library I came upon this very book. I found this book. It's called, "Thoughts on Design," by a man named Paul Rand. It's a little slim volume; I'm not sure if you've seen this. It's a very nice little book. It's about this guy, Paul Rand, who was one of the greatest graphic designers, and also a great writer as well. And when I saw this man's work, I realized how bad I was at design, or whatever I called it back then, and I suddenly had a kind of career goal, kind of in hot pursuit. So I kind of switched. I went to MIT, finished. I got my masters, and then went to art school after that. And just began to design stuff, like chopstick wrappers, napkins, menus — whatever I could get a handle on: sort of wheel-and-deal, move up in the design world, whatever. And isn't it that strange moment when you publish your design? Remember that moment — publishing your designs? Remember that moment? It felt so good, didn't it? So, I was published, you know, so, wow, my design's in a book, you know? After that, things kind of got strange, and I got thinking about the computer, because the computer to me always, kind of, bothered me. I didn't quite get it. And Paul Rand was a kind of crusty designer, you know, a crusty designer, like a good — kind of like a good French bread? You know, he wrote in one of his books: "A Yale student once said, 'I came here to learn how to design, not how to use a computer.' Design schools take heed." This is in the '80s, in the great clash of computer/non-computer people. A very difficult time, actually. And this to me was an important message from Rand. And so I began to sort of mess with the computer at the time. This is the first sort of play thing I did, my own serious play. I built a working version of an Adobe Illustrator-ish thing. It looks like Illustrator; it can, like, draw. It was very hard to make this, actually. It took a month to make this part. And then I thought, what if I added this feature, where I can say, this point, you can fly like a bird. You're free, kind of thing. So I could, sort of, change the kind of stability with a little control there on the dial, and I can sort of watch it flip around. And this is in 1993. And when my professors saw this, they were very upset at me. They were saying, Why's it moving? They were saying, Make it stop now. Now, I was saying, Well, that's the whole point: it's moving. And he says, Well, when's it going to stop? And I said, Never. And he said, Even worse. Stop it now. I started studying this whole idea, of like, what is this computer? It's a strange medium. It's not like print. It's not like video. It lasts forever. It's a very strange medium. So, I went off with this, and began to look for things even more. And so in Japan, I began to experiment with people. This is actually bad: human experiments. I would do these things where I'd have students become pens: there's blue pen, red pen, green pen, black pen. And someone sits down and draws a picture. They're laughing because he said, draw from the middle-right to the middle, and he kind of messed up. See, humans don't know how to take orders; the computer's so good at it. This guy figured out how to get the computer to draw with two pens at once: you know, you, pen, do this, and you, pen, do this. And so began to have multiple pens on the page — again, hard to do with our hands. And then someone discovered this "a-ha moment" where you could use coordinate systems. We thought, ah, this is when it's going to happen. In the end, he drew a house. It was the most boring thing. It became computerish; we began to think computerish — the X, Y system — and so that was kind of a revelation. And after this I wanted to build a computer out of people, called a human-powered computer. So, this happened in 1993. Sound down, please. It's a computer where the people are the parts. I have behind this wall a disk drive, a CPU, a graphics card, a memory system. They're picking up a giant floppy disk made of cardboard. It's put inside the computer. And that little program's on that cardboard disk. So, she wears the disk, and reads the data off the sectors of the disk, and the computer starts up; it sort of boots up, really. And it's a sort of a working computer. And when I built this computer, I had a moment of — what is it called? — the epiphany where I realized that the computer's just so fast. This computer appears to be fast - she's working pretty hard, and people are running around, and we think, wow, this is happening at a fast rate. And this computer's programmed to do only one thing, which is, if you move your mouse, the mouse changes on the screen. On the computer, when you move your mouse, that arrow moves around. On this computer, if you move the mouse, it takes half an hour for the mouse cursor to change. To give you a sense of the speed, the scale: the computer is just so amazingly fast, O.K.? And so, after this I began to do experiments for different companies. This is something I did for Sony in 1996. It was three Sony "H" devices that responded to sound. So, if you talk into the mike, you'll hear some music in your headphones; if you talk in the phone, then video would happen. So, I began to experiment with industry in different ways with this kind of mixture of skills. I did this ad. I don't believe in this kind of alcohol, but I do drink sometimes. And Chanel. So, getting to do different projects. And also, one thing I realized is that I like to make things. We like to make things. It's fun to make things. And so I never developed the ability to have a staff. I have no staff; it's all kind of made by hand — these sort of broken hands. And these hands were influenced by this man, Mr. Inami Naomi. This guy was my kind of like mentor. He was the first digital media producer in Tokyo. He's the guy that kind of discovered me, and kind of got me going in digital media. He was such an inspirational guy. I remember, like, we'd be in his studio, like, at 2 a.m., and then he'd show up from some client meeting. He'd come in and say, you know, If I am here, everything is okay. And you'd feel so much better, you know. And I'll never forget how, like, but — I'll never forget how, like, he had a sudden situation with his — he had an aneurysm. He went into a coma. And so, for three years he was out, and he could only blink, and so I realized at this moment, I thought, wow — how fragile is this thing we're wearing, this body and mind we're wearing, and so I thought, How do you go for it more? How do you take that time you have left and go after it? So, Naomi was pivotal in that. And so, I began to think more carefully about the computer. This was a moment where I was thinking about, so, you have a computer program, it responds to motion — X and Y — and I realized that each computer program has all these images inside the program. So, if you can see here, you know, that program you're seeing in the corner, if you spread it out, it's all these things all at once. It's real simultaneity. It's nothing we're used to working with. We're so used to working in one vector. This is all at the same time. The computer lives in so many dimensions. And also, at the same time I was frustrated, because I would go to all these art and design schools everywhere, and there were these, like, "the computer lab," you know, and this is, like, in the late 1990s, and this is in Basel, a great graphic design school. And here's this, like, dirty, kind of, shoddy, kind of, dark computer room. And I began to wonder, Is this the goal? Is this what we want, you know? And also, I began to be fascinated by machines — you know, like copy machines — and so this is actually in Basel. I noticed how we spent so much time on making it interactive — this is, like, a touch screen — and I noticed how you can only touch five places, and so, "why are we wasting so much interactivity everywhere?" became a question. And also, the sound: I discovered I can make my ThinkPad pretend it's a telephone. You get it? No? O.K. And also, I discovered in Logan airport, this was, like, calling out to me. Do you hear that? It's like cows. This is at 4 a.m. at Logan. So, I was wondering, like, what is this thing in front of me, this computer thing? It didn't make any sense. So, I began to make things again. This is another series of objects made of old computers from my basement. I made — I took my old Macintoshes and made different objects out of them from Tokyo. I began to be very disinterested in computers themselves, so I began to make paintings out of PalmPilots. I made this series of works. They're paintings I made and put a PalmPilot in the middle as a kind of display that's sort of thinking, I'm abstract art. What am I? I'm abstract. And so it keeps thinking out loud of its own abstraction. I began to be fascinated by plastic, so I spent four months making eight plastic blocks perfectly optically transparent, as a kind of release of stress. Because of that, I became interested in blue tape, so in San Francisco, at C.C., I had a whole exhibition on blue tape. I made a whole installation out of blue tape — blue painters' tape. And at this point my wife kind of got worried about me, so I stopped doing blue tape and began to think, Well, what else is there in life? And so computers, as you know, these big computers, there are now tiny computers. They're littler computers, so the one-chip computers, I began to program one-chip computers and make objects out of P.C. boards, LEDs. I began to make LED sculptures that would live inside little boxes out of MDF. This is a series of light boxes I made for a show in Italy. Very simple boxes: you just press one button and some LED interaction occurs. This is a series of lamps I made. This is a Bento box lamp: it's sort of a plastic rice lamp; it's very friendly. I did a show in London last year made out of iPods — I used iPods as a material. So I took 16 iPod Nanos and made a kind of a Nano fish, basically. Recently, this is for Reebok. I've done shoes for Reebok as well, as a kind of a hobby for apparel. So anyways, there are all these things you can do, but the thing I love the most is to experience, taste the world. The world is just so tasty. We think we'll go to a museum; that's where all the tastes are. No, they're all out there. So, this is, like, in front of the Eiffel Tower, really, actually, around the Louvre area. This I found, where nature had made a picture for me. This is a perfect 90-degree angle by nature. In this strange moment where, like, these things kind of appeared. We all are creative people. We have this gene defect in our mind. We can't help but stop, right? This feeling's a wonderful thing. It's the forever-always-on museum. This is from the Cape last year. I discovered that I had to find the equation of art and design, which we know as circle-triangle-square. It's everywhere on the beach, I discovered. I began to collect every instance of circle-triangle-square. I put these all back, by the way. And I also discovered how . some rocks are twins separated at birth. This is also out there, you know. I'm, like, how did this happen, kind of thing? I brought you guys together again. So, three years ago I discovered, the letters M-I-T occurring in simplicity and complexity. My alma mater, MIT, and I had this moment — a kind of M. Night Shayamalan moment — where I thought, Whoa! I have to do this. And I went after it with passion. However, recently this RISD opportunity kind of arose — going to RISD — and I couldn't reconcile this real easy, because the letters had told me, MIT forever. But I discovered in the French word raison d'être. I was, like, aha, wait a second. And there RISD appeared. And so I realized it was O.K. to go. So, I'm going to RISD, actually. Who's a RISD alum out there? RISD alums? Yeah, RISD. There we go, RISD. Woo, RISD. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Art Center — Art Center is good, too. RISD is kind of my new kind of passion, and I'll tell you a little bit about that. So, RISD is — I was outside RISD, and some student wrote this on some block, and I thought, Wow, RISD wants to know what itself is. And I have no idea what RISD should be, actually, or what it wants to be, but one thing I have to tell you is that although I'm a technologist, I don't like technology very much. It's a, kind of, the qi thing, or whatever. People say, Are you going to bring RISD into the future? And I say, well, I'm going to bring the future back to RISD. There's my perspective. Because in reality, the problem isn't how to make the world more technological. It's about how to make it more humane again. And if anything, I think RISD has a strange DNA. It's a strange exuberance about materials, about the world: a fascination that I think the world needs quite very much right now. So, thank you everyone.

Digging up dinosaurs

Paul Sereno

{0: 'Paul Sereno'}

{0: ['paleontologist']}

{0: "Surely not the only science career based on a museum tour epiphany, Paul Sereno's is almost certainly the most triumphant. He's dug up dinosaurs on five continents -- and discovered the world's largest crocodile, the (extinct) 40-foot <i>Sarchosuchus</i>."}

2005-02-28

2009-01-07

TED2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'da', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fi', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['Africa', 'animals', 'biology', 'dinosaurs', 'evolution', 'exploration', 'history', 'life', 'paleontology']

{168: "The search for humanity's roots", 315: "A dig for humanity's origins", 2238: 'How we unearthed the Spinosaurus', 1163: 'Building a dinosaur from a chicken', 1352: 'Where are the baby dinosaurs?', 23877: 'How did feathers evolve?'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_sereno_digging_up_dinosaurs/

Strange landscapes, scorching heat and (sometimes) mad crocodiles await scientists seeking clues to evolution's genius. Paleontologist Paul Sereno talks about his surprising encounters with prehistory -- and a new way to help students join the adventure.

Sixty-five million years ago, a very important and catastrophic event changed the course of life on land. And although we know that the land animals I'm going to talk about are just the scum of the Earth on the land — the little bits of land floating around — but they are important to us because they're sort of in our scale of experience from millimeters to meters. And these animals disappeared, and a separate life, mammals, radiated out to take their place. And so, we know this in extraordinary detail. And so this is a core from near Bermuda. We know that the tsunamis, the earthquakes, and the things that we've experienced in the entire record of humankind history can't really quite get around the kind of disaster that this represented for the Earth. So even before that impact was known, even before scientists in general came to an agreement over the theory of evolution, scientists and natural historians of all kinds of stripes actually had divided Earth's life's history into these two episodes: Mesozoic, the middle life, and the Cenozoic, the recent life. And as it turns out, it actually corresponds really nicely with geologic history. So we have a Mesozoic period, an age of fragmentation, and a Cenozoic period, an age of reconnection — South America to North America, India to Asia. And so my work, really, is trying to understand the character of that Mesozoic radiation compared to the Cenozoic radiation to see what mysteries we can understand from dinosaurs and from other animals about what life on drifting continents really can tell us about evolution. The work immediately begs the question, "Why didn't they go into the waters?" I mean, certainly mammals did. This is one example. You can go outside — see many other examples. Within five, 10 million years of the bolide impact we had a whole variety of animals going into the water. Why didn't they do that? Why didn't they hang around in trees at good size, and why didn't they burrow? Why didn't they do all these things, and if they didn't do all these things, what kinds of animals were in those spaces? And if there were no animals in those spaces, what does that tell us about, you know, how evolution works on land? Really interesting questions. I think a lot of it has to do with body size. In fact, I think that most of it has to do with body size — the size you are when you inherit a vacant ecospace from whatever natural disaster. Looking at dinosaur evolution and studying it, digging it up for many years, I end up looking at the mammal radiation, and it seems as though everything is quick time, just like technology, advancing by an order of magnitude. Dinosaur evolution proceeded at a stately pace, an order of magnitude slower on any way you want to measure it. You want to measure it by diversity? You want to measure it by the time it took to reach maximum body size? Yes, they do have larger body size, but many of them are smaller, but we're interested in the time it took them to achieve that. Fifty million years to achieve this maximum body size. And that is 10 times longer than it took the mammals to achieve maximum body size and invade all those habitats. So there's lessons to learn, and there's lessons to learn from the exception, the exception that we know very well today from the discoveries we've made, and many other scholars have made around the world. This slide was shown before. This is the famous Jurassic bird Archaeopteryx. We now know this transition is the one time that dinosaurs actually went below that body size — we're going to see where they began in a minute — and it is the one time that they rapidly invaded all the habitats I just told you that dinosaurs weren't in. They became marine. We now know them today from the ice caps. There's burrowing birds. They inhabit the trees at all body sizes, and, of course, they inhabit the land. So we were the first to actually name a bird from the famous series that later exploded onto the pages of Science and Nature. We called this bird Sinornis. It's a little bit more advanced than Archaeopteryx, and if you go to different layers, you find things that are less advanced than Archaeopteryx, and every grade in between, so that if you find something today, we're usually splitting hairs — or, more appropriately, feathers — as to decide whether it's actually a non-avian or an avian. It is the greatest transition that we have, actually, on land from one habitat to another, bar none, to understand how a bony, fairly heavy, kilogram or a couple-of-kilogram animal could make such a transition. It is really our greatest — one of our greatest — evolutionary sequences. Now, my work began at the beginning. I thought if I'm going to understand dinosaur evolution, I'd have to go back to those beds where they had picked up fragments, go back to a time and a place where the earliest dinosaurs existed. I'd like to call for this little video clip to give you some idea of, sort of, what we face. Normally, we get asked a lot of questions: "Well, how do you find fossils in areas that look like this?" If we could roll that first video clip. This is sort of a nice helicopter ride through those early beds, and they're located in Northeastern Argentina. And we're coming over a cliff, and at the top of that cliff, dinosaurs had basically taken over. At the bottom of the cliff, we find that they're rare as hens' teeth. That's where dinosaur origins is to be found: at the bottom of the cliff. You go into an area like this, you get a geologic map, you get a topographic map, and the best, most-inspired team you can bring to the area. And the rest is up to you. You've got to find fossils. You've got to dig a hole that's usually quite a bit bigger than that to get it out; you've got to climb those cliffs and find, really, everything that existed — not just the dinosaurs, but the entire story. If you're lucky, and you dig a place like that, you actually find the ash bed to dig it, and we did. 228 million years old, we found what really is the most primitive dinosaur: that's the Ur-dinosaur. A three-and-a-half foot thing, beautiful skull, predator, meat-eater, a two-legged animal. So, all the other dinosaurs that you know, or your kids know, at least, on four legs. This is sort of a look at the skull, and it's an absolutely fantastic thing about five or six inches long. It looks rather bird-like because it is. It's bird-like and hollow. A predator. Maybe 25 pounds, or 10 kilograms. That's where dinosaurs began. That's where the radiation began. That is 10 times larger than the mammal radiation, which was a four-legged radiation. We are extremely dinosaur-like, and unusual in our two-legged approach to life. Now, if you want to understand what happened then when the continents broke apart, and dinosaurs found — landlubbers, as they are — found themselves adrift. There's some missing puzzle pieces. Most of those missing puzzle pieces are southern continents, because it was those continents that are least explored. If you want to add to this picture and try and sketch it globally, you really have to force yourself to go down to the four corners of the Earth — Africa, India, Antarctica, Australia — and start putting together some of these pieces. I've been to some of those continents, but Africa was, in the words of Steven Pinker, was a blank slate, largely. But one with an immense chalkboard in the middle, with lots of little areas of dinosaur rock if you could survive an expedition. There's no roads into the Sahara. It's an enormous place. To be able to excavate the 80 tons of dinosaurs that we have in the Sahara and take them out, you really have to put together an expedition team that can handle the conditions. Some of them are political. Many of them are physical. Some of them — the most important — are mental. And you really have to be able to withstand conditions — you have to drive into the desert, you will see landscapes in many cases — you can see from what we've discovered — that nobody else has ever seen. And the kinds of teams they bring in? Well, they're composed of people who understand science as adventure with a purpose. They're usually students who've never seen a desert. Some of them are more experienced. Your job as a leader — this is definitely a team sport — your job as a leader is to try to inspire them to do more work than they've ever done in their life under conditions that they can't imagine. So, 125 degrees is normal. The ground surface at 150 — typical. So, you can't leave your normal metal tools out because you'll get a first-degree burn if you grab them sometimes. So, you are finding yourself also in an amazing cultural milieu. You're really rubbing shoulders with the world's last great nomadic people. These are the Tuareg nomads, and they're living their lives much as they have for centuries. Your job is to excavate things like this in the foreground, and make them enter the pages of history. To do that, you've got to actually transport them thousands of miles out of the desert. We're talking about Ethiopia, but let's talk about Niger — or Niger, in our English language — north of Nigeria — that's where this photograph was taken. Basically you're talking about a country that, when we started working there, did not have container traffic. You transported the bones out yourself to the coast of Africa, onto a boat, if you wanted to get them out of the middle of the Sahara. That's a 2,000 mile journey. So enormous excavations and a lot of work, and out of essentially a partial herd of dinosaurs that you saw buried there — 20 tons of material — we erect Jobaria, a sauropod dinosaur like we haven't seen on some other continents. It really is a little bit out of place temporally. It looks nothing like what we would find if we dug in contemporary beds in North America. Here's the animal that was causing it trouble. And, you know, on and on — a whole menagerie. When you pick up something like this — and some of you have had the chance to touch it — this is a piece of history. You're touching something that's 110 million years old. This is a thumb claw. There it was, moments after it was discovered. It is an incredible view of life, and it really began when we began to understand the depth of time. It's only been with us for less than a century, and in that time, that fourth dimension, when radioactive dating came about, less than a century ago, and we could actually tell how old some of these things were, is probably the most profound transformation, because it changes the way we look at ourselves and the world dramatically. When you pick up a piece of history like that, I think it can transform kids that are possibly interested in science. That's the animal that thumb claw came from: Suchomimus. Here's some others. This is something we found in Morocco, an immense animal. We prototyped by CAT-scanning the brain out of this animal. It turns out to have a forebrain one-fifteenth the size of a human. This was the cover of Science, because they thought that humans were more intelligent than these animals, but we can see by some in our administration that despite the enormous advantage in brain volume some of the attitudes remain the same. Anyway, smaller raptors. All the stuff from Jurassic Park that you know of — all those small animals — they all come from northern continents. This is the first skeleton from a southern continent, and guess what? You start preparing it. It has no big claw on its hind foot. It doesn't look like a Velociraptor. It's really a wholly separate radiation. So what we're trying to piece together here is a story. It involves flying reptiles like this Pterosaur that we reconstructed from Africa. Crocodiles, of course, and that's a nasty one we haven't named yet. And huge things — I mean, this is a lower jaw just laying there in the desert of this enormous crocodile. The crocodile is technically called Sarcosuchus. That's an adult Orinoco crocodile in its jaws. We had to try and reconstruct this. We had to actually look at recent crocodiles to understand how crocodiles scale. Could I have the second little video clip? Now, this field is just — and, of course, science in general — is just — adventure. We had to find and measure the largest crocodiles living today. Narrator: ... as long as their boat. Man: Look at that set of choppers! Yeah, he's a big one. Narrator: If they can just land it, this croc will provide useful data, helping Paul in his quest to understand Sarcosuchus. Man: OK, hand me some more here. Man 2: OK. Narrator: It falls to Paul to cover its eyes. Man: Watch out! Watch out! No, no, no, no. You're going to have to get on the back legs. Man: I got the back legs. Man 2: You have the back legs? No, you have the front legs, my friend. I've got it. I've got the back legs. Somebody get the front legs. Paul Sereno: Let's get this tape measure on him. Put it right there. Wow. Sixty-five. Wow. That's a big skull. Narrator: Big, but less than half the size of supercroc's skull. Man: Enormous. PS: You've got a ... 14-foot croc. Man: I knew it was big. PS: Don't get off. You don't get off, but don't worry about me. Narrator: Paul has his data, so they decide to release the animal back into the river. PS: Don't get off! Don't get off! Don't get off! Narrator: Paul has never seen a fossil do that. PS: Okay, when I say three, we move. One, two, three! Whoa! So — there were — (Applause) Well, you know, the — the fossil record is truly amazing because it really forces you to look at living animals in a new way. We proved with those measurements that crocodiles scaled isometrically. It depended on the shape of their skull, though, so we had to actually get those measurements to be sure that we had reconstructed and could prove to the scientific world that supercroc in fact is a 40-foot crocodile, probably a male. Anyway, you find other things, too. I'm going to lead an expedition to the Sahara to dig up Africa's largest neolithic site. We found this last year. Two hundred skeletons, tools, jewelry. This is a ceremonial disk. An amazing record of the colonization of the Sahara 5,000 years ago is been sitting out there waiting for us to go back. So, really exciting. And then work later is going to take us to Tibet. Now, we normally think of Tibet as a highland. It's really an island continent. It was a precursor to India, a messenger from Gondwana — a lost paradise of dinosaurs isolated for millions of years. No one's found them. We know where they are, and we're going to go and get them next year. They're only between 13 and 14,000 feet, but if you go in the warm part of the year, it's O.K. Now, I tried to suture together a dinosaur evolutionary history so that we can try to understand some basic patterns of evolution. I've talked about a few of them. We really need to take that further. We need to delve into this mass of anatomy that we've been compiling to understand where the changes are occurring and what this means. We can't predict, necessarily, what will happen in evolution, but we can learn some of the rules of the game, and that's really what we're trying to do. With regard to the biogeographic question, the Earth is dividing. These are all landlubbing animals. There's a couple of choices. You get divided, and a continent's division corresponds to a fork in the evolutionary tree, or you're crafty, and you manage to escape from one to the other and erase that division, or you're living peacefully on each side, and on one side you just go extinct, and you survive on the other side and create a difference. And the fourth thing is that you actually did one or the other of those three things, but the paleontologist never found you. And you take those four instances and you realize you have a complex problem. And so, in addition to digging, I think we have some answers from the dinosaur record. I think these dinosaurs migrated — we call it dispersal — around the globe, with the slightest land bridge. They did it within two or three degrees of the pole, to maintain similarity between continents. But when they were divided, indeed they were divided, and we do see the continents carving differences among dinosaurs. But there's one thing that's even more important, and I think that's extinction. We have downgraded this factor. It carves up the history of life, and gives us the differences that we see in the dinosaur world towards the end, right before the bolide impact. The best way to test this is to actually create a model. So if we move back, this is a two-dimensional typical tree of life. I want to give you three dimensions. So you see the tree of life, but now I've added the dimension of area. So the tree of life is normally divergence over time. Now we have divergence over time, but we've created the third dimension of area. This is a computer program which has three knobs. We can control those things that we're worried about: extinction, sampling, dispersal — going from one area to another. And ultimately we can control the branching to mimic what we think the continents were like, and run it a thousand times, so we can estimate the parameters, to answer the question whether we are on the mark or not, at least to know the barriers of the problems. So that's a little bit about the science. Today I'm going to spend the rest of my few minutes up here talking about the other stuff that I do in Chicago, which is related to the fact that I never — and actually, in talking to a lot of TEDsters, there's a number of you out there — I don't know that I'd get an answer honestly, if I asked you to raise your hand, but there are a number of you out there that started your scientific, technical, entertainment career as failures, by society's standards, as failures by schools. I was one of those. I was failed by my school — my school failed me. Who's pointing fingers? Several teachers nearly killed me. I found myself in art. I was a total failure in school, not really headed to graduate high school. And I went on — that's my first painting on canvas. I read a dictionary. I got into college. I became an artist. O.K., and started drawing. It became abstract. I worked up a portfolio, and I was headed to New York. Sometimes I would see bones when there was a body there. Something was going on in the background. I headed to New York to a studio. I took a side trip to the American Museum, and I never recovered. But really it's the same discipline — they're kindred disciplines. I mean, is there anything that is not visualizing what can't be seen, in terms of discovering this dinosaur bone from a small piece of it that's out there, or seeing the distortion that we try to see as evolutionary distortion in one animal to another? This is a very extraordinarily visual. I give you a human face because you're experts at that. It takes us years to understand how to do that with dinosaurs. They're really kindred disciplines. But what we're trying to create in Chicago is a way to get, collect together, those students who are least represented in our science and technology spheres. We all know, and there's been several allusions to it, that we are failing in our ability to produce enough scientists, engineers and technicians. We've known that for a long time. We've gone through the Sputnik phase, and now, as you see the increase in the pace of what we're doing, it becomes even more prominent. Where are all these people going to come from? And a more general question for our society is, what's going to happen to all the rest that are left behind? What about all the kids like me that were in school — kids like some of you out there — that were in school and didn't get a chance and will never get a chance to participate in science and technology? Those are the questions I ask. And we talk about Ethiopia, and it's very important. Niger is equally important, and I'm trying desperately to do something in Niger. They have an AIDS problem. I asked — the U.S. State Department asked the government recently, What do you want to do? And they gave them two problems. Dinosaurs was one of them. Give us a museum of dinosaurs, and we will attract tourists, which is our number two industry. And I hope to God the United States government, me, or TED, or somebody helps us do that, because that would be an incredible thing for their country. But when we look back at our own country, we're looking back at our cities, the cities where most of you come from — certainly the city I come from — there's legions of kids out there like these. And the question is — and we started to address this question for centuries — as to how we get these kids involved in science. We've started in Chicago an organization — a non-profit organization — called Project Exploration. These are two kids from Project Exploration. We met them in their early stages in high school. They were — failing to poor students, and they are now — one at the University of Chicago, another in Illinois. We've got students at Harvard. We're six years old. And we created a track record. Because when you go out there as a scholar, and you try to find out longitudinal studies, track records like that, there essentially are very few, if none. So, we've created an incredible track record of 100 percent graduation, 90 percent going to college, many first-generation, 90 percent of those choosing science as a career. It's an impressive track record, and so we look back and we say, well, we didn't really exactly work this out theoretically from the start, but when we look back, there are theoretical movements in science education. It's gone through science as an inquiry, which was a big advance, and Dewey back at Chicago — you learn by doing. To — you learn by envisioning yourself as a scientist, and then you learn to envision yourself as a scientist. The next step is to learn the capability to make yourself a scientist. You have to have those steps. If you have — It's easy to get kids interested in science. It's hard to get them to envision themselves as a scientist, which involves standing up in front of people like we're doing here at this symposium and presenting something as a knowledgeable person, and then seeing yourself in the role as a scientist and giving yourself the tools to pursue that. And so, that's what we're going to do. We're planning a permanent home in Chicago. We have lots of ideas, but I guarantee you this one thing — and I've talked to some people here at TED — it's not going to look like anything you've seen before. It's going to be part-school, part-museum hall, part-conservatory, part-zoo, and part of an answer to the problem of how you interest kids in science. Thank you very much.

My dream of a flying car

Paul Moller

{0: 'Paul Moller'}

{0: ['inventor']}

{0: 'With a team of engineers, Paul Moller works on the Skycar, a combination car and jet, as well as the M200, a saucer-shaped hovering car. He also develops next-generation engines to power these and other amazing vehicles.'}

2004-02-02

2009-01-08

TED2004

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['design', 'engineering', 'invention', 'technology', 'transportation']

{388: 'A flight through the ocean', 335: 'Our next giant leap', 411: 'The future of cars', 1260: 'A plane you can drive', 19322: 'How autonomous flying taxis could change the way you travel', 1402: 'From mach-20 glider to hummingbird drone'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_moller_my_dream_of_a_flying_car/

Paul Moller talks about the future of personal air travel -- the marriage of autos and flight that will give us true freedom to travel off-road. He shows two things he's working on: the Moller Skycar (a jet + car) and a passenger-friendly hovering disc.

Many of you could ask the question, you know, why is a flying car, or maybe more accurately, a roadable aircraft, possible at this time? A number of years ago, Mr. Ford predicted that flying cars of some form would be available. Now, 60 years later, I'm here to tell you why it's possible. When I was about five years old, not very much — about a year after Mr. Ford made his predictions, I was living in a rural part of Canada, on the side of a mountain in a very isolated area. Getting to school, for a kid that was actually pretty short for his age, through the Canadian winter, was not a pleasant experience. It was a trying and scary thing for a young kid to be going through. At the end of my first year in school, in the summer of that year, I discovered a couple hummingbirds that were caught in a shed near my home. They'd worn themselves out, beating themselves against the window, and, well, they were easy to capture. I took them outside and as I let them go, that split second, even though they were very tired, that second I let them go they hovered for a second, then zipped off into the distance. I thought, what a great way to get to school. (Laughter) For a kid at that age, this was like infinite speed, disappearing, and I was very inspired by that. And so the next — over the next six decades, believe it or not, I've built a number of aircraft, with the goal of creating something that could do for you, or me, what the hummingbird does, and give you that flexibility. I've called this vehicle, generically, a volantor, after the Latin word "volant," meaning, to fly in a light, nimble manner. Volantor-like helicopter, perhaps. The FAA, the controlling body above all, calls it a "powered lift aircraft." And they've actually issued a pilot's license — a powerlift pilot's license — for this type of aircraft. It's closer than you think. It's kind of remarkable when you consider that there are no operational powered lift aircraft. So for once, perhaps, the government is ahead of itself. The press calls my particular volantor a "Skycar." This is a little bit earlier version of it, that's why it's given the X designation, but it's a four-passenger aircraft that could take off vertically, like a helicopter — therefore it doesn't need an airfield. On the ground, it's powered electrically. It's actually classified as a motorcycle because of the three wheels, which is a great asset because it allows you, theoretically, to use this on the highways in most states, and actually in all cities. So that's an asset because if you've got to deal with the crash protection issues of the automobile, forget it — you're never going to fly it. (Laughter) One could say that a helicopter does pretty much what the hummingbird does, and gets around in much the same way, and it's true, but a helicopter is a very complex device. It's expensive — so expensive that very few people could own or use it. It's often been described because of its fragile nature and its complexity, as a series of parts — a large number of parts — flying in formation. (Laughter) Another difference, and I have to describe this, because it's very personal, another great difference between the helicopter and the volantor — in my case the Skycar volantor — is the experience that I've had in flying both of those. In a helicopter you feel — and it's still a remarkable sensation — you feel like you're being hauled up from above by a vibrating crane. When you get in the Skycar — and I can tell you, there's only one other person that's flown it, but he had the same sensation — you really feel like you're being lifted up by a magic carpet, without any vibration whatsoever. The sensation is unbelievable. And it's been a great motivator. I only get to fly this vehicle occasionally, and only when I can persuade my stockholders to let me do so, but it's still one of those wonderful experiences that reward you for all that time. What we really need is something to replace the automobile for those 50-plus mile trips. Very few people realize that 50 mile-plus trips make up 85 percent of the miles traveled in America. If we can get rid of that, then the highways will now be useful to you, as contrasted by what's happening in many parts of the world today. On this next slide, is an interesting history of what we really have seen in infrastructure, because whether I give you a perfect Skycar, the perfect vehicle for use, it's going to have very little value to you unless you've got a system to use it in. I'm sure any of you have asked the question, yeah, are there great things up there — what am I going to do, get up there? It's bad enough on a highway, what's it going to be like to be in the air? This world that you're going to be talking about tomorrow is going to be completely integrated. You're not going to be a pilot, you're going to be a passenger. And it's the infrastructure that really determines whether this process goes forward. I can tell you, technically we can build Skycars — my God, we went to the moon! The technology there was much more difficult than what I'm dealing with here. But we have to have these priority changes, we have to have infrastructure to go with this. Historically you see that we got around 200 years ago by canals, and as that system disappeared, were replaced by railroads. As that disappeared we came in with highways. But if you look at that top corner — the highway system — you see where we are today. Highways are no longer being built, and that's a fact. You won't see any additional highways in the next 10 years. However, the next 10 years, if like the last 10 years, we're going to see 30 percent more traffic. And where is that going to lead you to? So the issue then, I've often asked, is when is it going to happen? When are we going to be able to have these vehicles? And of course, if you ask me, I'm going to give you a really optimistic view. After all, I've been spending 60 years here believing it's going to happen tomorrow. So, I'm not going to quote myself on this. I'd prefer to quote someone else, who testified with me before Congress, and in his position as head of NASA put forward this particular vision of the future of this type of aircraft. Now I would argue, actually, if you look at the fact that on the highways today, you're only averaging about 30 miles per hour — on average, according to the DOT — the Skycar travels at over 300 miles an hour, up to 25,000 feet. And so, in effect, you could see perhaps a tenfold increase in the ability to get around as far as speed is concerned. Unbeknownst to many of you, the highway in the sky that I'm talking about here has been under construction for 10 years. It makes use of the GPS — you're familiar with GPS in your automobile, but you may not be familiar with the fact that there's a GPS U.S., there's a Russian GPS, and there's a new GPS system going to Europe, called Galileo. With those three systems, you have what is always necessary — a level of redundancy that says, if one system fails, you'll still have a way to make sure that you're being controlled. Because if you're in this world, where computers are controlling what you're doing, it's going to be very critical that something can't fail on you. How would a trip in a Skycar work? Well, you can't right now take off from your home because it's too noisy. I mean to be able to take off from your home, you'd have to be extremely quiet. But it's still fairly quiet. You'd motor, electrically, to a vertiport, which may be a few blocks, maybe even a few miles away. This is clearly, as I said earlier, a roadable aircraft, and you're not going to spend that much time on the road. After all, if you can fly like that, why are you going to drive around on a highway? Go to a local vertiport, plug in your destination, delivered almost like a passenger. You can play computer games, you can sleep, you can read on the way. This is the world — there won't be you as a pilot. And I know the pilots in the audience aren't going to like that — and I've had a lot of bad feedback from people who want to be up there, flying around and experiencing that. And of course, I suppose like recreational parks you can still do that. But the vehicle itself is going to be a very, very controlled environment. Or it's going to have no use to you as a person who might use such a system. We flew the first vehicle for the international press in 1965, when I really got it started. I was a professor at the U.C. Davis System, and I got a lot of excitement around this, and I was able to fund the initiation of the program back in that time. And then through the various years we invented various vehicles. Actually the critical point was in 1989, when we demonstrated the stability of this vehicle — how completely stable it was in all circumstances, which is of course very critical. Still not a practical vehicle during all of this, but moving in the right direction, we believe. Finally, in the early part of — or actually the middle of 2002, we flew the 400 — M400, which was the four-passenger vehicle. In this case here, we're flying it remotely, as we always did at the beginning. And we had very small power plants in it at this time. We are now installing larger powerplants, which will make it possible for me to get back on board. A vertical-takeoff aircraft is not the safest vehicle during the test flight program. There's an old adage that applied for the years between 1950s and 1970s, when every aeronautical company was working on vertical-takeoff aircraft. A vertical-takeoff aircraft needs an artificial stabilization system — that's essential. At least for the hover, and the low-speed flight. If that single-stability system, that brain that flies that aircraft, fails, or if the engine fails, that vehicle crashes. There is no option to that. And the adage that I'm referring to, that applied at that time, was that nothing comes down faster than a VTOL aircraft upside down. (Laughter) That's a macabre comment because we lost a lot of pilots. In fact, the aircraft companies gave up on vertical-takeoff aircraft more or less for a number of years. And there's really only one operational aircraft in the world today that's a vertical-takeoff aircraft — as distinct from a helicopter — and that's the Hawker Harrier jump jet. A vertical-takeoff aircraft, like the hummingbird, has a very high metabolism, which means it requires a lot of energy. Getting that energy is very, very difficult. It all comes down to that power plant — how to get a large amount of power in a small package. Fortunately, Dr. Felix Wankel invented the rotary engine. A very unique engine — it's round, it's small, it's vibration-free. It fits exactly where we need to fit it, right in the center of the hubs of the ducts in the system — very critical. In fact that engine — for those who are into the automobile — know that it recently is applied to the RX8 — the Mazda. And that sportscar won Sports Car of the Year. Wonderful engine. In that application, it generates one horsepower per pound, which is twice as good as your car engine today, but only half of what we need. My company has spent 35 years and many millions of dollars taking that rotary engine, which was invented in the late '50s, and getting it to the point that we get over two horsepower per pound, reliably, and critical. We actually get 175 horsepower into one cubic foot. We have eight engines in this vehicle. We have four computers. We have two parachutes. Redundancy is the critical issue here. If you want to stay alive you've got to have backups. And we have actually flown this vehicle and lost an engine, and continued to hover. The computers back up each other. There's a voting system — if one computer is not agreeing with the other three, it's kicked out of the system. And then you have three — you still have the triple redundancy. If one of those fails, you still have a second chance. If you stick around, then good luck. There won't be a third chance. The parachutes are there — hopefully, more for psychological than real reasons, but they will be an ultimate backup if it comes to that. (Laughter) I'd like to show you an animation in this next one, which is one element of the Skycar's use, but it's one that demonstrates how it could be used. You could think of it personally in your own terms, of how you might use it. Video: Skycar dispatched, launch rescue vehicle for San Francisco. Paul Moller: I believe that personal transportation in something like the Skycar, probably in another volantor form as well, will be a significant part of our lives, as Dr. Goldin says, within the next 10 years. And it's going to change the demographics in a very significant way. If you can live 75 miles from San Francisco and get there in 15 minutes, you're going to sell your 700,000-dollar apartment, buy an upscale home on the side of a mountain, buy a Skycar, which I think would be priced at that time perhaps in the area of 100,000 dollars, put money in the bank ... that's a very significant incentive for getting out of San Francisco. But you better be the first one out of town as the real estate values go to hell. (Laughter) Developing the Skycar has been a real challenge. Obviously I'm dependent on a lot of other people believing in what I'm doing — both financially and in technical help. And that has — you run into situations where you have this great acceptance of what you're doing, and a lot of rejection of the same kind of thing. I characterized this emerging technology in an aphorism, as it's described, which really talks about what I've experienced, and I'm sure what other people may have experienced in emerging technologies. There's an interesting poll that came out recently under NAS — I think it's MSNBC — in which they asked the question, "Are you in the market for a volantor?" Twenty-three percent said, "Yes, as soon as possible." Forty-seven percent — yes, as soon as they could — price could come down. Twenty-three percent said, "As soon as it's proven safe." Only seven percent said that they wouldn't consider buying a Skycar. I'm encouraged by that. At least it makes me feel like, to some extent, it is becoming self-evident. That we need an alternative to the automobile, at least for those 50-mile trips and more, so that the highways become usable in today's world. Thank you.

Organic algorithms in architecture

Greg Lynn

{0: 'Greg Lynn'}

{0: ['designer']}

{0: 'Greg Lynn is the head of Greg Lynn FORM, an architecture firm known for its boundary-breaking, biomorphic shapes and its embrace of digital tools for design and fabrication.'}

2005-02-02

2009-01-09

TED2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['design']

{427: 'My journey in design'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/greg_lynn_organic_algorithms_in_architecture/

Greg Lynn talks about the mathematical roots of architecture -- and how calculus and digital tools allow modern designers to move beyond the traditional building forms. A glorious church in Queens (and a titanium tea set) illustrate his theory.

What I thought I would talk about today is the transition from one mode of thinking about nature to another that's tracked by architecture. What's interesting about architects is, we always have tried to justify beauty by looking to nature, and arguably, beautiful architecture has always been looking at a model of nature. So, for roughly 300 years, the hot debate in architecture was whether the number five or the number seven was a better proportion to think about architecture, because the nose was one-fifth of your head, or because your head was one-seventh of your body. And the reason that that was the model of beauty and of nature was because the decimal point had not been invented yet — it wasn't the 16th century — and everybody had to dimension a building in terms of fractions, so a room would be dimensioned as one-fourth of a facade; the structural dais of that might be dimensioned as 10 units, and you would get down to the small elements by fractional subdivision: finer and finer and finer. In the 15th century, the decimal point was invented; architects stopped using fractions, and they had a new model of nature. So, what's going on today is that there's a model of natural form which is calculus-based and which is using digital tools, and that has a lot of implications to the way we think about beauty and form, and it has a lot of implications in the way we think about nature. The best example of this would probably be the Gothic, and the Gothic was invented after the invention of calculus, although the Gothic architects weren't really using calculus to define their forms. But what was important is, the Gothic moment in architecture was the first time that force and motion was thought of in terms of form. So, examples like Christopher Wren's King's Cross: you can see that the structural forces of the vaulting get articulated as lines, so you're really actually seeing the expression of structural force and form. Much later, Robert Maillart's bridges, which optimize structural form with a calculus curvature almost like a parabola. The Hanging Chain models of Antonio Gaudi, the Catalan architect. The end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, and how that Hanging Chain model translates into archways and vaulting. So, in all of these examples, structure is the determining force. Frei Otto was starting to use foam bubble diagrams and foam bubble models to generate his Mannheim Concert Hall. Interestingly, in the last 10 years Norman Foster used a similar heat thermal transfer model to generate the roof of the National Gallery, with the structural engineer Chris Williams. In all these examples, there's one ideal form, because these are thought in terms of structure. And as an architect, I've always found these kinds of systems very limiting, because I'm not interested in ideal forms and I'm not interested in optimizing to some perfect moment. So, what I thought I would bring up is another component that needs to be thought of, whenever you think about nature, and that's basically the invention of generic form in genetic evolution. My hero is actually not Darwin; it's a guy named William Bateson, father of Greg Bateson, who was here for a long time in Monterey. And he was what you'd call a teratologist: he looked at all of the monstrosities and mutations to find rules and laws, rather than looking at the norms. So, instead of trying to find the ideal type or the ideal average, he'd always look for the exception. So, in this example, which is an example of what's called Bateson's Rule, he has two kinds of mutations of a human thumb. When I first saw this image, 10 years ago, I actually found it very strange and beautiful at the same time. Beautiful, because it has symmetry. So, what he found is that in all cases of thumb mutations, instead of having a thumb, you would either get another opposable thumb, or you would get four fingers. So, the mutations reverted to symmetry. And Bateson invented the concept of symmetry breaking, which is that wherever you lose information in a system, you revert back to symmetry. So, symmetry wasn't the sign of order and organization — which is what I was always understanding, and as is an architect — symmetry was the absence of information. So, whenever you lost information, you'd move to symmetry; whenever you added information to a system, you would break symmetry. So, this whole idea of natural form shifted at that moment from looking for ideal shapes to looking for a combination of information and generic form. You know, literally after seeing that image, and finding out what Bateson was working with, we started to use these rules for symmetry breaking and branching to start to think about architectural form. To just talk for a minute about the digital mediums that we're using now and how they integrate calculus: the fact that they're calculus-based means that we don't have to think about dimension in terms of ideal units or discreet elements. So, in architecture we deal with big assemblies of components, so there might be up to, say, 50,000 pieces of material in this room you're sitting in right now that all need to get organized. Now, typically you'd think that they would all be the same: like, the chairs you're sitting in would all be the same dimension. You know, I haven't verified this, but it's the norm that every chair would be a slightly different dimension, because you'd want to space them all out for everybody's sight lines. The elements that make up the ceiling grid and the lighting, they're all losing their modular quality, and moving more and more to these infinitesimal dimensions. That's because we're all using calculus tools for manufacturing and for design. Calculus is also a mathematics of curves. So, even a straight line, defined with calculus, is a curve. It's just a curve without inflection. So, a new vocabulary of form is now pervading all design fields: whether it's automobiles, architecture, products, etc., it's really being affected by this digital medium of curvature. The intricacies of scale that come out of that — you know, in the example of the nose to the face, there's a fractional part-to-whole idea. With calculus, the whole idea of subdivision is more complex, because the whole and the parts are one continuous series. It's too early in the morning for a lecture on calculus, so I brought some images to just describe how that works. This is a Korean church that we did in Queens. And in this example, you can see that the components of this stair are repetitive, but they're repetitive without being modular. Each one of the elements in this structure is a unique distance and dimension, and all of the connections are unique angles. Now, the only way we could design that, or possibly construct it, is by using a calculus-based definition of the form. It also is much more dynamic, so that you can see that the same form opens and closes in a very dynamic way as you move across it, because it has this quality of vector in motion built into it. So the same space that appears to be a kind of closed volume, when seen from the other side becomes a kind of open vista. And you also get a sense of visual movement in the space, because every one of the elements is changing in a pattern, so that pattern leads your eye towards the altar. I think that's one of the main changes, also, in architecture: that we're starting to look now not for some ideal form, like a Latin cross for a church, but actually all the traits of a church: so, light that comes from behind from an invisible source, directionality that focuses you towards an altar. It turns out it's not rocket science to design a sacred space. You just need to incorporate a certain number of traits in a very kind of genetic way. So, these are the different perspectives of that interior, which has a very complex set of orientations all in a simple form. In terms of construction and manufacturing, this is a kilometer-long housing block that was built in the '70s in Amsterdam. And here we've broken the 500 apartments up into small neighborhoods, and differentiated those neighborhoods. I won't go into too much description of any of these projects, but what you can see is that the escalators and elevators that circulate people along the face of the building are all held up by 122 structural trusses. Because we're using escalators to move people, all of these trusses are picking up diagonal loads. So, every one of them is a little bit different-shaped as you move down the length of the building. So, working with Bentley and MicroStation, we've written a custom piece of software that networks all of the components together into these chunks of information, so that if we change any element along the length of the building, not only does that change distribute through each one of the trusses, but each one of the trusses then distributes that information down the length of the entire facade of the building. So it's a single calculation for every single component of the building that we're adding onto. So, it's tens of millions of calculations just to design one connection between a piece of structural steel and another piece of structural steel. But what it gives us is a harmonic and synthesized relationship of all these components, one to another. This idea has, kind of, brought me into doing some product design, and it's because design firms that have connections to architects, like, I'm working with Vitra, which is a furniture company, and Alessi, which is a houseware company. They saw this actually solving a problem: this ability to differentiate components but keep them synthetic. So, not to pick on BMW, or to celebrate them, but take BMW as an example. They have to, in 2005, have a distinct identity for all their models of cars. So, the 300 series, or whatever their newest car is, the 100 series that's coming out, has to look like the 700 series, at the other end of their product line, so they need a distinct, coherent identity, which is BMW. At the same time, there's a person paying 30,000 dollars for a 300-series car, and a person paying 70,000 dollars for a 700 series, and that person paying more than double doesn't want their car to look too much like the bottom-of-the-market car. So they have to also discriminate between these products. So, as manufacturing starts to allow more design options, this problem gets exacerbated, of the whole and the parts. Now, as an architect, part-to-whole relationships is all I think about, but in terms of product design it's becoming more and more of an issue for companies. So, the first kind of test product we did was with Alessi, which was for a coffee and tea set. It's an incredibly expensive coffee and tea set; we knew that at the beginning. So, I actually went to some people I knew down south in San Diego, and we used an exploded titanium forming method that's used in the aerospace industry. Basically what we can do, is just cut a graphite mold, put it in an oven, heat it to 1,000 degrees, gently inflate titanium that's soft, and then explode it at the last minute into this form. But what's great about it is, the forms are only a few hundred dollars. The titanium's several thousand dollars, but the forms are very cheap. So, we designed a system here of eight curves that could be swapped, very similar to that housing project I showed you, and we could recombine those together, so that we always had ergonomic shapes that always had the same volume and could always be produced in the same way. That way, each one of these tools we could pay for with a few hundred dollars, and get incredible variation in the components. And this is one of those examples of the sets. So, for me, what was important is that this coffee set — which is just a coffee pot, a teapot, and those are the pots sitting on a tray — that they would have a coherence — so, they would be Greg Lynn Alessi coffee pots — but that everyone who bought one would have a one-of-a-kind object that was unique in some way. To go back to architecture, what's organic about architecture as a field, unlike product design, is this whole issue of holism and of monumentality is really our realm. Like, we have to design things which are coherent as a single object, but also break down into small rooms and have an identity of both the big scale and the small scale. Architects tend to work with signature, so that an architect needs a signature and that signature has to work across the scale of houses up to, say, skyscrapers, and that problem of signatures is a thing we're very good at maintaining and working with; and intricacy, which is the relationship of, say, the shape of a building, its structure, its windows, its color, its pattern. These are real architectural problems. So, my kind of hero for this in the natural world are these tropical frogs. I got interested in them because they're the most extreme example of a surface where the texture and the — let's call it the decoration — I know the frog doesn't think of it as decoration, but that's how it works — are all intricately connected to one another. So a change in the form indicates a change in the color pattern. So, the pattern and the form aren't the same thing, but they really work together and are fused in some way. So, when doing a center for the national parks in Costa Rica, we tried to use that idea of a gradient color and a change in texture as the structure moves across the surface of the building. We also used a continuity of change from a main exhibition hall to a natural history museum, so it's all one continuous change in the massing, but within that massing are very different kinds of spaces and forms. In a housing project in Valencia, Spain, we're doing, the different towers of housing fused together in shared curves so you get a single mass, like a kind of monolith, but it breaks down into individual elements. And you can see that that change in massing also gives all 48 of the apartments a unique shape and size, but always within a, kind of, controlled limit, an envelope of change. I work with a group of other architects. We have a company called United Architects. We were one of the finalists for the World Trade Center site design. And I think this just shows how we were approaching the problem of incredibly large-scale construction. We wanted to make a kind of Gothic cathedral around the footprints of the World Trade Center site. And to do that, we tried to connect up the five towers into a single system. And we looked at, from the 1950s on, there were numerous examples of other architects trying to do the same thing. We really approached it at the level of the typology of the building, where we could build these five separate towers, but they would all join at the 60th floor and make a kind of single monolithic mass. With United Architects, also, we made a proposal for the European Central Bank headquarters that used the same system, but this time in a much more monolithic mass, like a sphere. But again, you can see this, kind of, organic fusion of multiple building elements to make a thing which is whole, but breaks down into smaller parts, but in an incredibly organic way. Finally, I'd like to just show you some of the effects of using digital fabrication. About six years ago, I bought one of these CNC mills, to just replace, kind of, young people cutting their fingers off all the time building models. And I also bought a laser cutter and started to fabricate within my own shop, kind of, large-scale building elements and models, where we could go directly to the tooling. What I found out is that the tooling, if you intervened in the software, actually produced decorative effects. So, for these interiors, like this shop in Stockholm, Sweden, or this installation wall in the Netherlands at the Netherlands Architecture Institute, we could use the texture that the tool would leave to produce a lot of the spatial effects, and we could integrate the texture of the wall with the form of the wall with the material. So, in vacuum-formed plastic, in fiberglass, and then even at the level of structural steel, which you think of as being linear and modular. The steel industry is so far ahead of the design industry that if you take advantage of it you can even start to think of beams and columns all rolled together into a single system which is highly efficient, but also produces decorative effects and formal effects that are very beautiful and organic. Thanks very much.

Ways of seeing

Rob Forbes

{0: 'Rob Forbes'}

{0: ['designer']}

{0: 'Rob Forbes founded Design Within Reach, the furniture company that brought high design to the general public. '}

2006-02-02

2009-01-12

TED2006

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['beauty', 'business', 'design', 'exploration', 'photography']

{207: 'Treat design as art', 372: 'Design and the Elastic Mind', 646: 'Designers -- think big!', 435: 'Great design is serious, not solemn', 1471: 'Design, explained.', 1474: 'We are all designers'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/rob_forbes_ways_of_seeing/

Rob Forbes, the founder of Design Within Reach, shows a gallery of snapshots that inform his way of seeing the world. Charming juxtapositions, found art, urban patterns -- this slideshow will open your eyes to the world around you.

I was listed on the online biography that said I was a design missionary. That's a bit lofty; I'm really more of something like a street walker. I spend a lot of time in urban areas looking for design, and studying design in the public sector. I take about 5,000 photographs a year, and I thought that I would edit from these, and try to come up with some images that might be appropriate and interesting to you. And I used three criteria: the first was, I thought I'd talk about real design within reach, design that's free, not design not quite within reach, as we're fondly known by our competition and competitors, but stuff that you can find on the streets, stuff that was free, stuff that was available to all people, and stuff that probably contains some other important messages. I'll use these sidewalks in Rio as an example. A very common public design done in the '50s. It's got a nice kind of flowing, organic form, very consistent with the Brazilian culture — I think good design adds to culture. Wholly inconsistent with San Francisco or New York. But I think these are my sort of information highways: I live in much more of an analog world, where pedestrian traffic and interaction and diversity exchange, and where I think the simple things under our feet have a great amount of meaning to us. How did I get started in this business? I was a ceramic designer for about 10 years, and just loved utilitarian form — simple things that we use every day, little compositions of color and surface on form. This led me to starting a company called Design Within Reach, a company dealing with simple forms, making good designers available to us, and also selling the personalities and character of the designers as well, and it seems to have worked. A couple of years into the process, I spent a lot of time in Europe traveling around, looking for design. And I had a bit of a wake-up call in Amsterdam: I was there going into the design stores, and mixing with our crowd of designers, and I recognized that a whole lot of stuff pretty much looked the same, and the effect of globalization has had that in our community also. We know a lot about what's going on with design around the world, and it's getting increasingly more difficult to find design that reflects a unique culture. I was walking around on the streets of Amsterdam and I recognized, you know, the big story from Amsterdam isn't what's in the design stores, it's what's out on the streets, and maybe it's self-explanatory, but a city that hasn't been taken over by modernism, that's preserved its kind of architecture and character, and where the bicycle plays an important part of the way in which people get around and where pedestrian rights are protected. And I write a newsletter that goes out every week, and I wrote an article about this, and it got such enormous response that I realized that design, that common design, that's in the public area means a lot to people, and establishes kind of a groundwork and a dialog. I then kind of thought about the other cities in Europe where I spend a lot of time looking for design, like Basel, where Vitra is located, or in northern Italy — all cities where there are a whole lot of bicycles, and where pedestrian areas — and I came to the conclusion that perhaps there was something about these important design centers that dealt with bicycles and foot traffic, and I'm sure the skeptic eye would say, no, the correlation there is that there are universities and schools where people can't afford cars, but it did seem that in many of these areas pedestrian traffic was protected. You wouldn't look at this and call this a designer bike: a designer bike is made of titanium or molybdenum. But I began looking at design in a place like Amsterdam and recognized, you know, the first job of design is to serve a social purpose. And so I look at this bike as not being a designer bike, but being a very good example of design. And since that time in Amsterdam, I spent an increasing amount of time in the cities, looking at design for common evidence of design that really isn't under so much of a designer's signature. I was in Buenos Aires very recently, and I went to see this bridge by Santiago Calatrava. He's a Spanish architect and designer. And the tourist brochures pointed me in the direction of this bridge — I love bridges, metaphorically and symbolically and structurally — and it was a bit of a disappointment, because of the sludge from the river was encrusted on it; it really wasn't in use. And I recognized that oftentimes design, when you're set up to see design, it can be a bit of a letdown. But there were lots of other things going on in this area: it was a kind of construction zone; a lot of buildings were going up. And, approaching a building from a distance, you don't see too much; you get a little closer, and you arrive at a nice little composition that might remind you of a Mondrian or a Diebenkorn or something. But to me it was an example of industrial materials with a little bit of colors and animation and a nice little still life — kind of unintended piece of design. And going a little closer, you get a different perspective. I find these little vignettes, these little accidental pieces of design, to be refreshing. They give me, I don't know, a sense of correctness in the world and some visual delight in the knowledge that the building will probably never look as good as this simple industrial scaffolding that is there to serve. Down the road, there was another building, a nice visual structure: horizontal, vertical elements, little decorative lines going across, these magenta squiggles, the workmen being reduced to decorative elements, just a nice, kind of, breakup of the urban place. And, you know, that no longer exists. You've captured it for a moment, and finding this little still life's like listening to little songs or something: it gives me an enormous amount of pleasure. Antoine Predock designed a wonderful ball stadium in San Diego called Petco Park. A terrific use of local materials, but inside you could find some interior compositions. Some people go to baseball stadiums to look at games; I go and see design relationships. Just a wonderful kind of breakup of architecture, and the way that the trees form vertical elements. Red is a color in the landscape that is often on stop signs. It takes your attention; it has a great amount of emotion; it stares back at you the way that a figure might. Just a piece of barrier tape construction stuff in Italy. Construction site in New York: red having this kind of emotional power that's almost an equivalent with the way in which — cuteness of puppies and such. Side street in Italy. Red drew me into this little composition, optimistic to me in the sense that maybe the public service's mailbox, door service, plumbing. It looks as if these different public services work together to create some nice little compositions. In Italy, you know, almost everything, kind of, looks good. Simple menus put on a board, achieving, kind of, the sort of balance. But I'm convinced that it's because you're walking around the streets and seeing things. Red can be comical: it can draw your attention to the poor little personality of the little fire hydrant suffering from bad civic planning in Havana. Color can animate simple blocks, simple materials: walking in New York, I'll stop. I don't always know why I take photographs of things. A nice visual composition of symmetry. Curves against sharp things. It's a comment on the way in which we deal with public seating in the city of New York. I've come across some other just, kind of, curious relationships of bollards on the street that have different interpretations, but — these things amuse me. Sometimes a trash can — this is just in the street in San Francisco — a trash can that's been left there for 18 months creates a nice 45-degree angle against these other relationships, and turns a common parking spot into a nice little piece of sculpture. So, there's this sort of silent hand of design at work that I see in places that I go. Havana is a wonderful area. It's quite free of commercial clutter: you don't see our logos and brands and names, and therefore you're alert to things physically. And this is a great protection of a pedestrian zone, and the repurposing of some colonial cannons to do that. And Cuba needs to be far more resourceful, because of the blockades and things, but a really wonderful playground. I've often wondered why Italy is really a leader in modern design. In our area, in furnishings, they're sort of way at the top. The Dutch are good also, but the Italians are good. And I came across this little street in Venice, where the communist headquarters were sharing a wall with this Catholic shrine. And I realized that, you know, Italy is a place where they can accept these different ideologies and deal with diversity and not have the problem, or they can choose to ignore them, but these — you don't have warring factions, and I think that maybe the tolerance of the absurdity which has made Italy so innovative and so tolerant. The past and the present work quite well together in Italy also, and I think that it's recognizable there, and has an important effect on culture, because their public spaces are protected, their sidewalks are protected, and you're actually able to confront these things physically, and I think this helps people get over their fear of modernism and other such things. A change might be a typical street corner in San Francisco. And I use this — this is, sort of, what I consider to be urban spam. I notice this stuff because I walk a lot, but here, private industry is really kind of making a mess of the public sector. And as I look at it, I sort of say, you know, the publications that report on problems in the urban area also contribute to it, and it's just my call to say to all of us, public policy won't change this at all; private industry has to work to take things like this seriously. The extreme might be in Italy where, again, there's kind of some type of control over what's happening in the environment is very evident, even in the way that they sell and distribute periodicals. I walk to work every day or ride my scooter, and I come down and park in this little spot. And I came down one day, and all the bikes were red. Now, this is not going to impress you guys who Photoshop, and can do stuff, but this was an actual moment when I got off my bike, and I looked and I thought, it's as if all of my biker brethren had kind of gotten together and conspired to make a little statement. And it reminded me that — to keep in the present, to look out for these kinds of things. It gave me possibilities for wonder — if maybe it's a yellow day in San Francisco, and we could all agree, and create some installations. But it also reminded me of the power of pattern and repetition to make an effect in our mind. And I don't know if there's a stronger kind of effect than pattern and the way it unites kind of disparate elements. I was at the art show in Miami in December, and spent a couple of hours looking at fine art, and amazed at the prices of art and how expensive it is, but having a great time looking at it. And I came outside, and the valets for this car service had created, you know, quite a nice little collage of these car keys, and my closest equivalent were a group of prayer tags that I had seen in Tokyo. And I thought that if pattern can unite these disparate elements, it can do just about anything. I don't have very many shots of people, because they kind of get in the way of studying pure form. I was in a small restaurant in Spain, having lunch — one of those nice days where you had the place kind of to yourself, and you have a glass of wine, and enjoying the local area and the culture and the food and the quiet, and feeling very lucky, and a bus load of tourists arrived, emptied out, filled up the restaurant. In a very short period of time, completely changed the atmosphere and character with loud voices and large bodies and such, and we had to get up and leave; it was just that uncomfortable. And at that moment, the sun came out, and through this perforated screen, a pattern was cast over these bodies and they kind of faded into the rear, and we left the restaurant kind of feeling O.K. about stuff. And I do think pattern has the capability of eradicating some of the most evil forces of society, such as bad form in restaurants, but quite seriously, it was a statement to me that one thing that you do, sort of, see is the aggressive nature of the industrial world has produced — kind of, large masses of things, and when you — in monoculture, and I think the preservation of diversity in culture is something that's important to us. The last shots that I have deal with — coming back to this theme of sidewalks, and I wanted to say something here about — I'm, kind of, optimistic, you know. Post-Second World War, the influence of the automobile has really been devastating in a lot of our cities. A lot of urban areas have been converted into parking lots in a sort of indiscriminate use. A lot of the planning departments became subordinated to the transportation department. It's as easy to rag on cars as it is on Wal-Mart; I'm not going to do that. But they're real examples in urbanization and the change that's occurred in the last number of years, and the heightened sensitivity to the importance of our urban environments as cultural centers. I think that they are, that the statements that we make in this public sector are our contributions to a larger whole. Cities are the place where we're most likely to encounter diversity and to mix with other people. We go there for stimulation in art and all those other things. But I think people have recognized the sanctity of our urban areas. A place like Chicago has really reached kind of a level of international stature. The U.S. is actually becoming a bit of a leader in kind of enlightened urban planning and renewal, and I want to single out a place like Chicago, where I look at some guy like Mayor Daley as a bit of a design hero for being able to work through the political processes and all that to improve an area. You would expect a city like this to have upgraded flower boxes on Michigan Avenue where wealthy people shop, but if you actually go along the street you find the flower boxes change from street to street: there's actual diversity in the plants. And the idea that a city group can maintain different types of foliage is really quite exceptional. There are common elements of this that you'll see throughout Chicago, and then there are your big-D design statements: the Pritzker Pavilion done by Frank Gehry. My measure of this as being an important bit of design is not so much the way that it looks, but the fact that it performs a very important social function. There are a lot of free concerts, for example, that go on in this area; it has a phenomenal acoustic system. But the commitment that the city has made to the public area is significant, and almost an international model. I work on the mayor's council in San Francisco, on the International Design Council for Mayors, and Chicago is looked at as the pinnacle, and I really would like to salute Mayor Daley and the folks there. I thought that I should include at least one shot of technology for you guys. This is also in Millennium Park in Chicago, where the Spanish artist-designer Plensa has created, kind of, a digital readout in this park that reflects back the characters and personalities of the people in this area. And it's a welcoming area, I think, inclusive of diversity, reflective of diversity, and I think this marriage of both technology and art in the public sector is an area where the U.S. can really take a leadership role, and Chicago is one example. Thank you very much.

The visual magic of comics

Scott McCloud

{0: 'Scott McCloud'}

{0: ['cartoonist']}

{0: "Scott McCloud is author of <i>Understanding Comics</i>, a comic book about comics. He's an evangelist for comics as a valid literary form (as more than pulp and kids' stuff) and his admiring fans include a laundry list of superstar cartoonists."}

2005-02-28

2009-01-13

TED2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'da', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'it', 'ko', 'nb', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['art', 'children', 'computers', 'creativity', 'design', 'entertainment', 'future', 'history', 'books']

{215: 'An illustrated journey through Rome', 87: 'Nerdcore comedy', 319: 'The next 5,000 days of the web', 427: 'My journey in design', 31630: 'A powerful way to unleash your natural creativity', 45868: 'Why should you read "Kafka on the Shore"?'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/scott_mccloud_the_visual_magic_of_comics/

In this unmissable look at the magic of comics, Scott McCloud bends the presentation format into a cartoon-like experience, where colorful diversions whiz through childhood fascinations and imagined futures that our eyes can hear and touch.

Of the five senses, vision is the one that I appreciate the most, and it's the one that I can least take for granted. I think this is partially due to my father, who was blind. It was a fact that he didn't make much of a fuss about, usually. One time in Nova Scotia, when we went to see a total eclipse of the sun — (Laughter) Yeah, same one as in the Carly Simon song, which may or may not refer to James Taylor, Warren Beatty or Mick Jagger; we're not really sure. They handed out these dark plastic viewers that allowed us to look directly at the sun without damaging our eyes. But Dad got really scared; he didn't want us doing that. He wanted us instead to use these cheap cardboard viewers, so that there was no chance at all that our eyes would be damaged. I thought this was a little strange at the time. What I didn't know at the time was that my father had actually been born with perfect eyesight. When he and his sister Martha were just very little, their mom took them out to see a total eclipse — or actually, a solar eclipse — and not long after that, both of them started losing their eyesight. Decades later, it turned out that the source of their blindness was most likely some sort of bacterial infection. As near as we can tell, it had nothing whatsoever to do with that solar eclipse, but by then my grandmother had already gone to her grave thinking it was her fault. So, Dad graduated Harvard in 1946, married my mom, and bought a house in Lexington, Massachusetts, where the first shots were fired against the British in 1775, although we didn't actually hit any of them until Concord. He got a job working for Raytheon designing guidance systems, which was part of the Route 128 high-tech axis in those days — so, the equivalent of Silicon Valley in the '70s. Dad wasn't a real militaristic kind of guy; he just felt bad that he wasn't able to fight in World War II on account of his handicap, although they did let him get through the several-hour-long army physical exam before they got to the very last test, which was for vision. (Laughter) So Dad started racking up all of these patents and gaining a reputation as a blind genius, rocket scientist, inventor. But to us he was just Dad, and our home life was pretty normal. As a kid, I watched a lot of television and had lots of nerdy hobbies like mineralogy and microbiology and the space program and a little bit of politics. I played a lot of chess. But at the age of 14, a friend got me interested in comic books, and I decided that was what I wanted to do for a living. So, here's my dad: he's a scientist, he's an engineer and he's a military contractor. So, he has four kids, right? One grows up to become a computer scientist, one grows up to join the Navy, one grows up to become an engineer ... And then there's me: the comic book artist. (Laughter) Which, incidentally, makes me the opposite of Dean Kamen, because I'm a comic book artist, son of an inventor, and he's an inventor, son of a comic book artist. (Laughter) Right? It's true. (Applause) The funny thing is, Dad had a lot of faith in me. He had faith in my abilities as a cartoonist, even though he had no direct evidence that I was any good whatsoever; everything he saw was just a blur. Now, this gives a real meaning to the term "blind faith," which doesn't have the same negative connotation for me that it does for other people. Now, faith in things which cannot be seen, which cannot be proved, is not the sort of faith that I've ever really related to all that much. I tend to like science, where what we see and can ascertain are the foundation of what we know. But there's a middle ground, too — a middle ground tread by people like poor old Charles Babbage and his steam-driven computers that were never built. Nobody really understood what it was that he had in mind except for Ada Lovelace, and he went to his grave trying to pursue that dream. Vannevar Bush with his memex — this idea of all of human knowledge at your fingertips — he had this vision. And I think a lot of people in his day probably thought he was a bit of a kook. And, yeah, we can look back in retrospect and say, "Yeah, ha-ha, it's all microfilm — (Laughter) But that's not the point; he understood the shape of the future. So did J.C.R. Licklider and his notions for computer-human interaction. Same thing: he understood the shape of the future, even though it was something that would only be implemented by people much later. Or Paul Baran, and his vision for packet switching. Hardly anybody listened to him in his day. Or even the people who actually pulled it off, the people at Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Boston, who just would sketch out these structures of what would eventually become a worldwide network, and sketching things on the back of napkins and on note papers and arguing over dinner at Howard Johnson's — on Route 128 in Lexington, Massachusetts, just two miles from where I was studying the Queen's Gambit Deferred and listening to Gladys Knight & The Pips singing "Midnight Train to Georgia" — (Laughter) in my dad's big easy chair, you know? So, three types of vision, right? Vision based on what one cannot see, the vision of that unseen and unknowable. The vision of that which has already been proven or can be ascertained. And this third kind, a vision of something which can be, which may be, based on knowledge but is, as yet, unproven. Now, we've seen a lot of examples of people who are pursuing that sort of vision in science, but I think it's also true in the arts, it's true in politics, it's even true in personal endeavors. What it comes down to, really, is four basic principles: learn from everyone; follow no one; watch for patterns; and work like hell. I think these are the four principles that go into this. And it's that third one, especially, where visions of the future begin to manifest themselves. What's interesting is that this particular way of looking at the world, is, I think, only one of four different ways that manifest themselves in different fields of endeavor. In comics, I know that it results in sort of a formalist attitude towards trying to understand how it works. Then there's another, more classical attitude which embraces beauty and craft; another one which believes in the pure transparency of content; and then another, which emphasizes the authenticity of human experience and honesty and rawness. These are four very different ways of looking at the world. I even gave them names: the classicist, the animist, the formalist and iconoclast. Interestingly, they seem to correspond more or less to Jung's four subdivisions of human thought. And they reflect a dichotomy of art and delight on left and the right; tradition and revolution on the top and the bottom. And if you go on the diagonal, you get content and form, and then beauty and truth. And it probably applies just as much to music and movies and fine art, which has nothing whatsoever to do with vision at all, or, for that matter, nothing to do with our conference theme of "Inspired by Nature," except to the extent of the fable of the frog who gives a ride to the scorpion on his back to get across the river because the scorpion promises not to sting him, but the scorpion stings him anyway and they both die, but not before the frog asks him why, and the scorpion says, "Because it's my nature." In that sense, yes. (Laughter) So this was my nature. The thing was, I saw that the route I took to discovering this focus in my work and who I was — I saw it as just this road to discovery. Actually, it was just me embracing my nature, which means that I didn't actually fall that far from the tree, after all. So what does a "scientific mind" do in the arts? I started making comics, but I also started trying to understand them, almost immediately. One of the most important things about comics that I discovered was that comics are a visual medium, but they try to embrace all of the senses within it. So, the different elements of comics, like pictures and words, and the different symbols and everything in between that comics presents, are all funneled through the single conduit, a vision. So we have things like resemblance, where something which resembles the physical world can be abstracted in a couple of different directions: abstracted from resemblance, but still retaining the complete meaning, or abstracted away from both resemblance and meaning towards the picture plane. Put all these three together, and you have a nice little map of the entire boundary of visual iconography, which comics can embrace. And if you move to the right you also get language, because that's abstracting even further from resemblance, but still maintaining meaning. Vision is called upon to represent sound and to understand the common properties of those two and their common heritage as well; also, to try to represent the texture of sound to capture its essential character through visuals. There's also a balance between the visible and the invisible in comics. Comics is a kind of call and response, in which the artist gives you something to see within the panels, and then gives you something to imagine between the panels. Also, another sense which comics' vision represents, and that's time. Sequence is a very important aspect of comics. Comics presents a kind of temporal map. And this temporal map was something that energizes modern comics, but I was wondering if perhaps it also energizes other sorts of forms, and I found some in history. You can see this same principle operating in these ancient versions of the same idea. What's happening is, an art form is colliding with a given technology, whether it's paint on stone, like the Tomb of Menna the Scribe in ancient Egypt, or a bas-relief sculpture rising up a stone column, or a 200-foot-long embroidery, or painted deerskin and tree bark running across 88 accordion-folded pages. What's interesting is, once you hit "print" — and this is from 1450, by the way — all of the artifacts of modern comics start to present themselves: rectilinear panel arrangements, simple line drawings without tone, and a left-to-right reading sequence. And within 100 years, you already start to see word balloons and captions, and it's really just a hop, skip and a jump from here to here. So I wrote a book about this in '93, but as I was finishing the book, I had to do a little bit of typesetting, and I was tired of going to my local copy shop to do it, so I bought a computer. And it was just a little thing — it wasn't good for much except text entry — but my father had told me about Moore's law back in the '70s, and I knew what was coming. And so, I kept my eyes peeled to see if the sort of changes that happened when we went from pre-print comics to print comics would happen when we went beyond, to post-print comics. So, one of the first things proposed was that we could mix the visuals of comics with the sound, motion and interactivity of the CD-ROMs being made in those days. This was even before the Web. And one of the first things they did was, they tried to take the comics page as is and transplant it to monitors, which was a classic McLuhanesque mistake of appropriating the shape of the previous technology as the content of the new technology. And so, what they would do is have these comic pages that resemble print comics pages, and they would introduce all this sound and motion. The problem was that if you go with this basic idea that space equals time in comics, what happens is that when you introduce sound and motion, which are temporal phenomena that can only be represented through time, they break with that continuity of presentation. Interactivity was another thing. There were hypertext comics, but the thing about hypertext is that everything in hypertext is either here, not here, or connected to here; it's profoundly nonspatial. The distance from Abraham Lincoln to a Lincoln penny to Penny Marshall to the Marshall Plan to "Plan 9" to nine lives: it's all the same. (Laughter) But in comics, every aspect of the work, every element of the work, has a spatial relationship to every other element at all times. So the question was: Was there any way to preserve that spatial relationship while still taking advantage of all of the things that digital had to offer us? And I found my personal answer for this in those ancient comics that I was showing you. Each of them has a single unbroken reading line, whether it's going zigzag across the walls or spiraling up a column or just straight left to right, or even going in a backwards zigzag across those 88 accordion-folded pages, the same thing is happening; that is, that the basic idea that as you move through space you move through time, is being carried out without any compromise, but there were compromises when print hit. Adjacent spaces were no longer adjacent moments, so the basic idea of comics was being broken again and again and again and again. And I thought, OK, well, if that's true, is there any way, when we go beyond today's print, to somehow bring that back? Now, the monitor is just as limited as the page, technically, right? It's a different shape, but other than that, it's the same basic limitation. But that's only if you look at the monitor as a page, but not if you look at the monitor as a window. And that's what I propose, that perhaps we could create these comics on an infinite canvas, along the X axis and the Y axis and staircases. We could do circular narratives that were literally circular. We could do a turn in a story that was literally a turn. Parallel narratives could be literally parallel. X, Y and also Z. So I had all these notions. This was back in the late '90s, and other people in my business thought I was pretty crazy, but a lot of people then went on and actually did it. I'm going to show you a couple now. This was an early collage comic by a fellow named Jasen Lex. And notice what's going on here. What I'm searching for is a durable mutation — that's what all of us are searching for. As media head into this new era, we are looking for mutations that are durable, that have some sort of staying power. Now, we're taking this basic idea of presenting comics in a visual medium, and we're carrying it through all the way from beginning to end. That's that entire comic you just saw, up on the screen right now. But even though we're only experiencing it one piece at a time, that's just where the technology is right now. As the technology evolves, as you get full immersive displays and whatnot, this sort of thing will only grow; it will adapt. It will adapt to its environment; it's a durable mutation. Here's another one. This is by Drew Weing; this is called "'Pup' Ponders the Heat Death of the Universe." See what's going on here as we draw these stories on an infinite canvas is you're creating a more pure expression of what this medium is all about. We'll go by this a little quickly. You get the idea. I just want to get to the last panel. [Cat 1: Pup! Earth to Pup! Cat 2: Come play baseball with us!] (Laughter) [Pup: Did either of you realize that eventually the universe will be nothing but a thin, cold gas spread across infinite, lonely space?] [Cat 1: Oh ... Cat 2: We'd better hurry, then!] (Laughter) Just one more. Talk about your infinite canvas. It's by a guy named Daniel Merlin Goodbrey, in Britain. Why is this important? I think this is important because media — all media — provide us a window back into our world. Now, it could be that motion pictures and eventually, virtual reality, or something equivalent to it, some sort of immersive display, is going to provide us with our most efficient escape from the world that we're in. That's why most people turn to storytelling, to escape. But media provides us with a window back into the world we live in. And when media evolve so that the identity of the media becomes increasingly unique — because what you're looking at is comics cubed, you're looking at comics that are more comics-like than they've ever been before — when that happens, you provide people with multiple ways of reentering the world through different windows. And when you do that, it allows them to triangulate the world they live in and see its shape. That's why I think this is important. One of many reasons, but I've got to go now. Thank you for having me.

The art and craft of bread

Peter Reinhart

{0: 'Peter Reinhart'}

{0: ['baker']}

{0: 'Master breadmaker Peter Reinhart is also a teacher, author and theologian. Through his lectures and numerous cookbooks, he channels the science of baking into deep, spiritual lessons -- and dispels stale myths about the nature (and flavor) of good, wholesome bread.'}

2008-07-17

2009-01-14

Taste3 2008

en

['ar', 'bg', 'ca', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['art', 'chemistry', 'food', 'life', 'love', 'science', 'Best of the Web']

{13778: 'How a team of chefs fed Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria', 2412: 'How we can make crops survive without water', 2875: 'A forgotten ancient grain that could help Africa prosper', 24003: 'The chemistry of cookies', 1111: 'Hands-on science with squishy circuits', 537: 'We need to feed the whole world'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_reinhart_the_art_and_craft_of_bread/

Batch to batch, crust to crust ... In tribute to the beloved staple food, baking master Peter Reinhart reflects on the cordial couplings (wheat and yeast, starch and heat) that give us our daily bread. Try not to eat a slice.

This is a wheat bread, a whole wheat bread, and it's made with a new technique that I've been playing around with, and developing and writing about which, for lack of a better name, we call the epoxy method. And I call it an epoxy method because — it's not very appetizing. I understand that — but — but if you think about epoxy, what's epoxy? It's two resins that are, sort of, in and of themselves — neither of which can make glue, but when you put the two together, something happens. A bond takes place, and you get this very strong, powerful adhesive. Well, in this technique, what I've tried to do is kind of gather all of the knowledge that the bread-baking world, the artisan bread-baking community, has been trying to accumulate over the last 20 years or so — since we've been engaged in a bread renaissance in America — and put it together to come up with a method that would help to take whole-grain breads. And let's face it, everyone's trying to move towards whole grains. We finally, after 40 years of knowing that wholegrain was a healthier option, we're finally getting to the point where we actually are tipping over and attempting to actually eat them. (Laughter) The challenge, though, for a wholegrain baker is, you know, how do you make it taste good? Because whole grain — it's easy with white flour to make a good-tasting bread. White flour is sweet. It's mainly starch, and starch, when you break it down — what is starch? It's — thank you — sugar, yes. So a baker, and a good baker, knows how to pull or draw forth the inherent sugar trapped in the starch. With whole grain bread, you have other obstacles. You've got bran, which is probably the healthiest part of the bread for us, or the fiber for us because it is just loaded with fiber, for the bran is fiber. It's got germ. Those are the good things, but those aren't the tastiest parts of the wheat. So whole grain breads historically have had sort of this onus of being health food breads, and people don't like to eat, quote, health food. They like to eat healthy and healthily, but when we think of something as a health food, we think of it as something we eat out of obligation, not out of passion and love for the flavor. And ultimately, the challenge of the baker, the challenge of every culinary student, of every chef, is to deliver flavor. Flavor is king. Flavor rules. I call it the flavor rule. Flavor rules. And — and you can get somebody to eat something that's good for them once, but they won't eat it again if they don't like it, right? So, this is the challenge for this bread. We're going to try this at lunch, and I'll explain a bit more about it, but it's made not only with two types of pre-doughs — this attempt, again, at bringing out flavor is to make a piece of dough the day before that is not leavened. It's just dough that is wet. It's hydrated dough we call "the soaker" — that helps to start enzyme activity. And enzymes are the secret, kind of, ingredient in dough that brings out flavor. It starts to release the sugars trapped in the starch. That's what enzymes are doing. And so, if we can release some of those, they become accessible to us in our palate. They become accessible to the yeast as food. They become accessible to the oven for caramelization to give us a beautiful crust. The other pre-dough that we make is fermented — our pre-ferment. And it's made — it can be a sourdough starter, or what we call a "biga" or any other kind of pre-fermented dough with a little yeast in it, and that starts to develop flavor also. And on day two, we put those two pieces together. That's the epoxy. And we're hoping that, sort of, the enzyme piece of dough becomes the fuel pack for the leavened piece of dough, and when we put them together and add the final ingredients, we can create a bread that does evoke the full potential of flavor trapped in the grain. That's the challenge. Okay, so, now, what we — in the journey of wheat, let's go back and look at these 12 stages. I'm going to go through them very quickly and then revisit them. Okay, we're going to start with the first stage. And this is what every student has to begin with. Everyone who works in the culinary world knows that the first stage of cooking is "mise en place," which is just a French way of saying, "get organized." Everything in its place. First stage. So in baking we call it scaling — weighing out the ingredients. Stage two is mixing. We take the ingredients and we mix them. We have to develop the gluten. There's no gluten in flour. There's only the potential for gluten. Here's another kind of prefiguring of epoxy because we've got glutenin and gliadin, neither of which are strong enough to make a good bread. But when they get hydrated and they bond to each other, they create a stronger molecule, a stronger protein we call gluten. And so we, in the mixing process, have to develop the gluten, we have to activate the leaven or the yeast, and we have to essentially distribute all the ingredients evenly. Then we get into fermentation, the third stage, which is really where the flavor develops. The yeast comes alive and starts eating the sugars, creating carbon dioxide and alcohol — essentially it's burping and sweating, which is what bread is. It's yeast burps and sweat. And somehow, this is transformed — the yeast burps and sweats are later transformed — and this is really getting to the heart of what makes bread so special is that it is a transformational food, and we're going to explore that in a minute. But then, quickly through the next few stages. We, after it's fermented and it's developed, started to develop flavor and character, we divide it into smaller units. And then we take those units and we shape them. We give them a little pre-shape, usually a round or a little torpedo shape, sometimes. That's called "rounding." And there's a short rest period. It can be for a few seconds. It can be for 20 or 30 minutes. We call that resting or benching. Then we go into final shaping, "panning" — which means putting the shaped loaf on a pan. This takes a second, but it's a distinctive stage. It can be in a basket. It can be in a loaf pan, but we pan it. And then, stage nine. The fermentation which started at stage three is continuing through all these other stages. Again, developing more flavor. The final fermentation takes place in stage nine. We call it "proofing." Proofing means to prove that the dough is alive. And at stage nine we get the dough to the final shape, and it goes into the oven — stage 10. Three transformations take place in the oven. The sugars in the dough caramelize in the crust. They give us that beautiful brown crust. Only the crust can caramelize. It's the only place that gets hot enough. Inside, the proteins — this gluten — coagulates. When it gets to about 160 degrees, the proteins all line up and they create structure, the gluten structure — what ultimately we will call the crumb of the bread. And the starches, when they reach about 180 degrees, gelatinize. And gelatinization is yet another oven transformation. Coagulation, caramelization and gelatinization — when the starch is thick and they absorb all the moisture that's around them, they — they kind of swell, and then they burst. And they burst, and they spill their guts into the bread. So basically now we're eating yeast sweats — sweat, burps and starch guts. Again, transformed in stage 10 in the oven because what went into the oven as dough comes out in stage 11 as bread. And stage 11, we call it cooling — because we never really eat the bread right away. There's a little carry-over baking. The proteins have to set up, strengthen and firm up. And then we have stage 12, which the textbooks call "packaging," but my students call "eating." And so, we're going to be on our own journey today from wheat to eat, and in a few minutes we will try this, and see if we have succeeded in fulfilling this baker's mission of pulling out flavor. But I want to go back now and revisit these steps, and talk about it from the standpoint of transformation, because I really believe that all things can be understood — and this is not my own idea. This goes back to the Scholastics and to the Ancients — that all things can be understood on four levels: the literal, the metaphoric or poetic level, the political or ethical level. And ultimately, the mystical or sometimes called the "anagogical" level. It's hard to get to those levels unless you go through the literal. In fact, Dante says you can't understand the three deeper levels unless you first understand the literal level, so that's why we're talking literally about bread. But let's kind of look at these stages again from the standpoint of connections to possibly a deeper level — all in my quest for answering the question, "What is it about bread that's so special?" And fulfilling this mission of evoking the full potential of flavor. Because what happens is, bread begins as wheat or any other grain. But what's wheat? Wheat is a grass that grows in the field. And, like all grasses, at a certain point it puts out seeds. And we harvest those seeds, and those are the wheat kernels. Now, in order to harvest it — I mean, what's harvesting? It's just a euphemism for killing, right? I mean, that's what's harvest — we say we harvest the pig, you know? Yes, we slaughter, you know. Yes, that's life. We harvest the wheat, and in harvesting it, we kill it. Now, wheat is alive, and as we harvest it, it gives up its seeds. Now, at least with seeds we have the potential for future life. We can plant those in the ground. And we save some of those for the next generation. But most of those seeds get crushed and turned into flour. And at that point, the wheat has suffered the ultimate indignity. It's not only been killed, but it's been denied any potential for creating future life. So we turn it into flour. So as I said, I think bread is a transformational food. The first transformation — and, by the way, the definition of transformation for me is a radical change from one thing into something else. O.K.? Radical, not subtle. Not like hot water made cold, or cold water turned hot, but water boiled off and becoming steam. That's a transformation, two different things. Well, in this case, the first transformation is alive to dead. I'd call that radical. So, we've got now this flour. And what do we do? We add some water. In stage one, we weigh it. In stage two, we add water and salt to it, mix it together, and we create something that we call "clay." It's like clay. And we infuse that clay with an ingredient that we call "leaven." In this case, it's yeast, but yeast is leaven. What does leaven mean? Leaven comes from the root word that means enliven — to vivify, to bring to life. By the way, what's the Hebrew word for clay? Adam. You see, the baker, in this moment, has become, in a sense, sort of, the God of his dough, you know, and his dough, well, while it's not an intelligent life form, is now alive. And we know it's alive because in stage three, it grows. Growth is the proof of life. And while it's growing, all these literal transformations are taking place. Enzymes are breaking forth sugars. Yeast is eating sugar and turning it into carbon dioxide and alcohol. Bacteria is in there, eating the same sugars, turning them into acids. In other words, personality and character's being developed in this dough under the watchful gaze of the baker. And the baker's choices all along the way determine the outcome of the product. A subtle change in temperature — a subtle change in time — it's all about a balancing act between time, temperature and ingredients. That's the art of baking. So all these things are determined by the baker, and the bread goes through some stages, and characters develop. And then we divide it, and this one big piece of dough is divided into smaller units, and each of those units are given shape by the baker. And as they're shaped, they're raised again, all along proving that they're alive, and developing character. And at stage 10, we take it to the oven. It's still dough. Nobody eats bread dough — a few people do, I think, but not too many. I've met some dough eaters, but — it's not the staff of life, right? Bread is the staff of life. But dough is what we're working with, and we take that dough to the oven, and it goes into the oven. As soon as the interior temperature of that dough crosses the threshold of 140 degrees, it passes what we call the "thermal death point." Students love that TDP. They think it's the name of a video game. But it's the thermal death point — all life ceases there. The yeast, whose mission it has been up till now to raise the dough, to enliven it, to vivify it, in order to complete its mission, which is also to turn this dough into bread, has to give up its life. So you see the symbolism at work? It's starting to come forth a little bit, you know. It's starting to make sense to me — what goes in is dough, what comes out is bread — or it goes in alive, comes out dead. Third transformation. First transformation, alive to dead. Second transformation, dead brought back to life. Third transformation, alive to dead — but dough to bread. Or another analogy would be, a caterpillar has been turned into a butterfly. And it's what comes out of the oven that is what we call the staff of life. This is the product that everyone in the world eats, that is so difficult to give up. It's so deeply embedded in our psyches that bread is used as a symbol for life. It's used as a symbol for transformation. And so, as we get to stage 12 and we partake of that, again completing the life cycle, you know, we have a chance to essentially ingest that — it nurtures us, and we continue to carry on and have opportunities to ponder things like this. So this is what I've learned from bread. This is what bread has taught me in my journey. And what we're going to attempt to do with this bread here, again, is to use, in addition to everything we talked about, this bread we're going to call "spent grain bread" because, as you know, bread-making is very similar to beer-making. Beer is basically liquid bread, or bread is solid beer. And — (Laughter) they — they're invented around the same time. I think beer came first. And the Egyptian who was tending the beer fell asleep in the hot, Egyptian sun, and it turned into bread. But we've got this bread, and what I did here is to try to, again, evoke even more flavor from this grain, was we've added into it the spent grain from beer-making. And if you make this bread, you can use any kind of spent grain from any type of beer. I like dark spent grain. Today we're using a light spent grain that's actually from, like, some kind of a lager of some sort — a light lager or an ale — that is wheat and barley that's been toasted. In other words, the beer-maker knows also how to evoke flavor from the grains by using sprouting and malting and roasting. We're going to take some of that, and put it into the bread. So now we not only have a high-fiber bread, but now fiber on top of fiber. And so this is, again, hopefully not only a healthy bread, but a bread that you will enjoy. So, if I, kind of, break this bread, maybe we can share this now a little bit here. We'll start a little piece here, and I'm going to take a little piece here — I think I'd better taste it myself before you have it at lunch. I'll leave you with what I call the baker's blessing. May your crust be crisp, and your bread always rise. Thank you.

What consumers want

Joseph Pine

{0: 'Joseph Pine'}

{0: ['writer']}

{0: "A writer and veteran consultant to entrepreneurs and executives alike, Joseph Pine's books and workshops help businesses create what modern consumers really want: authentic experiences."}

2004-02-29

2009-01-15

TED2004

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['business', 'consumerism', 'creativity', 'shopping']

{20: 'Choice, happiness and spaghetti sauce', 93: 'The paradox of choice', 97: 'The surprising science of happiness', 1555: 'The power of the informal economy', 1037: 'The case for collaborative consumption', 1572: 'The currency of the new economy is trust'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/joseph_pine_what_consumers_want/

Customers want to feel what they buy is authentic, but "Mass Customization" author Joseph Pine says selling authenticity is tough because, well, there's no such thing. He talks about a few experiences that may be artificial but make millions anyway.

I'm going to talk about a very fundamental change that is going on in the very fabric of the modern economy. And to talk about that, I'm going to go back to the beginning, because in the beginning were commodities. Commodities are things that you grow in the ground, raise on the ground or pull out of the ground: basically, animal, mineral, vegetable. And then you extract them out of the ground, and sell them on the open marketplace. Commodities were the basis of the agrarian economy that lasted for millennia. But then along came the industrial revolution, and then goods became the predominant economic offering, where we used commodities as a raw material to be able to make or manufacture goods. So, we moved from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy. Well, what then happened over the last 50 or 60 years, is that goods have become commoditized. Commoditized: where they're treated like a commodity, where people don't care who makes them. They just care about three things and three things only: price, price and price. Now, there's an antidote to commoditization, and that is customization. My first book was called "Mass Customization" — it came up a couple of times yesterday — and how I discovered this progression of economic value was realizing that customizing a good automatically turned it into a service, because it was done just for a particular person, because it wasn't inventoried, it was delivered on demand to that individual person. So, we moved from an industrial economy to a service-based economy. But over the past 10 or 20 years, what's happened is that services are being commoditized as well. Long-distance telephone service sold on price, price, price; fast-food restaurants with all their value pricing; and even the Internet is commoditizing not just goods, but services as well. What that means is that it's time to move to a new level of economic value. Time to go beyond the goods and the services, and use, in that same heuristic, what happens when you customize a service? What happens when you design a service that is so appropriate for a particular person — that's exactly what they need at this moment in time? Then you can't help but make them go "wow"; you can't help but turn it into a memorable event — you can't help but turn it into an experience. So we're shifting to an experience economy, where experiences are becoming the predominant economic offering. Now most places that I talk to, when I talk about experience, I talk about Disney — the world's premier experience-stager. I talk about theme restaurants, and experiential retail, and boutique hotels, and Las Vegas — the experience capital of the world. But here, when you think about experiences, think about Thomas Dolby and his group, playing music. Think about meaningful places. Think about drinking wine, about a journey to the Clock of the Long Now. Those are all experiences. Think about TED itself. The experience capital in the world of conferences. All of these are experiences. Now, over the last several years I spent a lot of time in Europe, and particularly in the Netherlands, and whenever I talk about the experience economy there, I'm always greeted at the end with one particular question, almost invariably. And the question isn't really so much a question as an accusation. And the Dutch, when they usually put it, it always starts with the same two words. You know the words I mean? You Americans. They say, you Americans. You like your fantasy environments, your fake, your Disneyland experiences. They say, we Dutch, we like real, natural, authentic experiences. So much has that happened that I've developed a fairly praticed response, which is: I point out that first of all, you have to understand that there is no such thing as an inauthentic experience. Why? Because the experience happens inside of us. It's our reaction to the events that are staged in front of us. So, as long as we are in any sense authentic human beings, then every experience we have is authentic. Now, there may be more or less natural or artificial stimuli for the experience, but even that is a matter of degree, not kind. And there's no such thing as a 100 percent natural experience. Even if you go for a walk in the proverbial woods, there is a company that manufactured the car that delivered you to the edge of the woods; there's a company that manufactured the shoes that you have to protect yourself from the ground of the woods. There's a company that provides a cell phone service you have in case you get lost in the woods. Right? All of those are man-made, artificiality brought into the woods by you, and by the very nature of being there. And then I always finish off by talking about — the thing that amazes me the most about this question, particularly coming from the Dutch, is that the Netherlands is every bit as manufactured as Disneyland. (Laughter) And the Dutch, they always go ... and they realize, I'm right! There isn't a square meter of ground in the entire country that hasn't been reclaimed from the sea, or otherwise moved, modified and manicured to look as if it had always been there. It's the only place you ever go for a walk in the woods and all the trees are lined up in rows. (Laughter) But nonetheless, not just the Dutch, but everyone has this desire for the authentic. And authenticity is therefore becoming the new consumer sensibility — the buying criteria by which consumers are choosing who are they going to buy from, and what they're going to buy. Becoming the basis of the economy. In fact, you can look at how each of these economies developed, that each one has their own business imperative, matched with a consumer sensibility. We're the agrarian economy, and we're supplying commodities. It's about supply and availability. Getting the commodities to market. With the industrial economy, it is about controlling costs — getting the costs down as low as possible so we can offer them to the masses. With the service economy, it is about improving quality. That has — the whole quality movement has risen with the service economy over the past 20 or 30 years. And now, with the experience economy, it's about rendering authenticity. Rendering authenticity — and the keyword is "rendering." Right? Rendering, because you have to get your consumers — as business people — to percieve your offerings as authentic. Because there is a basic paradox: no one can have an inauthentic experience, but no business can supply one. Because all businesses are man-made objects; all business is involved with money; all business is a matter of using machinery, and all those things make something inauthentic. So, how do you render authenticity, is the question. Are you rendering authenticity? When you think about that, let me go back to what Lionel Trilling, in his seminal book on authenticity, "Sincerity and Authenticity" — came out in 1960 — points to as the seminal point at which authenticity entered the lexicon, if you will. And that is, to no surprise, in Shakespeare, and in his play, Hamlet. And there is one part in this play, Hamlet, where the most fake of all the characters in Hamlet, Polonius, says something profoundly real. At the end of a laundry list of advice he's giving to his son, Laertes, he says this: And this above all: to thine own self be true. And it doth follow, as night the day, that thou canst not then be false to any man. And those three verses are the core of authenticity. There are two dimensions to authenticity: one, being true to yourself, which is very self-directed. Two, is other-directed: being what you say you are to others. And I don't know about you, but whenever I encounter two dimensions, I immediately go, ahh, two-by-two! All right? Anybody else like that, no? Well, if you think about that, you do, in fact, get a two-by-two. Where, on one dimension it's a matter of being true to yourself. As businesses, are the economic offerings you are providing — are they true to themselves? And the other dimension is: are they what they say they are to others? If not, you have, "is not true to itself," and "is not what it says it is," yielding a two-by-two matrix. And of course, if you are both true to yourself, and are what you say you are, then you're real real! (Laughter) The opposite, of course, is — fake fake. All right, now, there is value for fake. There will always be companies around to supply the fake, because there will always be desire for the fake. Fact is, there's a general rule: if you don't like it, it's fake; if you do like it, it's faux. (Laughter) Now, the other two sides of the coin are: being a real fake — is what it says it is, but is not true to itself, or being a fake real: is true to itself, but not what it says it is. You can think about those two — you know, both of these better than being fake fake — not quite as good as being real real. You can contrast them by thinking about Universal City Walk versus Disney World, or Disneyland. Universal City Walk is a real fake — in fact, we got this very term from Ada Louise Huxtable's book, "The Unreal America." A wonderful book, where she talks about Universal City Walk as — you know, she decries the fake, but she says, at least that's a real fake, right, because you can see behind the facade, right? It is what it says it is: It's Universal Studio; it's in the city of Los Angeles; you're going to walk a lot. Right? You don't tend to walk a lot in Los Angeles, well, here's a place where you are going to walk a lot, outside in this city. But is it really true to itself? Right? Is it really in the city? Is it — you can see behind all of it, and see what is going on in the facades of it. So she calls it a real fake. Disney World, on the other hand, is a fake real, or a fake reality. Right? It's not what it says it is. It's not really the magic kingdom. (Laughter) But it is — oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to — (Laughter) — sorry. We won't talk about Santa Claus then. (Laughter) But Disney World is wonderfully true to itself. Right? Just wonderfully true to itself. When you are there you are just immersed in this wonderful environment. So, it's a fake real. Now the easiest way to fall down in this, and not be real real, right, the easiest way not to be true to yourself is not to understand your heritage, and thereby repudiate that heritage. Right, the key of being true to yourself is knowing who you are as a business. Knowing where your heritage is: what you have done in the past. And what you have done in the past limits what you can do, what you can get away with, essentially, in the future. So, you have to understand that past. Think about Disney again. Disney, 10 or 15 years ago, right, the Disney — the company that is probably best-known for family values out there, Disney bought the ABC network. The ABC network, affectionately known in the trade as the T&A network, right — that's not too much jargon, is it? Right, the T&A network. Then it bought Miramax, known for its NC-17 fare, and all of a sudden, families everywhere couldn't really trust what they were getting from Disney. It was no longer true to its heritage; no longer true to Walt Disney. That's one of the reasons why they're having such trouble today, and why Roy Disney is out to get Michael Eisner. Because it is no longer true to itself. So, understand what — your past limits what you can do in the future. When it comes to being what you say you are, the easiest mistake that companies make is that they advertise things that they are not. That's when you're perceived as fake, as a phony company — advertizing things that you're not. Think about any hotel, any airline, any hospital. Right, if you could check into the ads, you'd have a great experience. (Laughter) But unfortunately, you have to experience the actual hotel, airline and hospital, and then you have that disconnect. Then you have that perception that you are phony. So, the number one thing to do when it comes to being what you say you are, is to provide places for people to experience who you are. For people to experience who you are. Right, it's not advertising does it. That's why you have companies like Starbucks, right, that doesn't advertise at all. They said, you want to know who we are, you have to come experience us. And think about the economic value they have provided by that experience. Right? Coffee, at its core, is what? Right? It's beans; right? It's coffee beans. You know how much coffee is worth, when treated as a commodity as a bean? Two or three cents per cup — that's what coffee is worth. But grind it, roast it, package it, put it on a grocery store shelf, and now it'll cost five, 10, 15 cents, when you treat it as a good. Take that same good, and perform the service of actually brewing it for a customer, in a corner diner, in a bodega, a kiosk somewhere, you get 50 cents, maybe a buck per cup of coffee. But surround the brewing of that coffee with the ambiance of a Starbucks, with the authentic cedar that goes inside of there, and now, because of that authentic experience, you can charge two, three, four, five dollars for a cup of coffee. So, authenticity is becoming the new consumer sensibility. Let me summarize it, for the business people in the audience, with three rules, three basic rules. One, don't say you're authentic unless you really are authentic. Two, it's easier to be authentic if you don't say you're authentic. And three, if you say you're authentic, you better be authentic. And then for the consumers, for everyone else in the audience, let me simply summarize it by saying, increasingly, what we — what will make us happy, is spending our time and our money satisfying the desire for authenticity. Thank you.

Great design is serious, not solemn

Paula Scher

{0: 'Paula Scher'}

{0: ['designer at play']}

{0: 'With a career that fuses rock and roll, corporate identity creation, and impressionistic geography, Paula Scher is a master conjurer of the instantly familiar.'}

2008-05-05

2009-01-16

Serious Play 2008

en

['ar', 'bg', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fi', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['art', 'design', 'entertainment', 'happiness', 'typography', 'Best of the Web']

{356: "Things I've learned in my life so far", 1410: 'Designing books is no laughing matter. OK, it is.', 1471: 'Design, explained.', 431: 'Ways of seeing', 392: 'Tales of creativity and play', 207: 'Treat design as art'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/paula_scher_great_design_is_serious_not_solemn/

Paula Scher looks back at a life in design (she's done album covers, books, the Citibank logo ...) and pinpoints the moment when she started really having fun. Look for gorgeous designs and images from her legendary career.

My work is play. And I play when I design. I even looked it up in the dictionary, to make sure that I actually do that, and the definition of play, number one, was engaging in a childlike activity or endeavor, and number two was gambling. And I realize I do both when I'm designing. I'm both a kid and I'm gambling all the time. And I think that if you're not, there's probably something inherently wrong with the structure or the situation you're in, if you're a designer. But the serious part is what threw me, and I couldn't quite get a handle on it until I remembered an essay. And it's an essay I read 30 years ago. It was written by Russell Baker, who used to write an "Observer" column in the New York Times. He's a wonderful humorist. And I'm going to read you this essay, or an excerpt from it because it really hit home for me. Here is a letter of friendly advice. Be serious, it says. What it means, of course, is, be solemn. Being solemn is easy. Being serious is hard. Children almost always begin by being serious, which is what makes them so entertaining when compared with adults as a class. Adults, on the whole, are solemn. In politics, the rare candidate who is serious, like Adlai Stevenson, is easily overwhelmed by one who is solemn, like Eisenhower. That's because it is hard for most people to recognize seriousness, which is rare, but more comfortable to endorse solemnity, which is commonplace. Jogging, which is commonplace, and widely accepted as good for you, is solemn. Poker is serious. Washington, D.C. is solemn. New York is serious. Going to educational conferences to tell you anything about the future is solemn. Taking a long walk by yourself, during which you devise a foolproof scheme for robbing Tiffany's, is serious. (Laughter) Now, when I apply Russell Baker's definition of solemnity or seriousness to design, it doesn't necessarily make any particular point about quality. Solemn design is often important and very effective design. Solemn design is also socially correct, and is accepted by appropriate audiences. It's what right-thinking designers and all the clients are striving for. Serious design, serious play, is something else. For one thing, it often happens spontaneously, intuitively, accidentally or incidentally. It can be achieved out of innocence, or arrogance, or out of selfishness, sometimes out of carelessness. But mostly, it's achieved through all those kind of crazy parts of human behavior that don't really make any sense. Serious design is imperfect. It's filled with the kind of craft laws that come from something being the first of its kind. Serious design is also — often — quite unsuccessful from the solemn point of view. That's because the art of serious play is about invention, change, rebellion — not perfection. Perfection happens during solemn play. Now, I always saw design careers like surreal staircases. If you look at the staircase, you'll see that in your 20s the risers are very high and the steps are very short, and you make huge discoveries. You sort of leap up very quickly in your youth. That's because you don't know anything and you have a lot to learn, and so that anything you do is a learning experience and you're just jumping right up there. As you get older, the risers get shallower and the steps get wider, and you start moving along at a slower pace because you're making fewer discoveries. And as you get older and more decrepit, you sort of inch along on this sort of depressing, long staircase, leading you into oblivion. (Laughter) I find it's actually getting really hard to be serious. I'm hired to be solemn, but I find more and more that I'm solemn when I don't have to be. And in my 35 years of working experience, I think I was really serious four times. And I'm going to show them to you now, because they came out of very specific conditions. It's great to be a kid. Now, when I was in my early 20s, I worked in the record business, designing record covers for CBS Records, and I had no idea what a great job I had. I thought everybody had a job like that. And what — the way I looked at design and the way I looked at the world was, what was going on around me and the things that came at the time I walked into design were the enemy. I really, really, really hated the typeface Helvetica. I thought the typeface Helvetica was the cleanest, most boring, most fascistic, really repressive typeface, and I hated everything that was designed in Helvetica. And when I was in my college days, this was the sort of design that was fashionable and popular. This is actually quite a lovely book jacket by Rudy de Harak, but I just hated it, because it was designed with Helvetica, and I made parodies about it. I just thought it was, you know, completely boring. (Laughter) So — so, my goal in life was to do stuff that wasn't made out of Helvetica. And to do stuff that wasn't made out of Helvetica was actually kind of hard because you had to find it. And there weren't a lot of books about the history of design in the early 70s. There weren't — there wasn't a plethora of design publishing. You actually had to go to antique stores. You had to go to Europe. You had to go places and find the stuff. And what I responded to was, you know, Art Nouveau, or deco, or Victorian typography, or things that were just completely not Helvetica. And I taught myself design this way, and this was sort of my early years, and I used these things in really goofy ways on record covers and in my design. I wasn't educated. I just sort of put these things together. I mixed up Victorian designs with pop, and I mixed up Art Nouveau with something else. And I made these very lush, very elaborate record covers, not because I was being a post-modernist or a historicist — because I didn't know what those things were. I just hated Helvetica. (Laughter) And that kind of passion drove me into very serious play, a kind of play I could never do now because I'm too well-educated. And there's something wonderful about that form of youth, where you can let yourself grow and play, and be really a brat, and then accomplish things. By the end of the '70s, actually, the stuff became known. I mean, these covers appeared all over the world, and they started winning awards, and people knew them. And I was suddenly a post-modernist, and I began a career as — in my own business. And first I was praised for it, then criticized for it, but the fact of the matter was, I had become solemn. I didn't do what I think was a piece of serious work again for about 14 years. I spent most of the '80s being quite solemn, turning out these sorts of designs that I was expected to do because that's who I was, and I was living in this cycle of going from serious to solemn to hackneyed to dead, and getting rediscovered all over again. So, here was the second condition for which I think I accomplished some serious play. There's a Paul Newman movie that I love called "The Verdict." I don't know how many of you have seen it, but it's a beaut. And in the movie, he plays a down-and-out lawyer who's become an ambulance chaser. And he's taken on — he's given, actually — a malpractice suit to handle that's sort of an easy deal, and in the midst of trying to connect the deal, he starts to empathize and identify with his client, and he regains his morality and purpose, and he goes on to win the case. And in the depth of despair, in the midst of the movie, when it looks like he can't pull this thing off, and he needs this case, he needs to win this case so badly. There's a shot of Paul Newman alone, in his office, saying, "This is the case. There are no other cases. This is the case. There are no other cases." And in that moment of desire and focus, he can win. And that is a wonderful position to be in to create some serious play. And I had that moment in 1994 when I met a theater director named George Wolfe, who was going to have me design an identity for the New York Shakespeare Festival, then known, and then became the Public Theater. And I began getting immersed in this project in a way I never was before. This is what theater advertising looked like at that time. This is what was in the newspapers and in the New York Times. So, this is sort of a comment on the time. And the Public Theater actually had much better advertising than this. They had no logo and no identity, but they had these very iconic posters painted by Paul Davis. And George Wolf had taken over from another director and he wanted to change the theater, and he wanted to make it urban and loud and a place that was inclusive. So, drawing on my love of typography, I immersed myself into this project. And what was different about it was the totality of it, was that I really became the voice, the visual voice, of a place in a way I had never done before, where every aspect — the smallest ad, the ticket, whatever it was — was designed by me. There was no format. There was no in-house department that these things were pushed to. I literally for three years made everything — every scrap of paper, everything online, that this theater did. And it was the only job, even though I was doing other jobs. I lived and breathed it in a way I haven't with a client since. It enabled me to really express myself and grow. And I think that you know when you're going to be given this position, and it's rare, but when you get it and you have this opportunity, it's the moment of serious play. I did these things, and I still do them. I still work for the Public Theater. I'm on their board, and I still am involved with it. The high point of the Public Theater, I think, was in 1996, two years after I designed it, which was the "Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk" campaign that was all over New York. But something happened to it, and what happened to it was, it became very popular. And that is a kiss of death for something serious because it makes it solemn. And what happened was that New York City, to a degree, ate my identity because people began to copy it. Here's an ad in the New York Times somebody did for a play called "Mind Games." Then "Chicago" came out, used similar graphics, and the Public Theater's identity was just totally eaten and taken away, which meant I had to change it. So, I changed it so that every season was different, and I continued to do these posters, but they never had the seriousness of the first identity because they were too individual, and they didn't have that heft of everything being the same thing. Now — and I think since the Public Theater, I must have done more than a dozen cultural identities for major institutions, and I don't think I ever — I ever grasped that seriousness again — I do them for very big, important institutions in New York City. The institutions are solemn, and so is the design. They're better crafted than the Public Theater was, and they spend more money on them, but I think that that moment comes and goes. The best way to accomplish serious design — which I think we all have the opportunity to do — is to be totally and completely unqualified for the job. That doesn't happen very often, but it happened to me in the year 2000, when for some reason or another, a whole pile of different architects started to ask me to design the insides of theaters with them, where I would take environmental graphics and work them into buildings. I'd never done this kind of work before. I didn't know how to read an architectural plan, I didn't know what they were talking about, and I really couldn't handle the fact that a job — a single job — could go on for four years because I was used to immediacy in graphic design, and that kind of attention to detail was really bad for somebody like me, with ADD. So, it was a rough — it was a rough go, but I fell in love with this process of actually integrating graphics into architecture because I didn't know what I was doing. I said, "Why can't the signage be on the floor?" New Yorkers look at their feet. And then I found that actors and actresses actually take their cues from the floor, so it turned out that these sorts of sign systems began to make sense. They integrated with the building in really peculiar ways. They ran around corners, they went up sides of buildings, and they melded into the architecture. This is Symphony Space on 90th Street and Broadway, and the type is interwoven into the stainless steel and backlit with fiber optics. And the architect, Jim Polshek, essentially gave me a canvas to play typography out on. And it was serious play. This is the children's museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, made out of completely inexpensive materials. Extruded typography that's backlit with neon. Things I never did before, built before. I just thought they'd be kind of fun to do. Donors' walls made out of Lucite. And then, inexpensive signage. (Laughter) I think my favorite of these was this little job in Newark, New Jersey. It's a performing arts school. This is the building that — they had no money, and they had to recast it, and they said, if we give you 100,000 dollars, what can you do with it? And I did a little Photoshop job on it, and I said, Well, I think we can paint it. And we did. And it was play. And there's the building. Everything was painted — typography over the whole damn thing, including the air conditioning ducts. I hired guys who paint flats fixed on the sides of garages to do the painting on the building, and they loved it. They got into it — they took the job incredibly seriously. They used to climb up on the building and call me and tell me that they had to correct my typography — that my spacing was wrong, and they moved it, and they did wonderful things with it. They were pretty serious, too. It was quite wonderful. By the time I did Bloomberg's headquarters my work had begun to become accepted. People wanted it in big, expensive places. And that began to make it solemn. Bloomberg was all about numbers, and we did big numbers through the space and the numbers were projected on a spectacular LED that my partner, Lisa Strausfeld, programmed. But it became the end of the seriousness of the play, and it started to, once again, become solemn. This is a current project in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where I got to be goofy. I was invited to design a logo for this neighborhood, called the North Side, and I thought it was silly for a neighborhood to have a logo. I think that's rather creepy, actually. Why would a neighborhood have a logo? A neighborhood has a thing — it's got a landmark, it's got a place, it's got a restaurant. It doesn't have a logo. I mean, what would that be? So I had to actually give a presentation to a city council and neighborhood constituents, and I went to Pittsburgh and I said, "You know, really what you have here are all these underpasses that separate the neighborhood from the center of town. Why don't you celebrate them, and make the underpasses landmarks?" So I began doing this crazy presentation of these installations — potential installations — on these underpass bridges, and stood up in front of the city council — and was a little bit scared, I have to admit. But I was so utterly unqualified for this project, and so utterly ridiculous, and ignored the brief so desperately that I think they just embraced it with wholeheartedness, just completely because it was so goofy to begin with. And this is the bridge they're actually painting up and preparing as we speak. It will change every six months, and it will become an art installation in the North Side of Pittsburgh, and it will probably become a landmark in the area. John Hockenberry told you a bit about my travail with Citibank, that is now a 10-year relationship, and I still work with them. And I actually am amused by them and like them, and think that as a very, very, very, very, very big corporation they actually keep their graphics very nice. I drew the logo for Citibank on a napkin in the first meeting. That was the play part of the job. And then I spent a year going to long, tedious, boring meetings, trying to sell this logo through to a huge corporation to the point of tears. I thought I was going to go crazy at the end of this year. We made idiotic presentations showing how the Citi logo made sense, and how it was really derived from an umbrella, and we made animations of these things, and we came back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. And it was worth it, because they bought this thing, and it played out on such a grand scale, and it's so internationally recognizable, but for me it was actually a very, very depressing year. As a matter of fact, they actually never bought onto the logo until Fallon put it on its very good "Live Richly" campaign, and then everybody accepted it all over the world. So during this time I needed some kind of counterbalance for this crazy, crazy existence of going to these long, idiotic meetings. And I was up in my country house, and for some reason, I began painting these very big, very involved, laborious, complicated maps of the entire world, and listing every place on the planet, and putting them in, and misspelling them, and putting things in the wrong spot, and completely controlling the information, and going totally and completely nuts with it. They would take me about six months initially, but then I started getting faster at it. Here's the United States. Every single city of the United States is on here. And it hung for about eight months at the Cooper-Hewitt, and people walked up to it, and they would point to a part of the map and they'd say, "Oh, I've been here." And, of course, they couldn't have been because it's in the wrong spot. (Laughter) But what I liked about it was, I was controlling my own idiotic information, and I was creating my own palette of information, and I was totally and completely at play. One of my favorites was this painting I did of Florida after the 2000 election that has the election results rolling around in the water. I keep that for evidence. (Laughter) Somebody was up at my house and saw the paintings and recommended them to a gallery, and I had a first show about two-and-a-half years ago, and I showed these paintings that I'm showing you now. And then a funny thing happened — they sold. And they sold quickly, and became rather popular. We started making prints from them. This is Manhattan, one from the series. This is a print from the United States which we did in red, white and blue. We began doing these big silkscreen prints, and they started selling, too. So, the gallery wanted me to have another show in two years, which meant that I really had to paint these paintings much faster than I had ever done them. And I — they started to become more political, and I picked areas that sort of were in the news or that I had some feeling about, and I began doing these things. And then this funny thing happened. I found that I was no longer at play. I was actually in this solemn landscape of fulfilling an expectation for a show, which is not where I started with these things. So, while they became successful, I know how to make them, so I'm not a neophyte, and they're no longer serious — they have become solemn. And that's a terrifying factor — when you start something and it turns that way — because it means that all that's left for you is to go back and to find out what the next thing is that you can push, that you can invent, that you can be ignorant about, that you can be arrogant about, that you can fail with, and that you can be a fool with. Because in the end, that's how you grow, and that's all that matters. So, I'm plugging along here — (Laughter) and I'm just going to have to blow up the staircase. Thank you very much.

Design and discovery

David Carson

{0: 'David Carson'}

{0: ['type designer']}

{0: 'David Carson is the "grunge typographer" whose magazine Ray Gun helped explode the possibilities of text on a page. '}

2003-02-02

2009-01-19

TED2003

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'lv', 'mk', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['design', 'exploration', 'humor', 'photography', 'typography']

{1977: 'My life in typefaces', 891: 'Intricate beauty by design', 356: "Things I've learned in my life so far", 182: 'The illustrated woman', 489: 'What is retro-futurism?', 172: 'Designing for simplicity'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/david_carson_design_and_discovery/

Great design is a never-ending journey of discovery -- for which it helps to pack a healthy sense of humor. Sociologist and surfer-turned-designer David Carson walks through a gorgeous (and often quite funny) slide deck of his work and found images.

I had requested slides, kind of adamantly, up till the — pretty much, last few days, but was denied access to a slide projector. (Laughter) I actually find them a lot more emotional — (Laughter) — and personal, and the neat thing about a slide projector is you can actually focus the work, unlike PowerPoint and some other programs. Now, I agree that you have to — yeah, there are certain concessions and, you know, if you use a slide projector, you're not able to have the bad type swing in from the back or the side, or up or down, but maybe that's an O.K. trade-off, to trade that off for a focus. (Laughter) It's a thought. Just a thought. And there's something nice about slides getting stuck. And the thing you really hope for is occasionally they burn up, which we won't see tonight. So. With that, let's get the first slide up here. This, as many of you have probably guessed, is a recently emptied beer can in Portugal. (Laughter) This — I had just arrived in Barcelona for the first time, and I thought — you know, fly all night, I looked up, and I thought, wow, how clean. You come into this major airport, and they simply have a B. I mean, how nice is that? Everything's gotten simpler in design, and here's this mega airport, and God, I just — I took a picture. I thought, God, that is the coolest thing I've ever seen at an airport. Till a couple months later, I went back to the same airport — same plane, I think — and looked up, and it said C. (Laughter) It was only then that I realized it was simply a gate that I was coming into. (Laughter) I'm a big believer in the emotion of design, and the message that's sent before somebody begins to read, before they get the rest of the information; what is the emotional response they get to the product, to the story, to the painting — whatever it is. That area of design interests me the most, and I think this for me is a real clear, very simplified version of what I'm talking about. These are a couple of garage doors painted identical, situated next to each other. So, here's the first door. You know, you get the message. You know, it's pretty clear. Take a look at the second door and see if there's any different message. O.K., which one would you park in front of? (Laughter) Same color, same message, same words. The only thing that's different is the expression that the individual door-owner here put into the piece — and, again, which is the psycho-killer here? (Laughter) Yet it doesn't say that; it doesn't need to say that. I would probably park in front of the other one. I'm sure a lot of you are aware that graphic design has gotten a lot simpler in the last five years or so. It's gotten so simple that it's already starting to kind of come back the other way again and get a little more expressive. But I was in Milan and saw this street sign, and was very happy to see that apparently this idea of minimalism has even been translated by the graffiti artist. (Laughter) And this graffiti artist has come along, made this sign a little bit better, and then moved on. (Laughter) He didn't overpower it like they have a tendency to do. (Laughter) This is for a book by "Metropolis." I took some photos, and this is a billboard in Florida, and either they hadn't paid their rent, or they didn't want to pay their rent again on the sign, and the billboard people were too cheap to tear the whole sign down, so they just teared out sections of it. And I would argue that it's possibly more effective than the original billboard in terms of getting your attention, getting you to look over that way. And hopefully you don't stop and buy those awful pecan things — Stuckey's. This is from my second book. The first book is called, "The End of Print," and it was done along with a film, working with William Burroughs. And "The End of Print" is now in its fifth printing. (Laughter) When I first contacted William Burroughs about being part of it, he said no; he said he didn't believe it was the end of print. And I said, well, that's fine; I just would love to have your input on this film and this book, and he finally agreed to it. And at the end of the film, he says in this great voice that I can't mimic but I'll kind of try, but not really, he says, "I remember attending an exhibition called, 'Photography: The End of Painting.'" And then he says, "And, of course, it wasn't at all." So, apparently when photography was perfected, there were people going around saying, that's it: you've just ruined painting. People are just going to take pictures now. And of course, that wasn't the case. So, this is from "2nd Sight," a book I did on intuition. I think it's not the only ingredient in design, but possibly the most important. It's something everybody has. It's not a matter of teaching it; in fact, most of the schools tend to discount intuition as an ingredient of your working process because they can't quantify it: it's very hard to teach people the four steps to intuitive design, but we can teach you the four steps to a nice business card or a newsletter. So it tends to get discounted. This is a quote from Albert Einstein, who says, "The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness — call it intuition or what you will — and the solution just comes to you, and you don't know from where or why." So, it's kind of like when somebody says, Who did that song? And the more you try to think about it, the further the answer gets from you, and the minute you stop thinking about it, your intuition gives you that answer, in a sense. I like this for a couple of reasons. If you've had any design courses, they would teach you you can't read this. I think you eventually can and, more importantly, I think it's true. "Don't mistake legibility for communication." Just because something's legible doesn't means it communicates. More importantly, it doesn't mean it communicates the right thing. So, what is the message sent before somebody actually gets into the material? And I think that's sometimes an overlooked area. This is working with Marshall McLuhan. I stayed and worked with his wife and son, Eric, and we came up with close to 600 quotes from Marshall that are just amazing in terms of being ahead of the times, predicting so much of what has happened in the advertising, television, media world. And so this book is called "Probes." It's another word for quotes. And it's — a lot of them are never — have never been published before, and basically, I've interpreted the different quotes. So, this was the contents page originally. When I got done it was 540 pages, and then the publisher, Gingko Press, ended up cutting it down considerably: it's just under 400 pages now. But I decided I liked this contents page — I liked the way it looks — so I kept it. (Laughter) It now has no relevance to the book whatsoever, but it's a nice spread, I think, in there. (Laughter) So, a couple spreads from the book: here McLuhan says, "The new media are not bridges between Man and Nature; they are Nature." "The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property," which had never been done before printing. "When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result." "While people are engaged in creating a totally different world, they always form vivid images of the preceding world." I hate this stuff. It's hard to read. (Laughter) (Applause) "People in the electronic age have no possible environment except the globe, and no possible occupation except information gathering." That was it. That's all he saw as the options. And not too far off. So, this is a project for Nine Inch Nails. And I only show it because it seemed like it got all this relevancy all of a sudden, and it was done right after 9/11. And I had recently discovered a bomb shelter in the backyard of a house I had bought in LA that the real estate person hadn't pointed out. (Laughter) There was some bomb shelter built, apparently in the '60s Cuban missile crisis. And I asked the real estate guy what it was as we were walking by, and he goes, "It's something to do with the sewage system." I was, O.K.; that's fine. I finally went down there, and it was this old rusted circular thing, and two beds, and very kind of creepy and weird. And also, surprisingly, it was done in kind of a cheap metal, and it had completely rusted through, and water everywhere, and spiders. And I thought, you know, what were they thinking? You'd think maybe cement, possibly, or something. But anyway, I used this for a cover for the Nine Inch Nails DVD, and I've also now fixed the bomb shelter with duct tape, and it's ready. I think I'm ready. So. This is an experiment, really, for a client, Quicksilver, where we were taking what was a six-shot sequence and trying to use print as a medium to get people to the Web. So, this is a six-shot sequence. I've taken one shot; I cropped it a few different ways. And then the tiny line of copy says, If you want to see this entire sequence — how this whole ride was — go to the website. And my guess is that a lot of the surf kids did go to the site to get this entire picture. Got no way of tracking it, so I could be totally wrong. (Laughter) I don't have the site. It's just the piece itself. This is a group in New York called the Coalition for a Smoke-free Environment — asked me to do these posters. They were wild-posted around New York City. You can't really — well, you can't see it at all — but the second line is really the more kind of payoff, in a sense. It says, "If the cigarette companies can lie, then so can we." But — (Laughter) (Applause) — but I did. These were literally wild-posted all over New York one night, and there were definitely some heads turning, you know, people smoking and, "Huh!" (Laughter) And it was purposely done to look fairly serious. It wasn't some, you know, weird grunge type or something; it looked like they might be real. Anyway. Poster for Atlantic Center for the Arts, a school in Florida. This amazes me. This is a product I just found out. I was in the Caribbean at Christmas, and I'm just blown away that in this day and age they will still sell — not that they will sell — that there is felt a need for people to lighten the color of their skin. This was either an old product with new packaging, or a brand-new package, and I just thought, Yikes! How's that still happening? I do a lot of workshops all over the world, really, and this particular assignment was to come up with new symbols for the restroom doors. (Laughter) I felt this was one of the more successful solutions. The students actually cut them up and put them up around bars and restaurants that night, and I just always have this vision of this elderly couple going to use the restroom ... (Laughter) I did some work for Microsoft a few years back. It was a worldwide branding campaign. And it was interesting to me — my background is in sociology; I had no design training, and sometimes people say, well, that explains it — but it was a very interesting experiment because there's no product that I had to sell; it was simply the image of Microsoft they were trying to improve. They thought some people didn't like them. (Laughter) I found out that's very true, working on this campaign worldwide. And our goal was to try to humanize them a bit, and what I did was add type and people to the ad, which the previous campaign had not had, and nobody remembered them, and nobody referenced them. And we were trying to say that, hey, some of these guys that work there are actually OK; some of them actually have friends and family, and they're not all awful people. And the umbrella campaign was "Thank God it's Monday." So, we tried to take this — what was perceived as a negative: their over-competitiveness, their, you know, long working hours — and turn it into a positive and not run from it. You know: Thank God it's Monday — I get to go back to that little cubicle, those fake gray walls, and hear everybody else's conversations f or 10 hours and then go home. But anyway, this is one of the ads I was most pleased with, because they were all elaborately art-directed, and this one I thought actually felt like the girl was looking at the computer. It says, "Wonder Around." And then it's a piece of the software. And this is how the ad ran around the world. In Germany, they made one small change without checking with me — nor did they have to, because it was done through agencies — but see if you can tell the difference. This is how the ad ran throughout the world; Germany made one slight change in the ad. (Laughter) Now, there's kind of two issues here. If you're going to put a kid in the ad, pick one that looks alive. (Laughter) I just have a feeling this kid's been there for a week, you know. He's just really hoping that boots up and, you know ... (Laughter) And then as the agency explained to me, they said, "Look, we don't have little green people in our country; why would we put little green people in our ads, for instance?" So, I understand their logic. I totally disagree with it; I think it's a very small-minded approach, the world is certainly much more global, and I certainly think the people of Germany could have handled a little black girl sitting in front of a computer, though we'll never know. This is some work from Ray Gun. And the point of this magazine was to read the articles, listen to the music, and try to interpret it. There's no grid, there's no system, there's nothing set up in advance. This is an opener for Brian Eno, and it's just kind of my personal interpretation of the music. This is rockstars talking about teachers they had lusted after in school. There's a lot of great writing in "Ray Gun." And I was fortunate to find a photograph of a teacher sitting on some books. (Laughter) Article on Bryan Ferry — just really boring article — so I set the whole article in Dingbat. (Laughter) You could — you could highlight it; you could make it Helvetica or something: it is the actual article. I suppose you could eventually decode it, but it's really not very well written; it really wouldn't be worthwhile. (Laughter) Having done a lot of magazines, I'm very curious how big magazines handle big stories, and I was very curious to see how Time and Newsweek would handle 9/11. And I was basically pretty disappointed to see that they had chosen to show the photo we'd already seen a million times, which was basically the moment of impact. And People magazine, I thought, got probably the best shot. It's kind of horsey type, but the texture — the second plane not quite hitting: there was something more enticing, if that's the right — it's not the right word — but in this cover than Time or Newsweek. But when I got into this magazine, there's something kind of disturbing, and this continued. On the left we see people dying; we see people running for their lives. And on the right we learn that there's a new way to support your breast. The coveted right-hand page was not given up to the whole issue. Look at the image of this lady — who knows what she's going through? — and the copy says: "He knows just how to give me goosebumps." Yeah, he jumps out of buildings. It's — unfortunately, this one works, kind of, as a spread. And this continued through the entire magazine. It did not let up. This says: "One clean fits all." . There were a lot of orphans made this day, and here's a dead body being brought out. It just seems to me possibly even a blank page would have been more appropriate. And this one I think is possibly the worst: two ladies, both facing the same way, both wearing jeans. One — who knows what she's going through; the other one is worried about model behavior and milk. And — I gave a talk in New York a couple months after this, and afterwards somebody came up to me and they said that — they actually emailed me — and they said that they appreciated the talk, and when they got back to their car, they found a note on their car that made them think maybe New York was getting back to being New York again after this event — it had been a few months. This was what they found on their car. (Laughter) There's very few times you'd be happy to find this on your car, but it did seem to indicate that we were coming back. This is my desktop. Somebody told me today there was this thing called folders, but I don't know what they are. These are my notes for the talk — there might be a correlation here. We are wrapping up. This I saw on the plane, flying in, for hot new products. I'm not sure this is an improvement, or a good idea, because, like, if you don't spend quite enough time in front of your computer, you can now get a plate in the keyboard, so there's no more faking it — that you don't really sit at your desk all day and eat and work anyway. Now there's a plate, and it would be really, really convenient to get a piece of pizza, then type a little bit, then ... I'm just not sure this is improvement. If you ever doubt the power of graphic design, this is a very generic sign that literally says, "Vote for Hitler." It says nothing else. And this to me is an extreme case of the power of emotion, of graphic design, even though, in fact, was a very generic poster at the time. What's next? What's next is going to be people. As we get more technically driven, the importance of people becomes more than it's ever been before. You have to utilize who you are in your work. Nobody else can do that: nobody else can pull from your background, from your parents, your upbringing, your whole life experience. If you allow that to happen, it's really the only way you can do some unique work, and you're going to enjoy the work a lot more as well. This is — I like found art; hand lettering's coming back in a big way, and I thought this was a great example of both. This lady's advertising for her lost pit bull. It's friendly — she's underlined friendly — that's probably why she calls it Hercules or Hercles. She can't spell. (Laughter) But more importantly, she's willing to give you 20 bucks to go find this lost pit bull. And I'm thinking, yeah, right, I'll go look for a lost pit bill for 20 bucks. I have visions of people going down alleyways yelling out for Hercles, and you get charged by this thing and you go, oh, please be Hercles; please be the friendly one. (Laughter) I'm sure she never found the dog, because I took the sign. (Laughter) But I was asked to give a talk at a conference in Sacramento a few years back. And the theme was courage, and they asked me to talk about how courageous it is to be a graphic designer. And I remembered seeing this photograph of my father, who was a test pilot, and he told me that when you signed up to become a test pilot, they told you that there was a 40 to 50 percent chance of death on the job. That's pretty high for most occupations. (Laughter) But, you know, the government would make a plane; they'd say, go see if that one flies, would you? Some of them did; some of them didn't. And I started thinking about some of these decisions I have to make between, like, serif versus san-serif. (Laughter) And for the most part, they're not real life-threatening. Why not experiment? Why not have some fun? Why not put some of yourself into the work? And when I was teaching, I used to always ask the students, What's the definition of a good job? And as teachers, after you get all the answers, you like to give them the correct answer. And the best one I've heard — I'm sure some of you have heard this — the definition of a good job is: If you could afford to — if money wasn't an issue — would you be doing that same work? And if you would, you've got a great job. And if you wouldn't, what the heck are you doing? You're going to be dead a really long time. Thank you very much.

Tools for a better world

Jamais Cascio

{0: 'Jamais Cascio'}

{0: ['world-builder']}

{0: "Jamais Cascio follows the threads of civilization's intended (and unintended) consequences into an unpredictable future, bringing back glimpses of a green world wired beyond our wildest dreams."}

2006-02-02

2009-01-21

TED2006

en

['ar', 'bg', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['culture', 'future', 'global issues', 'social change', 'technology']

{2: 'Simple designs to save a life', 74: 'The route to a sustainable future', 90: 'Unleash your creativity in a Fab Lab', 1361: 'How mobile phones power disaster relief', 190: 'The anthropology of mobile phones', 1518: 'Your phone company is watching'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/jamais_cascio_tools_for_a_better_world/

We all want to make the world better -- but how? Jamais Cascio looks at some specific tools and techniques that can make a difference. It's a fascinating talk that might just inspire you to act.

The future that we will create can be a future that we'll be proud of. I think about this every day; it's quite literally my job. I'm co-founder and senior columnist at Worldchanging.com. Alex Steffen and I founded Worldchanging in late 2003, and since then we and our growing global team of contributors have documented the ever-expanding variety of solutions that are out there, right now and on the near horizon. In a little over two years, we've written up about 4,000 items — replicable models, technological tools, emerging ideas — all providing a path to a future that's more sustainable, more equitable and more desirable. Our emphasis on solutions is quite intentional. There are tons of places to go, online and off, if what you want to find is the latest bit of news about just how quickly our hell-bound handbasket is moving. We want to offer people an idea of what they can do about it. We focus primarily on the planet's environment, but we also address issues of global development, international conflict, responsible use of emerging technologies, even the rise of the so-called Second Superpower and much, much more. The scope of solutions that we discuss is actually pretty broad, but that reflects both the range of challenges that need to be met and the kinds of innovations that will allow us to do so. A quick sampling really can barely scratch the surface, but to give you a sense of what we cover: tools for rapid disaster relief, such as this inflatable concrete shelter; innovative uses of bioscience, such as a flower that changes color in the presence of landmines; ultra high-efficiency designs for homes and offices; distributed power generation using solar power, wind power, ocean power, other clean energy sources; ultra, ultra high-efficiency vehicles of the future; ultra high-efficiency vehicles you can get right now; and better urban design, so you don't need to drive as much in the first place; bio-mimetic approaches to design that take advantage of the efficiencies of natural models in both vehicles and buildings; distributed computing projects that will help us model the future of the climate. Also, a number of the topics that we've been talking about this week at TED are things that we've addressed in the past on Worldchanging: cradle-to-cradle design, MIT's Fab Labs, the consequences of extreme longevity, the One Laptop per Child project, even Gapminder. As a born-in-the-mid-1960s Gen X-er, hurtling all too quickly to my fortieth birthday, I'm naturally inclined to pessimism. But working at Worldchanging has convinced me, much to my own surprise, that successful responses to the world's problems are nonetheless possible. Moreover, I've come to realize that focusing only on negative outcomes can really blind you to the very possibility of success. As Norwegian social scientist Evelin Lindner has observed, "Pessimism is a luxury of good times ... In difficult times, pessimism is a self-fulfilling, self-inflicted death sentence." The truth is, we can build a better world, and we can do so right now. We have the tools: we saw a hint of that a moment ago, and we're coming up with new ones all the time. We have the knowledge, and our understanding of the planet improves every day. Most importantly, we have the motive: we have a world that needs fixing, and nobody's going to do it for us. Many of the solutions that I and my colleagues seek out and write up every day have some important aspects in common: transparency, collaboration, a willingness to experiment, and an appreciation of science — or, more appropriately, science! (Laughter) The majority of models, tools and ideas on Worldchanging encompass combinations of these characteristics, so I want to give you a few concrete examples of how these principles combine in world-changing ways. We can see world-changing values in the emergence of tools to make the invisible visible — that is, to make apparent the conditions of the world around us that would otherwise be largely imperceptible. We know that people often change their behavior when they can see and understand the impact of their actions. As a small example, many of us have experienced the change in driving behavior that comes from having a real time display of mileage showing precisely how one's driving habits affect the vehicle's efficiency. The last few years have all seen the rise of innovations in how we measure and display aspects of the world that can be too big, or too intangible, or too slippery to grasp easily. Simple technologies, like wall-mounted devices that display how much power your household is using, and what kind of results you'll get if you turn off a few lights — these can actually have a direct positive impact on your energy footprint. Community tools, like text messaging, that can tell you when pollen counts are up or smog levels are rising or a natural disaster is unfolding, can give you the information you need to act in a timely fashion. Data-rich displays like maps of campaign contributions, or maps of the disappearing polar ice caps, allow us to better understand the context and the flow of processes that affect us all. We can see world-changing values in research projects that seek to meet the world's medical needs through open access to data and collaborative action. Now, some people emphasize the risks of knowledge-enabled dangers, but I'm convinced that the benefits of knowledge-enabled solutions are far more important. For example, open-access journals, like the Public Library of Science, make cutting-edge scientific research free to all — everyone in the world. And actually, a growing number of science publishers are adopting this model. Last year, hundreds of volunteer biology and chemistry researchers around the world worked together to sequence the genome of the parasite responsible for some of the developing world's worst diseases: African sleeping sickness, leishmaniasis and Chagas disease. That genome data can now be found on open-access genetic data banks around the world, and it's an enormous boon to researchers trying to come up with treatments. But my favorite example has to be the global response to the SARS epidemic in 2003, 2004, which relied on worldwide access to the full gene sequence of the SARS virus. The U.S. National Research Council in its follow-up report on the outbreak specifically cited this open availability of the sequence as a key reason why the treatment for SARS could be developed so quickly. And we can see world-changing values in something as humble as a cell phone. I can probably count on my fingers the number of people in this room who do not use a mobile phone — and where is Aubrey, because I know he doesn't? (Laughter) For many of us, cell phones have really become almost an extension of ourselves, and we're really now beginning to see the social changes that mobile phones can bring about. You may already know some of the big-picture aspects: globally, more camera phones were sold last year than any other kind of camera, and a growing number of people live lives mediated through the lens, and over the network — and sometimes enter history books. In the developing world, mobile phones have become economic drivers. A study last year showed a direct correlation between the growth of mobile phone use and subsequent GDP increases across Africa. In Kenya, mobile phone minutes have actually become an alternative currency. The political aspects of mobile phones can't be ignored either, from text message swarms in Korea helping to bring down a government, to the Blairwatch Project in the UK, keeping tabs on politicians who try to avoid the press. (Laughter) And it's just going to get more wild. Pervasive, always-on networks, high quality sound and video, even devices made to be worn instead of carried in the pocket, will transform how we live on a scale that few really appreciate. It's no exaggeration to say that the mobile phone may be among the world's most important technologies. And in this rapidly evolving context, it's possible to imagine a world in which the mobile phone becomes something far more than a medium for social interaction. I've long admired the Witness project, and Peter Gabriel told us more details about it on Wednesday, in his profoundly moving presentation. And I'm just incredibly happy to see the news that Witness is going to be opening up a Web portal to enable users of digital cameras and camera phones to send in their recordings over the Internet, rather than just hand-carrying the videotape. Not only does this add a new and potentially safer avenue for documenting abuses, it opens up the program to the growing global digital generation. Now, imagine a similar model for networking environmentalists. Imagine a Web portal collecting recordings and evidence of what's happening to the planet: putting news and data at the fingertips of people of all kinds, from activists and researchers to businesspeople and political figures. It would highlight the changes that are underway, but would more importantly give voice to the people who are willing to work to see a new world, a better world, come about. It would give everyday citizens a chance to play a role in the protection of the planet. It would be, in essence, an "Earth Witness" project. Now, just to be clear, in this talk I'm using the name "Earth Witness" as part of the scenario, simply as a shorthand, for what this imaginary project could aspire to, not to piggyback on the wonderful work of the Witness organization. It could just as easily be called, "Environmental Transparency Project," "Smart Mobs for Natural Security" — but Earth Witness is a lot easier to say. Now, many of the people who participate in Earth Witness would focus on ecological problems, human-caused or otherwise, especially environmental crimes and significant sources of greenhouse gases and emissions. That's understandable and important. We need better documentation of what's happening to the planet if we're ever going to have a chance of repairing the damage. But the Earth Witness project wouldn't need to be limited to problems. In the best Worldchanging tradition, it might also serve as a showcase for good ideas, successful projects and efforts to make a difference that deserve much more visibility. Earth Witness would show us two worlds: the world we're leaving behind, and the world we're building for generations to come. And what makes this scenario particularly appealing to me is we could do it today. The key components are already widely available. Camera phones, of course, would be fundamental to the project. And for a lot of us, they're as close as we have yet to always-on, widely available information tools. We may not remember to bring our digital cameras with us wherever we go, but very few of us forget our phones. You could even imagine a version of this scenario in which people actually build their own phones. Over the course of last year, open-source hardware hackers have come up with multiple models for usable, Linux-based mobile phones, and the Earth Phone could spin off from this kind of project. At the other end of the network, there'd be a server for people to send photos and messages to, accessible over the Web, combining a photo-sharing service, social networking platforms and a collaborative filtering system. Now, you Web 2.0 folks in the audience know what I'm talking about, but for those of you for whom that last sentence was in a crazy moon language, I mean simply this: the online part of the Earth Witness project would be created by the users, working together and working openly. That's enough right there to start to build a compelling chronicle of what's now happening to our planet, but we could do more. An Earth Witness site could also serve as a collection spot for all sorts of data about conditions around the planet picked up by environmental sensors that attach to your cell phone. Now, you don't see these devices as add-ons for phones yet, but students and engineers around the world have attached atmospheric sensors to bicycles and handheld computers and cheap robots and the backs of pigeons — that being a project that's actually underway right now at U.C. Irvine, using bird-mounted sensors as a way of measuring smog-forming pollution. It's hardly a stretch to imagine putting the same thing on a phone carried by a person. Now, the idea of connecting a sensor to your phone is not new: phone-makers around the world offer phones that sniff for bad breath, or tell you to worry about too much sun exposure. Swedish firm Uppsala Biomedical, more seriously, makes a mobile phone add-on that can process blood tests in the field, uploading the data, displaying the results. Even the Lawrence Livermore National Labs have gotten into the act, designing a prototype phone that has radiation sensors to find dirty bombs. Now, there's an enormous variety of tiny, inexpensive sensors on the market, and you can easily imagine someone putting together a phone that could measure temperature, CO2 or methane levels, the presence of some biotoxins — potentially, in a few years, maybe even H5N1 avian flu virus. You could see that some kind of system like this would actually be a really good fit with Larry Brilliant's InSTEDD project. Now, all of this data could be tagged with geographic information and mashed up with online maps for easy viewing and analysis. And that's worth noting in particular. The impact of open-access online maps over the last year or two has been simply phenomenal. Developers around the world have come up with an amazing variety of ways to layer useful data on top of the maps, from bus routes and crime statistics to the global progress of avian flu. Earth Witness would take this further, linking what you see with what thousands or millions of other people see around the world. It's kind of exciting to think about what might be accomplished if something like this ever existed. We'd have a far better — far better knowledge of what's happening on our planet environmentally than could be gathered with satellites and a handful of government sensor nets alone. It would be a collaborative, bottom-up approach to environmental awareness and protection, able to respond to emerging concerns in a smart mobs kind of way — and if you need greater sensor density, just have more people show up. And most important, you can't ignore how important mobile phones are to global youth. This is a system that could put the next generation at the front lines of gathering environmental data. And as we work to figure out ways to mitigate the worst effects of climate disruption, every little bit of information matters. A system like Earth Witness would be a tool for all of us to participate in the improvement of our knowledge and, ultimately, the improvement of the planet itself. Now, as I suggested at the outset, there are thousands upon thousands of good ideas out there, so why have I spent the bulk of my time telling you about something that doesn't exist? Because this is what tomorrow could look like: bottom-up, technology-enabled global collaboration to handle the biggest crisis our civilization has ever faced. We can save the planet, but we can't do it alone — we need each other. Nobody's going to fix the world for us, but working together, making use of technological innovations and human communities alike, we might just be able to fix it ourselves. We have at our fingertips a cornucopia of compelling models, powerful tools, and innovative ideas that can make a meaningful difference in our planet's future. We don't need to wait for a magic bullet to save us all; we already have an arsenal of solutions just waiting to be used. There's a staggering array of wonders out there, across diverse disciplines, all telling us the same thing: success can be ours if we're willing to try. And as we say at Worldchanging, another world isn't just possible; another world is here. We just need to open our eyes. Thank you very much.

Genomics 101

Barry Schuler

{0: 'Barry Schuler'}

{0: ['entrepreneur']}

{0: "Barry Schuler's multimedia firm Medior built key interactive technologies for AOL, helping millions connect to the Internet through a simple, accessible interface. Now, through venture capital (and wine appreciation), he wants to do the same for genomics."}

2008-06-30

2009-01-22

Taste3 2008

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['biology', 'entrepreneur', 'food', 'genetics', 'science', 'technology']

{227: 'On the verge of creating synthetic life', 331: 'DNA folding, in detail', 214: "A plant's-eye view", 6: "Sampling the ocean's DNA", 863: 'Watch me unveil "synthetic life"', 1223: 'Welcome to the genomic revolution'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schuler_genomics_101/

What is genomics? How will it affect our lives? In this intriguing primer on the genomics revolution, entrepreneur Barry Schuler says we can at least expect healthier, tastier food. He suggests we start with the pinot noir grape, to build better wines.

What's happening in genomics, and how this revolution is about to change everything we know about the world, life, ourselves, and how we think about them. If you saw 2001: A Space Odyssey, and you heard the boom, boom, boom, boom, and you saw the monolith, you know, that was Arthur C. Clarke's representation that we were at a seminal moment in the evolution of our species. In this case, it was picking up bones and creating a tool, using it as a tool, which meant that apes just, sort of, running around and eating and doing each other figured out they can make things if they used a tool. And that moved us to the next level. And, you know, we in the last 30 years in particular have seen this acceleration in knowledge and technology, and technology has bred more knowledge and given us tools. And we've seen many seminal moments. We've seen the creation of small computers in the '70s and early '80s, and who would have thought back then that every single person would not have just one computer but probably 20, in your home, and in not just your P.C. but in every device — in your washing machine, your cell phone. You're walking around; your car has 12 microprocessors. Then we go along and create the Internet and connect the world together; we flatten the world. We've seen so much change, and we've given ourselves these tools now — these high-powered tools — that are allowing us to turn the lens inward into something that is common to all of us, and that is a genome. How's your genome today? Have you thought about it lately? Heard about it, at least? You probably hear about genomes these days. I thought I'd take a moment to tell you what a genome is. It's, sort of, like if you ask people, Well, what is a megabyte or megabit? And what is broadband? People never want to say, I really don't understand. So, I will tell you right off of the bat. You've heard of DNA; you probably studied a little bit in biology. A genome is really a description for all of the DNA that is in a living organism. And one thing that is common to all of life is DNA. It doesn't matter whether you're a yeast; it doesn't matter whether you're a mouse; doesn't matter whether you're a fly; we all have DNA. The DNA is organized in words, call them: genes and chromosomes. And when Watson and Crick in the '50s first decoded this beautiful double helix that we know as the DNA molecule — very long, complicated molecule — we then started on this journey to understand that inside of that DNA is a language that determines the characteristics, our traits, what we inherit, what diseases we may get. We've also along the way discovered that this is a very old molecule, that all of the DNA in your body has been around forever, since the beginning of us, of us as creatures. There is a historical archive. Living in your genome is the history of our species, and you as an individual human being, where you're from, going back thousands and thousands and thousands of years, and that's now starting to be understood. But also, the genome is really the instruction manual. It is the program. It is the code of life. It is what makes you function; it is what makes every organism function. DNA is a very elegant molecule. It's long and it's complicated. Really all you have to know about it is that there's four letters: A, T, C, G; they represent the name of a chemical. And with these four letters, you can create a language: a language that can describe anything, and very complicated things. You know, they are generally put together in pairs, creating a word or what we call base pairs. And you would, you know, when you think about it, four letters, or the representation of four things, makes us work. And that may not sound very intuitive, but let me flip over to something else you know about, and that's computers. Look at this screen here and, you know, you see pictures and you see words, but really all there are are ones and zeros. The language of technology is binary; you've probably heard that at some point in time. Everything that happens in digital is converted, or a representation, of a one and a zero. So, when you're listening to iTunes and your favorite music, that's really just a bunch of ones and zeros playing very quickly. When you're seeing these pictures, it's all ones and zeros, and when you're talking on your telephone, your cell phone, and it's going over the network, your voice is all being turned into ones and zeros and magically whizzed around. And look at all the complex things and wonderful things we've been able to create with just a one and a zero. Well, now you ramp that up to four, and you have a lot of complexity, a lot of ways to describe mechanisms. So, let's talk about what that means. So, if you look at a human genome, they consist of 3.2 billion of these base pairs. That's a lot. And they mix up in all different fashions, and that makes you a human being. If you convert that to binary, just to give you a little bit of sizing, we're actually smaller than the program Microsoft Office. It's not really all that much data. I will also tell you we're at least as buggy. (Laughter) This here is a bug in my genome that I have struggled with for a long, long time. When you get sick, it is a bug in your genome. In fact, many, many diseases we have struggled with for a long time, like cancer, we haven't been able to cure because we just don't understand how it works at the genomic level. We are starting to understand that. So, up to this point we tried to fix it by using what I call shit-against-the-wall pharmacology, which means, well, let's just throw chemicals at it, and maybe it's going to make it work. But if you really understand why does a cell go from normal cell to cancer? What is the code? What are the exact instructions that are making it do that? then you can go about the process of trying to fix it and figure it out. So, for your next dinner over a great bottle of wine, here's a few factoids for you. We actually have about 24,000 genes that do things. We have about a hundred, 120,000 others that don't appear to function every day, but represent this archival history of how we used to work as a species going back tens of thousands of years. You might also be interested in knowing that a mouse has about the same amount of genes. They recently sequenced Pinot Noir, and it also has about 30,000 genes, so the number of genes you have may not necessarily represent the complexity or the evolutionary order of any particular species. Now, look around: just look next to your neighbor, look forward, look backward. We all look pretty different. A lot of very handsome and pretty people here, skinny, chubby, different races, cultures. We are all 99.9% genetically equal. It is one one-hundredth of one percent of genetic material that makes the difference between any one of us. That's a tiny amount of material, but the way that ultimately expresses itself is what makes changes in humans and in all species. So, we are now able to read genomes. The first human genome took 10 years, three billion dollars. It was done by Dr. Craig Venter. And then James Watson's — one of the co-founders of DNA — genome was done for two million dollars, and in just two months. And if you think about the computer industry and how we've gone from big computers to little ones and how they get more powerful and faster all the time, the same thing is happening with gene sequencing now: we are on the cusp of being able to sequence human genomes for about 5,000 dollars in about an hour or a half-hour; you will see that happen in the next five years. And what that means is, you are going to walk around with your own personal genome on a smart card. It will be here. And when you buy medicine, you won't be buying a drug that's used for everybody. You will give your genome to the pharmacist, and your drug will be made for you and it will work much better than the ones that were — you won't have side effects. All those side effects, you know, oily residue and, you know, whatever they say in those commercials: forget about that. They're going to make all that stuff go away. What does a genome look like? Well, there it is. It is a long, long series of these base pairs. If you saw the genome for a mouse or for a human it would look no different than this, but what scientists are doing now is they're understanding what these do and what they mean. Because what Nature is doing is double-clicking all the time. In other words, the first couple of sentences here, assuming this is a grape plant: make a root, make a branch, create a blossom. In a human being, down in here it could be: make blood cells, start cancer. For me it may be: every calorie you consume, you conserve, because I come from a very cold climate. For my wife: eat three times as much and you never put on any weight. It's all hidden in this code, and it's starting to be understood at breakneck pace. So, what can we do with genomes now that we can read them, now that we're starting to have the book of life? Well, there's many things. Some are exciting. Some people will find very scary. I will tell you a couple of things that will probably make you want to projectile puke on me, but that's okay. So, you know, we now can learn the history of organisms. You can do a very simple test: scrape your cheek; send it off. You can find out where your relatives come from; you can do your genealogy going back thousands of years. We can understand functionality. This is really important. We can understand, for example, why we create plaque in our arteries, what creates the starchiness inside of a grain, why does yeast metabolize sugar and produce carbon dioxide. We can also look at, at a grander scale, what creates problems, what creates disease, and how we may be able to fix them. Because we can understand this, we can fix them, make better organisms. Most importantly, what we're learning is that Nature has provided us a spectacular toolbox. The toolbox exists. An architect far better and smarter than us has given us that toolbox, and we now have the ability to use it. We are now not just reading genomes; we are writing them. This company, Synthetic Genomics, I'm involved with, created the first full synthetic genome for a little bug, a very primitive creature called Mycoplasma genitalium. If you have a UTI, you've probably — or ever had a UTI — you've come in contact with this little bug. Very simple — only has about 246 genes — but we were able to completely synthesize that genome. Now, you have the genome and you say to yourself, So, if I plug this synthetic genome — if I pull the old one out and plug it in — does it just boot up and live? Well, guess what. It does. Not only does it do that; if you took the genome — that synthetic genome — and you plugged it into a different critter, like yeast, you now turn that yeast into Mycoplasma. It's, sort of, like booting up a PC with a Mac O.S. software. Well, actually, you could do it the other way. So, you know, by being able to write a genome and plug it into an organism, the software, if you will, changes the hardware. And this is extremely profound. So, last year the French and Italians announced they got together and they went ahead and they sequenced Pinot Noir. The genomic sequence now exists for the entire Pinot Noir organism, and they identified, once again, about 29,000 genes. They have discovered pathways that create flavors, although it's very important to understand that those compounds that it's cranking out have to match a receptor in our genome, in our tongue, for us to understand and interpret those flavors. They've also discovered that there's a heck of a lot of activity going on producing aroma as well. They've identified areas of vulnerability to disease. They now are understanding, and the work is going on, exactly how this plant works, and we have the capability to know, to read that entire code and understand how it ticks. So, then what do you do? Knowing that we can read it, knowing that we can write it, change it, maybe write its genome from scratch. So, what do you do? Well, one thing you could do is what some people might call Franken-Noir. (Laughter) We can build a better vine. By the way, just so you know: you get stressed out about genetically modified organisms; there is not one single vine in this valley or anywhere that is not genetically modified. They're not grown from seeds; they're grafted into root stock; they would not exist in nature on their own. So, don't worry about, don't stress about that stuff. We've been doing this forever. So, we could, you know, focus on disease resistance; we can go for higher yields without necessarily having dramatic farming techniques to do it, or costs. We could conceivably expand the climate window: we could make Pinot Noir grow maybe in Long Island, God forbid. (Laughter) We could produce better flavors and aromas. You want a little more raspberry, a little more chocolate here or there? All of these things could conceivably be done, and I will tell you I'd pretty much bet that it will be done. But there's an ecosystem here. In other words, we're not, sort of, unique little organisms running around; we are part of a big ecosystem. In fact — I'm sorry to inform you — that inside of your digestive tract is about 10 pounds of microbes which you're circulating through your body quite a bit. Our ocean's teaming with microbes; in fact, when Craig Venter went and sequenced the microbes in the ocean, in the first three months tripled the known species on the planet by discovering all-new microbes in the first 20 feet of water. We now understand that those microbes have more impact on our climate and regulating CO2 and oxygen than plants do, which we always thought oxygenate the atmosphere. We find microbial life in every part of the planet: in ice, in coal, in rocks, in volcanic vents; it's an amazing thing. But we've also discovered, when it comes to plants, in plants, as much as we understand and are starting to understand their genomes, it is the ecosystem around them, it is the microbes that live in their root systems, that have just as much impact on the character of those plants as the metabolic pathways of the plants themselves. If you take a closer look at a root system, you will find there are many, many, many diverse microbial colonies. This is not big news to viticulturists; they have been, you know, concerned with water and fertilization. And, again, this is, sort of, my notion of shit-against-the-wall pharmacology: you know certain fertilizers make the plant more healthy so you put more in. You don't necessarily know with granularity exactly what organisms are providing what flavors and what characteristics. We can start to figure that out. We all talk about terroir; we worship terroir; we say, Wow, is my terroir great! It's so special. I've got this piece of land and it creates terroir like you wouldn't believe. Well, you know, we really, we argue and debate about it — we say it's climate, it's soil, it's this. Well, guess what? We can figure out what the heck terroir is. It's in there, waiting to be sequenced. There are thousands of microbes there. They're easy to sequence: unlike a human, they, you know, have a thousand, two thousand genes; we can figure out what they are. All we have to do is go around and sample, dig into the ground, find those bugs, sequence them, correlate them to the kinds of characteristics we like and don't like — that's just a big database — and then fertilize. And then we understand what is terroir. So, some people will say, Oh, my God, are we playing God? Are we now, if we engineer organisms, are we playing God? And, you know, people would always ask James Watson — he's not always the most politically correct guy ... (Laughter) ... and they would say, "Are, you know, are you playing God?" And he had the best answer I ever heard to this question: "Well, somebody has to." (Laughter) I consider myself a very spiritual person, and without, you know, the organized religion part, and I will tell you: I don't believe there's anything unnatural. I don't believe that chemicals are unnatural. I told you I'm going to make some of you puke. It's very simple: we don't invent molecules, compounds. They're here. They're in the universe. We reorganize things, we change them around, but we don't make anything unnatural. Now, we can create bad impacts — we can poison ourselves; we can poison the Earth — but that's just a natural outcome of a mistake we made. So, what's happening today is, Nature is presenting us with a toolbox, and we find that this toolbox is very extensive. There are microbes out there that actually make gasoline, believe it or not. There are microbes, you know — go back to yeast. These are chemical factories; the most sophisticated chemical factories are provided by Nature, and we now can use those. There also is a set of rules. Nature will not allow you to — we could engineer a grape plant, but guess what. We can't make the grape plant produce babies. Nature has put a set of rules out there. We can work within the rules; we can't break the rules; we're just learning what the rules are. I just ask the question, if you could cure all disease — if you could make disease go away, because we understand how it actually works, if we could end hunger by being able to create nutritious, healthy plants that grow in very hard-to-grow environments, if we could create clean and plentiful energy — we, right in the labs at Synthetic Genomics, have single-celled organisms that are taking carbon dioxide and producing a molecule very similar to gasoline. So, carbon dioxide — the stuff we want to get rid of — not sugar, not anything. Carbon dioxide, a little bit of sunlight, you end up with a lipid that is highly refined. We could solve our energy problems; we can reduce CO2,; we could clean up our oceans; we could make better wine. If we could, would we? Well, you know, I think the answer is very simple: working with Nature, working with this tool set that we now understand, is the next step in humankind's evolution. And all I can tell you is, stay healthy for 20 years. If you can stay healthy for 20 years, you'll see 150, maybe 300. Thank you.

The extraordinary power of ordinary people

Sherwin Nuland

{0: 'Sherwin Nuland'}

{0: ['doctor']}

{0: 'A practicing surgeon for three decades, Sherwin Nuland witnessed life and death in every variety. Then he turned to writing, exploring what there is to people beyond just anatomy.'}

2003-02-02

2009-01-23

TED2003

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hy', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['philanthropy', 'philosophy', 'writing']

{189: 'How electroshock therapy changed me', 1043: 'Using our practical wisdom', 209: 'Rebuilding a neighborhood with beauty, dignity, hope', 130: 'We can be Buddhas', 200: "Why aren't we more compassionate?", 647: "Let's revive the Golden Rule"}

https://www.ted.com/talks/sherwin_nuland_the_extraordinary_power_of_ordinary_people/

Sherwin Nuland, a surgeon and a writer, meditates on the idea of hope -- the desire to become our better selves and make a better world. It's a thoughtful 12 minutes that will help you focus on the road ahead.

You know, I am so bad at tech that my daughter — who is now 41 — when she was five, was overheard by me to say to a friend of hers, If it doesn't bleed when you cut it, my daddy doesn't understand it. (Laughter) So, the assignment I've been given may be an insuperable obstacle for me, but I'm certainly going to try. What have I heard during these last four days? This is my third visit to TED. One was to TEDMED, and one, as you've heard, was a regular TED two years ago. I've heard what I consider an extraordinary thing that I've only heard a little bit in the two previous TEDs, and what that is is an interweaving and an interlarding, an intermixing, of a sense of social responsibility in so many of the talks — global responsibility, in fact, appealing to enlightened self-interest, but it goes far beyond enlightened self-interest. One of the most impressive things about what some, perhaps 10, of the speakers have been talking about is the realization, as you listen to them carefully, that they're not saying: Well, this is what we should do; this is what I would like you to do. It's: This is what I have done because I'm excited by it, because it's a wonderful thing, and it's done something for me and, of course, it's accomplished a great deal. It's the old concept, the real Greek concept, of philanthropy in its original sense: phil-anthropy, the love of humankind. And the only explanation I can have for some of what you've been hearing in the last four days is that it arises, in fact, out of a form of love. And this gives me enormous hope. And hope, of course, is the topic that I'm supposed to be speaking about, which I'd completely forgotten about until I arrived. And when I did, I thought, well, I'd better look this word up in the dictionary. So, Sarah and I — my wife — walked over to the public library, which is four blocks away, on Pacific Street, and we got the OED, and we looked in there, and there are 14 definitions of hope, none of which really hits you between the eyes as being the appropriate one. And, of course, that makes sense, because hope is an abstract phenomenon; it's an abstract idea, it's not a concrete word. Well, it reminds me a little bit of surgery. If there's one operation for a disease, you know it works. If there are 15 operations, you know that none of them work. And that's the way it is with definitions of words. If you have appendicitis, they take your appendix out, and you're cured. If you've got reflux oesophagitis, there are 15 procedures, and Joe Schmo does it one way and Will Blow does it another way, and none of them work, and that's the way it is with this word, hope. They all come down to the idea of an expectation of something good that is due to happen. And you know what I found out? The Indo-European root of the word hope is a stem, K-E-U — we would spell it K-E-U; it's pronounced koy — and it is the same root from which the word curve comes from. But what it means in the original Indo-European is a change in direction, going in a different way. And I find that very interesting and very provocative, because what you've been hearing in the last couple of days is the sense of going in different directions: directions that are specific and unique to problems. There are different paradigms. You've heard that word several times in the last four days, and everyone's familiar with Kuhnian paradigms. So, when we think of hope now, we have to think of looking in other directions than we have been looking. There's another — not definition, but description, of hope that has always appealed to me, and it was one by Václav Havel in his perfectly spectacular book "Breaking the Peace," in which he says that hope does not consist of the expectation that things will come out exactly right, but the expectation that they will make sense regardless of how they come out. I can't tell you how reassured I was by the very last sentence in that glorious presentation by Dean Kamen a few days ago. I wasn't sure I heard it right, so I found him in one of the inter-sessions. He was talking to a very large man, but I didn't care. I interrupted, and I said, "Did you say this?" He said, "I think so." So, here's what it is: I'll repeat it. "The world will not be saved by the Internet." It's wonderful. Do you know what the world will be saved by? I'll tell you. It'll be saved by the human spirit. And by the human spirit, I don't mean anything divine, I don't mean anything supernatural — certainly not coming from this skeptic. What I mean is this ability that each of us has to be something greater than herself or himself; to arise out of our ordinary selves and achieve something that at the beginning we thought perhaps we were not capable of. On an elemental level, we have all felt that spirituality at the time of childbirth. Some of you have felt it in laboratories; some of you have felt it at the workbench. We feel it at concerts. I've felt it in the operating room, at the bedside. It is an elevation of us beyond ourselves. And I think that it's going to be, in time, the elements of the human spirit that we've been hearing about bit by bit by bit from so many of the speakers in the last few days. And if there's anything that has permeated this room, it is precisely that. I'm intrigued by a concept that was brought to life in the early part of the 19th century — actually, in the second decade of the 19th century — by a 27-year-old poet whose name was Percy Shelley. Now, we all think that Shelley obviously is the great romantic poet that he was; many of us tend to forget that he wrote some perfectly wonderful essays, too, and the most well-remembered essay is one called "A Defence of Poetry." Now, it's about five, six, seven, eight pages long, and it gets kind of deep and difficult after about the third page, but somewhere on the second page he begins talking about the notion that he calls "moral imagination." And here's what he says, roughly translated: A man — generic man — a man, to be greatly good, must imagine clearly. He must see himself and the world through the eyes of another, and of many others. See himself and the world — not just the world, but see himself. What is it that is expected of us by the billions of people who live in what Laurie Garrett the other day so appropriately called despair and disparity? What is it that they have every right to ask of us? What is it that we have every right to ask of ourselves, out of our shared humanity and out of the human spirit? Well, you know precisely what it is. There's a great deal of argument about whether we, as the great nation that we are, should be the policeman of the world, the world's constabulary, but there should be virtually no argument about whether we should be the world's healer. There has certainly been no argument about that in this room in the past four days. So, if we are to be the world's healer, every disadvantaged person in this world — including in the United States — becomes our patient. Every disadvantaged nation, and perhaps our own nation, becomes our patient. So, it's fun to think about the etymology of the word "patient." It comes initially from the Latin patior, to endure, or to suffer. So, you go back to the old Indo-European root again, and what do you find? The Indo-European stem is pronounced payen — we would spell it P-A-E-N — and, lo and behold, mirabile dictu, it is the same root as the word compassion comes from, P-A-E-N. So, the lesson is very clear. The lesson is that our patient — the world, and the disadvantaged of the world — that patient deserves our compassion. But beyond our compassion, and far greater than compassion, is our moral imagination and our identification with each individual who lives in that world, not to think of them as a huge forest, but as individual trees. Of course, in this day and age, the trick is not to let each tree be obscured by that Bush in Washington that can get — can get in the way. (Laughter) So, here we are. We are, should be, morally committed to being the healer of the world. And we have had examples over and over and over again — you've just heard one in the last 15 minutes — of people who have not only had that commitment, but had the charisma, the brilliance — and I think in this room it's easy to use the word brilliant, my God — the brilliance to succeed at least at the beginning of their quest, and who no doubt will continue to succeed, as long as more and more of us enlist ourselves in their cause. Now, if we're talking about medicine, and we're talking about healing, I'd like to quote someone who hasn't been quoted. It seems to me everybody in the world's been quoted here: Pogo's been quoted; Shakespeare's been quoted backwards, forwards, inside out. I would like to quote one of my own household gods. I suspect he never really said this, because we don't know what Hippocrates really said, but we do know for sure that one of the great Greek physicians said the following, and it has been recorded in one of the books attributed to Hippocrates, and the book is called "Precepts." And I'll read you what it is. Remember, I have been talking about, essentially philanthropy: the love of humankind, the individual humankind and the individual humankind that can bring that kind of love translated into action, translated, in some cases, into enlightened self-interest. And here he is, 2,400 years ago: "Where there is love of humankind, there is love of healing." We have seen that here today with the sense, with the sensitivity — and in the last three days, and with the power of the indomitable human spirit. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Hypersonic sound and other inventions

Woody Norris

{0: 'Woody Norris'}

{0: ['inventor']}

{0: 'Woody Norris is a serial inventor of electronics, tools and cutting-edge sonic equipment -- such as the LRAD acoustic cannon.'}

2004-02-02

2009-01-26

TED2004

en

['ar', 'bg', 'da', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['business', 'creativity', 'design', 'invention', 'technology']

{492: 'High-altitude wind energy from kites!', 385: 'Toys and materials from the future', 429: 'My dream of a flying car', 2610: 'Everything you hear on film is a lie', 660: 'The 4 ways sound affects us', 31121: 'What should electric cars sound like? '}

https://www.ted.com/talks/woody_norris_hypersonic_sound_and_other_inventions/

Woody Norris shows off two of his inventions that use sound in new ways, including the Long Range Acoustic Device, or LRAD. He talks about his untraditional approach to inventing and education, because, as he puts it: "Almost nothing has been invented yet." So -- what's next?

I became an inventor by accident. I was out of the air force in 1956. No, no, that's not true: I went in in 1956, came out in 1959, was working at the University of Washington, and I came up with an idea, from reading a magazine article, for a new kind of a phonograph tone arm. Now, that was before cassette tapes, C.D.s, DVDs — any of the cool stuff we've got now. And it was an arm that, instead of hinging and pivoting as it went across the record, went straight: a radial, linear tracking tone arm. And it was the hardest invention I ever made, but it got me started, and I got really lucky after that. And without giving you too much of a tirade, I want to talk to you about an invention I brought with me today: my 44th invention. No, that's not true either. Golly, I'm just totally losing it. My 44th patent; about the 15th invention. I call this hypersonic sound. I'm going to play it for you in a couple minutes, but I want to make an analogy before I do to this. I usually show this hypersonic sound and people will say, That's really cool, but what's it good for? And I say, What is the light bulb good for? Sound, light: I'm going to draw the analogy. When Edison invented the light bulb, pretty much looked like this. Hasn't changed that much. Light came out of it in every direction. Before the light bulb was invented, people had figured out how to put a reflector behind it, focus it a little bit; put lenses in front of it, focus it a little bit better. Ultimately we figured out how to make things like lasers that were totally focused. Now, think about where the world would be today if we had the light bulb, but you couldn't focus light; if when you turned one on it just went wherever it wanted to. That's the way loudspeakers pretty much are. You turn on the loudspeaker, and after almost 80 years of having those gadgets, the sound just kind of goes where it wants. Even when you're standing in front of a megaphone, it's pretty much every direction. A little bit of differential, but not much. If the light bulb was the way the speaker is, and you couldn't focus or sharpen the edges or define it, we wouldn't have that, or movies in general, or computers, or T.V. sets, or C.D.s, or DVDs — and just go down the list of what the importance is of being able to focus light. Now, after almost 80 years of having sound, I thought it was about time that we figure out a way to put sound where you want to. I have a couple of units. That guy there was made for a demo I did yesterday early in the day for a big car maker in Detroit who wants to put them in a car — small version, over your head — so that you can actually get binaural sound in a car. What if I could aim sound the way I aim light? I got this waterfall I recorded in my back yard. Now, you're not going to hear a thing unless it hits you. Maybe if I hit the side wall it will bounce around the room. (Applause) The sound is being made right next to your ears. Is that cool? (Applause) Because I have some limited time, I'll cut it off for a second, and tell you about how it works and what it's good for. Course, like light, it's great to be able to put sound to highlight a clothing rack, or the cornflakes, or the toothpaste, or a talking plaque in a movie theater lobby. Sony's got an idea — Sony's our biggest customers right now. They tried this back in the '60s and were too smart, and so they gave up. But they want to use it — seriously. There's a mix an inventor has to have. You have to be kind of smart, and though I did not graduate from college doesn't mean I'm stupid, because you cannot be stupid and do very much in the world today. Too many other smart people out there. So. I just happened to get my education in a little different way. I'm not at all against education. I think it's wonderful; I think sometimes people, when they get educated, lose it: they get so smart they're unwilling to look at things that they know better than. And we're living in a great time right now, because almost everything's being explored anew. I have this little slogan that I use a lot, which is: virtually nothing — and I mean this honestly — has been invented yet. We're just starting. We're just starting to really discover the laws of nature and science and physics. And this is, I hope, a little piece of it. Sony's got this vision back — to get myself on track — that when you stand in the checkout line in the supermarket, you're going to watch a new T.V. channel. They know that when you watch T.V. at home, because there are so many choices you can change channels, miss their commercials. A hundred and fifty-one million people every day stand in the line at the supermarket. Now, they've tried this a couple years ago and it failed, because the checker gets tired of hearing the same message every 20 minutes, and reaches out, turns off the sound. And, you know, if the sound isn't there, the sale typically isn't made. For instance, like, when you're on an airplane, they show the movie, you get to watch it for free; when you want to hear the sound, you pay. And so ABC and Sony have devised this new thing where when you step in the line in the supermarket — initially it'll be Safeways. It is Safeways; they're trying this in three parts of the country right now — you'll be watching TV. And hopefully they'll be sensitive that they don't want to offend you with just one more outlet. But what's great about it, from the tests that have been done, is, if you don't want to hear it, you take about one step to the side and you don't hear it. So, we create silence as much as we create sound. ATMs that talk to you; nobody else hears it. Sit in bed, two in the morning, watch TV; your spouse, or someone, is next to you, asleep; doesn't hear it, doesn't wake up. We're also working on noise canceling things like snoring, noise from automobiles. I have been really lucky with this technology: all of a sudden as it is ready, the world is ready to accept it. They have literally beat a path to our door. We've been selling it since about last September, October, and it's been immensely gratifying. If you're interested in what it costs — I'm not selling them today — but this unit, with the electronics and everything, if you buy one, is around a thousand bucks. We expect by this time next year, it'll be hundreds, a few hundred bucks, to buy it. It's not any more pricey than regular electronics. Now, when I played it for you, you didn't hear the thunderous bass. This unit that I played goes from about 200 hertz to above the range of hearing. It's actually emitting ultrasound — low-level ultrasound — that's about 100,000 vibrations per second. And the sound that you're hearing, unlike a regular speaker on which all the sound is made on the face, is made out in front of it, in the air. The air is not linear, as we've always been taught. You turn up the volume just a little bit — I'm talking about a little over 80 decibels — and all of a sudden the air begins to corrupt signals you propagate. Here's why: the speed of sound is not a constant. It's fairly slow. It changes with temperature and with barometric pressure. Now, imagine, if you will, without getting too technical, I'm making a little sine wave here in the air. Well, if I turn up the amplitude too much, I'm having an effect on the pressure, which means during the making of that sine wave, the speed at which it is propagating is shifting. All of audio as we know it is an attempt to be more and more perfectly linear. Linearity means higher quality sound. Hypersonic sound is exactly the opposite: it's 100 percent based on non-linearity. An effect happens in the air, it's a corrupting effect of the sound — the ultrasound in this case — that's emitted, but it's so predictable that you can produce very precise audio out of that effect. Now, the question is, where's the sound made? Instead of being made on the face of the cone, it's made at literally billions of little independent points along this narrow column in the air, and so when I aim it towards you, what you hear is made right next to your ears. I said we can shorten the column, we can spread it out to cover the couch. I can put it so that one ear hears one speaker, the other ear hears the other. That's true binaural sound. When you listen to stereo on your home system, your both ears hear both speakers. Turn on the left speaker sometime and notice you're hearing it also in your right ear. So, the stage is more restricted — the sound stage that's supposed to spread out in front of you. Because the sound is made in the air along this column, it does not follow the inverse square law, which says it drops off about two thirds every time you double the distance: 6dB every time you go from one meter, for instance, to two meters. That means you go to a rock concert or a symphony, and the guy in the front row gets the same level as the guy in the back row, now, all of a sudden. Isn't that terrific? So, we've been, as I say, very successful, very lucky, in having companies catch the vision of this, from cars — car makers who want to put a stereo system in the front for the kids, and a separate system in the back — oh, no, the kids aren't driving today. (Laughter) I was seeing if you were listening. Actually, I haven't had breakfast yet. A stereo system in the front for mom and dad, and maybe there's a little DVD player in the back for the kids, and the parents don't want to be bothered with that, or their rap music or whatever. So, again, this idea of being able to put sound anywhere you want to is really starting to catch on. It also works for transmitting and communicating data. It also works five times better underwater. We've got the military — have just deployed some of these into Iraq, where you can put fake troop movements quarter of a mile away on a hillside. (Laughter) Or you can whisper in the ear of a supposed terrorist some Biblical verse. (Laughter) I'm serious. And they have these infrared devices that can look at their countenance, and see a fraction of a degree Kelvin in temperature shift from 100 yards away when they play this thing. And so, another way of hopefully determining who's friendly and who isn't. We make a version with this which puts out 155 decibels. Pain is 120. So it allows you to go nearly a mile away and communicate with people, and there can be a public beach just off to the side, and they don't even know it's turned on. We sell those to the military presently for about 70,000 dollars, and they're buying them as fast as we can make them. We put it on a turret with a camera, so that when they shoot at you, you're over there, and it's there. I have a bunch of other inventions. I invented a plasma antenna, to shift gears. Looked up at the ceiling of my office one day — I was working on a ground-penetrating radar project — and my physicist CEO came in and said, "We have a real problem. We're using very short wavelengths. We've got a problem with the antenna ringing. When you run very short wavelengths, like a tuning fork the antenna resonates, and there's more energy coming out of the antenna than there is the backscatter from the ground that we're trying to analyze, taking too much processing." I says, "Why don't we make an antenna that only exists when you want it? Turn it on; turn it off. That's a fluorescent tube refined." I just sold that for a million and a half dollars, cash. I took it back to the Pentagon after it got declassified, when the patent issued, and told the people back there about it, and they laughed, and then I took them back a demo and they bought. (Laughter) Any of you ever wore a Jabber headphone — the little cell headphones? That's my invention. I sold that for seven million dollars. Big mistake: it just sold for 80 million dollars two years ago. I actually drew that up on a little crummy Mac computer in my attic at my house, and one of the many designs which they have now is still the same design I drew way back when. So, I've been really lucky as an inventor. I'm the happiest guy you're ever going to meet. And my dad died before he realized anybody in the family would maybe, hopefully, make something out of themselves. You've been a great audience. I know I've jumped all over the place. I usually figure out what my talk is when I get up in front of a group. Let me give you, in the last minute, one more quick demo of this guy, for those of you that haven't heard it. Can never tell if it's on. If you haven't heard it, raise your hand. Getting it over there? Get the cameraman. Yeah, there you go. I've got a Coke can opening that's right in your head; that's really cool. Thank you once again. Appreciate it very much.

A theory of Earth's mass extinctions

Peter Ward

{0: 'Peter Ward'}

{0: ['paleontologist']}

{0: 'Peter D. Ward studies life on Earth -- where it came from, how it might end, and how utterly rare it might be.'}

2008-02-27

2009-01-27

TED2008

en

['ar', 'bg', 'da', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fi', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'ku', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['dinosaurs', 'disease', 'environment', 'history', 'life', 'science', 'space']

{499: 'The jungle search for viruses', 42: 'Is this our final century?', 167: '10 ways the world could end', 49433: 'This ancient rock is changing our theory on the origin of life', 796: 'Suspended animation is within our grasp', 40: 'The story of life in photographs'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_ward_a_theory_of_earth_s_mass_extinctions/

Asteroid strikes get all the coverage, but "Medea Hypothesis" author Peter Ward argues that most of Earth's mass extinctions were caused by lowly bacteria. The culprit, a poison called hydrogen sulfide, may have an interesting application in medicine.

So, I want to start out with this beautiful picture from my childhood. I love the science fiction movies. Here it is: "This Island Earth." And leave it to Hollywood to get it just right. Two-and-a-half years in the making. (Laughter) I mean, even the creationists give us 6,000, but Hollywood goes to the chase. And in this movie, we see what we think is out there: flying saucers and aliens. Every world has an alien, and every alien world has a flying saucer, and they move about with great speed. Aliens. Well, Don Brownlee, my friend, and I finally got to the point where we got tired of turning on the TV and seeing the spaceships and seeing the aliens every night, and tried to write a counter-argument to it, and put out what does it really take for an Earth to be habitable, for a planet to be an Earth, to have a place where you could probably get not just life, but complexity, which requires a huge amount of evolution, and therefore constancy of conditions. So, in 2000 we wrote "Rare Earth." In 2003, we then asked, let's not think about where Earths are in space, but how long has Earth been Earth? If you go back two billion years, you're not on an Earth-like planet any more. What we call an Earth-like planet is actually a very short interval of time. Well, "Rare Earth" actually taught me an awful lot about meeting the public. Right after, I got an invitation to go to a science fiction convention, and with all great earnestness walked in. David Brin was going to debate me on this, and as I walked in, the crowd of a hundred started booing lustily. I had a girl who came up who said, "My dad says you're the devil." You cannot take people's aliens away from them and expect to be anybody's friends. Well, the second part of that, soon after — and I was talking to Paul Allen; I saw him in the audience, and I handed him a copy of "Rare Earth." And Jill Tarter was there, and she turned to me, and she looked at me just like that girl in "The Exorcist." It was, "It burns! It burns!" Because SETI doesn't want to hear this. SETI wants there to be stuff out there. I really applaud the SETI efforts, but we have not heard anything yet. And I really do think we have to start thinking about what's a good planet and what isn't. Now, I throw this slide up because it indicates to me that, even if SETI does hear something, can we figure out what they said? Because this was a slide that was passed between the two major intelligences on Earth — a Mac to a PC — and it can't even get the letters right — (Laughter) — so how are we going to talk to the aliens? And if they're 50 light years away, and we call them up, and you blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then 50 years later it comes back and they say, Please repeat? I mean, there we are. Our planet is a good planet because it can keep water. Mars is a bad planet, but it's still good enough for us to go there and to live on its surface if we're protected. But Venus is a very bad — the worst — planet. Even though it's Earth-like, and even though early in its history it may very well have harbored Earth-like life, it soon succumbed to runaway greenhouse — that's an 800 degrees [Fahrenheit] surface — because of rampant carbon dioxide. Well, we know from astrobiology that we can really now predict what's going to happen to our particular planet. We are right now in the beautiful Oreo of existence — of at least life on Planet Earth — following the first horrible microbial age. In the Cambrian explosion, life emerged from the swamps, complexity arose, and from what we can tell, we're halfway through. We have as much time for animals to exist on this planet as they have been here now, till we hit the second microbial age. And that will happen, paradoxically — everything you hear about global warming — when we hit CO2 down to 10 parts per million, we are no longer going to have to have plants that are allowed to have any photosynthesis, and there go animals. So, after that we probably have seven billion years. The Sun increases in its intensity, in its brightness, and finally, at about 12 billion years after it first started, the Earth is consumed by a large Sun, and this is what's left. So, a planet like us is going to have an age and an old age, and we are in its golden summer age right now. But there's two fates to everything, isn't there? Now, a lot of you are going to die of old age, but some of you, horribly enough, are going to die in an accident. And that's the fate of a planet, too. Earth, if we're lucky enough — if it doesn't get hit by a Hale-Bopp, or gets blasted by some supernova nearby in the next seven billion years — we'll find under your feet. But what about accidental death? Well, paleontologists for the last 200 years have been charting death. It's strange — extinction as a concept wasn't even thought about until Baron Cuvier in France found this first mastodon. He couldn't match it up to any bones on the planet, and he said, Aha! It's extinct. And very soon after, the fossil record started yielding a very good idea of how many plants and animals there have been since complex life really began to leave a very interesting fossil record. In that complex record of fossils, there were times when lots of stuff seemed to be dying out very quickly, and the father/mother geologists called these "mass extinctions." All along it was thought to be either an act of God or perhaps long, slow climate change, and that really changed in 1980, in this rocky outcrop near Gubbio, where Walter Alvarez, trying to figure out what was the time difference between these white rocks, which held creatures of the Cretaceous period, and the pink rocks above, which held Tertiary fossils. How long did it take to go from one system to the next? And what they found was something unexpected. They found in this gap, in between, a very thin clay layer, and that clay layer — this very thin red layer here — is filled with iridium. And not just iridium; it's filled with glassy spherules, and it's filled with quartz grains that have been subjected to enormous pressure: shock quartz. Now, in this slide the white is chalk, and this chalk was deposited in a warm ocean. The chalk itself's composed by plankton which has fallen down from the sea surface onto the sea floor, so that 90 percent of the sediment here is skeleton of living stuff, and then you have that millimeter-thick red layer, and then you have black rock. And the black rock is the sediment on the sea bottom in the absence of plankton. And that's what happens in an asteroid catastrophe, because that's what this was, of course. This is the famous K-T. A 10-kilometer body hit the planet. The effects of it spread this very thin impact layer all over the planet, and we had very quickly the death of the dinosaurs, the death of these beautiful ammonites, Leconteiceras here, and Celaeceras over here, and so much else. I mean, it must be true, because we've had two Hollywood blockbusters since that time, and this paradigm, from 1980 to about 2000, totally changed how we geologists thought about catastrophes. Prior to that, uniformitarianism was the dominant paradigm: the fact that if anything happens on the planet in the past, there are present-day processes that will explain it. But we haven't witnessed a big asteroid impact, so this is a type of neo-catastrophism, and it took about 20 years for the scientific establishment to finally come to grips: yes, we were hit; and yes, the effects of that hit caused a major mass extinction. Well, there are five major mass extinctions over the last 500 million years, called the Big Five. They range from 450 million years ago to the last, the K-T, number four, but the biggest of all was the P, or the Permian extinction, sometimes called the mother of all mass extinctions. And every one of these has been subsequently blamed on large-body impact. But is this true? The most recent, the Permian, was thought to have been an impact because of this beautiful structure on the right. This is a Buckminsterfullerene, a carbon-60. Because it looks like those terrible geodesic domes of my late beloved '60s, they're called "buckyballs." This evidence was used to suggest that at the end of the Permian, 250 million years ago, a comet hit us. And when the comet hits, the pressure produces the buckyballs, and it captures bits of the comet. Helium-3: very rare on the surface of the Earth, very common in space. But is this true? In 1990, working on the K-T extinction for 10 years, I moved to South Africa to begin work twice a year in the great Karoo desert. I was so lucky to watch the change of that South Africa into the new South Africa as I went year by year. And I worked on this Permian extinction, camping by this Boer graveyard for months at a time. And the fossils are extraordinary. You know, you're gazing upon your very distant ancestors. These are mammal-like reptiles. They are culturally invisible. We do not make movies about these. This is a Gorgonopsian, or a Gorgon. That's an 18-inch long skull of an animal that was probably seven or eight feet, sprawled like a lizard, probably had a head like a lion. This is the top carnivore, the T-Rex of its time. But there's lots of stuff. This is my poor son, Patrick. (Laughter) This is called paleontological child abuse. Hold still, you're the scale. (Laughter) There was big stuff back then. Fifty-five species of mammal-like reptiles. The age of mammals had well and truly started 250 million years ago ... ... and then a catastrophe happened. And what happens next is the age of dinosaurs. It was all a mistake; it should have never happened. But it did. Now, luckily, this Thrinaxodon, the size of a robin egg here: this is a skull I've discovered just before taking this picture — there's a pen for scale; it's really tiny — this is in the Lower Triassic, after the mass extinction has finished. You can see the eye socket and you can see the little teeth in the front. If that does not survive, I'm not the thing giving this talk. Something else is, because if that doesn't survive, we are not here; there are no mammals. It's that close; one species ekes through. Well, can we say anything about the pattern of who survives and who doesn't? Here's sort of the end of that 10 years of work. The ranges of stuff — the red line is the mass extinction. But we've got survivors and things that get through, and it turns out the things that get through preferentially are cold bloods. Warm-blooded animals take a huge hit at this time. The survivors that do get through produce this world of crocodile-like creatures. There's no dinosaurs yet; just this slow, saurian, scaly, nasty, swampy place with a couple of tiny mammals hiding in the fringes. And there they would hide for 160 million years, until liberated by that K-T asteroid. So, if not impact, what? And the what, I think, is that we returned, over and over again, to the Pre-Cambrian world, that first microbial age, and the microbes are still out there. They hate we animals. They really want their world back. And they've tried over and over and over again. This suggests to me that life causing these mass extinctions because it did is inherently anti-Gaian. This whole Gaia idea, that life makes the world better for itself — anybody been on a freeway on a Friday afternoon in Los Angeles believing in the Gaia theory? No. So, I really suspect there's an alternative, and that life does actually try to do itself in — not consciously, but just because it does. And here's the weapon, it seems, that it did so over the last 500 million years. There are microbes which, through their metabolism, produce hydrogen sulfide, and they do so in large amounts. Hydrogen sulfide is very fatal to we humans. As small as 200 parts per million will kill you. You only have to go to the Black Sea and a few other places — some lakes — and get down, and you'll find that the water itself turns purple. It turns purple from the presence of numerous microbes which have to have sunlight and have to have hydrogen sulfide, and we can detect their presence today — we can see them — but we can also detect their presence in the past. And the last three years have seen an enormous breakthrough in a brand-new field. I am almost extinct — I'm a paleontologist who collects fossils. But the new wave of paleontologists — my graduate students — collect biomarkers. They take the sediment itself, they extract the oil from it, and from that they can produce compounds which turn out to be very specific to particular microbial groups. It's because lipids are so tough, they can get preserved in sediment and last the hundreds of millions of years necessary, and be extracted and tell us who was there. And we know who was there. At the end of the Permian, at many of these mass extinction boundaries, this is what we find: isorenieratene. It's very specific. It can only occur if the surface of the ocean has no oxygen, and is totally saturated with hydrogen sulfide — enough, for instance, to come out of solution. This led Lee Kump, and others from Penn State and my group, to propose what I call the Kump Hypothesis: many of the mass extinctions were caused by lowering oxygen, by high CO2. And the worst effect of global warming, it turns out: hydrogen sulfide being produced out of the oceans. Well, what's the source of this? In this particular case, the source over and over has been flood basalts. This is a view of the Earth now, if we extract a lot of it. And each of these looks like a hydrogen bomb; actually, the effects are even worse. This is when deep-Earth material comes to the surface, spreads out over the surface of the planet. Well, it's not the lava that kills anything, it's the carbon dioxide that comes out with it. This isn't Volvos; this is volcanoes. But carbon dioxide is carbon dioxide. So, these are new data Rob Berner and I — from Yale — put together, and what we try to do now is track the amount of carbon dioxide in the entire rock record — and we can do this from a variety of means — and put all the red lines here, when these — what I call greenhouse mass extinctions — took place. And there's two things that are really evident here to me, is that these extinctions take place when CO2 is going up. But the second thing that's not shown on here: the Earth has never had any ice on it when we've had 1,000 parts per million CO2. We are at 380 and climbing. We should be up to a thousand in three centuries at the most, but my friend David Battisti in Seattle says he thinks a 100 years. So, there goes the ice caps, and there comes 240 feet of sea level rise. I live in a view house now; I'm going to have waterfront. All right, what's the consequence? The oceans probably turn purple. And we think this is the reason that complexity took so long to take place on planet Earth. We had these hydrogen sulfide oceans for a very great long period. They stop complex life from existing. We know hydrogen sulfide is erupting presently a few places on the planet. And I throw this slide in — this is me, actually, two months ago — and I throw this slide in because here is my favorite animal, chambered nautilus. It's been on this planet since the animals first started — 500 million years. This is a tracking experiment, and any of you scuba divers, if you want to get involved in one of the coolest projects ever, this is off the Great Barrier Reef. And as we speak now, these nautilus are tracking out their behaviors to us. But the thing about this is that every once in a while we divers can run into trouble, so I'm going to do a little thought experiment here. This is a Great White Shark that ate some of my traps. We pulled it up; up it comes. So, it's out there with me at night. So, I'm swimming along, and it takes off my leg. I'm 80 miles from shore, what's going to happen to me? Well now, I die. Five years from now, this is what I hope happens to me: I'm taken back to the boat, I'm given a gas mask: 80 parts per million hydrogen sulfide. I'm then thrown in an ice pond, I'm cooled 15 degrees lower and I could be taken to a critical care hospital. And the reason I could do that is because we mammals have gone through a series of these hydrogen sulfide events, and our bodies have adapted. And we can now use this as what I think will be a major medical breakthrough. This is Mark Roth. He was funded by DARPA. Tried to figure out how to save Americans after battlefield injuries. He bleeds out pigs. He puts in 80 parts per million hydrogen sulfide — the same stuff that survived these past mass extinctions — and he turns a mammal into a reptile. "I believe we are seeing in this response the result of mammals and reptiles having undergone a series of exposures to H2S." I got this email from him two years ago; he said, "I think I've got an answer to some of your questions." So, he now has taken mice down for as many as four hours, sometimes six hours, and these are brand-new data he sent me on the way over here. On the top, now, that is a temperature record of a mouse who has gone through — the dotted line, the temperatures. So, the temperature starts at 25 centigrade, and down it goes, down it goes. Six hours later, up goes the temperature. Now, the same mouse is given 80 parts per million hydrogen sulfide in this solid graph, and look what happens to its temperature. Its temperature drops. It goes down to 15 degrees centigrade from 35, and comes out of this perfectly fine. Here is a way we can get people to critical care. Here's how we can bring people cold enough to last till we get critical care. Now, you're all thinking, yeah, what about the brain tissue? And so this is one of the great challenges that is going to happen. You're in an accident. You've got two choices: you're going to die, or you're going to take the hydrogen sulfide and, say, 75 percent of you is saved, mentally. What are you going to do? Do we all have to have a little button saying, Let me die? This is coming towards us, and I think this is going to be a revolution. We're going to save lives, but there's going to be a cost to it. The new view of mass extinctions is, yes, we were hit, and, yes, we have to think about the long term, because we will get hit again. But there's a far worse danger confronting us. We can easily go back to the hydrogen sulfide world. Give us a few millennia — and we humans should last those few millennia — will it happen again? If we continue, it'll happen again. How many of us flew here? How many of us have gone through our entire Kyoto quota just for flying this year? How many of you have exceeded it? Yeah, I've certainly exceeded it. We have a huge problem facing us as a species. We have to beat this. I want to be able to go back to this reef. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: I've just got one question for you, Peter. Am I understanding you right, that what you're saying here is that we have in our own bodies a biochemical response to hydrogen sulfide that in your mind proves that there have been past mass extinctions due to climate change? Peter Ward: Yeah, every single cell in us can produce minute quantities of hydrogen sulfide in great crises. This is what Roth has found out. So, what we're looking at now: does it leave a signal? Does it leave a signal in bone or in plant? And we go back to the fossil record and we could try to detect how many of these have happened in the past. CA: It's simultaneously an incredible medical technique, but also a terrifying ... PW: Blessing and curse.

Changing my legs - and my mindset

Aimee Mullins

{0: 'Aimee Mullins'}

{0: ['athlete and actor']}

{0: 'A record-breaker at the Paralympic Games in 1996, Aimee Mullins has built a career as a model, actor and advocate for women, sports and the next generation of prosthetics. '}

1998-02-02

2009-01-28

TED1998

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'lt', 'nb', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sr', 'sv', 'th', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['beauty', 'body language', 'design', 'prosthetics', 'sports', 'technology', 'bionics']

{82: 'Luke, a new prosthetic arm for soldiers', 482: 'My 12 pairs of legs', 769: 'The opportunity of adversity', 1986: 'Are athletes really getting faster, better, stronger?', 1285: 'Living beyond limits', 1311: 'There are no scraps of men'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/aimee_mullins_changing_my_legs_and_my_mindset/

In this TED archive video from 1998, paralympic sprinter Aimee Mullins talks about her record-setting career as a runner, and about the amazing carbon-fiber prosthetic legs (then a prototype) that helped her cross the finish line.

Sheryl Shade: Hi, Aimee. Aimee Mullins: Hi. SS: Aimee and I thought we'd just talk a little bit, and I wanted her to tell all of you what makes her a distinctive athlete. AM: Well, for those of you who have seen the picture in the little bio — it might have given it away — I'm a double amputee, and I was born without fibulas in both legs. I was amputated at age one, and I've been running like hell ever since, all over the place. SS: Well, why don't you tell them how you got to Georgetown — why don't we start there? Why don't we start there? AM: I'm a senior in Georgetown in the Foreign Service program. I won a full academic scholarship out of high school. They pick three students out of the nation every year to get involved in international affairs, and so I won a full ride to Georgetown and I've been there for four years. Love it. SS: When Aimee got there, she decided that she's, kind of, curious about track and field, so she decided to call someone and start asking about it. So, why don't you tell that story? AM: Yeah. Well, I guess I've always been involved in sports. I played softball for five years growing up. I skied competitively throughout high school, and I got a little restless in college because I wasn't doing anything for about a year or two sports-wise. And I'd never competed on a disabled level, you know — I'd always competed against other able-bodied athletes. That's all I'd ever known. In fact, I'd never even met another amputee until I was 17. And I heard that they do these track meets with all disabled runners, and I figured, "Oh, I don't know about this, but before I judge it, let me go see what it's all about." So, I booked myself a flight to Boston in '95, 19 years old and definitely the dark horse candidate at this race. I'd never done it before. I went out on a gravel track a couple of weeks before this meet to see how far I could run, and about 50 meters was enough for me, panting and heaving. And I had these legs that were made of a wood and plastic compound, attached with Velcro straps — big, thick, five-ply wool socks on — you know, not the most comfortable things, but all I'd ever known. And I'm up there in Boston against people wearing legs made of all things — carbon graphite and, you know, shock absorbers in them and all sorts of things — and they're all looking at me like, OK, we know who's not going to win this race. And, I mean, I went up there expecting — I don't know what I was expecting — but, you know, when I saw a man who was missing an entire leg go up to the high jump, hop on one leg to the high jump and clear it at six feet, two inches ... Dan O'Brien jumped 5'11" in '96 in Atlanta, I mean, if it just gives you a comparison of — these are truly accomplished athletes, without qualifying that word "athlete." And so I decided to give this a shot: heart pounding, I ran my first race and I beat the national record-holder by three hundredths of a second, and became the new national record-holder on my first try out. And, you know, people said, "Aimee, you know, you've got speed — you've got natural speed — but you don't have any skill or finesse going down that track. You were all over the place. We all saw how hard you were working." And so I decided to call the track coach at Georgetown. And I thank god I didn't know just how huge this man is in the track and field world. He's coached five Olympians, and the man's office is lined from floor to ceiling with All America certificates of all these athletes he's coached. He's just a rather intimidating figure. And I called him up and said, "Listen, I ran one race and I won ..." (Laughter) "I want to see if I can, you know — I need to just see if I can sit in on some of your practices, see what drills you do and whatever." That's all I wanted — just two practices. "Can I just sit in and see what you do?" And he said, "Well, we should meet first, before we decide anything." You know, he's thinking, "What am I getting myself into?" So, I met the man, walked in his office, and saw these posters and magazine covers of people he has coached. And we got to talking, and it turned out to be a great partnership because he'd never coached a disabled athlete, so therefore he had no preconceived notions of what I was or wasn't capable of, and I'd never been coached before. So this was like, "Here we go — let's start on this trip." So he started giving me four days a week of his lunch break, his free time, and I would come up to the track and train with him. So that's how I met Frank. That was fall of '95. But then, by the time that winter was rolling around, he said, "You know, you're good enough. You can run on our women's track team here." And I said, "No, come on." And he said, "No, no, really. You can. You can run with our women's track team." In the spring of 1996, with my goal of making the U.S. Paralympic team that May coming up full speed, I joined the women's track team. And no disabled person had ever done that — run at a collegiate level. So I don't know, it started to become an interesting mix. SS: Well, on your way to the Olympics, a couple of memorable events happened at Georgetown. Why don't you just tell them? AM: Yes, well, you know, I'd won everything as far as the disabled meets — everything I competed in — and, you know, training in Georgetown and knowing that I was going to have to get used to seeing the backs of all these women's shirts — you know, I'm running against the next Flo-Jo — and they're all looking at me like, "Hmm, what's, you know, what's going on here?" And putting on my Georgetown uniform and going out there and knowing that, you know, in order to become better — and I'm already the best in the country — you know, you have to train with people who are inherently better than you. And I went out there and made it to the Big East, which was sort of the championship race at the end of the season. It was really, really hot. And it's the first — I had just gotten these new sprinting legs that you see in that bio, and I didn't realize at that time that the amount of sweating I would be doing in the sock — it actually acted like a lubricant and I'd be, kind of, pistoning in the socket. And at about 85 meters of my 100 meters sprint, in all my glory, I came out of my leg. Like, I almost came out of it, in front of, like, 5,000 people. And I, I mean, was just mortified — because I was signed up for the 200, you know, which went off in a half hour. (Laughter) I went to my coach: "Please, don't make me do this." I can't do this in front of all those people. My legs will come off. And if it came off at 85 there's no way I'm going 200 meters. And he just sat there like this. My pleas fell on deaf ears, thank god. Because you know, the man is from Brooklyn; he's a big man. He says, "Aimee, so what if your leg falls off? You pick it up, you put the damn thing back on, and finish the goddamn race!" (Laughter) (Applause) And I did. So, he kept me in line. He kept me on the right track. SS: So, then Aimee makes it to the 1996 Paralympics, and she's all excited. Her family's coming down — it's a big deal. It's now two years that you've been running? AM: No, a year. SS: A year. And why don't you tell them what happened right before you go run your race? AM: Okay, well, Atlanta. The Paralympics, just for a little bit of clarification, are the Olympics for people with physical disabilities — amputees, persons with cerebral palsy, and wheelchair athletes — as opposed to the Special Olympics, which deals with people with mental disabilities. So, here we are, a week after the Olympics and down at Atlanta, and I'm just blown away by the fact that just a year ago, I got out on a gravel track and couldn't run 50 meters. And so, here I am — never lost. I set new records at the U.S. Nationals — the Olympic trials — that May, and was sure that I was coming home with the gold. I was also the only, what they call "bilateral BK" — below the knee. I was the only woman who would be doing the long jump. I had just done the long jump, and a guy who was missing two legs came up to me and says, "How do you do that? You know, we're supposed to have a planar foot, so we can't get off on the springboard." I said, "Well, I just did it. No one told me that." So, it's funny — I'm three inches within the world record — and kept on from that point, you know, so I'm signed up in the long jump — signed up? No, I made it for the long jump and the 100-meter. And I'm sure of it, you know? I made the front page of my hometown paper that I delivered for six years, you know? It was, like, this is my time for shine. And we're at the trainee warm-up track, which is a few blocks away from the Olympic stadium. These legs that I was on, which I'll take out right now — I was the first person in the world on these legs. I was the guinea pig., I'm telling you, this was, like — talk about a tourist attraction. Everyone was taking pictures — "What is this girl running on?" And I'm always looking around, like, where is my competition? It's my first international meet. I tried to get it out of anybody I could, you know, "Who am I running against here?" "Oh, Aimee, we'll have to get back to you on that one." I wanted to find out times. "Don't worry, you're doing great." This is 20 minutes before my race in the Olympic stadium, and they post the heat sheets. And I go over and look. And my fastest time, which was the world record, was 15.77. Then I'm looking: the next lane, lane two, is 12.8. Lane three is 12.5. Lane four is 12.2. I said, "What's going on?" And they shove us all into the shuttle bus, and all the women there are missing a hand. (Laughter) So, I'm just, like — they're all looking at me like 'which one of these is not like the other,' you know? I'm sitting there, like, "Oh, my god. Oh, my god." You know, I'd never lost anything, like, whether it would be the scholarship or, you know, I'd won five golds when I skied. In everything, I came in first. And Georgetown — that was great. I was losing, but it was the best training because this was Atlanta. Here we are, like, crème de la crème, and there is no doubt about it, that I'm going to lose big. And, you know, I'm just thinking, "Oh, my god, my whole family got in a van and drove down here from Pennsylvania." And, you know, I was the only female U.S. sprinter. So they call us out and, you know — "Ladies, you have one minute." And I remember putting my blocks in and just feeling horrified because there was just this murmur coming over the crowd, like, the ones who are close enough to the starting line to see. And I'm like, "I know! Look! This isn't right." And I'm thinking that's my last card to play here; if I'm not going to beat these girls, I'm going to mess their heads a little, you know? (Laughter) I mean, it was definitely the "Rocky IV" sensation of me versus Germany, and everyone else — Estonia and Poland — was in this heat. And the gun went off, and all I remember was finishing last and fighting back tears of frustration and incredible — incredible — this feeling of just being overwhelmed. And I had to think, "Why did I do this?" If I had won everything — but it was like, what was the point? All this training — I had transformed my life. I became a collegiate athlete, you know. I became an Olympic athlete. And it made me really think about how the achievement was getting there. I mean, the fact that I set my sights, just a year and three months before, on becoming an Olympic athlete and saying, "Here's my life going in this direction — and I want to take it here for a while, and just seeing how far I could push it." And the fact that I asked for help — how many people jumped on board? How many people gave of their time and their expertise, and their patience, to deal with me? And that was this collective glory — that there was, you know, 50 people behind me that had joined in this incredible experience of going to Atlanta. So, I apply this sort of philosophy now to everything I do: sitting back and realizing the progression, how far you've come at this day to this goal, you know. It's important to focus on a goal, I think, but also recognize the progression on the way there and how you've grown as a person. That's the achievement, I think. That's the real achievement. SS: Why don't you show them your legs? AM: Oh, sure. SS: You know, show us more than one set of legs. AM: Well, these are my pretty legs. (Laughter) No, these are my cosmetic legs, actually, and they're absolutely beautiful. You've got to come up and see them. There are hair follicles on them, and I can paint my toenails. And, seriously, like, I can wear heels. Like, you guys don't understand what that's like to be able to just go into a shoe store and buy whatever you want. SS: You got to pick your height? AM: I got to pick my height, exactly. (Laughter) Patrick Ewing, who played for Georgetown in the '80s, comes back every summer. And I had incessant fun making fun of him in the training room because he'd come in with foot injuries. I'm like, "Get it off! Don't worry about it, you know. You can be eight feet tall. Just take them off." (Laughter) He didn't find it as humorous as I did, anyway. OK, now, these are my sprinting legs, made of carbon graphite, like I said, and I've got to make sure I've got the right socket. No, I've got so many legs in here. These are — do you want to hold that actually? That's another leg I have for, like, tennis and softball. It has a shock absorber in it so it, like, "Shhhh," makes this neat sound when you jump around on it. All right. And then this is the silicon sheath I roll over, to keep it on. Which, when I sweat, you know, I'm pistoning out of it. SS: Are you a different height? AM: In these? SS: In these. AM: I don't know. I don't think so. I may be a little taller. I actually can put both of them on. SS: She can't really stand on these legs. She has to be moving, so ... AM: Yeah, I definitely have to be moving, and balance is a little bit of an art in them. But without having the silicon sock, I'm just going to try slip in it. And so, I run on these, and have shocked half the world on these. (Applause) These are supposed to simulate the actual form of a sprinter when they run. If you ever watch a sprinter, the ball of their foot is the only thing that ever hits the track. So when I stand in these legs, my hamstring and my glutes are contracted, as they would be had I had feet and were standing on the ball of my feet. (Audience: Who made them?) AM: It's a company in San Diego called Flex-Foot. And I was a guinea pig, as I hope to continue to be in every new form of prosthetic limbs that come out. But actually these, like I said, are still the actual prototype. I need to get some new ones because the last meet I was at, they were everywhere. You know, it's like a big — it's come full circle. Moderator: Aimee and the designer of them will be at TEDMED 2, and we'll talk about the design of them. AM: Yes, we'll do that. SS: Yes, there you go. AM: So, these are the sprint legs, and I can put my other... SS: Can you tell about who designed your other legs? AM: Yes. These I got in a place called Bournemouth, England, about two hours south of London, and I'm the only person in the United States with these, which is a crime because they are so beautiful. And I don't even mean, like, because of the toes and everything. For me, while I'm such a serious athlete on the track, I want to be feminine off the track, and I think it's so important not to be limited in any capacity, whether it's, you know, your mobility or even fashion. I mean, I love the fact that I can go in anywhere and pick out what I want — the shoes I want, the skirts I want — and I'm hoping to try to bring these over here and make them accessible to a lot of people. They're also silicon. This is a really basic, basic prosthetic limb under here. It's like a Barbie foot under this. (Laughter) It is. It's just stuck in this position, so I have to wear a two-inch heel. And, I mean, it's really — let me take this off so you can see it. I don't know how good you can see it, but, like, it really is. There're veins on the feet, and then my heel is pink, and my Achilles' tendon — that moves a little bit. And it's really an amazing store. I got them a year and two weeks ago. And this is just a silicon piece of skin. I mean, what happened was, two years ago this man in Belgium was saying, "God, if I can go to Madame Tussauds' wax museum and see Jerry Hall replicated down to the color of her eyes, looking so real as if she breathed, why can't they build a limb for someone that looks like a leg, or an arm, or a hand?" I mean, they make ears for burn victims. They do amazing stuff with silicon. SS: Two weeks ago, Aimee was up for the Arthur Ashe award at the ESPYs. And she came into town and she rushed around and she said, "I have to buy some new shoes!" We're an hour before the ESPYs, and she thought she'd gotten a two-inch heel but she'd actually bought a three-inch heel. AM: And this poses a problem for me, because it means I'm walking like that all night long. SS: For 45 minutes. Luckily, the hotel was terrific. They got someone to come in and saw off the shoes. (Laughter) AM: I said to the receptionist — I mean, I am just harried, and Sheryl's at my side — I said, "Look, do you have anybody here who could help me? Because I have this problem ... " You know, at first they were just going to write me off, like, "If you don't like your shoes, sorry. It's too late." "No, no, no, no. I've got these special feet that need a two-inch heel. I have a three-inch heel. I need a little bit off." They didn't even want to go there. They didn't even want to touch that one. They just did it. No, these legs are great. I'm actually going back in a couple of weeks to get some improvements. I want to get legs like these made for flat feet so I can wear sneakers, because I can't with these ones. So... Moderator: That's it. SS: That's Aimee Mullins. (Applause)

Solving medical mysteries

Joe DeRisi

{0: 'Joe DeRisi'}

{0: ['biochemist']}

{0: 'Joe DeRisi hunts for the genes that make us sick. At his lab, he works to understand the genome of Plasmodium falciparum, the deadliest form of malaria. '}

2006-02-02

2009-01-29

TED2006

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'mk', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['global issues', 'illness', 'medicine', 'science', 'technology', 'virus']

{499: 'The jungle search for viruses', 142: 'The potential of regenerative medicine', 259: 'Can we domesticate germs?', 46518: 'How do viruses jump from animals to humans?', 50853: 'What vaccinating vampire bats can teach us about pandemics', 529: 'Lessons from the 1918 flu'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/joe_derisi_solving_medical_mysteries/

Biochemist Joe DeRisi talks about amazing new ways to diagnose viruses (and treat the illnesses they cause) using DNA. His work may help us understand malaria, SARS, avian flu -- and the 60 percent of everyday viral infections that go undiagnosed.

How can we investigate this flora of viruses that surround us, and aid medicine? How can we turn our cumulative knowledge of virology into a simple, hand-held, single diagnostic assay? I want to turn everything we know right now about detecting viruses and the spectrum of viruses that are out there into, let's say, a small chip. When we started thinking about this project — how we would make a single diagnostic assay to screen for all pathogens simultaneously — well, there's some problems with this idea. First of all, viruses are pretty complex, but they're also evolving very fast. This is a picornavirus. Picornaviruses — these are things that include the common cold and polio, things like this. You're looking at the outside shell of the virus, and the yellow color here are those parts of the virus that are evolving very, very fast, and the blue parts are not evolving very fast. When people think about making pan-viral detection reagents, usually it's the fast-evolving problem that's an issue, because how can we detect things if they're always changing? But evolution is a balance: where you have fast change, you also have ultra-conservation — things that almost never change. And so we looked into this a little more carefully, and I'm going to show you data now. This is just some stuff you can do on the computer from the desktop. I took a bunch of these small picornaviruses, like the common cold, like polio and so on, and I just broke them down into small segments. And so took this first example, which is called coxsackievirus, and just break it into small windows. And I'm coloring these small windows blue if another virus shares an identical sequence in its genome to that virus. These sequences right up here — which don't even code for protein, by the way — are almost absolutely identical across all of these, so I could use this sequence as a marker to detect a wide spectrum of viruses, without having to make something individual. Now, over here there's great diversity: that's where things are evolving fast. Down here you can see slower evolution: less diversity. Now, by the time we get out here to, let's say, acute bee paralysis virus — probably a bad one to have if you're a bee —- this virus shares almost no similarity to coxsackievirus, but I can guarantee you that the sequences that are most conserved among these viruses on the right-hand of the screen are in identical regions right up here. And so we can encapsulate these regions of ultra-conservation through evolution — how these viruses evolved — by just choosing DNA elements or RNA elements in these regions to represent on our chip as detection reagents. OK, so that's what we did, but how are we going to do that? Well, for a long time, since I was in graduate school, I've been messing around making DNA chips — that is, printing DNA on glass. And that's what you see here: These little salt spots are just DNA tacked onto glass, and so I can put thousands of these on our glass chip and use them as a detection reagent. We took our chip over to Hewlett-Packard and used their atomic force microscope on one of these spots, and this is what you see: you can actually see the strands of DNA lying flat on the glass here. So, what we're doing is just printing DNA on glass — little flat things — and these are going to be markers for pathogens. OK, I make little robots in lab to make these chips, and I'm really big on disseminating technology. If you've got enough money to buy just a Camry, you can build one of these too, and so we put a deep how-to guide on the Web, totally free, with basically order-off-the-shelf parts. You can build a DNA array machine in your garage. Here's the section on the all-important emergency stop switch. (Laughter) Every important machine's got to have a big red button. But really, it's pretty robust. You can actually be making DNA chips in your garage and decoding some genetic programs pretty rapidly. It's a lot of fun. (Laughter) And so what we did — and this is a really cool project — we just started by making a respiratory virus chip. I talked about that — you know, that situation where you go into the clinic and you don't get diagnosed? Well, we just put basically all the human respiratory viruses on one chip, and we threw in herpes virus for good measure — I mean, why not? The first thing you do as a scientist is, you make sure stuff works. And so what we did is, we take tissue culture cells and infect them with various viruses, and we take the stuff and fluorescently label the nucleic acid, the genetic material that comes out of these tissue culture cells — mostly viral stuff — and stick it on the array to see where it sticks. Now, if the DNA sequences match, they'll stick together, and so we can look at spots. And if spots light up, we know there's a certain virus in there. That's what one of these chips really looks like, and these red spots are, in fact, signals coming from the virus. And each spot represents a different family of virus or species of virus. And so, that's a hard way to look at things, so I'm just going to encode things as a little barcode, grouped by family, so you can see the results in a very intuitive way. What we did is, we took tissue culture cells and infected them with adenovirus, and you can see this little yellow barcode next to adenovirus. And, likewise, we infected them with parainfluenza-3 — that's a paramyxovirus — and you see a little barcode here. And then we did respiratory syncytial virus. That's the scourge of daycare centers everywhere — it's like boogeremia, basically. (Laughter) You can see that this barcode is the same family, but it's distinct from parainfluenza-3, which gives you a very bad cold. And so we're getting unique signatures, a fingerprint for each virus. Polio and rhino: they're in the same family, very close to each other. Rhino's the common cold, and you all know what polio is, and you can see that these signatures are distinct. And Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpes virus gives a nice signature down here. And so it is not any one stripe or something that tells me I have a virus of a particular type here; it's the barcode that in bulk represents the whole thing. All right, I can see a rhinovirus — and here's the blow-up of the rhinovirus's little barcode — but what about different rhinoviruses? How do I know which rhinovirus I have? There're 102 known variants of the common cold, and there're only 102 because people got bored collecting them: there are just new ones every year. And so, here are four different rhinoviruses, and you can see, even with your eye, without any fancy computer pattern-matching recognition software algorithms, that you can distinguish each one of these barcodes from each other. Now, this is kind of a cheap shot, because I know what the genetic sequence of all these rhinoviruses is, and I in fact designed the chip expressly to be able to tell them apart, but what about rhinoviruses that have never seen a genetic sequencer? We don't know what the sequence is; just pull them out of the field. So, here are four rhinoviruses we never knew anything about — no one's ever sequenced them — and you can also see that you get unique and distinguishable patterns. You can imagine building up some library, whether real or virtual, of fingerprints of essentially every virus. But that's, again, shooting fish in a barrel, you know, right? You have tissue culture cells. There are a ton of viruses. What about real people? You can't control real people, as you probably know. You have no idea what someone's going to cough into a cup, and it's probably really complex, right? It could have lots of bacteria, it could have more than one virus, and it certainly has host genetic material. So how do we deal with this? And how do we do the positive control here? Well, it's pretty simple. That's me, getting a nasal lavage. And the idea is, let's experimentally inoculate people with virus. This is all IRB-approved, by the way; they got paid. And basically we experimentally inoculate people with the common cold virus. Or, even better, let's just take people right out of the emergency room — undefined, community-acquired respiratory tract infections. You have no idea what walks in through the door. So, let's start off with the positive control first, where we know the person was healthy. They got a shot of virus up the nose, let's see what happens. Day zero: nothing happening. They're healthy; they're clean — it's amazing. Actually, we thought the nasal tract might be full of viruses even when you're walking around healthy. It's pretty clean. If you're healthy, you're pretty healthy. Day two: we get a very robust rhinovirus pattern, and it's very similar to what we get in the lab doing our tissue culture experiment. So that's great, but again, cheap shot, right? We put a ton of virus up this guy's nose. So — (Laughter) — I mean, we wanted it to work. He really had a cold. So, how about the people who walk in off the street? Here are two individuals represented by their anonymous ID codes. They both have rhinoviruses; we've never seen this pattern in lab. We sequenced part of their viruses; they're new rhinoviruses no one's actually even seen. Remember, our evolutionary-conserved sequences we're using on this array allow us to detect even novel or uncharacterized viruses, because we pick what is conserved throughout evolution. Here's another guy. You can play the diagnosis game yourself here. These different blocks represent the different viruses in this paramyxovirus family, so you can kind of go down the blocks and see where the signal is. Well, doesn't have canine distemper; that's probably good. (Laughter) But by the time you get to block nine, you see that respiratory syncytial virus. Maybe they have kids. And then you can see, also, the family member that's related: RSVB is showing up here. So, that's great. Here's another individual, sampled on two separate days — repeat visits to the clinic. This individual has parainfluenza-1, and you can see that there's a little stripe over here for Sendai virus: that's mouse parainfluenza. The genetic relationships are very close there. That's a lot of fun. So, we built out the chip. We made a chip that has every known virus ever discovered on it. Why not? Every plant virus, every insect virus, every marine virus. Everything that we could get out of GenBank — that is, the national repository of sequences. Now we're using this chip. And what are we using it for? Well, first of all, when you have a big chip like this, you need a little bit more informatics, so we designed the system to do automatic diagnosis. And the idea is that we simply have virtual patterns, because we're never going to get samples of every virus — it would be virtually impossible. But we can get virtual patterns, and compare them to our observed result — which is a very complex mixture — and come up with some sort of score of how likely it is this is a rhinovirus or something. And this is what this looks like. If, for example, you used a cell culture that's chronically infected with papilloma, you get a little computer readout here, and our algorithm says it's probably papilloma type 18. And that is, in fact, what these particular cell cultures are chronically infected with. So let's do something a little bit harder. We put the beeper in the clinic. When somebody shows up, and the hospital doesn't know what to do because they can't diagnose it, they call us. That's the idea, and we're setting this up in the Bay Area. And so, this case report happened three weeks ago. We have a 28-year-old healthy woman, no travel history, [unclear], doesn't smoke, doesn't drink. 10-day history of fevers, night sweats, bloody sputum — she's coughing up blood — muscle pain. She went to the clinic, and they gave her antibiotics and then sent her home. She came back after ten days of fever, right? Still has the fever, and she's hypoxic — she doesn't have much oxygen in her lungs. They did a CT scan. A normal lung is all sort of dark and black here. All this white stuff — it's not good. This sort of tree and bud formation indicates there's inflammation; there's likely to be infection. OK. So, the patient was treated then with a third-generation cephalosporin antibiotic and doxycycline, and on day three, it didn't help: she had progressed to acute failure. They had to intubate her, so they put a tube down her throat and they began to mechanically ventilate her. She could no longer breathe for herself. What to do next? Don't know. Switch antibiotics: so they switched to another antibiotic, Tamiflu. It's not clear why they thought she had the flu, but they switched to Tamiflu. And on day six, they basically threw in the towel. You do an open lung biopsy when you've got no other options. There's an eight percent mortality rate with just doing this procedure, and so basically — and what do they learn from it? You're looking at her open lung biopsy. And I'm no pathologist, but you can't tell much from this. All you can tell is, there's a lot of swelling: bronchiolitis. It was "unrevealing": that's the pathologist's report. And so, what did they test her for? They have their own tests, of course, and so they tested her for over 70 different assays, for every sort of bacteria and fungus and viral assay you can buy off the shelf: SARS, metapneumovirus, HIV, RSV — all these. Everything came back negative, over 100,000 dollars worth of tests. I mean, they went to the max for this woman. And basically on hospital day eight, that's when they called us. They gave us endotracheal aspirate — you know, a little fluid from the throat, from this tube that they got down there — and they gave us this. We put it on the chip; what do we see? Well, we saw parainfluenza-4. Well, what the hell's parainfluenza-4? No one tests for parainfluenza-4. No one cares about it. In fact, it's not even really sequenced that much. There's just a little bit of it sequenced. There's almost no epidemiology or studies on it. No one would even consider it, because no one had a clue that it could cause respiratory failure. And why is that? Just lore. There's no data — no data to support whether it causes severe or mild disease. Clearly, we have a case of a healthy person that's going down. OK, that's one case report. I'm going to tell you one last thing in the last two minutes that's unpublished — it's going to come out tomorrow — and it's an interesting case of how you might use this chip to find something new and open a new door. Prostate cancer. I don't need to give you many statistics about prostate cancer. Most of you already know it: third leading cause of cancer deaths in the U.S. Lots of risk factors, but there is a genetic predisposition to prostate cancer. For maybe about 10 percent of prostate cancer, there are folks that are predisposed to it. And the first gene that was mapped in association studies for this, early-onset prostate cancer, was this gene called RNASEL. What is that? It's an antiviral defense enzyme. So, we're sitting around and thinking, "Why would men who have the mutation — a defect in an antiviral defense system — get prostate cancer? It doesn't make sense — unless, maybe, there's a virus?" So, we put tumors —- and now we have over 100 tumors — on our array. And we know who's got defects in RNASEL and who doesn't. And I'm showing you the signal from the chip here, and I'm showing you for the block of retroviral oligos. And what I'm telling you here from the signal, is that men who have a mutation in this antiviral defense enzyme, and have a tumor, often have — 40 percent of the time — a signature which reveals a new retrovirus. OK, that's pretty wild. What is it? So, we clone the whole virus. First of all, I'll tell you that a little automated prediction told us it was very similar to a mouse virus. But that doesn't tell us too much, so we actually clone the whole thing. And the viral genome I'm showing you right here? It's a classic gamma retrovirus, but it's totally new; no one's ever seen it before. Its closest relative is, in fact, from mice, and so we would call this a xenotropic retrovirus, because it's infecting a species other than mice. And this is a little phylogenetic tree to see how it's related to other viruses. We've done it for many patients now, and we can say that they're all independent infections. They all have the same virus, but they're different enough that there's reason to believe that they've been independently acquired. Is it really in the tissue? And I'll end up with this: yes. We take slices of these biopsies of tumor tissue and use material to actually locate the virus, and we find cells here with viral particles in them. These guys really do have this virus. Does this virus cause prostate cancer? Nothing I'm saying here implies causality. I don't know. Is it a link to oncogenesis? I don't know. Is it the case that these guys are just more susceptible to viruses? Could be. And it might have nothing to do with cancer. But now it's a door. We have a strong association between the presence of this virus and a genetic mutation that's been linked to cancer. That's where we're at. So, it opens up more questions than it answers, I'm afraid, but that's what, you know, science is really good at. This was all done by folks in the lab — I cannot take credit for most of this. This is a collaboration between myself and Don. This is the guy who started the project in my lab, and this is the guy who's been doing prostate stuff. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Fiddling in reel time

Natalie MacMaster

{0: 'Natalie MacMaster'}

{0: ['fiddler']}

{0: 'Natalie MacMaster is a star of Cape Breton fiddling, a Canadian tradition with Scottish roots. Her energetic style and virtuoso talent has brought her star billing on the international folk circuit.'}

2003-02-02

2009-01-30

TED2003

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'th', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['collaboration', 'culture', 'entertainment', 'music', 'piano', 'violin', 'live music', 'performance']

{1298: 'There are no mistakes on the bandstand', 959: 'Hurdy-gurdy for beginners', 246: 'Inventing instruments that unlock new music', 1808: 'In the key of genius', 1526: 'The mad scientist of music', 883: 'How architecture helped music evolve'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/natalie_macmaster_fiddling_in_reel_time/

Natalie MacMaster and her musical partner Donnell Leahy play several tunes from the Cape Breton tradition -- a sprightly, soulful style of folk fiddling. It's an inspired collaboration that will have you clapping (and maybe dancing) along.

Natalie MacMaster: I'm going to just quickly start out with a little bit of music here. (Applause) (Music) (Applause) Thank you! (Applause) I took my shoes off to dance, but maybe I'll get at that later. Anyways, I... where to start? Well, I'm really excited to talk a bit about my own upbringing in music and family and all of that, but I'm even more excited for you people to hear about Donnell's amazing family and maybe even a little bit about how we met, and all that sort of thing, but for those of you that may not be familiar with my upbringing, I'm from Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, eastern Canada, which is a very, very musical island, and its origins come from Scotland with the music and all the traditions, the dancing, the language, which unfortunately is dying out in Cape Breton. The traditional language is Gaelic, but a lot of the music came from the Gaelic language, and the dancing and the singing and everything, and my bloodline is Scottish through and through, but my mother and father are two very, very musical people. My mom taught me to dance when I was five, and my dad taught me to play fiddle when I was nine. My uncle is a very well-known Cape Breton fiddler. His name's Buddy MacMaster, and just a wonderful guy, and we have a great tradition at home called square dancing, and we had parties, great parties at our house and the neighbors' houses, and you talk about kitchen cèilidhs. Well, cèilidh first of all is Gaelic for party, but kitchen party in Cape Breton is very common, and basically somebody drops into the house, and no matter what house you go to in Cape Breton, there's a fiddle there, guaranteed, and I'd say, well there's first of all more fiddlers per capita in Cape Breton than anywhere in the world, so ten chances to one, the fellow who walked in the door could play it, so you'd have someone come into the house, you'd invite them to play a tune, and lo and behold a little party would start up and somebody would dance, and somebody would sing, and all that sort of thing, so it was a wonderful, wonderful way to grow up, and that is where my beginnings in music come from: my surroundings, my family, just my bloodline in itself, and, oh, I've done lots of things with my music. I've recorded lots of CDs. I was nominated for a Grammy and I've won some awards and stuff like that, so that's awesome, but the best part was meeting my husband, and I've actually known Donnell for probably 12 years now, and I'm going to get into a little bit of, I guess, how music brought us together, but I'm going to introduce you right now to my new husband as of October 5, Donnell Leahy. (Applause) (Applause) Donnell Leahy: Thank you. I'm kind of new to the TED experience and I'm glad to be here, but I'm just trying to put it all together, trying to figure all you people out, and I've been here for a short while, and I'm starting to understand a little bit better. So I asked Natalie, what do I do? And she said, just talk about yourself. It's kind of boring, but I'll just tell you a little bit about my family. I'm one of 11 brothers and sisters from Lakefield, Ontario, an hour and a half northeast of Toronto, and we grew up on a farm. Mom and Dad raised beef cattle, and I'm the oldest boy. There are four girls a little bit older than me. We grew up without a television. People find that strange, but I think it was a great blessing for us. We had a television for a few years, but of course we wasted so much time and the work wasn't getting done, so out went the television. We grew up playing— Mom's from Cape Breton, coincidentally. Mom and Natalie's mother knew each other. We grew up playing, and used to dance together, right, yeah. (Laughter) We grew up playing a bunch of, we played by ear and I think that's important for us because we were not really exposed to a lot of different styles of music. We learned to play the instruments, but we kind of had to come from within or go from within, because we didn't watch television, we didn't listen to a lot of radio. We went to church and to school sometimes, and farmed and played music, so we were able, I think, at a very critical age to develop our own style, our own self, and my mother plays, my father plays, and the style that came from the Ottawa Valley in Ontario, we call it French-Canadian style but it originated in logging camps. Years ago, hundreds of men would go up for the winter to the camps in Northern Ontario and in Quebec, and they were all different cultures, and the Irish, the French, Scottish, German, they'd all meet, and of course at night, they'd play cards and step dance and play fiddles, and over the course of many years, the Ottawa Valley fiddling kind of evolved and the Ottawa Valley step dancing evolved, so that's, I kind of started out with that style and I quickly started doing my own thing, and then I met Natalie, and I was exposed to the great Cape Breton fiddling. That's how we met. (Laughter) You tell them. (Laughter) NM: You want to or no? (Laughter) Well I guess I have to now. Well, it's just so interesting that Donnell's upbringing was very similar to mine, and I actually saw Donnell play when I was about 12 years old, and he and his family came to Inverness, which is about 45 minutes from where I lived, and I was just blown away, like, it was just amazing, and you'll find out why pretty soon here, but I couldn't believe the fiddling and Mom was there with me, and she was saying — Donnell's mother came up on stage and danced with her children, and Mom was saying, "That's Julie MacDonnell, I used to dance with her when we were kids. Little did I think our children would be playing instruments, you know, playing music, yeah." Twelve years, er, 20 years later little did she think her kids would be getting married, but anyway, so, then I got a phone call about, I dunno, seven years later. I was 19, first or second year of college, and it was Donnell, and he said "Hi, you probably don't know me but my name is Donnell Leahy." And I said, "I know you. I have a tape of yours at home." And he said, "Well, I'm in Truro," which is where I was, and he asked me out for supper. That's it. (Laughter) (Applause) Then — Will I keep going? (Laughs) (Laughter) Then we dated for two years, broke up for 10, got back together and got married. (Laughter) (Applause) DL: So anyway, we're running out of time, so I'll just get to it. I'm going to play a piece of music for you. It's actually a Scottish piece I've chosen. I starts out with a slow air. Airs were played in Europe at burials, as a body was carried out from the wake site to the burial site, the procession was led by a piper or a fiddle player. I'll quickly play a short part of the air, and then I'm going to get into kind of a crazy tune that is very difficult to play when you're not warmed up, so, if I mess it up, pretend you like it anyway. It's called The Banks. (Tuning) (Laughter) (Music) (Applause) NM: Well, we're gonna play one together now. (Applause) We're laughing, like, because our styles are totally different, as you can hear. And so, you know, Donnell and I are actually in the process of writing new pieces of music together that we can play, but we don't have any of those ready. We just started yesterday. (Laughter) So we're gonna play something together anyway. DL: With one minute. NM: With one minute. (Audience reaction) DL: You start. NM: No, you have to start, because you've got to do your thing. (Music) NM: I'm not tuned. Hold on. (Tuning) NM: I feel like I'm in the duck or the bird pose right now. (Laughter) (Music) (Audience claps along) (Applause) Announcer: Great news, they're running late downstairs. We've got another 10 minutes. (Applause) NM: Okay. Sure. All right, okay. Let's get her going. (Applause) (Tuning) DL: What do you want to play? NM: Well, um... (Music) (Laughter) NM: Uh, sure. DL: How fast? NM: Not too fast. (Music) (Audience claps along) (Cheering) (Audience claps along) (Music) (Applause) DL: We're going to play a tune and Natalie's going to accompany me on the piano. The Cape Breton piano playing is just awesome. It's very rhythmic and, you'll see it. My mom plays piano, and she learned to play before they had a piano at home in Cape Breton. Before Mom's family had a piano in Cape Breton, she learned to play the rhythms on a piece of board, and the fiddlers would all congregate to play on the cold winter's evenings and Mom would be banging on this board, so when they bought a piano, they bought it in Toronto and had it taken by train and brought in on a horse, a horse and sleigh to the house. It became the only piano in the region, and Mom said she could basically play as soon as the piano arrived, she could play it because she had learned all these rhythms. Anyway, we found the piano last year and were able to bring it back home. We purchased it. It had gone through, like, five or six families, and it was just a big thing for us, and we found actually an old picture of somebody and their family years ago. Anyway, I'm blabbering on here. NM: No, I want you to tell them about Leahy. DL: What about Leahy? (Laughter) NM: Just tell them what— DL: She wants me to talk about— We have a band named Leahy. There's 11 siblings. We, um— What will I tell them? (Laughter) We opened— NM: No surgeries. DL: No surgeries, oh yeah. We had a great opportunity. We opened for Shania Twain for two years on her international tour. It was a big thing for us, and now all my sisters are off having babies and the boys are all getting married, so we're staying close to home for, I guess, another couple of weeks. What can I say? I don't know what to say, Natalie. We, uh... (Laughter) (Laughter) NM: Is this what marriage is about? (Applause) I like it. (Applause) (Laughter) DL: Oh yeah, okay, in my family we had seven girls, four boys, we had two fiddles and one piano, and of course we were all fighting to play on the instruments, so dad and mom set a rule that you couldn't kick anyone off the instrument. You had to wait until they were finished, so of course, what we would do is we'd get on the piano and you wouldn't even get off to eat, because you wouldn't want to give it up to your brother or sister, and they'd wait and wait and wait, and it'd be midnight and you'd be still sitting there on the piano, but it was their way to get us to practice. Will we play a tune? NM: It worked. DL: It worked. Sorry, I hate to carry on... So this is our last number, and we'll feature Nat on piano. Okay, play in, how about A? (Music) (Applause)

A solar energy system that tracks the sun

Bill Gross

{0: 'Bill Gross'}

{0: ['idea guy']}

{0: 'Bill Gross founded Idealab, an incubator of new inventions, ideas and businesses.'}

2003-02-02

2009-02-02

TED2003

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'th', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['energy', 'invention', 'solar energy', 'technology', 'electricity']

{492: 'High-altitude wind energy from kites!', 51: 'Winning the oil endgame', 9: 'To invent is to give', 9464: 'The thrilling potential for off-grid solar energy', 15531: 'How we can turn the cold of outer space into a renewable resource', 9983: 'A printable, flexible, organic solar cell'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gross_a_solar_energy_system_that_tracks_the_sun/

Bill Gross, the founder of Idealab, talks about his life as an inventor, starting with his high-school company selling solar energy plans and kits. Learn here about a groundbreaking system for solar cells -- and some questions we haven't yet solved.

Right when I was 15 was when I first got interested in solar energy. My family had moved from Fort Lee, New Jersey to California, from the snow to lots of heat, and gas lines. There was gas rationing in 1973. The energy crisis was in full bore. I started reading "Popular Science" magazine, and I got really excited about the potential of solar energy to try and solve that crisis. I had just taken trigonometry in high school, I learned about the parabola and how it could concentrate rays of light to a single focus. That got me very excited. And I really felt that there would be potential to build some kind of thing that could concentrate light. So, I started this company called Solar Devices. And this was a company where I built parabolas, I took metal shop, and I remember walking into metal shop building parabolas and Stirling engines. And I was building a Stirling engine over on the lathe, and all the motorcycle guys said, "You're building a bong, aren't you?" And I said, "No, it's a Stirling engine." But they didn't believe me. I sold the plans for this engine and for this dish in the back of "Popular Science" magazine, for four dollars each. And I earned enough money to pay for my first year of Caltech. It was a really big excitement for me to get into Caltech. And at my first year at Caltech, I continued the business. But then, in the second year of Caltech, they started grading. The whole first year was pass/fail, but the second year was graded. I wasn't able to keep up with the business, and I ended up with a 25-year detour. My dream had been to convert solar energy at a very practical cost, but then I had this big detour. First, the coursework at Caltech. Then, when I graduated from Caltech, the IBM PC came out, and I got addicted to the IBM PC in 1981. And then in 1983, Lotus 1-2-3 came out, and I was completely blown away by Lotus 1-2-3. I began operating my business with 1-2-3, began writing add-ins for 1-2-3, wrote a natural language interface to 1-2-3. I started an educational software company after I joined Lotus, and then I started Idealab so I could have a roof under which I could build multiple companies in succession. Much later — in 2000, very recently — the new California energy crisis — what was purported to be a big energy crisis — was coming. And I was trying to figure out if we could build something that would capitalize on that and get people backup energy, in case the crisis really came. And I started looking at how we could build battery backup systems that could give people five hours, 10 hours, maybe even a full day, or three days' worth of backup power. I'm glad you heard earlier today, batteries are unbelievably — lack density compared to fuel. So much more energy can be stored with fuel than with batteries. You'd have to fill your entire parking space of one garage space just to give yourself four hours of battery backup. And I concluded, after researching every other technology that we could deploy for storing energy — flywheels, different formulations of batteries — it just wasn't practical to store energy. So what about making energy? Maybe we could make energy. I tried to figure out — maybe solar's become attractive. It's been 25 years since I was doing this, let me go back and look at what's been happening with solar cells. And the price had gone down from 10 dollars a watt to about four or five dollars a watt, but it stabilized. And it needed to get much lower to be cost-effective. I studied all the new things that had happened in solar cells, and was looking for ways we could make solar cells more inexpensively. A lot of new things are happening to do that, but fundamentally, the process requires a tremendous amount of energy. Some people say it takes more energy to make a solar cell than it will give out in its entire life. If we reduce the amount of energy it takes to make the cells, that will become more practical. But right now, you pretty much have to take silicon, put it in an oven at 1600 F for 17 hours, to make the cells. A lot of people are working to try and reduce that, but I didn't have anything to contribute. So I tried to figure out what other way could we try to make cost-effective solar electricity. What if we collect the sun with a large reflector — like I had been thinking about in high school, but maybe with modern technology we could make it cheaper — concentrate it to a small converter, and then the conversion device wouldn't have to be as expensive, because it's much smaller, rather than solar cells, which have to cover the entire surface that you want to gather sun from. This seemed practical now, because a lot of new technologies had come in the 25 years since I had last looked at it. There was a lot of new manufacturing techniques, not to mention really cheap miniature motors — brushless motors, servomotors, stepper motors, that are used in printers and scanners. So, that's a breakthrough. Of course, inexpensive microprocessors and a very important breakthrough — genetic algorithms. I'll be very short on genetic algorithms. It's a powerful way of solving intractable problems using natural selection. You take a problem that you can't solve with a pure mathematical answer, you build an evolutionary system to try multiple tries at guessing, you add sex — where you take half of one solution and half of another and then make new mutations — and you use natural selection to kill off not-as-good solutions. Usually, with a genetic algorithm on a computer today, with a three gigahertz processor, you can solve many formerly intractable problems in just a matter of minutes. So we tried to come up with a way to use genetic algorithms to create a new type of concentrator. And I'll show you what we came up with. Traditionally, concentrators look like this. Those shapes are parabolas. They take all the parallel incoming rays and focus it to a single spot. They have to track the sun, because they have to point directly at the sun. They usually have a one degree acceptance angle — once they're more than a degree off, none of the sunlight rays will hit the focus. So we tried to come up with a non-tracking collector that would gather much more than one degree of light, with no moving parts. So we created a genetic algorithm to try this out, we made a model in Excel of a multisurface reflector, and an amazing thing evolved, literally, from trying a billion cycles, a billion different attempts, with a fitness function that defined how can you collect the most light, from the most angles, over a day, from the sun. And this is the shape that evolved. It's this non-tracking collector with these six tuba-like horns, and each of them collect light in the following way — if the sunlight strikes right here, it might bounce right to the center, the hot spot, directly, but if the sun is off axis and comes from the side, it might hit two places and take two bounces. So for direct light, it takes only one bounce, for off-axis light it might take two, and for extreme off-axis, it might take three. Your efficiency goes down with more bounces, because you lose about 10 percent with each bounce, but this allowed us to collect light from a plus or minus 25-degree angle. So, about two and a half hours of the day we could collect with a stationary component. Solar cells collect light for four and a half hours though. On an average adjusted day, a solar cell — because the sun's moving across the sky, the solar cell is going down with a sine wave function of performance at the off-axis angles. It collects about four and a half average hours of sunlight a day. So even this, although it was great with no moving parts — we could achieve high temperatures — wasn't enough. We needed to beat solar cells. So we took a look at another idea. We looked at a way to break up a parabola into individual petals that would track. So what you see here is 12 separate petals that each could be controlled with individual microprocessors that would only cost a dollar. You can buy a two-megahertz microprocessor for a dollar now. And you can buy stepper motors that pretty much never wear out because they have no brushes, for a dollar. So we can control all 12 of these petals for under 50 dollars and what this would allow us to do is not have to move the focus any more, but only move the petals. The whole system would have a much lower profile, but also we could gather sunlight for six and a half to seven hours a day. Now that we have concentrated sunlight, what are we going to put at the center to convert sunlight to electricity? So we tried to look at all the different heat engines that have been used in history to convert sunlight or heat to electricity, And one of the great ones of all time, James Watt's steam engine of 1788 was a major breakthrough. James Watt didn't actually invent the steam engine, he just refined it. But his refinements were incredible. He added new linear motion guides to the pistons, he added a condenser to cool the steam outside the cylinder, he made the engine double-acting, so it had double the power. Those were major breakthroughs. All of the improvements he made — and it's justifiable that our measure of energy, the watt, today is named after him. So we looked at this engine, and this had some potential. Steam engines are dangerous, and they had tremendous impact on the world — industrial revolution and ships and locomotives. But they're usually good to be large, so they're not good for distributed power generation. They're also very high-pressure, so they're dangerous. Another type of engine is the hot air engine. And the hot air engine also was not invented by Robert Stirling, but Robert Stirling came along in 1816 and radically improved it. This engine, because it was so interesting — it only worked on air, no steam — has led to hundreds of creative designs over the years that use the Stirling engine principle. But after the Stirling engine, Otto came along, and also, he didn't invent the internal combustion engine, he just refined it. He showed it in Paris in 1867, and it was a major achievement because it brought the power density of the engine way up. You could now get a lot more power in a lot smaller space, and that allowed the engine to be used for mobile applications. So, once you have mobility, you're making a lot of engines because you've got lots of units, as opposed to steam ships or big factories, so this was the engine that ended up benefiting from mass production where all the other engines didn't. So, because it went into mass production, costs were reduced, 100 years of refinement, emissions were reduced, tremendous production value. There have been hundreds of millions of internal combustion engines built, compared to thousands of Stirling engines built. And not nearly as many small steam engines being built anymore, only large ones for big operations. So after looking at these three, and 47 others, we concluded that the Stirling engine would be the best one to use. I want to give you a brief explanation of how we looked at it and how it works. So we tried to look at the Stirling engine in a new way, because it was practical — weight no longer mattered for our application. The internal combustion engine took off because weight mattered, because you were moving around. But if you're trying to generate solar energy in a static place the weight doesn't matter so much. We also discovered that efficiency doesn't matter so much if your energy source is free. Normally, efficiency is crucial because the fuel cost of your engine over its life dwarfs the cost of the engine. But if your fuel source is free, then the only thing that matters is the up-front capital cost of the engine. So you don't want to optimize for efficiency, you want to optimize for power per dollar. So using that new twist, with the new criteria, we thought we could relook at the Stirling engine, and also bring genetic algorithms in. Basically, Robert Stirling didn't have Gordon Moore before him to get us three gigahertz of processor power. So we took the same genetic algorithm that we used earlier to make that concentrator, which didn't work out for us, to optimize the Stirling engine, and make its design sizes and all of its dimensions the exact optimum to get the most power per dollar, irrespective of weight, irrespective of size, just to get the most conversion of solar energy, because the sun is free. And that's the process we took — let me show you how the engine works. The simplest heat engine, or hot air engine, of all time would be this — take a box, a steel canister, with a piston. Put a flame under it, the piston moves up. Take it off the flame and pour water on it, or let it cool down, the piston moves down. That's a heat engine. That's the most fundamental heat engine you could have. The problem is the efficiency is one hundredth of one percent, because you're heating all the metal of the chamber and then cooling all the metal of the chamber each time. And you're only getting power from the air that's heating at the same time, but you're wasting energy heating and cooling the metal. So someone came up with a very clever idea. Instead of heating and cooling the whole cylinder, what about if you put a displacer inside — a little thing that shuttles the air back and forth. You move that up and down with a little bit of energy but now you're only shifting the air down to the hot end and up to the cold end. So, now you're not alternately heating and cooling the metal, just the air. That allows you to get the efficiency up from a hundredth of a percent to about two percent. And then Robert Stirling came along with this genius idea, which was, well, I'm still not heating the metal now, with this kind of engine, but I'm still reheating all the air. I'm still heating the air every time and cooling the air every time. What about if I put a thermal sponge in the middle, in the passageway between where the air has to move between hot and cold? So he made fine wires, and cracked glass, and all different kinds of materials to be a heat sponge. So when the air pushes up to go from the hot end to the cold end, it puts some heat into the sponge. And then when the air comes back after it's been cooled, it picks up that heat again. So you're reusing your energy five or six times, and that brings the efficiency up to between 30 and 40 percent. It's a little known, but brilliant, genius invention of Robert Stirling that takes the hot air engine from being somewhat impractical — like I found out when I made the real simple version in high school — to very potentially possible, once you get the efficiency up, if you can design this to be low enough cost. So we really set out on a path to try and make the lowest cost possible. We built a huge mathematical model of how a Stirling engine works. We applied the genetic algorithm. We got the results from that for the optimal engine. We built engines — so we built 100 different engines over the last two years. We measured each one, we readjusted the model to what we measured, and then we led that to the current prototype. It led to a very compact, inexpensive engine, and this is what the engine looks like. Let me show you what it looks like in real life. So this is the engine. It's just a small cylinder down here, which holds the generator inside and all the linkage, and it's the hot cap — the hot cylinder on the top — this part gets hot, this part is cool, and electricity comes out. The exact converse is also true. If you put electricity in, this will get hot and this will get cold, you get refrigeration. So it's a complete reversible cycle, a very efficient cycle, and quite a simple thing to make. So now you put the two things together. So you have the engine. What if you combine the petals and the engine in the center? The petals track and the engine gets the concentrated sunlight, takes that heat and turns it into electricity. This is what the first prototype of our system looked like with the petals and the engine in the center. This is being run out in the sun, and now I want to show you what the actual thing looks like. (Applause) Thank you. So this is a unit with the 12 petals. These petals cost about a dollar each — they're lightweight, injection-molded plastic, aluminized. The mechanism to control each petal is below there, with a microprocessor on each one. There are thermocouples on the engine — little sensors that detect the heat when the sunlight strikes them. Each petal adjusts itself separately to keep the highest temperature on it. When the sun comes out in the morning, the petals will seek the sun, find it by searching for the highest temperature. About a minute and a half or two minutes after the rays are striking the hot cap the engine will be warm enough to start and then the engine will generate electricity for about six and a half hours a day — six and a half to seven hours as the sun moves across the sky. A critical part that we can take advantage of is that we have these inexpensive microprocessors and each of these petals is autonomous, and each of these petals figures out where the sun is with no user setup. So you don't have to tell what latitude, longitude you're at, what your roof slope angle is, or what orientation. It doesn't really care. What it does is it searches to find the hottest spot, it searches again a half an hour later, a day later, a month later. It basically figures out where on Earth you are by watching the direction the sun moves, so you don't have to actually enter anything about that. The way the unit works is, when the sun comes out, the engine will start and you get power out here. We have AC and DC, get 12 volts DC, so that could be used for certain applications. We have an inverter in there, so you get 117 volts AC. And you also get hot water. The hot water's optional. You don't have to use it, it will cool itself. But you can use it to optionally heat hot water and that brings the efficiency up even higher because some of the heat that you'd normally be rejecting, you can now use as useful energy, whether it's for a pool or hot water. Let me show you a quick movie of what this looks like running. This is the first test where we took it outside and each of the petals were individually seeking. And what they do is step, very coarsely at first, and very finely afterward. Once they get a temperature reading on the thermocouple indicating they found the sun, they slow down and do a fine search. Then the petals will move into position, and the engine will start. We've been working on this for the last two years. We're very excited about the progress, we have a long way to go though. This is how we envision it would be in a residential installation: you'd probably have more than one unit on your roof. It could be on your roof, your backyard, or somewhere else. You don't have to have enough units to power your entire house, you just save money with each incremental one you add. So you're still using the grid potentially, in this type of application, to be your backup supply — of course, you can't use these at night, and you can't use these on cloudy days. But by reducing your energy use, pretty much at the peak times — usually when you have your air conditioning on, or other times like that — this generates the peak power at the peak usage time, so it's very complementary in that sense. This is how we would envision a residential application. We also think there's very big potential for energy farms, especially in remote land where there happens to be a lot of sun. It's a really good combination of those two factors. It turns out there's a lot of powerful sun all around the world, obviously, but in special places where it happens to be relatively inexpensive to place these and also in many more places where there is high wind power. So an example of that is, here's the map of the United States. Pretty much everywhere that's not green or blue is a really ideal place, but even the green or blue areas are good, just not as good as the places that are red, orange and yellow. But the hot spot right around Las Vegas and Death Valley is very good. And is only affects the payback period, it doesn't mean that you couldn't use solar energy; you could use it anywhere on Earth. It just affects the payback period if you're comparing to grid-supplied electricity. But if you don't have grid-supplied electricity, then the question of payback is a different one entirely. It's just how many watts do you get per dollar, and how could you benefit from that to change your life in some way. This is the map of the whole Earth, and you can see a huge swathe in the middle where a large part of the population is, there's tremendous chances for solar energy. And of course, look at Africa. The potential to take advantage of solar energy there is unbelievable, and I'm really excited to talk more about finding ways we can help with that. So, in conclusion, I would say my journey has shown me that you can revisit old ideas in a new light, and sometimes ideas that have been discarded in the past can be practical now if you apply some new technology or new twists. We believe we're getting very close to something practical and affordable. Our short-term goal for this is to be half the price of solar cells and our longer-term goal is to be less than a five-year payback. And at less than a five-year payback, this becomes very economic. So you don't have to just have a feel-good attitude about energy to want to have one of these. It just makes economic sense. Right now, solar paybacks are between 30 and 50 years. If you get it down below five years, then it's almost a no-brainer because the interest to own it — someone else will finance it for you and you can just make money from day one. So that's our real powerful goal that we're really shooting for in the company. Two other things that I learned that were very surprising to me — one was how casual we are about energy. I was walking from the elevator over here, and even just looking at the stage right now — so there's probably 20,500-watt lights right now. There's 10,000 watts of light pouring on the stage, one horsepower is 746 watts, at full power. So there's basically 15 horses running at full speed just to keep the stage lit. Not to mention the 200 horses that are probably running right now to keep the air-conditioning going. And it's just amazing, walk in the elevator, and there's lights on in the elevator. Of course, now I'm very sensitive at home when we leave the lights on by mistake. But, everywhere around us we have insatiable use for energy because it's so cheap. And it's cheap because we've been subsidized by energy that's been concentrated by the sun. Basically, oil is solar-energy concentrate. It's been pounded for a billion years with a lot of energy to make it have all that energy contained in it. And we don't have a birthright to just use that up as fast as we are, I think. And it would be great if we could make our energy usage renewable, where as we're using the energy, we're creating it at the same pace, and I really hope we can get there. Thank you very much, you've been a great audience.

Mosquitos, malaria and education

Bill Gates

{0: 'Bill Gates'}

{0: ['philanthropist']}

{0: "A passionate techie and a shrewd businessman, Bill Gates changed the world while leading Microsoft to dizzying success. Now he's doing it again with his own style of philanthropy and passion for innovation."}

2009-02-02

2009-02-05

TED2009

en

['ar', 'az', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'gl', 'he', 'hi', 'hu', 'hy', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'ms', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sq', 'sr', 'ta', 'tr', 'ur', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['business', 'education', 'health', 'illness', 'insects', 'philanthropy', 'science', 'technology']

{499: 'The jungle search for viruses', 62: 'Global priorities bigger than climate change', 58: 'My wish: Help me stop pandemics', 1739: 'Teachers need real feedback', 1667: 'Use data to build better schools', 1734: 'My story, from gangland daughter to star teacher'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_mosquitos_malaria_and_education/

Bill Gates hopes to solve some of the world's biggest problems using a new kind of philanthropy. In a passionate and, yes, funny 18 minutes, he asks us to consider two big questions and how we might answer them. (And see the Q&amp;A on the TED Blog.)

I wrote a letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest about what was going well, what wasn't, and making it kind of an annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people in to work on those problems, because I think there are some very important problems that don't get worked on naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make as much progress as we need to. So this morning I'm going to share two of these problems and talk about where they stand. But before I dive into those I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part of the reason I feel that way is looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died before the age of five. So that's a factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It's a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters a lot. And the key reason we were able to it was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. And I think that's doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there's only a few diseases that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria. So that brings us to the first problem that I'll raise this morning, which is how do we stop a deadly disease that's spread by mosquitos? Well, what's the history of this disease? It's been a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it's the only disease we can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn't know what caused it until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that's why the death rate did come down. Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. So we can see: 1900, it's everywhere. 1945, it's still most places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you've gotten most of the northern areas. And more recently you can see it's just around the equator. And so this leads to the paradox that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn't get much investment. For example, there's more money put into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it's a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that's why that priority has been set. But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one time are suffering from it. It means that you can't get the economies in these areas going because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could experience this. We'll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There's no reason only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected. So we've come up with a few new things. We've got bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What it means is the mother and child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can't get at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that's happened now in a number of countries. It's great to see. But we have to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we've ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If you go into a country with the right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that's where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you'll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And the world has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn't pay attention. Now we're on the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There's new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that's going into phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And that should save over two thirds of the lives if it's effective. So we're going to have these new tools. But that alone doesn't give us the road map. Because the road map to get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for these things. And so as these elements come together, I'm quite optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria. Now let me turn to a second question, a fairly different question, but I'd say equally important. And this is: How do you make a teacher great? It seems like the kind of question that people would spend a lot of time on, and we'd understand very well. And the answer is, really, that we don't. Let's start with why this is important. Well, all of us here, I'll bet, had some great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That's part of the reason we're here today, part of the reason we're successful. I can say that, even though I'm a college drop-out. I had great teachers. In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent have been the best in the world, if you measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they've gone on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront. Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it's getting weaker. And if you look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And we have to change this. We have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics. When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that had been covered up for a long time because they always took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren't tracking where the kids were before that. But most of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it's over 50 percent. And even if you graduate from high school, if you're low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. If you're low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn't seem entirely fair. So, how do you make education better? Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has invested in this. There's many people working on it. We've worked on small schools, we've funded scholarships, we've done things in libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a school or between schools? And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone in the world away. So, it's simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers. And so you'd say, "Wow, we should reward those people. We should retain those people. We should find out what they're doing and transfer that skill to other people." But I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today. What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think these are people with master's degrees. They've gone back and they've gotten their Master's of Education. This chart takes four different factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there's no effect at all, is a master's degree. Now, the way the pay system works is there's two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money to people who get their master's degree. But it in no way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in math there's a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it's your past performance. There are some people who are very good at this. And we've done almost nothing to study what that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage the people with it to stay in the system. You might say, "Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher's leave?" The answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. And it's a system with very high turnover. Now, there are a few places — very few — where great teachers are being made. A good example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It's an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than in the normal public schools. They're team teaching. They're constantly improving their teachers. They're taking data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, "Hey, you caused this amount of increase." They're deeply engaged in making teaching better. When you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it's very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, "What is going on?" The teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, "I'm in the sports rally or something. What's going on?" And the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren't paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have the position of the kid who doesn't want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it. How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren't told how good they are. The data isn't gathered. In the teacher's contract, it will limit the number of times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a factory where you've got these workers, some of them just making crap and the management is told, "Hey, you can only come down here once a year, but you need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a good job in that one brief moment." Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn't have the tools to do it. They don't have the test scores, and there's a whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that's sort of working in the opposite direction. But I'm optimistic about this, I think there are some clear things we can do. First of all, there's a lot more testing going on, and that's given us the picture of where we are. And that allows us to understand who's doing it well, and call them out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, "OK, here's a little clip of something I thought I did well. Here's a little clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?" And they could all sit and work together on those problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff. You can take those great courses and make them available so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have a kid who's behind, you would know you could assign them that video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only be available just on the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we can do it much better. Now there's a book actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, "Work Hard, Be Nice." And I thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a good teacher does. I'm going to send everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause) Now, we put a lot of money into education, and I really think that education is the most important thing to get right for the country to have as strong a future as it should have. In fact we have in the stimulus bill — it's interesting — the House version actually had money in it for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there are people who are threatened by these things. But I — I'm optimistic. I think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. I only had time to frame those two problems. There's a lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you're getting excited, just at the very name of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn't naturally make it happen. Governments don't naturally pick these things in the right way. The private sector doesn't naturally put its resources into these things. So it's going to take brilliant people like you to study these things, get other people involved — and you're helping to come up with solutions. And with that, I think there's some great things that will come out of it. Thank you. (Applause)

Your elusive creative genius

Elizabeth Gilbert

{0: 'Elizabeth Gilbert'}

{0: ['writer']}

{0: 'The author of "Eat, Pray, Love," Elizabeth Gilbert has thought long and hard about some big topics. Her fascinations: genius, creativity and how we get in our own way when it comes to both.'}

2009-02-05

2009-02-09

TED2009

en

['ar', 'az', 'be', 'bg', 'ca', 'cs', 'da', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'et', 'eu', 'fa', 'fi', 'fil', 'fr', 'fr-ca', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'hy', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'ku', 'lt', 'lv', 'mk', 'mn', 'my', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sl', 'sq', 'sr', 'sv', 'th', 'tr', 'uk', 'uz', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['creativity', 'culture', 'entertainment', 'poetry', 'work', 'writing', 'personality']

{250: 'Where does creativity hide?', 66: 'Do schools kill creativity?', 1164: 'Taking imagination seriously', 605: 'A kinder, gentler philosophy of success', 61930: "It's OK to feel overwhelmed. Here's what to do next", 2332: 'How to find work you love'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_your_elusive_creative_genius/

Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses -- and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius. It's a funny, personal and surprisingly moving talk.

I am a writer. Writing books is my profession but it's more than that, of course. It is also my great lifelong love and fascination. And I don't expect that that's ever going to change. But, that said, something kind of peculiar has happened recently in my life and in my career, which has caused me to have to recalibrate my whole relationship with this work. And the peculiar thing is that I recently wrote this book, this memoir called "Eat, Pray, Love" which, decidedly unlike any of my previous books, went out in the world for some reason, and became this big, mega-sensation, international bestseller thing. The result of which is that everywhere I go now, people treat me like I'm doomed. Seriously — doomed, doomed! Like, they come up to me now, all worried, and they say, "Aren't you afraid you're never going to be able to top that? Aren't you afraid you're going to keep writing for your whole life and you're never again going to create a book that anybody in the world cares about at all, ever again?" So that's reassuring, you know. But it would be worse, except for that I happen to remember that over 20 years ago, when I was a teenager, when I first started telling people that I wanted to be a writer, I was met with this same sort of fear-based reaction. And people would say, "Aren't you afraid you're never going to have any success? Aren't you afraid the humiliation of rejection will kill you? Aren't you afraid that you're going to work your whole life at this craft and nothing's ever going to come of it and you're going to die on a scrap heap of broken dreams with your mouth filled with bitter ash of failure?" (Laughter) Like that, you know. The answer — the short answer to all those questions is, "Yes." Yes, I'm afraid of all those things. And I always have been. And I'm afraid of many, many more things besides that people can't even guess at, like seaweed and other things that are scary. But, when it comes to writing, the thing that I've been sort of thinking about lately, and wondering about lately, is why? You know, is it rational? Is it logical that anybody should be expected to be afraid of the work that they feel they were put on this Earth to do. And what is it specifically about creative ventures that seems to make us really nervous about each other's mental health in a way that other careers kind of don't do, you know? Like my dad, for example, was a chemical engineer and I don't recall once in his 40 years of chemical engineering anybody asking him if he was afraid to be a chemical engineer, you know? "That chemical-engineering block, John, how's it going?" It just didn't come up like that, you know? But to be fair, chemical engineers as a group haven't really earned a reputation over the centuries for being alcoholic manic-depressives. (Laughter) We writers, we kind of do have that reputation, and not just writers, but creative people across all genres, it seems, have this reputation for being enormously mentally unstable. And all you have to do is look at the very grim death count in the 20th century alone, of really magnificent creative minds who died young and often at their own hands, you know? And even the ones who didn't literally commit suicide seem to be really undone by their gifts, you know. Norman Mailer, just before he died, last interview, he said, "Every one of my books has killed me a little more." An extraordinary statement to make about your life's work. But we don't even blink when we hear somebody say this, because we've heard that kind of stuff for so long and somehow we've completely internalized and accepted collectively this notion that creativity and suffering are somehow inherently linked and that artistry, in the end, will always ultimately lead to anguish. And the question that I want to ask everybody here today is are you guys all cool with that idea? Are you comfortable with that? Because you look at it even from an inch away and, you know — I'm not at all comfortable with that assumption. I think it's odious. And I also think it's dangerous, and I don't want to see it perpetuated into the next century. I think it's better if we encourage our great creative minds to live. And I definitely know that, in my case — in my situation — it would be very dangerous for me to start sort of leaking down that dark path of assumption, particularly given the circumstance that I'm in right now in my career. Which is — you know, like check it out, I'm pretty young, I'm only about 40 years old. I still have maybe another four decades of work left in me. And it's exceedingly likely that anything I write from this point forward is going to be judged by the world as the work that came after the freakish success of my last book, right? I should just put it bluntly, because we're all sort of friends here now — it's exceedingly likely that my greatest success is behind me. So Jesus, what a thought! That's the kind of thought that could lead a person to start drinking gin at nine o'clock in the morning, and I don't want to go there. (Laughter) I would prefer to keep doing this work that I love. And so, the question becomes, how? And so, it seems to me, upon a lot of reflection, that the way that I have to work now, in order to continue writing, is that I have to create some sort of protective psychological construct, right? I have to sort of find some way to have a safe distance between me, as I am writing, and my very natural anxiety about what the reaction to that writing is going to be, from now on. And, as I've been looking, over the last year, for models for how to do that, I've been sort of looking across time, and I've been trying to find other societies to see if they might have had better and saner ideas than we have about how to help creative people sort of manage the inherent emotional risks of creativity. And that search has led me to ancient Greece and ancient Rome. So stay with me, because it does circle around and back. But, ancient Greece and ancient Rome — people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings back then, OK? People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons. The Greeks famously called these divine attendant spirits of creativity "daemons." Socrates, famously, believed that he had a daemon who spoke wisdom to him from afar. The Romans had the same idea, but they called that sort of disembodied creative spirit a genius. Which is great, because the Romans did not actually think that a genius was a particularly clever individual. They believed that a genius was this, sort of magical divine entity, who was believed to literally live in the walls of an artist's studio, kind of like Dobby the house elf, and who would come out and sort of invisibly assist the artist with their work and would shape the outcome of that work. So brilliant — there it is, right there, that distance that I'm talking about — that psychological construct to protect you from the results of your work. And everyone knew that this is how it functioned, right? So the ancient artist was protected from certain things, like, for example, too much narcissism, right? If your work was brilliant, you couldn't take all the credit for it, everybody knew that you had this disembodied genius who had helped you. If your work bombed, not entirely your fault, you know? Everyone knew your genius was kind of lame. (Laughter) And this is how people thought about creativity in the West for a really long time. And then the Renaissance came and everything changed, and we had this big idea, and the big idea was, let's put the individual human being at the center of the universe above all gods and mysteries, and there's no more room for mystical creatures who take dictation from the divine. And it's the beginning of rational humanism, and people started to believe that creativity came completely from the self of the individual. And for the first time in history, you start to hear people referring to this or that artist as being a genius, rather than having a genius. And I got to tell you, I think that was a huge error. You know, I think that allowing somebody, one mere person to believe that he or she is like, the vessel, you know, like the font and the essence and the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery is just a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile, human psyche. It's like asking somebody to swallow the sun. It just completely warps and distorts egos, and it creates all these unmanageable expectations about performance. And I think the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years. And, if this is true, and I think it is true, the question becomes, what now? Can we do this differently? Maybe go back to some more ancient understanding about the relationship between humans and the creative mystery. Maybe not. Maybe we can't just erase 500 years of rational humanistic thought in one 18 minute speech. And there's probably people in this audience who would raise really legitimate scientific suspicions about the notion of, basically, fairies who follow people around rubbing fairy juice on their projects and stuff. I'm not, probably, going to bring you all along with me on this. But the question that I kind of want to pose is — you know, why not? Why not think about it this way? Because it makes as much sense as anything else I have ever heard in terms of explaining the utter maddening capriciousness of the creative process. A process which, as anybody who has ever tried to make something — which is to say basically everyone here —- knows does not always behave rationally. And, in fact, can sometimes feel downright paranormal. I had this encounter recently where I met the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone, who's now in her 90s, but she's been a poet her entire life and she told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. And she said it was like a thunderous train of air. And it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet. She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, "run like hell." And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. And other times she wouldn't be fast enough, so she'd be running and running, and she wouldn't get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it "for another poet." And then there were these times — this is the piece I never forgot — she said that there were moments where she would almost miss it, right? So, she's running to the house and she's looking for the paper and the poem passes through her, and she grabs a pencil just as it's going through her, and then she said, it was like she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it. She would catch the poem by its tail, and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. And in these instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact but backwards, from the last word to the first. (Laughter) So when I heard that I was like — that's uncanny, that's exactly what my creative process is like. (Laughter) That's not at all what my creative process is — I'm not the pipeline! I'm a mule, and the way that I have to work is I have to get up at the same time every day, and sweat and labor and barrel through it really awkwardly. But even I, in my mulishness, even I have brushed up against that thing, at times. And I would imagine that a lot of you have too. You know, even I have had work or ideas come through me from a source that I honestly cannot identify. And what is that thing? And how are we to relate to it in a way that will not make us lose our minds, but, in fact, might actually keep us sane? And for me, the best contemporary example that I have of how to do that is the musician Tom Waits, who I got to interview several years ago on a magazine assignment. And we were talking about this, and you know, Tom, for most of his life, he was pretty much the embodiment of the tormented contemporary modern artist, trying to control and manage and dominate these sort of uncontrollable creative impulses that were totally internalized. But then he got older, he got calmer, and one day he was driving down the freeway in Los Angeles, and this is when it all changed for him. And he's speeding along, and all of a sudden he hears this little fragment of melody, that comes into his head as inspiration often comes, elusive and tantalizing, and he wants it, it's gorgeous, and he longs for it, but he has no way to get it. He doesn't have a piece of paper, or a pencil, or a tape recorder. So he starts to feel all of that old anxiety start to rise in him like, "I'm going to lose this thing, and I'll be be haunted by this song forever. I'm not good enough, and I can't do it." And instead of panicking, he just stopped. He just stopped that whole mental process and he did something completely novel. He just looked up at the sky, and he said, "Excuse me, can you not see that I'm driving?" (Laughter) "Do I look like I can write down a song right now? If you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment when I can take care of you. Otherwise, go bother somebody else today. Go bother Leonard Cohen." And his whole work process changed after that. Not the work, the work was still oftentimes as dark as ever. But the process, and the heavy anxiety around it was released when he took the genie, the genius out of him where it was causing nothing but trouble, and released it back where it came from, and realized that this didn't have to be this internalized, tormented thing. It could be this peculiar, wondrous, bizarre collaboration, kind of conversation between Tom and the strange, external thing that was not quite Tom. When I heard that story, it started to shift a little bit the way that I worked too, and this idea already saved me once. It saved me when I was in the middle of writing "Eat, Pray, Love," and I fell into one of those sort of pits of despair that we all fall into when we're working on something and it's not coming and you start to think this is going to be a disaster, the worst book ever written. Not just bad, but the worst book ever written. And I started to think I should just dump this project. But then I remembered Tom talking to the open air and I tried it. So I just lifted my face up from the manuscript and I directed my comments to an empty corner of the room. And I said aloud, "Listen you, thing, you and I both know that if this book isn't brilliant that is not entirely my fault, right? Because you can see that I am putting everything I have into this, I don't have any more than this. If you want it to be better, you've got to show up and do your part of the deal. But if you don't do that, you know what, the hell with it. I'm going to keep writing anyway because that's my job. And I would please like the record to reflect today that I showed up for my part of the job." (Laughter) Because — (Applause) Because in the end it's like this, OK — centuries ago in the deserts of North Africa, people used to gather for these moonlight dances of sacred dance and music that would go on for hours and hours, until dawn. They were always magnificent, because the dancers were professionals and they were terrific, right? But every once in a while, very rarely, something would happen, and one of these performers would actually become transcendent. And I know you know what I'm talking about, because I know you've all seen, at some point in your life, a performance like this. It was like time would stop, and the dancer would sort of step through some kind of portal and he wasn't doing anything different than he had ever done, 1,000 nights before, but everything would align. And all of a sudden, he would no longer appear to be merely human. He would be lit from within, and lit from below and all lit up on fire with divinity. And when this happened, back then, people knew it for what it was, you know, they called it by its name. They would put their hands together and they would start to chant, "Allah, Allah, Allah, God, God, God." That's God, you know. Curious historical footnote: when the Moors invaded southern Spain, they took this custom with them and the pronunciation changed over the centuries from "Allah, Allah, Allah," to "Olé, olé, olé," which you still hear in bullfights and in flamenco dances. In Spain, when a performer has done something impossible and magic, "Allah, olé, olé, Allah, magnificent, bravo," incomprehensible, there it is — a glimpse of God. Which is great, because we need that. But, the tricky bit comes the next morning, for the dancer himself, when he wakes up and discovers that it's Tuesday at 11 a.m., and he's no longer a glimpse of God. He's just an aging mortal with really bad knees, and maybe he's never going to ascend to that height again. And maybe nobody will ever chant God's name again as he spins, and what is he then to do with the rest of his life? This is hard. This is one of the most painful reconciliations to make in a creative life. But maybe it doesn't have to be quite so full of anguish if you never happened to believe, in the first place, that the most extraordinary aspects of your being came from you. But maybe if you just believed that they were on loan to you from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life to be passed along when you're finished, with somebody else. And, you know, if we think about it this way, it starts to change everything. This is how I've started to think, and this is certainly how I've been thinking in the last few months as I've been working on the book that will soon be published, as the dangerously, frighteningly over-anticipated follow up to my freakish success. And what I have to sort of keep telling myself when I get really psyched out about that is don't be afraid. Don't be daunted. Just do your job. Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever that might be. If your job is to dance, do your dance. If the divine, cockeyed genius assigned to your case decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed, for just one moment through your efforts, then "Olé!" And if not, do your dance anyhow. And "Olé!" to you, nonetheless. I believe this and I feel that we must teach it. "Olé!" to you, nonetheless, just for having the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) June Cohen: Olé! (Applause)

Using design to make ideas new

Milton Glaser

{0: 'Milton Glaser'}

{0: ['graphic designer']}

{0: 'If his career began and ended with "I [heart] N Y," Milton Glaser would still be a legend. But over his multi-decade career, his body of work is sprinkled with similarly iconic images and logos.'}

1998-02-02

2009-02-11

TED1998

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['art', 'communication', 'creativity', 'culture', 'design']

{215: 'An illustrated journey through Rome', 50: 'Happiness by design', 122: 'Human-centered design', 400: 'Tidying up art', 1747: 'Embrace the shake', 891: 'Intricate beauty by design'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/milton_glaser_using_design_to_make_ideas_new/

From the TED archives: The legendary graphic designer Milton Glaser dives deep into a new painting inspired by Piero della Francesca. From here, he muses on what makes a convincing poster, by breaking down an idea and making it new.

'Theme and variations' is one of those forms that require a certain kind of intellectual activity, because you are always comparing the variation with the theme that you hold in your mind. You might say that the theme is nature and everything that follows is a variation on the subject. I was asked, I guess about six years ago, to do a series of paintings that in some way would celebrate the birth of Piero della Francesca. And it was very difficult for me to imagine how to paint pictures that were based on Piero until I realized that I could look at Piero as nature — that I would have the same attitude towards looking at Piero della Francesca as I would if I were looking out a window at a tree. And that was enormously liberating to me. Perhaps it's not a very insightful observation, but that really started me on a path to be able to do a kind of theme and variations based on a work by Piero, in this case that remarkable painting that's in the Uffizi, "The Duke of Montefeltro," who faces his consort, Battista. Once I realized that I could take some liberties with the subject, I did the following series of drawings. That's the real Piero della Francesca — one of the greatest portraits in human history. And these, I'll just show these without comment. It's just a series of variations on the head of the Duke of Montefeltro, who's a great, great figure in the Renaissance, and probably the basis for Machiavelli's "The Prince." He apparently lost an eye in battle, which is why he is always shown in profile. And this is Battista. And then I decided I could move them around a little bit — so that for the first time in history, they're facing the same direction. Whoops! Passed each other. And then a visitor from another painting by Piero, this is from "The Resurrection of Christ" — as though the cast had just gotten of the set to have a chat. And now, four large panels: this is upper left; upper right; lower left; lower right. Incidentally, I've never understood the conflict between abstraction and naturalism. Since all paintings are inherently abstract to begin with there doesn't seem to be an argument there. On another subject — (Laughter) — I was driving in the country one day with my wife, and I saw this sign, and I said, "That is a fabulous piece of design." And she said, "What are you talking about?" I said, "Well, it's so persuasive, because the purpose of that sign is to get you into the garage, and since most people are so suspicious of garages, and know that they're going to be ripped off, they use the word 'reliable.' But everybody says they're reliable. But, reliable Dutchman" — (Laughter) — "Fantastic!" Because as soon as you hear the word Dutchman — which is an archaic word, nobody calls Dutch people "Dutchmen" anymore — but as soon as you hear Dutchman, you get this picture of the kid with his finger in the dike, preventing the thing from falling and flooding Holland, and so on. And so the entire issue is detoxified by the use of "Dutchman." Now, if you think I'm exaggerating at all in this, all you have to do is substitute something else, like "Indonesian." (Laughter) Or even "French." (Laughter) Now, "Swiss" works, but you know it's going to cost a lot of money. (Laughter) I'm going to take you quickly through the actual process of doing a poster. I do a lot of work for the School of Visual Arts, where I teach, and the director of this school — a remarkable man named Silas Rhodes — often gives you a piece of text and he says, "Do something with this." And so he did. And this was the text — "In words as fashion the same rule will hold/ Alike fantastic if too new or old/ Be not the first by whom the new are tried/ Nor yet the last to lay the old aside." I could make nothing of that. And I really struggled with this one. And the first thing I did, which was sort of in the absence of another idea, was say I'll sort of write it out and make some words big, and I'll have some kind of design on the back somehow, and I was hoping — as one often does — to stumble into something. So I took another crack at it — you've got to keep it moving — and I Xeroxed some words on pieces of colored paper and I pasted them down on an ugly board. I thought that something would come out of it, like "Words rule fantastic new old first last Pope" because it's by Alexander Pope, but I sort of made a mess out of it, and then I thought I'd repeat it in some way so it was legible. So, it was going nowhere. Sometimes, in the middle of a resistant problem, I write down things that I know about it. But you can see the beginning of an idea there, because you can see the word "new" emerging from the "old." That's what happens. There's a relationship between the old and the new; the new emerges from the context of the old. And then I did some variations of it, but it still wasn't coalescing graphically at all. I had this other version which had something interesting about it in terms of being able to put it together in your mind from clues. The W was clearly a W, the N was clearly an N, even though they were very fragmentary and there wasn't a lot of information in it. Then I got the words "new" and "old" and now I had regressed back to a point where there seemed to be no return. (Laughter) I was really desperate at this point. And so, I do something I'm truthfully ashamed of, which is that I took two drawings I had made for another purpose and I put them together. It says "dreams" at the top. And I was going to do a thing, I say, "Well, change the copy. Let it say something about dreams, and come to SVA and you'll sort of fulfill your dreams." But, to my credit, I was so embarrassed about doing that that I never submitted this sketch. And, finally, I arrived at the following solution. Now, it doesn't look terribly interesting, but it does have something that distinguishes it from a lot of other posters. For one thing, it transgresses the idea of what a poster's supposed to be, which is to be understood and seen immediately, and not explained. I remember hearing all of you in the graphic arts — "If you have to explain it, it ain't working." And one day I woke up and I said, "Well, suppose that's not true?" (Laughter) So here's what it says in my explanation at the bottom left. It says, "Thoughts: This poem is impossible. Silas usually has a better touch with his choice of quotations. This one generates no imagery at all." I am now exposing myself to my audience, right? Which is something you never want to do professionally. "Maybe the words can make the image without anything else happening. What's the heart of this poem? Don't be trendy if you want to be serious. Is doing the poster this way trendy in itself? I guess one could reduce the idea further by suggesting that the new emerges behind and through the old, like this." And then I show you a little drawing — you see, you remember that old thing I discarded? Well, I found a way to use it. So, there's that little alternative over there, and I say, "Not bad," — criticizing myself — "but more didactic than visual. Maybe what wants to be said is that old and the new are locked in a dialectical embrace, a kind of dance where each defines the other." And then more self-questioning — "Am I being simple-minded? Is this the kind of simple that looks obvious, or the kind that looks profound? There's a significant difference. This could be embarrassing. Actually, I realize fear of embarrassment drives me as much as any ambition. Do you think this sort of thing could really attract a student to the school?" (Laughter) Well, I think there are two fresh things here — two fresh things. One is the sort of willingness to expose myself to a critical audience, and not to suggest that I am confident about what I'm doing. And as you know, you have to have a front. I mean — you've got to be confident; if you don't believe in your work, who else is going to believe in it? So that's one thing, to introduce the idea of doubt into graphics. That can be a big contribution. The other thing is to actually give you two solutions for the price of one; you get the big one and if you don't like that, how about the little one? (Laughter) And that too is a relatively new idea. And here's just a series of experiments where I ask the question of — does a poster have to be square? Now, this is a little illusion. That poster is not folded. It's not folded, that's a photograph and it's cut on the diagonal. Same cheap trick in the upper left-hand corner. And here, a very peculiar poster because, simply because of using the isometric perspective in the computer, it won't sit still in the space. At times, it seems to be wider at the back than the front, and then it shifts. And if you sit here long enough, it'll float off the page into the audience. But, we don't have time. (Laughter) And then an experiment — a little bit about the nature of perspective, where the outside shape is determined by the peculiarity of perspective, but the shape of the bottle — which is identical to the outside shape — is seen frontally. And another piece for the art directors' club is "Anna Rees" casting long shadows. This is another poster from the School of Visual Arts. There were 10 artists invited to participate in it, and it was one of those things where it was extremely competitive and I didn't want to be embarrassed, so I worked very hard on this. The idea was — and it was a brilliant idea — was to have 10 posters distributed throughout the city's subway system so every time you got on the subway you'd be passing a different poster, all of which had a different idea of what art is. But I was absolutely stuck on the idea of "art is" and trying to determine what art was. But then I gave up and I said, "Well, art is whatever." And as soon as I said that, I discovered that the word "hat" was hidden in the word "whatever," and that led me to the inevitable conclusion. But then again, it's on my list of didactic posters. My intent is to have a literary accompaniment that explains the poster, in case you don't get it. (Laughter) Now this says, "Note to the viewer: I thought I might use a visual cliche of our time — Magritte's everyman — to express the idea that art is mystery, continuity and history. I'm also convinced that, in an age of computer manipulation, surrealism has become banal, a shadow of its former self. The phrase 'Art is whatever' expresses the current inclusiveness that surrounds art-making — a sort of 'it ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it' notion. The shadow of Magritte falls across the central part of the poster a poetic event that occurs as the shadow man isolates the word 'hat,' hidden in the word 'whatever.' The four hats shown in the poster suggests how art might be defined: as a thing itself, the worth of the thing, the shadow of the thing, and the shape of the thing. Whatever." (Applause) OK. (Applause) And the one that I did not submit, which I still like, I wanted to use the same phrase. There were wonderful experiments by Bruno Munari on letterforms some years ago — sort of, see how far you could go and still be able to read them. And that idea stuck in my head. But then I took the pieces that I had taken off and put them at the bottom. And, of course those are the remains, and they're so labeled. But what really happens is that you read it as: "Art is whatever remains." Thank you. (Applause)

Toy tiles that talk to each other

David Merrill

{0: 'David Merrill'}

{0: ['mit grad student']}

{0: 'David Merrill works on Siftables, tiny computer blocks that interact with each other to make networks (and music).'}

2009-02-06

2009-02-12

TED2009

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'eu', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'hy', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'mk', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['art', 'business', 'children', 'computers', 'design', 'education', 'invention', 'music', 'technology', 'toy']

{350: 'Playtime with Pleo, your robotic dinosaur friend', 48: 'Everyday inventions', 202: '5 dangerous things you should let your kids do', 1152: 'Visualizing ourselves ... with crowd-sourced data', 1984: 'The best computer interface? Maybe ... your hands', 2246: "New video technology that reveals an object's hidden properties"}

https://www.ted.com/talks/david_merrill_toy_tiles_that_talk_to_each_other/

MIT grad student David Merrill demos Siftables -- cookie-sized, computerized tiles you can stack and shuffle in your hands. These future-toys can do math, play music, and talk to their friends, too. Is this the next thing in hands-on learning?

I want to start out by asking you to think back to when you were a kid, playing with blocks. As you figured out how to reach out and grasp, pick them up and move them around, you were actually learning how to think and solve problems by understanding and manipulating spatial relationships. Spatial reasoning is deeply connected to how we understand a lot of the world around us. So, as a computer scientist inspired by this utility of our interactions with physical objects — along with my adviser Pattie, and my collaborator Jeevan Kalanithi — I started to wonder — what if when we used a computer, instead of having this one mouse cursor that was a like a digital fingertip moving around a flat desktop, what if we could reach in with both hands and grasp information physically, arranging it the way we wanted? This question was so compelling that we decided to explore the answer, by building Siftables. In a nutshell, a Siftable is an interactive computer the size of a cookie. They're able to be moved around by hand, they can sense each other, they can sense their motion, and they have a screen and a wireless radio. Most importantly, they're physical, so like the blocks, you can move them just by reaching out and grasping. And Siftables are an example of a new ecosystem of tools for manipulating digital information. And as these tools become more physical, more aware of their motion, aware of each other, and aware of the nuance of how we move them, we can start to explore some new and fun interaction styles. So, I'm going to start with some simple examples. This Siftable is configured to show video, and if I tilt it in one direction, it'll roll the video this way; if I tilt it the other way it rolls it backwards. And these interactive portraits are aware of each other. So if I put them next to each other, they get interested. If they get surrounded, they notice that too, they might get a little flustered. And they can also sense their motion and tilt. One of the interesting implications on interaction, we started to realize, was that we could use everyday gestures on data, like pouring a color the way we might pour a liquid. So in this case, we've got three Siftables configured to be paint buckets and I can use them to pour color into that central one, where they get mixed. If we overshoot, we can pour a little bit back. There are also some neat possibilities for education, like language, math and logic games where we want to give people the ability to try things quickly, and view the results immediately. So here I'm — (Applause) This is a Fibonacci sequence that I'm making with a simple equation program. Here we have a word game that's kind of like a mash-up between Scrabble and Boggle. Basically, in every round you get a randomly assigned letter on each Siftable, and as you try to make words it checks against a dictionary. Then, after about 30 seconds, it reshuffles, and you have a new set of letters and new possibilities to try. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) So these are some kids that came on a field trip to the Media Lab, and I managed to get them to try it out, and shoot a video. They really loved it. And, one of the interesting things about this kind of application is that you don't have to give people many instructions. All you have to say is, "Make words," and they know exactly what to do. So here's another few people trying it out. That's our youngest beta tester, down there on the right. Turns out, all he wanted to do was to stack the Siftables up. So to him, they were just blocks. Now, this is an interactive cartoon application. And we wanted to build a learning tool for language learners. And this is Felix, actually. And he can bring new characters into the scene, just by lifting the Siftables off the table that have that character shown on them. Here, he's bringing the sun out. Video: The sun is rising. David Merrill: Now he's brought a tractor into the scene. Video: The orange tractor. Good job! Yeah! DM: So by shaking the Siftables and putting them next to each other he can make the characters interact — Video: Woof! DM: inventing his own narrative. Video: Hello! DM: It's an open-ended story, and he gets to decide how it unfolds. Video: Fly away, cat. DM: So, the last example I have time to show you today is a music sequencing and live performance tool that we've built recently, in which Siftables act as sounds like lead, bass and drums. Each of these has four different variations, you get to choose which one you want to use. And you can inject these sounds into a sequence that you can assemble into the pattern that you want. And you inject it by just bumping up the sound Siftable against a sequence Siftable. There are effects that you can control live, like reverb and filter. You attach it to a particular sound and then tilt to adjust it. And then, overall effects like tempo and volume that apply to the entire sequence. So let's have a look. Video: (Music) DM: We'll start by putting a lead into two sequence Siftables, arrange them into a series, extend it, add a little more lead. Now I put a bass line in. Video: (Music) DM: Now I'll put some percussion in. Video: (Music) DM: And now I'll attach the filter to the drums, so I can control the effect live. Video: (Music) DM: I can speed up the whole sequence by tilting the tempo one way or the other. Video: (Music) DM: And now I'll attach the filter to the bass for some more expression. Video: (Music) DM: I can rearrange the sequence while it plays. So I don't have to plan it out in advance, but I can improvise, making it longer or shorter as I go. And now, finally, I can fade the whole sequence out using the volume Siftable, tilted to the left. (Applause) Thank you. So, as you can see, my passion is for making new human-computer interfaces that are a better match to the ways our brains and bodies work. And today, I had time to show you one point in this new design space, and a few of the possibilities that we're working to bring out of the laboratory. So the thought I want to leave you with is that we're on the cusp of this new generation of tools for interacting with digital media that are going to bring information into our world on our terms. Thank you very much. I look forward to talking with all of you. (Applause)

Our loss of wisdom

Barry Schwartz

{0: 'Barry Schwartz'}

{0: ['psychologist']}

{0: "Barry Schwartz studies the link between economics and psychology, offering startling insights into modern life. Lately, working with Ken Sharpe, he's studying wisdom."}

2009-02-07

2009-02-16

TED2009

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'da', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'et', 'fa', 'fr', 'fr-ca', 'gl', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'hy', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'lt', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sr', 'sv', 'th', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['business', 'culture', 'global issues', 'philosophy', 'self', 'social change', 'society', 'psychology']

{93: 'The paradox of choice', 487: 'Our buggy moral code', 208: 'The life-long learner', 1043: 'Using our practical wisdom', 771: 'Four ways to fix a broken legal system', 1836: "Why we shouldn't trust markets with our civic life"}

https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_our_loss_of_wisdom/

Barry Schwartz makes a passionate call for "practical wisdom" as an antidote to a society gone mad with bureaucracy. He argues powerfully that rules often fail us, incentives often backfire, and practical, everyday wisdom will help rebuild our world.

In his inaugural address, Barack Obama appealed to each of us to give our best as we try to extricate ourselves from this current financial crisis. But what did he appeal to? He did not, happily, follow in the footsteps of his predecessor, and tell us to just go shopping. Nor did he tell us, "Trust us. Trust your country. Invest, invest, invest." Instead, what he told us was to put aside childish things. And he appealed to virtue. Virtue is an old-fashioned word. It seems a little out of place in a cutting-edge environment like this one. And besides, some of you might be wondering, what the hell does it mean? Let me begin with an example. This is the job description of a hospital janitor that is scrolling up on the screen. And all of the items on it are unremarkable. They're the things you would expect: mop the floors, sweep them, empty the trash, restock the cabinets. It may be a little surprising how many things there are, but it's not surprising what they are. But the one thing I want you to notice about them is this: even though this is a very long list, there isn't a single thing on it that involves other human beings. Not one. The janitor's job could just as well be done in a mortuary as in a hospital. And yet, when some psychologists interviewed hospital janitors to get a sense of what they thought their jobs were like, they encountered Mike, who told them about how he stopped mopping the floor because Mr. Jones was out of his bed getting a little exercise, trying to build up his strength, walking slowly up and down the hall. And Charlene told them about how she ignored her supervisor's admonition and didn't vacuum the visitor's lounge because there were some family members who were there all day, every day who, at this moment, happened to be taking a nap. And then there was Luke, who washed the floor in a comatose young man's room twice because the man's father, who had been keeping a vigil for six months, didn't see Luke do it the first time, and his father was angry. And behavior like this from janitors, from technicians, from nurses and, if we're lucky now and then, from doctors, doesn't just make people feel a little better, it actually improves the quality of patient care and enables hospitals to run well. Now, not all janitors are like this, of course. But the ones who are think that these sorts of human interactions involving kindness, care and empathy are an essential part of the job. And yet their job description contains not one word about other human beings. These janitors have the moral will to do right by other people. And beyond this, they have the moral skill to figure out what "doing right" means. "Practical wisdom," Aristotle told us, "is the combination of moral will and moral skill." A wise person knows when and how to make the exception to every rule, as the janitors knew when to ignore the job duties in the service of other objectives. A wise person knows how to improvise, as Luke did when he re-washed the floor. Real-world problems are often ambiguous and ill-defined and the context is always changing. A wise person is like a jazz musician — using the notes on the page, but dancing around them, inventing combinations that are appropriate for the situation and the people at hand. A wise person knows how to use these moral skills in the service of the right aims. To serve other people, not to manipulate other people. And finally, perhaps most important, a wise person is made, not born. Wisdom depends on experience, and not just any experience. You need the time to get to know the people that you're serving. You need permission to be allowed to improvise, try new things, occasionally to fail and to learn from your failures. And you need to be mentored by wise teachers. When you ask the janitors who behaved like the ones I described how hard it is to learn to do their job, they tell you that it takes lots of experience. And they don't mean it takes lots of experience to learn how to mop floors and empty trash cans. It takes lots of experience to learn how to care for people. At TED, brilliance is rampant. It's scary. The good news is you don't need to be brilliant to be wise. The bad news is that without wisdom, brilliance isn't enough. It's as likely to get you and other people into trouble as anything else. (Applause) Now, I hope that we all know this. There's a sense in which it's obvious, and yet, let me tell you a little story. It's a story about lemonade. A dad and his seven-year-old son were watching a Detroit Tigers game at the ballpark. His son asked him for some lemonade and Dad went to the concession stand to buy it. All they had was Mike's Hard Lemonade, which was five percent alcohol. Dad, being an academic, had no idea that Mike's Hard Lemonade contained alcohol. So he brought it back. And the kid was drinking it, and a security guard spotted it, and called the police, who called an ambulance that rushed to the ballpark, whisked the kid to the hospital. The emergency room ascertained that the kid had no alcohol in his blood. And they were ready to let the kid go. But not so fast. The Wayne County Child Welfare Protection Agency said no. And the child was sent to a foster home for three days. At that point, can the child go home? Well, a judge said yes, but only if the dad leaves the house and checks into a motel. After two weeks, I'm happy to report, the family was reunited. But the welfare workers and the ambulance people and the judge all said the same thing: "We hate to do it but we have to follow procedure." How do things like this happen? Scott Simon, who told this story on NPR, said, "Rules and procedures may be dumb, but they spare you from thinking." And, to be fair, rules are often imposed because previous officials have been lax and they let a child go back to an abusive household. Fair enough. When things go wrong, as of course they do, we reach for two tools to try to fix them. One tool we reach for is rules. Better ones, more of them. The second tool we reach for is incentives. Better ones, more of them. What else, after all, is there? We can certainly see this in response to the current financial crisis. Regulate, regulate, regulate. Fix the incentives, fix the incentives, fix the incentives ... The truth is that neither rules nor incentives are enough to do the job. How could you even write a rule that got the janitors to do what they did? And would you pay them a bonus for being empathic? It's preposterous on its face. And what happens is that as we turn increasingly to rules, rules and incentives may make things better in the short run, but they create a downward spiral that makes them worse in the long run. Moral skill is chipped away by an over-reliance on rules that deprives us of the opportunity to improvise and learn from our improvisations. And moral will is undermined by an incessant appeal to incentives that destroy our desire to do the right thing. And without intending it, by appealing to rules and incentives, we are engaging in a war on wisdom. Let me just give you a few examples, first of rules and the war on moral skill. The lemonade story is one. Second, no doubt more familiar to you, is the nature of modern American education: scripted, lock-step curricula. Here's an example from Chicago kindergarten. Reading and enjoying literature and words that begin with 'B.' "The Bath:" Assemble students on a rug and give students a warning about the dangers of hot water. Say 75 items in this script to teach a 25-page picture book. All over Chicago in every kindergarten class in the city, every teacher is saying the same words in the same way on the same day. We know why these scripts are there. We don't trust the judgment of teachers enough to let them loose on their own. Scripts like these are insurance policies against disaster. And they prevent disaster. But what they assure in its place is mediocrity. (Applause) Don't get me wrong. We need rules! Jazz musicians need some notes — most of them need some notes on the page. We need more rules for the bankers, God knows. But too many rules prevent accomplished jazz musicians from improvising. And as a result, they lose their gifts, or worse, they stop playing altogether. Now, how about incentives? They seem cleverer. If you have one reason for doing something and I give you a second reason for doing the same thing, it seems only logical that two reasons are better than one and you're more likely to do it. Right? Well, not always. Sometimes two reasons to do the same thing seem to compete with one another instead of complimenting, and they make people less likely to do it. I'll just give you one example because time is racing. In Switzerland, back about 15 years ago, they were trying to decide where to site nuclear waste dumps. There was going to be a national referendum. Some psychologists went around and polled citizens who were very well informed. And they said, "Would you be willing to have a nuclear waste dump in your community?" Astonishingly, 50 percent of the citizens said yes. They knew it was dangerous. They thought it would reduce their property values. But it had to go somewhere and they had responsibilities as citizens. The psychologists asked other people a slightly different question. They said, "If we paid you six weeks' salary every year would you be willing to have a nuclear waste dump in your community?" Two reasons. It's my responsibility and I'm getting paid. Instead of 50 percent saying yes, 25 percent said yes. What happens is that the second this introduction of incentive gets us so that instead of asking, "What is my responsibility?" all we ask is, "What serves my interests?" When incentives don't work, when CEOs ignore the long-term health of their companies in pursuit of short-term gains that will lead to massive bonuses, the response is always the same. Get smarter incentives. The truth is that there are no incentives that you can devise that are ever going to be smart enough. Any incentive system can be subverted by bad will. We need incentives. People have to make a living. But excessive reliance on incentives demoralizes professional activity in two senses of that word. It causes people who engage in that activity to lose morale and it causes the activity itself to lose morality. Barack Obama said, before he was inaugurated, "We must ask not just 'Is it profitable?' but 'Is it right?'" And when professions are demoralized, everyone in them becomes dependent on — addicted to — incentives and they stop asking "Is it right?" We see this in medicine. ("Although it's nothing serious, let's keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn't turn into a major lawsuit.") And we certainly see it in the world of business. ("In order to remain competitive in today's marketplace, I'm afraid we're going to have to replace you with a sleezeball.") ("I sold my soul for about a tenth of what the damn things are going for now.") It is obvious that this is not the way people want to do their work. So what can we do? A few sources of hope: we ought to try to re-moralize work. One way not to do it: teach more ethics courses. (Applause) There is no better way to show people that you're not serious than to tie up everything you have to say about ethics into a little package with a bow and consign it to the margins as an ethics course. What to do instead? One: Celebrate moral exemplars. Acknowledge, when you go to law school, that a little voice is whispering in your ear about Atticus Finch. No 10-year-old goes to law school to do mergers and acquisitions. People are inspired by moral heroes. But we learn that with sophistication comes the understanding that you can't acknowledge that you have moral heroes. Well, acknowledge them. Be proud that you have them. Celebrate them. And demand that the people who teach you acknowledge them and celebrate them too. That's one thing we can do. I don't know how many of you remember this: another moral hero, 15 years ago, Aaron Feuerstein, who was the head of Malden Mills in Massachusetts — they made Polartec — The factory burned down. 3,000 employees. He kept every one of them on the payroll. Why? Because it would have been a disaster for them and for the community if he had let them go. "Maybe on paper our company is worth less to Wall Street, but I can tell you it's worth more. We're doing fine." Just at this TED we heard talks from several moral heroes. Two were particularly inspiring to me. One was Ray Anderson, who turned — (Applause) — turned, you know, a part of the evil empire into a zero-footprint, or almost zero-footprint business. Why? Because it was the right thing to do. And a bonus he's discovering is he's actually going to make even more money. His employees are inspired by the effort. Why? Because there happy to be doing something that's the right thing to do. Yesterday we heard Willie Smits talk about re-foresting in Indonesia. (Applause) In many ways this is the perfect example. Because it took the will to do the right thing. God knows it took a huge amount of technical skill. I'm boggled at how much he and his associates needed to know in order to plot this out. But most important to make it work — and he emphasized this — is that it took knowing the people in the communities. Unless the people you're working with are behind you, this will fail. And there isn't a formula to tell you how to get the people behind you, because different people in different communities organize their lives in different ways. So there's a lot here at TED, and at other places, to celebrate. And you don't have to be a mega-hero. There are ordinary heroes. Ordinary heroes like the janitors who are worth celebrating too. As practitioners each and every one of us should strive to be ordinary, if not extraordinary heroes. As heads of organizations, we should strive to create environments that encourage and nurture both moral skill and moral will. Even the wisest and most well-meaning people will give up if they have to swim against the current in the organizations in which they work. If you run an organization, you should be sure that none of the jobs — none of the jobs — have job descriptions like the job descriptions of the janitors. Because the truth is that any work that you do that involves interaction with other people is moral work. And any moral work depends upon practical wisdom. And, perhaps most important, as teachers, we should strive to be the ordinary heroes, the moral exemplars, to the people we mentor. And there are a few things that we have to remember as teachers. One is that we are always teaching. Someone is always watching. The camera is always on. Bill Gates talked about the importance of education and, in particular, the model that KIPP was providing: "Knowledge is power." And he talked about a lot of the wonderful things that KIPP is doing to take inner-city kids and turn them in the direction of college. I want to focus on one particular thing KIPP is doing that Bill didn't mention. That is that they have come to the realization that the single most important thing kids need to learn is character. They need to learn to respect themselves. They need to learn to respect their schoolmates. They need to learn to respect their teachers. And, most important, they need to learn to respect learning. That's the principle objective. If you do that, the rest is just pretty much a coast downhill. And the teachers: the way you teach these things to the kids is by having the teachers and all the other staff embody it every minute of every day. Obama appealed to virtue. And I think he was right. And the virtue I think we need above all others is practical wisdom, because it's what allows other virtues — honesty, kindness, courage and so on — to be displayed at the right time and in the right way. He also appealed to hope. Right again. I think there is reason for hope. I think people want to be allowed to be virtuous. In many ways, it's what TED is all about. Wanting to do the right thing in the right way for the right reasons. This kind of wisdom is within the grasp of each and every one of us if only we start paying attention. Paying attention to what we do, to how we do it, and, perhaps most importantly, to the structure of the organizations within which we work, so as to make sure that it enables us and other people to develop wisdom rather than having it suppressed. Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: You have to go and stand out here a sec. Barry Schwartz: Thank you very much. (Applause)

The next species of human

Juan Enriquez

{0: 'Juan Enriquez'}

{0: ['author', 'academic', 'futurist']}

{0: 'Juan Enriquez thinks and writes about the profound changes that genomics and brain research will bring about in business, technology, politics and society.'}

2009-02-04

2009-02-17

TED2009

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['biology', 'business', 'economics', 'robots', 'science', 'technology']

{193: 'Using biology to rethink the energy challenge', 38: 'The accelerating power of technology', 227: 'On the verge of creating synthetic life', 1467: 'Will our kids be a different species?', 1187: 'Caring for engineered tissue', 1346: 'Back to the future (of 1994)'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/juan_enriquez_the_next_species_of_human/

While the mega-banks were toppling in early 2009, Juan Enriquez took the stage to say: The really big reboot is yet to come. But don't look for it on the stock exchange or the political ballot. It'll come from science labs, and it promises keener bodies and minds. Our kids are going to be ... different.

There's a great big elephant in the room called the economy. So let's start talking about that. I wanted to give you a current picture of the economy. That's what I have behind myself. (Laughter) But of course what we have to remember is this. And what you have to think about is, when you're dancing in the flames, what's next? So what I'm going to try to do in the next 17 and a half minutes is I'm going to talk first about the flames — where we are in the economy — and then I'm going to take three trends that have taken place at TED over the last 25 years and that will take place in this conference and I will try and bring them together. And I will try and give you a sense of what the ultimate reboot looks like. Those three trends are the ability to engineer cells, the ability to engineer tissues, and robots. And somehow it will all make sense. But anyway, let's start with the economy. There's a couple of really big problems that are still sitting there. One is leverage. And the problem with leverage is it makes the U.S. financial system look like this. (Laughter) So, a normal commercial bank has nine to 10 times leverage. That means for every dollar you deposit, it loans out about nine or 10. A normal investment bank is not a deposit bank, it's an investment bank; it has 15 to 20 times. It turns out that B of A in September had 32 times. And your friendly Citibank had 47 times. Oops. That means every bad loan goes bad 47 times over. And that, of course, is the reason why all of you are making such generous and wonderful donations to these nice folks. And as you think about that, you've got to wonder: so what do banks have in store for you now? (Laughter) It ain't pretty. The government, meanwhile, has been acting like Santa Claus. We all love Santa Claus, right? But the problem with Santa Clause is, if you look at the mandatory spending of what these folks have been doing and promising folks, it turned out that in 1967, 38 percent was mandatory spending on what we call "entitlements." And then by 2007 it was 68 percent. And we weren't supposed to run into 100 percent until about 2030. Except we've been so busy giving away a trillion here, a trillion there, that we've brought that date of reckoning forward to about 2017. And we thought we were going to be able to lay these debts off on our kids, but, guess what? We're going to start to pay them. And the problem with this stuff is, now that the bill's come due, it turns out Santa isn't quite as cute when it's summertime. Right? (Laughter) Here's some advice from one of the largest investors in the United States. This guy runs the China Investment Corporation. He is the main buyer of U.S. Treasury bonds. And he gave an interview in December. Here's his first bit of advice. And here's his second bit of advice. And, by the way, the Chinese Prime Minister reiterated this at Davos last Sunday. This stuff is getting serious enough that if we don't start paying attention to the deficit, we're going to end up losing the dollar. And then all bets are off. Let me show you what it looks like. I think I can safely say that I'm the only trillionaire in this room. This is an actual bill. And it's 10 triliion dollars. The only problem with this bill is it's not really worth very much. That was eight bucks last week, four bucks this week, a buck next week. And that's what happens to currencies when you don't stand behind them. So the next time somebody as cute as this shows up on your doorstep, and sometimes this creature's called Chrysler and sometimes Ford and sometimes ... whatever you want — you've just got to say no. And you've got to start banishing a word that's called "entitlement." And the reason we have to do that in the short term is because we have just run out of cash. If you look at the federal budget, this is what it looks like. The orange slice is what's discretionary. Everything else is mandated. It makes no difference if we cut out the bridges to Alaska in the overall scheme of things. So what we have to start thinking about doing is capping our medical spending because that's a monster that's simply going to eat the entire budget. We've got to start thinking about asking people to retire a little bit later. If you're 60 to 65 you retire on time. Your 401(k) just got nailed. If you're 50 to 60 we want you to work two years more. If you're under 50 we want you to work four more years. The reason why that's reasonable is, when your grandparents were given Social Security, they got it at 65 and were expected to check out at 68. Sixty-eight is young today. We've also got to cut the military about three percent a year. We've got to limit other mandatory spending. We've got to quit borrowing as much, because otherwise the interest is going to eat that whole pie. And we've got to end up with a smaller government. And if we don't start changing this trend line, we are going to lose the dollar and start to look like Iceland. I got what you're thinking. This is going to happen when hell freezes over. But let me remind you this December it did snow in Vegas. (Laughter) Here's what happens if you don't address this stuff. So, Japan had a fiscal real estate crisis back in the late '80s. And its 225 largest companies today are worth one quarter of what they were 18 years ago. We don't fix this now, how would you like to see a Dow 3,500 in 2026? Because that's the consequence of not dealing with this stuff. And unless you want this person to not just become the CFO of Florida, but the United States, we'd better deal with this stuff. That's the short term. That's the flame part. That's the financial crisis. Now, right behind the financial crisis there's a second and bigger wave that we need to talk about. That wave is much larger, much more powerful, and that's of course the wave of technology. And what's really important in this stuff is, as we cut, we also have to grow. Among other things, because startup companies are .02 percent of U.S. GDP investmentm and they're about 17.8 percent of output. It's groups like that in this room that generate the future of the U.S. economy. And that's what we've got to keep growing. We don't have to keep growing these bridges to nowhere. So let's bring a romance novelist into this conversation. And that's where these three trends come together. That's where the ability to engineer microbes, the ability to engineer tissues, and the ability to engineer robots begin to lead to a reboot. And let me recap some of the stuff you've seen. Craig Venter showed up last year and showed you the first fully programmable cell that acts like hardware where you can insert DNA and have it boot up as a different species. In parallel, the folks at MIT have been building a standard registry of biological parts. So think of it as a Radio Shack for biology. You can go out and get your proteins, your RNA, your DNA, whatever. And start building stuff. In 2006 they brought together high school students and college students and started to build these little odd creatures. They just happened to be alive instead of circuit boards. Here was one of the first things they built. So, cells have this cycle. First they don't grow. Then they grow exponentially. Then they stop growing. Graduate students wanted a way of telling which stage they were in. So they engineered these cells so that when they're growing in the exponential phase, they would smell like wintergreen. And when they stopped growing they would smell like bananas. And you could tell very easily when your experiment was working and wasn't, and where it was in the phase. This got a bit more complicated two years later. Twenty-one countries came together. Dozens of teams. They started competing. The team from Rice University started to engineer the substance in red wine that makes red wine good for you into beer. So you take resveratrol and you put it into beer. Of course, one of the judges is wandering by, and he goes, "Wow! Cancer-fighting beer! There is a God." (Laughter) The team from Taiwan was a little bit more ambitious. They tried to engineer bacterias in such a way that they would act as your kidneys. Four years ago, I showed you this picture. And people oohed and ahhed, because Cliff Tabin had been able to grow an extra wing on a chicken. And that was very cool stuff back then. But now moving from bacterial engineering to tissue engineering, let me show you what's happened in that period of time. Two years ago, you saw this creature. An almost-extinct animal from Xochimilco, Mexico called an axolotl that can re-generate its limbs. You can freeze half its heart. It regrows. You can freeze half the brain. It regrows. It's almost like leaving Congress. (Laughter) But now, you don't have to have the animal itself to regenerate, because you can build cloned mice molars in Petri dishes. And, of course if you can build mice molars in Petri dishes, you can grow human molars in Petri dishes. This should not surprise you, right? I mean, you're born with no teeth. You give away all your teeth to the tooth fairy. You re-grow a set of teeth. But then if you lose one of those second set of teeth, they don't regrow, unless, if you're a lawyer. (Laughter) But, of course, for most of us, we know how to grow teeth, and therefore we can take adult stem teeth, put them on a biodegradable mold, re-grow a tooth, and simply implant it. And we can do it with other things. So, a Spanish woman who was dying of T.B. had a donor trachea, they took all the cells off the trachea, they spraypainted her stem cells onto that cartilage. She regrew her own trachea, and 72 hours later it was implanted. She's now running around with her kids. This is going on in Tony Atala's lab in Wake Forest where he is re-growing ears for injured soldiers, and he's also re-growing bladders. So there are now nine women walking around Boston with re-grown bladders, which is much more pleasant than walking around with a whole bunch of plastic bags for the rest of your life. This is kind of getting boring, right? I mean, you understand where this story's going. But, I mean it gets more interesting. Last year, this group was able to take all the cells off a heart, leaving just the cartilage. Then, they sprayed stem cells onto that heart, from a mouse. Those stem cells self-organized, and that heart started to beat. Life happens. This may be one of the ultimate papers. This was done in Japan and in the U.S., published at the same time, and it rebooted skin cells into stem cells, last year. That meant that you can take the stuff right here, and turn it into almost anything in your body. And this is becoming common, it's moving very quickly, it's moving in a whole series of places. Third trend: robots. Those of us of a certain age grew up expecting that by now we would have Rosie the Robot from "The Jetsons" in our house. And all we've got is a Roomba. (Laughter) We also thought we'd have this robot to warn us of danger. Didn't happen. And these were robots engineered for a flat world, right? So, Rosie runs around on skates and the other one ran on flat threads. If you don't have a flat world, that's not good, which is why the robot's we're designing today are a little different. This is Boston Dynamics' "BigDog." And this is about as close as you can get to a physical Turing test. O.K., so let me remind you, a Turing test is where you've got a wall, you're talking to somebody on the other side of the wall, and when you don't know if that thing is human or animal — that's when computers have reached human intelligence. This is not an intelligence Turing rest, but this is as close as you can get to a physical Turing test. And this stuff is moving very quickly, and by the way, that thing can carry about 350 pounds of weight. These are not the only interesting robots. You've also got flies, the size of flies, that are being made by Robert Wood at Harvard. You've got Stickybots that are being made at Stanford. And as you bring these things together, as you bring cells, biological tissue engineering and mechanics together, you begin to get some really odd questions. In the last Olympics, this gentleman, who had several world records in the Special Olympics, tried to run in the normal Olympics. The only issue with Oscar Pistorius is he was born without bones in the lower part of his legs. He came within about a second of qualifying. He sued to be allowed to run, and he won the suit, but didn't qualify by time. Next Olympics, you can bet that Oscar, or one of Oscar's successors, is going to make the time. And two or three Olympics after that, they are going to be unbeatable. And as you bring these trends together, and as you think of what it means to take people who are profoundly deaf, who can now begin to hear — I mean, remember the evolution of hearing aids, right? I mean, your grandparents had these great big cones, and then your parents had these odd boxes that would squawk at odd times during dinner, and now we have these little buds that nobody sees. And now you have cochlear implants that go into people's heads and allow the deaf to begin to hear. Now, they can't hear as well as you and I can. But, in 10 or 15 machine generations they will, and these are machine generations, not human generations. And about two or three years after they can hear as well as you and I can, they'll be able to hear maybe how bats sing, or how whales talk, or how dogs talk, and other types of tonal scales. They'll be able to focus their hearing, they'll be able to increase the sensitivity, decrease the sensitivity, do a series of things that we can't do. And the same thing is happening in eyes. This is a group in Germany that's beginning to engineer eyes so that people who are blind can begin to see light and dark. Very primitive. And then they'll be able to see shape. And then they'll be able to see color, and then they'll be able to see in definition, and one day, they'll see as well as you and I can. And a couple of years after that, they'll be able to see in ultraviolet, they'll be able to see in infrared, they'll be able to focus their eyes, they'll be able to come into a microfocus. They'll do stuff you and I can't do. All of these things are coming together, and it's a particularly important thing to understand, as we worry about the flames of the present, to keep an eye on the future. And, of course, the future is looking back 200 years, because next week is the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth. And it's the 150th anniversary of the publication of "The Origin of Species." And Darwin, of course, argued that evolution is a natural state. It is a natural state in everything that is alive, including hominids. There have actually been 22 species of hominids that have been around, have evolved, have wandered in different places, have gone extinct. It is common for hominids to evolve. And that's the reason why, as you look at the hominid fossil record, erectus, and heidelbergensis, and floresiensis, and Neanderthals, and Homo sapiens, all overlap. The common state of affairs is to have overlapping versions of hominids, not one. And as you think of the implications of that, here's a brief history of the universe. The universe was created 13.7 billion years ago, and then you created all the stars, and all the planets, and all the galaxies, and all the Milky Ways. And then you created Earth about 4.5 billion years ago, and then you got life about four billion years ago, and then you got hominids about 0.006 billion years ago, and then you got our version of hominids about 0.0015 billion years ago. Ta-dah! Maybe the reason for thr creation of the universe, and all the galaxies, and all the planets, and all the energy, and all the dark energy, and all the rest of stuff is to create what's in this room. Maybe not. That would be a mildly arrogant viewpoint. (Laughter) So, if that's not the purpose of the universe, then what's next? (Laughter) I think what we're going to see is we're going to see a different species of hominid. I think we're going to move from a Homo sapiens into a Homo evolutis. And I think this isn't 1,000 years out. I think most of us are going to glance at it, and our grandchildren are going to begin to live it. And a Homo evolutis brings together these three trends into a hominid that takes direct and deliberate control over the evolution of his species, her species and other species. And that, of course, would be the ultimate reboot. Thank you very much. (Applause)

The El Sistema music revolution

José Antonio Abreu

{0: 'José Antonio Abreu'}

{0: ['maestro']}

{0: "José Antonio Abreu founded El Sistema in 1975 to help Venezuelan kids learn to play musical instruments and be part of an orchestra. The TED Prize winner's bold idea has seeded hundreds of youth orchestras -- and many happy lives."}

2009-02-05

2009-02-18

TED2009

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'hy', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'lv', 'ml', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['conducting', 'culture', 'education', 'entertainment', 'music', 'philanthropy', 'poverty']

{466: "El Sistema's top youth orchestra", 286: 'The transformative power of classical music', 45: "An 11-year-old's magical violin", 1240: 'Trusting the ensemble', 663: 'Lead like the great conductors', 2100: 'Why I take the piano on the road ... and in the air'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/jose_antonio_abreu_the_el_sistema_music_revolution/

José Antonio Abreu is the charismatic founder of a youth orchestra system that has transformed thousands of kids' lives in Venezuela. He shares his amazing story and unveils a TED Prize wish that could have a big impact in the US and beyond.

Chris Anderson: Let's now see the extraordinary speech that we captured a couple weeks ago. (Music) Jose Antonio Abreu: My dear friends, ladies and gentlemen, I am overjoyed today at being awarded the TED Prize on behalf of all the distinguished music teachers, artists and educators from Venezuela who have selflessly and loyally accompanied me for 35 years in founding, growing and developing in Venezuela the National System of Youth and Children's Orchestras and Choirs. Since I was a boy, in my early childhood, I always wanted to be a musician, and, thank God, I made it. From my teachers, my family and my community, I had all the necessary support to become a musician. All my life I've dreamed that all Venezuelan children have the same opportunity that I had. From that desire and from my heart stemmed the idea to make music a deep and global reality for my country. From the very first rehearsal, I saw the bright future ahead. Because the rehearsal meant a great challenge to me. I had received a donation of 50 music stands to be used by 100 boys in that rehearsal. When I arrived at the rehearsal, only 11 kids had shown up, and I said to myself, "Do I close the program or multiply these kids?" I decided to face the challenge, and on that same night, I promised those 11 children I'd turn our orchestra into one of the leading orchestras in the world. Two months ago, I remembered that promise I made, when a distinguished English critic published an article in the London Times, asking who could be the winner of the Orchestra World Cup. He mentioned four great world orchestras, and the fifth one was Venezuela's Youth Symphony Orchestra. Today we can say that art in Latin America is no longer a monopoly of elites and that it has become a social right, a right for all the people. Child: There is no difference here between classes, nor white or black, nor if you have money or not. Simply, if you are talented, if you have the vocation and the will to be here, you get in. You share with us and make music. JA: During the recent tour by the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela of U.S. and Europe, we saw how our music moved young audiences to the bottom of their souls, how children and adolescents rushed up to the stage to receive the jackets from our musicians, how the standing ovations, sometimes 30 minutes long, seemed to last forever, and how the public, after the concert was over, went out into the street to greet our young people in triumph. This meant not only an artistic triumph, but also a profound emotional sympathy between the public of the most advanced nations of the world and the musical youth of Latin America, as seen in Venezuela, giving these audiences a message of music, vitality, energy, enthusiasm and strength. In its essence, the orchestra and the choir are much more than artistic structures. They are examples and schools of social life, because to sing and to play together means to intimately coexist toward perfection and excellence, following a strict discipline of organization and coordination in order to seek the harmonic interdependence of voices and instruments. That's how they build a spirit of solidarity and fraternity among them, develop their self-esteem and foster the ethical and aesthetical values related to the music in all its senses. This is why music is immensely important in the awakening of sensibility, in the forging of values and in the training of youngsters to teach other kids. Child: After all this time here, music is life. Nothing else. Music is life. JA: Each teenager and child in El Sistema has his own story, and they are all important and of great significance to me. Let me mention the case of Edicson Ruiz. He is a boy from a parish in Caracas who passionately attended to his double bass lessons at the San Agustin's Junior Orchestra. With his effort, and the support of his mother, his family and his community, he became a principal member in the double bass segment of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. We have another well-known case — Gustavo Dudamel. He started as a boy member of the children's orchestra in his hometown, Barquisimeto. There, he grew as a violinist and as a conductor. He became the conductor of Venezuela's junior orchestras, and today conducts the world's greatest orchestras. He is the musical director of Los Angeles Philharmonic, and is still the overall leader of Venezuela's junior orchestras. He was the conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, and he's an unbeatable example for young musicians in Latin America and the world. The structure of El Sistema is based on a new and flexible managing style adapted to the features of each community and region, and today attends to 300,000 children of the lower and middle class all over Venezuela. It's a program of social rescue and deep cultural transformation designed for the whole Venezuelan society with absolutely no distinctions whatsoever, but emphasizing the vulnerable and endangered social groups. The effect of El Sistema is felt in three fundamental circles: in the personal/social circle, in the family circle and in the community. In the personal/social circle, the children in the orchestras and choirs develop their intellectual and emotional side. The music becomes a source for developing the dimensions of the human being, thus elevating the spirit and leading man to a full development of his personality. So, the emotional and intellectual profits are huge — the acquisition of leadership, teaching and training principles, the sense of commitment, responsibility, generosity and dedication to others, and the individual contribution to achieve great collective goals. All this leads to the development of self-esteem and confidence. Mother Teresa of Calcutta insisted on something that always impressed me: the most miserable and tragic thing about poverty is not the lack of bread or roof, but the feeling of being no-one — the feeling of not being anyone, the lack of identification, the lack of public esteem. That's why the child's development in the orchestra and the choir provides him with a noble identity and makes him a role model for his family and community. It makes him a better student at school because it inspires in him a sense of responsibility, perseverance and punctuality that will greatly help him at school. Within the family, the parents' support is unconditional. The child becomes a role model for both his parents, and this is very important for a poor child. Once the child discovers he is important to his family, he begins to seek new ways of improving himself and hopes better for himself and his community. Also, he hopes for social and economic improvements for his own family. All this makes up a constructive and ascending social dynamic. The large majority of our children belong, as I already mentioned, to the most vulnerable strata of the Venezuelan population. That encourages them to embrace new dreams, new goals, and progress in the various opportunities that music has to offer. Finally, in the circle of the community, the orchestras prove to be the creative spaces of culture and sources of exchange and new meanings. The spontaneity music has excludes it as a luxury item and makes it a patrimony of society. It's what makes a child play a violin at home, while his father works in his carpentry. It's what makes a little girl play the clarinet at home, while her mother does the housework. The idea is that the families join with pride and joy in the activities of the orchestras and the choirs that their children belong to. The huge spiritual world that music produces in itself, which also lies within itself, ends up overcoming material poverty. From the minute a child's taught how to play an instrument, he's no longer poor. He becomes a child in progress heading for a professional level, who'll later become a full citizen. Needless to say that music is the number one prevention against prostitution, violence, bad habits, and everything degrading in the life of a child. A few years ago, historian Arnold Toynbee said that the world was suffering a huge spiritual crisis. Not an economic or social crisis, but a spiritual one. I believe that to confront such a crisis, only art and religion can give proper answers to humanity, to mankind's deepest aspirations, and to the historic demands of our times. Education — the synthesis of wisdom and knowledge — is the means to strive for a more perfect, more aware, more noble and more just society. With passion and enthusiasm we pay profound respects to TED for its outstanding humanism, the scope of its principles, for its open and generous promotion of young values. We hope that TED can contribute in a full and fundamental way to the building of this new era in the teaching of music, in which the social, communal, spiritual and vindicatory aims of the child and the adolescent become a beacon and a goal for a vast social mission. No longer putting society at the service of art, and much less at the services of monopolies of the elite, but instead art at the service of society, at the service of the weakest, at the service of the children, at the service of the sick, at the service of the vulnerable, and at the service of all those who cry for vindication through the spirit of their human condition and the raising up of their dignity. (Music) (Applause) CA: We are going live now to Caracas. We are going live to Caracas to hear Maestro Abreu's TED Prize wish. JA: Here is my TED Prize wish: I wish that you'll help to create and document a special training program for 50 gifted young musicians, passionate about their art and social justice, and dedicated to bringing El Sistema to the United States and other countries. Thank you very much. (Applause)

El Sistema's top youth orchestra

Gustavo Dudamel and the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra

{0: 'Gustavo Dudamel and the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra'}

{0: ['ensemble']}

{0: 'The Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra is the national high-school-age youth orchestra of El Sistema, made up of the best young musicians from throughout Venezuela. Gustavo Dudamel, himself a product of El Sistema, is the new musical director of the LA Philharmonic.'}

2009-02-05

2009-02-18

TED2009

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'eo', 'es', 'fa', 'fil', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'ku', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'th', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['TED Prize', 'children', 'conducting', 'culture', 'education', 'entertainment', 'music', 'performance', 'live music']

{464: 'The El Sistema music revolution', 46: 'Improvising on piano, aged 14', 45: "An 11-year-old's magical violin", 663: 'Lead like the great conductors', 1240: 'Trusting the ensemble', 1526: 'The mad scientist of music'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/gustavo_dudamel_and_the_teresa_carreno_youth_orchestra_el_sistema_s_top_youth_orchestra/

The Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra contains the best high school musicians from Venezuela's life-changing music program, El Sistema. Led here by Gustavo Dudamel, they play Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10, 2nd movement, and Arturo Márquez' Danzón No. 2.

Chris Anderson: And now we go live to Caracas to see one of Maestro Abreu's great proteges. He is the new musical director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. He's the greatest young conductor in the world. Gustavo Dudamel! (Applause) (Music) (Applause) Gustavo Dudamel: Hi everybody in L.A. Hi Quincy. Hi Maestro Zander. Hi Mark. We are very happy to have the possibility to be with you in the other side of the world. We can speak only with music. We are very happy because we have the opportunity to have this angel in the world — not only in our country, Venezuela, but in our world. He has given us the possibility to have dreams and to make true the dreams. And here are the results of this wonderful project that is The System in Venezuela. We hope to have, our Maestro, to have orchestras in all the countries in all Americas. And we want to play a little piece for you by one of the most important composers of America. A Mexican composer: Arturo Marquez. "Danzon No. 2." (Music) (Applause)

My wish: Protect our oceans

Sylvia Earle

{0: 'Sylvia Earle'}

{0: ['oceanographer']}

{0: "Sylvia Earle has been at the forefront of ocean exploration for more than four decades. The winner of the 2009 TED Prize, she's a tireless advocate for our oceans."}

2009-02-05

2009-02-19

TED2009

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fi', 'fr', 'gl', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sl', 'sr', 'sv', 'th', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['TED Prize', 'activism', 'biodiversity', 'exploration', 'oceans', 'science', 'submarine', 'marine biology', 'global commons']

{206: 'Underwater astonishments', 264: 'The astonishing hidden world of the deep ocean', 6: "Sampling the ocean's DNA", 1372: 'A census of the ocean', 1011: 'Making law on the high seas', 998: 'Saving the ocean one island at a time'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/sylvia_earle_my_wish_protect_our_oceans/

Legendary ocean researcher Sylvia Earle shares astonishing images of the ocean -- and shocking stats about its rapid decline -- as she makes her TED Prize wish: that we will join her in protecting the vital blue heart of the planet.

Fifty years ago, when I began exploring the ocean, no one — not Jacques Perrin, not Jacques Cousteau or Rachel Carson — imagined that we could do anything to harm the ocean by what we put into it or by what we took out of it. It seemed, at that time, to be a sea of Eden, but now we know, and now we are facing paradise lost. I want to share with you my personal view of changes in the sea that affect all of us, and to consider why it matters that in 50 years, we've lost — actually, we've taken, we've eaten — more than 90 percent of the big fish in the sea; why you should care that nearly half of the coral reefs have disappeared; why a mysterious depletion of oxygen in large areas of the Pacific should concern not only the creatures that are dying, but it really should concern you. It does concern you, as well. I'm haunted by the thought of what Ray Anderson calls "tomorrow's child," asking why we didn't do something on our watch to save sharks and bluefin tuna and squids and coral reefs and the living ocean while there still was time. Well, now is that time. I hope for your help to explore and protect the wild ocean in ways that will restore the health and, in so doing, secure hope for humankind. Health to the ocean means health for us. And I hope Jill Tarter's wish to engage Earthlings includes dolphins and whales and other sea creatures in this quest to find intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. And I hope, Jill, that someday we will find evidence that there is intelligent life among humans on this planet. (Laughter) Did I say that? I guess I did. For me, as a scientist, it all began in 1953 when I first tried scuba. It's when I first got to know fish swimming in something other than lemon slices and butter. I actually love diving at night; you see a lot of fish then that you don't see in the daytime. Diving day and night was really easy for me in 1970, when I led a team of aquanauts living underwater for weeks at a time — at the same time that astronauts were putting their footprints on the moon. In 1979 I had a chance to put my footprints on the ocean floor while using this personal submersible called Jim. It was six miles offshore and 1,250 feet down. It's one of my favorite bathing suits. Since then, I've used about 30 kinds of submarines and I've started three companies and a nonprofit foundation called Deep Search to design and build systems to access the deep sea. I led a five-year National Geographic expedition, the Sustainable Seas expeditions, using these little subs. They're so simple to drive that even a scientist can do it. And I'm living proof. Astronauts and aquanauts alike really appreciate the importance of air, food, water, temperature — all the things you need to stay alive in space or under the sea. I heard astronaut Joe Allen explain how he had to learn everything he could about his life support system and then do everything he could to take care of his life support system; and then he pointed to this and he said, "Life support system." We need to learn everything we can about it and do everything we can to take care of it. The poet Auden said, "Thousands have lived without love; none without water." Ninety-seven percent of Earth's water is ocean. No blue, no green. If you think the ocean isn't important, imagine Earth without it. Mars comes to mind. No ocean, no life support system. I gave a talk not so long ago at the World Bank and I showed this amazing image of Earth and I said, "There it is! The World Bank!" That's where all the assets are! And we've been trawling them down much faster than the natural systems can replenish them. Tim Worth says the economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment. With every drop of water you drink, every breath you take, you're connected to the sea. No matter where on Earth you live. Most of the oxygen in the atmosphere is generated by the sea. Over time, most of the planet's organic carbon has been absorbed and stored there, mostly by microbes. The ocean drives climate and weather, stabilizes temperature, shapes Earth's chemistry. Water from the sea forms clouds that return to the land and the seas as rain, sleet and snow, and provides home for about 97 percent of life in the world, maybe in the universe. No water, no life; no blue, no green. Yet we have this idea, we humans, that the Earth — all of it: the oceans, the skies — are so vast and so resilient it doesn't matter what we do to it. That may have been true 10,000 years ago, and maybe even 1,000 years ago but in the last 100, especially in the last 50, we've drawn down the assets, the air, the water, the wildlife that make our lives possible. New technologies are helping us to understand the nature of nature; the nature of what's happening, showing us our impact on the Earth. I mean, first you have to know that you've got a problem. And fortunately, in our time, we've learned more about the problems than in all preceding history. And with knowing comes caring. And with caring, there's hope that we can find an enduring place for ourselves within the natural systems that support us. But first we have to know. Three years ago, I met John Hanke, who's the head of Google Earth, and I told him how much I loved being able to hold the world in my hands and go exploring vicariously. But I asked him: "When are you going to finish it? You did a great job with the land, the dirt. What about the water?" Since then, I've had the great pleasure of working with the Googlers, with DOER Marine, with National Geographic, with dozens of the best institutions and scientists around the world, ones that we could enlist, to put the ocean in Google Earth. And as of just this week, last Monday, Google Earth is now whole. Consider this: Starting right here at the convention center, we can find the nearby aquarium, we can look at where we're sitting, and then we can cruise up the coast to the big aquarium, the ocean, and California's four national marine sanctuaries, and the new network of state marine reserves that are beginning to protect and restore some of the assets We can flit over to Hawaii and see the real Hawaiian Islands: not just the little bit that pokes through the surface, but also what's below. To see — wait a minute, we can go kshhplash! — right there, ha — under the ocean, see what the whales see. We can go explore the other side of the Hawaiian Islands. We can go actually and swim around on Google Earth and visit with humpback whales. These are the gentle giants that I've had the pleasure of meeting face to face many times underwater. There's nothing quite like being personally inspected by a whale. We can pick up and fly to the deepest place: seven miles down, the Mariana Trench, where only two people have ever been. Imagine that. It's only seven miles, but only two people have been there, 49 years ago. One-way trips are easy. We need new deep-diving submarines. How about some X Prizes for ocean exploration? We need to see deep trenches, the undersea mountains, and understand life in the deep sea. We can now go to the Arctic. Just ten years ago I stood on the ice at the North Pole. An ice-free Arctic Ocean may happen in this century. That's bad news for the polar bears. That's bad news for us too. Excess carbon dioxide is not only driving global warming, it's also changing ocean chemistry, making the sea more acidic. That's bad news for coral reefs and oxygen-producing plankton. Also it's bad news for us. We're putting hundreds of millions of tons of plastic and other trash into the sea. Millions of tons of discarded fishing nets, gear that continues to kill. We're clogging the ocean, poisoning the planet's circulatory system, and we're taking out hundreds of millions of tons of wildlife, all carbon-based units. Barbarically, we're killing sharks for shark fin soup, undermining food chains that shape planetary chemistry and drive the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the oxygen cycle, the water cycle — our life support system. We're still killing bluefin tuna; truly endangered and much more valuable alive than dead. All of these parts are part of our life support system. We kill using long lines, with baited hooks every few feet that may stretch for 50 miles or more. Industrial trawlers and draggers are scraping the sea floor like bulldozers, taking everything in their path. Using Google Earth you can witness trawlers — in China, the North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico — shaking the foundation of our life support system, leaving plumes of death in their path. The next time you dine on sushi — or sashimi, or swordfish steak, or shrimp cocktail, whatever wildlife you happen to enjoy from the ocean — think of the real cost. For every pound that goes to market, more than 10 pounds, even 100 pounds, may be thrown away as bycatch. This is the consequence of not knowing that there are limits to what we can take out of the sea. This chart shows the decline in ocean wildlife from 1900 to 2000. The highest concentrations are in red. In my lifetime, imagine, 90 percent of the big fish have been killed. Most of the turtles, sharks, tunas and whales are way down in numbers. But, there is good news. Ten percent of the big fish still remain. There are still some blue whales. There are still some krill in Antarctica. There are a few oysters in Chesapeake Bay. Half the coral reefs are still in pretty good shape, a jeweled belt around the middle of the planet. There's still time, but not a lot, to turn things around. But business as usual means that in 50 years, there may be no coral reefs — and no commercial fishing, because the fish will simply be gone. Imagine the ocean without fish. Imagine what that means to our life support system. Natural systems on the land are in big trouble too, but the problems are more obvious, and some actions are being taken to protect trees, watersheds and wildlife. And in 1872, with Yellowstone National Park, the United States began establishing a system of parks that some say was the best idea America ever had. About 12 percent of the land around the world is now protected: safeguarding biodiversity, providing a carbon sink, generating oxygen, protecting watersheds. And, in 1972, this nation began to establish a counterpart in the sea, National Marine Sanctuaries. That's another great idea. The good news is that there are now more than 4,000 places in the sea, around the world, that have some kind of protection. And you can find them on Google Earth. The bad news is that you have to look hard to find them. In the last three years, for example, the U.S. protected 340,000 square miles of ocean as national monuments. But it only increased from 0.6 of one percent to 0.8 of one percent of the ocean protected, globally. Protected areas do rebound, but it takes a long time to restore 50-year-old rockfish or monkfish, sharks or sea bass, or 200-year-old orange roughy. We don't consume 200-year-old cows or chickens. Protected areas provide hope that the creatures of Ed Wilson's dream of an encyclopedia of life, or the census of marine life, will live not just as a list, a photograph, or a paragraph. With scientists around the world, I've been looking at the 99 percent of the ocean that is open to fishing — and mining, and drilling, and dumping, and whatever — to search out hope spots, and try to find ways to give them and us a secure future. Such as the Arctic — we have one chance, right now, to get it right. Or the Antarctic, where the continent is protected, but the surrounding ocean is being stripped of its krill, whales and fish. Sargasso Sea's three million square miles of floating forest is being gathered up to feed cows. 97 percent of the land in the Galapagos Islands is protected, but the adjacent sea is being ravaged by fishing. It's true too in Argentina on the Patagonian shelf, which is now in serious trouble. The high seas, where whales, tuna and dolphins travel — the largest, least protected, ecosystem on Earth, filled with luminous creatures, living in dark waters that average two miles deep. They flash, and sparkle, and glow with their own living light. There are still places in the sea as pristine as I knew as a child. The next 10 years may be the most important, and the next 10,000 years the best chance our species will have to protect what remains of the natural systems that give us life. To cope with climate change, we need new ways to generate power. We need new ways, better ways, to cope with poverty, wars and disease. We need many things to keep and maintain the world as a better place. But, nothing else will matter if we fail to protect the ocean. Our fate and the ocean's are one. We need to do for the ocean what Al Gore did for the skies above. A global plan of action with a world conservation union, the IUCN, is underway to protect biodiversity, to mitigate and recover from the impacts of climate change, on the high seas and in coastal areas, wherever we can identify critical places. New technologies are needed to map, photograph and explore the 95 percent of the ocean that we have yet to see. The goal is to protect biodiversity, to provide stability and resilience. We need deep-diving subs, new technologies to explore the ocean. We need, maybe, an expedition — a TED at sea — that could help figure out the next steps. And so, I suppose you want to know what my wish is. I wish you would use all means at your disposal — films, expeditions, the web, new submarines — and campaign to ignite public support for a global network of marine protected areas — hope spots large enough to save and restore the ocean, the blue heart of the planet. How much? Some say 10 percent, some say 30 percent. You decide: how much of your heart do you want to protect? Whatever it is, a fraction of one percent is not enough. My wish is a big wish, but if we can make it happen, it can truly change the world, and help ensure the survival of what actually — as it turns out — is my favorite species; that would be us. For the children of today, for tomorrow's child: as never again, now is the time. Thank you. (Applause)

Join the SETI search

Jill Tarter

{0: 'Jill Tarter'}

{0: ['astronomer']}

{0: "SETI's Jill Tarter has devoted her career to hunting for signs of sentient beings elsewhere. Winner of the 2009 TED Prize, almost all aspects of her field have been affected by her work."}

2009-02-05

2009-02-20

TED2009

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'hu', 'hy', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'lt', 'ml', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['TED Prize', 'exploration', 'extraterrestrial life', 'intelligence', 'science', 'space', 'universe', 'telescopes']

{306: "Let's look for life in the outer solar system", 467: 'My wish: Protect our oceans', 440: "A theory of Earth's mass extinctions", 23736: 'Calculating the odds of intelligent alien life', 42: 'Is this our final century?', 23714: "Why can't we see evidence of alien life?"}

https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_tarter_join_the_seti_search/

The SETI Institute's Jill Tarter makes her TED Prize wish: to accelerate our search for cosmic company. Using a growing array of radio telescopes, she and her team listen for patterns that may be a sign of intelligence elsewhere in the universe.

So, my question: are we alone? The story of humans is the story of ideas — scientific ideas that shine light into dark corners, ideas that we embrace rationally and irrationally, ideas for which we've lived and died and killed and been killed, ideas that have vanished in history, and ideas that have been set in dogma. It's a story of nations, of ideologies, of territories, and of conflicts among them. But, every moment of human history, from the Stone Age to the Information Age, from Sumer and Babylon to the iPod and celebrity gossip, they've all been carried out — every book that you've read, every poem, every laugh, every tear — they've all happened here. Here. Here. Here. (Laughter) Perspective is a very powerful thing. Perspectives can change. Perspectives can be altered. From my perspective, we live on a fragile island of life, in a universe of possibilities. For many millennia, humans have been on a journey to find answers, answers to questions about naturalism and transcendence, about who we are and why we are, and of course, who else might be out there. Is it really just us? Are we alone in this vast universe of energy and matter and chemistry and physics? Well, if we are, it's an awful waste of space. (Laughter) But, what if we're not? What if, out there, others are asking and answering similar questions? What if they look up at the night sky, at the same stars, but from the opposite side? Would the discovery of an older cultural civilization out there inspire us to find ways to survive our increasingly uncertain technological adolescence? Might it be the discovery of a distant civilization and our common cosmic origins that finally drives home the message of the bond among all humans? Whether we're born in San Francisco, or Sudan, or close to the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, we are the products of a billion-year lineage of wandering stardust. We, all of us, are what happens when a primordial mixture of hydrogen and helium evolves for so long that it begins to ask where it came from. Fifty years ago, the journey to find answers took a different path and SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, began. So, what exactly is SETI? Well, SETI uses the tools of astronomy to try and find evidence of someone else's technology out there. Our own technologies are visible over interstellar distances, and theirs might be as well. It might be that some massive network of communications, or some shield against asteroidal impact, or some huge astro-engineering project that we can't even begin to conceive of, could generate signals at radio or optical frequencies that a determined program of searching might detect. For millennia, we've actually turned to the priests and the philosophers for guidance and instruction on this question of whether there's intelligent life out there. Now, we can use the tools of the 21st century to try and observe what is, rather than ask what should be, believed. SETI doesn't presume the existence of extra terrestrial intelligence; it merely notes the possibility, if not the probability in this vast universe, which seems fairly uniform. The numbers suggest a universe of possibilities. Our sun is one of 400 billion stars in our galaxy, and we know that many other stars have planetary systems. We've discovered over 350 in the last 14 years, including the small planet, announced earlier this week, which has a radius just twice the size of the Earth. And, if even all of the planetary systems in our galaxy were devoid of life, there are still 100 billion other galaxies out there, altogether 10^22 stars. Now, I'm going to try a trick, and recreate an experiment from this morning. Remember, one billion? But, this time not one billion dollars, one billion stars. Alright, one billion stars. Now, up there, 20 feet above the stage, that's 10 trillion. Well, what about 10^22? Where's the line that marks that? That line would have to be 3.8 million miles above this stage. (Laughter) 16 times farther away than the moon, or four percent of the distance to the sun. So, there are many possibilities. (Laughter) And much of this vast universe, much more may be habitable than we once thought, as we study extremophiles on Earth — organisms that can live in conditions totally inhospitable for us, in the hot, high pressure thermal vents at the bottom of the ocean, frozen in ice, in boiling battery acid, in the cooling waters of nuclear reactors. These extremophiles tell us that life may exist in many other environments. But those environments are going to be widely spaced in this universe. Even our nearest star, the Sun — its emissions suffer the tyranny of light speed. It takes a full eight minutes for its radiation to reach us. And the nearest star is 4.2 light years away, which means its light takes 4.2 years to get here. And the edge of our galaxy is 75,000 light years away, and the nearest galaxy to us, 2.5 million light years. That means any signal we detect would have started its journey a long time ago. And a signal would give us a glimpse of their past, not their present. Which is why Phil Morrison calls SETI, "the archaeology of the future." It tells us about their past, but detection of a signal tells us it's possible for us to have a long future. I think this is what David Deutsch meant in 2005, when he ended his Oxford TEDTalk by saying he had two principles he'd like to share for living, and he would like to carve them on stone tablets. The first is that problems are inevitable. The second is that problems are soluble. So, ultimately what's going to determine the success or failure of SETI is the longevity of technologies, and the mean distance between technologies in the cosmos — distance over space and distance over time. If technologies don't last and persist, we will not succeed. And we're a very young technology in an old galaxy, and we don't yet know whether it's possible for technologies to persist. So, up until now I've been talking to you about really large numbers. Let me talk about a relatively small number. And that's the length of time that the Earth was lifeless. Zircons that are mined in the Jack Hills of western Australia, zircons taken from the Jack Hills of western Australia tell us that within a few hundred million years of the origin of the planet there was abundant water and perhaps even life. So, our planet has spent the vast majority of its 4.56 billion year history developing life, not anticipating its emergence. Life happened very quickly, and that bodes well for the potential of life elsewhere in the cosmos. And the other thing that one should take away from this chart is the very narrow range of time over which humans can claim to be the dominant intelligence on the planet. It's only the last few hundred thousand years modern humans have been pursuing technology and civilization. So, one needs a very deep appreciation of the diversity and incredible scale of life on this planet as the first step in preparing to make contact with life elsewhere in the cosmos. We are not the pinnacle of evolution. We are not the determined product of billions of years of evolutionary plotting and planning. We are one outcome of a continuing adaptational process. We are residents of one small planet in a corner of the Milky Way galaxy. And Homo sapiens are one small leaf on a very extensive Tree of Life, which is densely populated by organisms that have been honed for survival over millions of years. We misuse language, and talk about the "ascent" of man. We understand the scientific basis for the interrelatedness of life but our ego hasn't caught up yet. So this "ascent" of man, pinnacle of evolution, has got to go. It's a sense of privilege that the natural universe doesn't share. Loren Eiseley has said, "One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human." One day that eye may be that of an intelligent alien, and the sooner we eschew our narrow view of evolution the sooner we can truly explore our ultimate origins and destinations. We are a small part of the story of cosmic evolution, and we are going to be responsible for our continued participation in that story, and perhaps SETI will help as well. Occasionally, throughout history, this concept of this very large cosmic perspective comes to the surface, and as a result we see transformative and profound discoveries. So in 1543, Nicholas Copernicus published "The Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres," and by taking the Earth out of the center, and putting the sun in the center of the solar system, he opened our eyes to a much larger universe, of which we are just a small part. And that Copernican revolution continues today to influence science and philosophy and technology and theology. So, in 1959, Giuseppe Coccone and Philip Morrison published the first SETI article in a refereed journal, and brought SETI into the scientific mainstream. And in 1960, Frank Drake conducted the first SETI observation looking at two stars, Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, for about 150 hours. Now Drake did not discover extraterrestrial intelligence, but he learned a very valuable lesson from a passing aircraft, and that's that terrestrial technology can interfere with the search for extraterrestrial technology. We've been searching ever since, but it's impossible to overstate the magnitude of the search that remains. All of the concerted SETI efforts, over the last 40-some years, are equivalent to scooping a single glass of water from the oceans. And no one would decide that the ocean was without fish on the basis of one glass of water. The 21st century now allows us to build bigger glasses — much bigger glasses. In Northern California, we're beginning to take observations with the first 42 telescopes of the Allen Telescope Array — and I've got to take a moment right now to publicly thank Paul Allen and Nathan Myhrvold and all the TeamSETI members in the TED community who have so generously supported this research. (Applause) The ATA is the first telescope built from a large number of small dishes, and hooked together with computers. It's making silicon as important as aluminum, and we'll grow it in the future by adding more antennas to reach 350 for more sensitivity and leveraging Moore's law for more processing capability. Today, our signal detection algorithms can find very simple artifacts and noise. If you look very hard here you can see the signal from the Voyager 1 spacecraft, the most distant human object in the universe, 106 times as far away from us as the sun is. And over those long distances, its signal is very faint when it reaches us. It may be hard for your eye to see it, but it's easily found with our efficient algorithms. But this is a simple signal, and tomorrow we want to be able to find more complex signals. This is a very good year. 2009 is the 400th anniversary of Galileo's first use of the telescope, Darwin's 200th birthday, the 150th anniversary of the publication of "On the Origin of Species," the 50th anniversary of SETI as a science, the 25th anniversary of the incorporation of the SETI Institute as a non-profit, and of course, the 25th anniversary of TED. And next month, the Kepler Spacecraft will launch and will begin to tell us just how frequent Earth-like planets are, the targets for SETI's searches. In 2009, the U.N. has declared it to be the International Year of Astronomy, a global festival to help us residents of Earth rediscover our cosmic origins and our place in the universe. And in 2009, change has come to Washington, with a promise to put science in its rightful position. (Applause) So, what would change everything? Well, this is the question the Edge foundation asked this year, and four of the respondents said, "SETI." Why? Well, to quote: "The discovery of intelligent life beyond Earth would eradicate the loneliness and solipsism that has plagued our species since its inception. And it wouldn't simply change everything, it would change everything all at once." So, if that's right, why did we only capture four out of those 151 minds? I think it's a problem of completion and delivery, because the fine print said, "What game-changing ideas and scientific developments would you expect to live to see?" So, we have a fulfillment problem. We need bigger glasses and more hands in the water, and then working together, maybe we can all live to see the detection of the first extraterrestrial signal. That brings me to my wish. I wish that you would empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company. The first step would be to tap into the global brain trust, to build an environment where raw data could be stored, and where it could be accessed and manipulated, where new algorithms could be developed and old algorithms made more efficient. And this is a technically creative challenge, and it would change the perspective of people who worked on it. And then, we'd like to augment the automated search with human insight. We'd like to use the pattern recognition capability of the human eye to find faint, complex signals that our current algorithms miss. And, of course, we'd like to inspire and engage the next generation. We'd like to take the materials that we have built for education, and get them out to students everywhere, students that can't come and visit us at the ATA. We'd like to tell our story better, and engage young people, and thereby change their perspective. I'm sorry Seth Godin, but over the millennia, we've seen where tribalism leads. We've seen what happens when we divide an already small planet into smaller islands. And, ultimately, we actually all belong to only one tribe, to Earthlings. And SETI is a mirror — a mirror that can show us ourselves from an extraordinary perspective, and can help to trivialize the differences among us. If SETI does nothing but change the perspective of humans on this planet, then it will be one of the most profound endeavors in history. So, in the opening days of 2009, a visionary president stood on the steps of the U.S. Capitol and said, "We cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass, that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve, that, as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself." So, I look forward to working with the TED community to hear about your ideas about how to fulfill this wish, and in collaborating with you, hasten the day that that visionary statement can become a reality. Thank you. (Applause)

How Benjamin Button got his face

Ed Ulbrich

{0: 'Ed Ulbrich'}

{0: ['visual storyteller']}

{0: 'Ed Ulbrich works at the leading edge of computer-generated visuals. On a recent project, filmmakers, artists, and technologists have been working at a breakthrough point where reality and digitally created worlds collide.'}

2009-02-04

2009-02-23

TED2009

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['aging', 'business', 'entertainment', 'film', 'technology', 'animation']

{205: 'The mystery box', 785: 'Before Avatar ... a curious boy', 55: 'My wish: A global day of film', 41224: 'Digital humans that look just like us', 662: 'Animating a photo-real digital face', 1760: 'How I made an impossible film'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/ed_ulbrich_how_benjamin_button_got_his_face/

Ed Ulbrich, the digital-effects guru from Digital Domain, explains the Oscar-winning technology that allowed his team to digitally create the older versions of Brad Pitt's face for "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."

I'm here today representing a team of artists and technologists and filmmakers that worked together on a remarkable film project for the last four years. And along the way they created a breakthrough in computer visualization. So I want to show you a clip of the film now. Hopefully it won't stutter. And if we did our jobs well, you won't know that we were even involved. Voice (Video): I don't know how it's possible ... but you seem to have more hair. Brad Pitt: What if I told you that I wasn't getting older ... but I was getting younger than everybody else? I was born with some form of disease. Voice: What kind of disease? BP: I was born old. Man: I'm sorry. BP: No need to be. There's nothing wrong with old age. Girl: Are you sick? BP: I heard momma and Tizzy whisper, and they said I was gonna die soon. But ... maybe not. Girl: You're different than anybody I've ever met. BB: There were many changes ... some you could see, some you couldn't. Hair started growing in all sorts of places, along with other things. I felt pretty good, considering. Ed Ulbrich: That was a clip from "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." Many of you, maybe you've seen it or you've heard of the story, but what you might not know is that for nearly the first hour of the film, the main character, Benjamin Button, who's played by Brad Pitt, is completely computer-generated from the neck up. Now, there's no use of prosthetic makeup or photography of Brad superimposed over another actor's body. We've created a completely digital human head. So I'd like to start with a little bit of history on the project. This is based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story. It's about a man who's born old and lives his life in reverse. Now, this movie has floated around Hollywood for well over half a century, and we first got involved with the project in the early '90s, with Ron Howard as the director. We took a lot of meetings and we seriously considered it. But at the time we had to throw in the towel. It was deemed impossible. It was beyond the technology of the day to depict a man aging backwards. The human form, in particular the human head, has been considered the Holy Grail of our industry. The project came back to us about a decade later, and this time with a director named David Fincher. Now, Fincher is an interesting guy. David is fearless of technology, and he is absolutely tenacious. And David won't take "no." And David believed, like we do in the visual effects industry, that anything is possible as long as you have enough time, resources and, of course, money. And so David had an interesting take on the film, and he threw a challenge at us. He wanted the main character of the film to be played from the cradle to the grave by one actor. It happened to be this guy. We went through a process of elimination and a process of discovery with David, and we ruled out, of course, swapping actors. That was one idea: that we would have different actors, and we would hand off from actor to actor. We even ruled out the idea of using makeup. We realized that prosthetic makeup just wouldn't hold up, particularly in close-up. And makeup is an additive process. You have to build the face up. And David wanted to carve deeply into Brad's face to bring the aging to this character. He needed to be a very sympathetic character. So we decided to cast a series of little people that would play the different bodies of Benjamin at the different increments of his life and that we would in fact create a computer-generated version of Brad's head, aged to appear as Benjamin, and attach that to the body of the real actor. Sounded great. Of course, this was the Holy Grail of our industry, and the fact that this guy is a global icon didn't help either, because I'm sure if any of you ever stand in line at the grocery store, you know — we see his face constantly. So there really was no tolerable margin of error. There were two studios involved: Warner Brothers and Paramount. And they both believed this would make an amazing film, of course, but it was a very high-risk proposition. There was lots of money and reputations at stake. But we believed that we had a very solid methodology that might work ... But despite our verbal assurances, they wanted some proof. And so, in 2004, they commissioned us to do a screen test of Benjamin. And we did it in about five weeks. But we used lots of cheats and shortcuts. We basically put something together to get through the meeting. I'll roll that for you now. This was the first test for Benjamin Button. And in here, you can see, that's a computer-generated head — pretty good — attached to the body of an actor. And it worked. And it gave the studio great relief. After many years of starts and stops on this project, and making that tough decision, they finally decided to greenlight the movie. And I can remember, actually, when I got the phone call to congratulate us, to say the movie was a go, I actually threw up. (Laughter) You know, this is some tough stuff. So we started to have early team meetings, and we got everybody together, and it was really more like therapy in the beginning, convincing each other and reassuring each other that we could actually undertake this. We had to hold up an hour of a movie with a character. And it's not a special effects film; it has to be a man. We really felt like we were in a — kind of a 12-step program. And of course, the first step is: admit you've got a problem. (Laughter) So we had a big problem: we didn't know how we were going to do this. But we did know one thing. Being from the visual effects industry, we, with David, believed that we now had enough time, enough resources, and, God, we hoped we had enough money. And we had enough passion to will the processes and technology into existence. So, when you're faced with something like that, of course you've got to break it down. You take the big problem and you break it down into smaller pieces and you start to attack that. So we had three main areas that we had to focus on. We needed to make Brad look a lot older — needed to age him 45 years or so. And we also needed to make sure that we could take Brad's idiosyncrasies, his little tics, the little subtleties that make him who he is and have that translate through our process so that it appears in Benjamin on the screen. And we also needed to create a character that could hold up under, really, all conditions. He needed to be able to walk in broad daylight, at nighttime, under candlelight, he had to hold an extreme close-up, he had to deliver dialogue, he had to be able to run, he had to be able to sweat, he had to be able to take a bath, to cry, he even had to throw up. Not all at the same time — but he had to, you know, do all of those things. And the work had to hold up for almost the first hour of the movie. We did about 325 shots. So we needed a system that would allow Benjamin to do everything a human being can do. And we realized that there was a giant chasm between the state of the art of technology in 2004 and where we needed it to be. So we focused on motion capture. I'm sure many of you have seen motion capture. The state of the art at the time was something called marker-based motion capture. I'll give you an example here. It's basically the idea of, you wear a leotard, and they put some reflective markers on your body, and instead of using cameras, there're infrared sensors around a volume, and those infrared sensors track the three-dimensional position of those markers in real time. And then animators can take the data of the motion of those markers and apply them to a computer-generated character. You can see the computer characters on the right are having the same complex motion as the dancers. But we also looked at numbers of other films at the time that were using facial marker tracking, and that's the idea of putting markers on the human face and doing the same process. And as you can see, it gives you a pretty crappy performance. That's not terribly compelling. And what we realized was that what we needed was the information that was going on between the markers. We needed the subtleties of the skin. We needed to see skin moving over muscle moving over bone. We needed creases and dimples and wrinkles and all of those things. Our first revelation was to completely abort and walk away from the technology of the day, the status quo, the state of the art. So we aborted using motion capture. And we were now well out of our comfort zone, and in uncharted territory. So we were left with this idea that we ended up calling "technology stew." We started to look out in other fields. The idea was that we were going to find nuggets or gems of technology that come from other industries like medical imaging, the video game space, and re-appropriate them. And we had to create kind of a sauce. And the sauce was code in software that we'd written to allow these disparate pieces of technology to come together and work as one. Initially, we came across some remarkable research done by a gentleman named Dr. Paul Ekman in the early '70s. He believed that he could, in fact, catalog the human face. And he came up with this idea of Facial Action Coding System, or FACS. He believed that there were 70 basic poses or shapes of the human face, and that those basic poses or shapes of the face can be combined to create infinite possibilities of everything the human face is capable of doing. And of course, these transcend age, race, culture, gender. So this became the foundation of our research as we went forward. And then we came across some remarkable technology called Contour. And here you can see a subject having phosphorus makeup stippled on her face. And now what we're looking at is really creating a surface capture as opposed to a marker capture. The subject stands in front of a computer array of cameras, and those cameras can, frame-by-frame, reconstruct the geometry of exactly what the subject's doing at the moment. So, effectively, you get 3D data in real time of the subject. And if you look in a comparison, on the left, we see what volumetric data gives us and on the right you see what markers give us. So, clearly, we were in a substantially better place for this. But these were the early days of this technology, and it wasn't really proven yet. We measure complexity and fidelity of data in terms of polygonal count. And so, on the left, we were seeing 100,000 polygons. We could go up into the millions of polygons. It seemed to be infinite. This was when we had our "Aha!" This was the breakthrough. This is when we're like, "OK, we're going to be OK, This is actually going to work." And the "Aha!" was, what if we could take Brad Pitt, and we could put Brad in this device, and use this Contour process, and we could stipple on this phosphorescent makeup and put him under the black lights, and we could, in fact, scan him in real time performing Ekman's FACS poses. Right? So, effectively, we ended up with a 3D database of everything Brad Pitt's face is capable of doing. (Laughter) From there, we actually carved up those faces into smaller pieces and components of his face. So we ended up with literally thousands and thousands and thousands of shapes, a complete database of all possibilities that his face is capable of doing. Now, that's great, except we had him at age 44. We need to put another 40 years on him at this point. We brought in Rick Baker, and Rick is one of the great makeup and special effects gurus of our industry. And we also brought in a gentleman named Kazu Tsuji, and Kazu Tsuji is one of the great photorealist sculptors of our time. And we commissioned them to make a maquette, or a bust, of Benjamin. So, in the spirit of "The Great Unveiling" — I had to do this — I had to unveil something. So this is Ben 80. We created three of these: there's Ben 80, there's Ben 70, there's Ben 60. And this really became the template for moving forward. Now, this was made from a life cast of Brad. So, in fact, anatomically, it is correct. The eyes, the jaw, the teeth: everything is in perfect alignment with what the real guy has. We have these maquettes scanned into the computer at very high resolution — enormous polygonal count. And so now we had three age increments of Benjamin in the computer. But we needed to get a database of him doing more than that. We went through this process, then, called retargeting. This is Brad doing one of the Ekman FACS poses. And here's the resulting data that comes from that, the model that comes from that. Retargeting is the process of transposing that data onto another model. And because the life cast, or the bust — the maquette — of Benjamin was made from Brad, we could transpose the data of Brad at 44 onto Brad at 87. So now, we had a 3D database of everything Brad Pitt's face can do at age 87, in his 70s and in his 60s. Next we had to go into the shooting process. So while all that's going on, we're down in New Orleans and locations around the world. And we shot our body actors, and we shot them wearing blue hoods. So these are the gentleman who played Benjamin. And the blue hoods helped us with two things: one, we could easily erase their heads; and we also put tracking markers on their heads so we could recreate the camera motion and the lens optics from the set. But now we needed to get Brad's performance to drive our virtual Benjamin. And so we edited the footage that was shot on location with the rest of the cast and the body actors and about six months later we brought Brad onto a sound stage in Los Angeles and he watched on the screen. His job, then, was to become Benjamin. And so we looped the scenes. He watched again and again. We encouraged him to improvise. And he took Benjamin into interesting and unusual places that we didn't think he was going to go. We shot him with four HD cameras so we'd get multiple views of him and then David would choose the take of Brad being Benjamin that he thought best matched the footage with the rest of the cast. From there we went into a process called image analysis. And so here, you can see again, the chosen take. And you are seeing, now, that data being transposed on to Ben 87. And so, what's interesting about this is we used something called image analysis, which is taking timings from different components of Benjamin's face. And so we could choose, say, his left eyebrow. And the software would tell us that, well, in frame 14 the left eyebrow begins to move from here to here, and it concludes moving in frame 32. And so we could choose numbers of positions on the face to pull that data from. And then, the sauce I talked about with our technology stew — that secret sauce was, effectively, software that allowed us to match the performance footage of Brad in live action with our database of aged Benjamin, the FACS shapes that we had. On a frame-by-frame basis, we could actually reconstruct a 3D head that exactly matched the performance of Brad. So this was how the finished shot appeared in the film. And here you can see the body actor. And then this is what we called the "dead head," no reference to Jerry Garcia. And then here's the reconstructed performance now with the timings of the performance. And then, again, the final shot. It was a long process. (Applause) The next section here, I'm going to just blast through this, because we could do a whole TEDTalk on the next several slides. We had to create a lighting system. So really, a big part of our processes was creating a lighting environment for every single location that Benjamin had to appear so that we could put Ben's head into any scene and it would exactly match the lighting that's on the other actors in the real world. We also had to create an eye system. We found the old adage, you know, "The eyes are the window to the soul," absolutely true. So the key here was to keep everybody looking in Ben's eyes. And if you could feel the warmth, and feel the humanity, and feel his intent coming through the eyes, then we would succeed. So we had one person focused on the eye system for almost two full years. We also had to create a mouth system. We worked from dental molds of Brad. We had to age the teeth over time. We also had to create an articulating tongue that allowed him to enunciate his words. There was a whole system written in software to articulate the tongue. We had one person devoted to the tongue for about nine months. He was very popular. Skin displacement: another big deal. The skin had to be absolutely accurate. He's also in an old age home, he's in a nursing home around other old people, so he had to look exactly the same as the others. So, lots of work on skin deformation, you can see in some of these cases it works, in some cases it looks bad. This is a very, very, very early test in our process. So, effectively we created a digital puppet that Brad Pitt could operate with his own face. There were no animators necessary to come in and interpret behavior or enhance his performance. There was something that we encountered, though, that we ended up calling "the digital Botox effect." So, as things went through this process, Fincher would always say, "It sandblasts the edges off of the performance." And thing our process and the technology couldn't do, is they couldn't understand intent, the intent of the actor. So it sees a smile as a smile. It doesn't recognize an ironic smile, or a happy smile, or a frustrated smile. So it did take humans to kind of push it one way or another. But we ended up calling the entire process and all the technology "emotion capture," as opposed to just motion capture. Take another look. Brad Pitt: Well, I heard momma and Tizzy whisper, and they said I was gonna die soon, but ... maybe not. EU: That's how to create a digital human in 18 minutes. (Applause) A couple of quick factoids; it really took 155 people over two years, and we didn't even talk about 60 hairstyles and an all-digital haircut. But, that is Benjamin. Thank you.

Seas of plastic

Charles Moore

{0: 'Charles Moore'}

{0: ['oceanographer']}

{0: "Charles Moore is founder of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation. He captains the foundation's research vessel, the <i>Alguita</i>, documenting the great expanses of plastic waste that now litter our oceans."}

2009-02-05

2009-02-24

TED2009

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'et', 'fa', 'fi', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'lv', 'mr', 'my', 'nb', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sr', 'sv', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['business', 'environment', 'oceans', 'plastic', 'science']

{279: 'Turning powerful stats into art', 467: 'My wish: Protect our oceans', 264: 'The astonishing hidden world of the deep ocean', 986: 'Tough truths about plastic pollution', 2756: 'What really happens to the plastic you throw away?', 8788: 'The surprising solution to ocean plastic'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/charles_moore_seas_of_plastic/

Capt. Charles Moore of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation first discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch -- an endless floating waste of plastic trash. Now he's drawing attention to the growing, choking problem of plastic debris in our seas.

Let's talk trash. You know, we had to be taught to renounce the powerful conservation ethic we developed during the Great Depression and World War II. After the war, we needed to direct our enormous production capacity toward creation of products for peacetime. Life Magazine helped in this effort by announcing the introduction of throwaways that would liberate the housewife from the drudgery of doing dishes. Mental note to the liberators: throwaway plastics take a lot of space and don't biodegrade. Only we humans make waste that nature can't digest. Plastics are also hard to recycle. A teacher told me how to express the under-five-percent of plastics recovered in our waste stream. It's diddly-point-squat. That's the percentage we recycle. Now, melting point has a lot to do with this. Plastic is not purified by the re-melting process like glass and metal. It begins to melt below the boiling point of water and does not drive off the oily contaminants for which it is a sponge. Half of each year's 100 billion pounds of thermal plastic pellets will be made into fast-track trash. A large, unruly fraction of our trash will flow downriver to the sea. Here is the accumulation at Biona Creek next to the L.A. airport. And here is the flotsam near California State University Long Beach and the diesel plant we visited yesterday. In spite of deposit fees, much of this trash leading out to the sea will be plastic beverage bottles. We use two million of them in the United States every five minutes, here imaged by TED presenter Chris Jordan, who artfully documents mass consumption and zooms in for more detail. Here is a remote island repository for bottles off the coast of Baja California. Isla San Roque is an uninhabited bird rookery off Baja's sparsely populated central coast. Notice that the bottles here have caps on them. Bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate, PET, will sink in seawater and not make it this far from civilization. Also, the caps are produced in separate factories from a different plastic, polypropylene. They will float in seawater, but unfortunately do not get recycled under the bottle bills. Let's trace the journey of the millions of caps that make it to sea solo. After a year the ones from Japan are heading straight across the Pacific, while ours get caught in the California current and first head down to the latitude of Cabo San Lucas. After ten years, a lot of the Japanese caps are in what we call the Eastern Garbage Patch, while ours litter the Philippines. After 20 years, we see emerging the debris accumulation zone of the North Pacific Gyre. It so happens that millions of albatross nesting on Kure and Midway atolls in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands National Monument forage here and scavenge whatever they can find for regurgitation to their chicks. A four-month old Laysan Albatross chick died with this in its stomach. Hundreds of thousands of the goose-sized chicks are dying with stomachs full of bottle caps and other rubbish, like cigarette lighters ... but, mostly bottle caps. Sadly, their parents mistake bottle caps for food tossing about in the ocean surface. The retainer rings for the caps also have consequences for aquatic animals. This is Mae West, still alive at a zookeeper's home in New Orleans. I wanted to see what my home town of Long Beach was contributing to the problem, so on Coastal Clean-Up Day in 2005 I went to the Long Beach Peninsula, at the east end of our long beach. We cleaned up the swaths of beach shown. I offered five cents each for bottle caps. I got plenty of takers. Here are the 1,100 bottle caps they collected. I thought I would spend 20 bucks. That day I ended up spending nearly 60. I separated them by color and put them on display the next Earth Day at Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in San Pedro. Governor Schwarzenegger and his wife Maria stopped by to discuss the display. In spite of my "girly man" hat, crocheted from plastic shopping bags, they shook my hand. (Laughter) I showed him and Maria a zooplankton trawl from the gyre north of Hawaii with more plastic than plankton. Here's what our trawl samples from the plastic soup our ocean has become look like. Trawling a zooplankton net on the surface for a mile produces samples like this. And this. Now, when the debris washes up on the beaches of Hawaii it looks like this. And this particular beach is Kailua Beach, the beach where our president and his family vacationed before moving to Washington. Now, how do we analyze samples like this one that contain more plastic than plankton? We sort the plastic fragments into different size classes, from five millimeters to one-third of a millimeter. Small bits of plastic concentrate persistent organic pollutants up to a million times their levels in the surrounding seawater. We wanted to see if the most common fish in the deep ocean, at the base of the food chain, was ingesting these poison pills. We did hundreds of necropsies, and over a third had polluted plastic fragments in their stomachs. The record-holder, only two-and-a-half inches long, had 84 pieces in its tiny stomach. Now, you can buy certified organic produce. But no fishmonger on Earth can sell you a certified organic wild-caught fish. This is the legacy we are leaving to future generations. The throwaway society cannot be contained — it has gone global. We simply cannot store and maintain or recycle all our stuff. We have to throw it away. Now, the market can do a lot for us, but it can't fix the natural system in the ocean we've broken. All the king's horses and all the king's men ... will never gather up all the plastic and put the ocean back together again. Narrator (Video): The levels are increasing, the amount of packaging is increasing, the "throwaway" concept of living is proliferating, and it's showing up in the ocean. Anchor: He offers no hope of cleaning it up. Straining the ocean for plastic would be beyond the budget of any country and it might kill untold amounts of sea life in the process. The solution, Moore says, is to stop the plastic at its source: stop it on land before it falls in the ocean. And in a plastic-wrapped and packaged world, he doesn't hold out much hope for that, either. This is Brian Rooney for Nightline, in Long Beach, California. Charles Moore: Thank you.

A dive into the reef's Twilight Zone

Richard Pyle

{0: 'Richard Pyle'}

{0: ['ichthyologist']}

{0: 'Ichthyologist Richard Pyle is a fish nerd. In his quest to discover and document new species of fish, he has also become a trailblazing exploratory diver and a pioneer of database technology. '}

2004-02-02

2009-02-25

TED2004

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['biodiversity', 'exploration', 'fear', 'fish', 'oceans', 'science', 'technology', 'marine biology']

{141: "Inside the world's deepest caves", 467: 'My wish: Protect our oceans', 343: 'Life in the deep oceans', 2414: 'Glow-in-the-dark sharks and other stunning sea creatures', 2378: 'The exhilarating peace of freediving', 11684: 'The wonderful world of life in a drop of water'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_pyle_a_dive_into_the_reef_s_twilight_zone/

In this illuminating talk, Richard Pyle shows us thriving life on the cliffs of coral reefs and groundbreaking diving technologies he has pioneered to explore it. He and his team risk everything to reveal the secrets of undiscovered species.

This is the first of two rather extraordinary photographs I'm going to show you today. It was taken 18 years ago. I was 19 years old at the time. I had just returned from one of the deepest dives I'd ever made at that time — a little over 200 feet. And I had caught this little fish. It turns out that particular one was the first of its kind ever taken alive. I'm not just an ichthyologist, I'm a bona fide fish nerd. And to a fish nerd, this is some pretty exciting stuff. More exciting was the fact that the person who took this photo is a guy named Jack Randall, the greatest living ichthyologist on earth — the Grand Poobah of fish nerds, if you will. And so, it was really exciting to me to have this moment in time. It set the course for the rest of my life. But really, the most significant, most profound thing about this picture is it was taken two days before I was completely paralyzed from the neck down. I made a really stupid kind of mistake that most 19-year-old males do when they think they're immortal, and I got a bad case of the bends and was paralyzed, and had to be flown back for treatment. I learned two really important things that day. The first thing I learned — well, I'm mortal. That's a really big one. And the second thing I learned was that I knew, with profound certainty, that this is exactly what I was going to do for the rest of my life. I had to focus all my energies towards going to find new species of things down on deep coral reefs. When you think of a coral reef, this is what most people think of: these big, hard, elaborate corals, lots of bright, colorful fishes and things. But this is really just the tip of the iceberg. If you look at this diagram of a coral reef, we know a lot about that part up near the top. The reason we know so much about it is scuba divers can very easily go down there and access it. There is a problem with scuba, though, in that it imposes some limitations on how deep you can go. It turns out that depth is about 200 feet. I'll get into why that is in just a minute, but the point is, scuba divers generally stay less than 100 feet deep, and very rarely go much below this, at least, not with any kind of sanity. So to go deeper, most biologists have turned to submersibles. Now, submersibles are great, wonderful things, but if you're going to spend 30,000 dollars a day to use one of these things and it's capable of going 2,000 feet, you're not going to go farting around up here in a couple of hundred feet, you're going to go way down deep. So the bottom line is, almost all research using submersibles has taken place well below 500 feet. Now, it's pretty obvious at this point there's a zone here in the middle. That's the zone that centers around my own personal pursuit of happiness. I want to find out what's in this zone; we know almost nothing about it. Scuba divers can't get there, submarines go right on past it. It took me a year to learn to walk again after my diving accident in Palau. During that year, I spent a lot of time learning about the physics and physiology of diving and how to overcome these limitations. I'm just going to show you a basic idea. We're all breathing air right now. Air is a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen, 20 percent oxygen, 80 percent nitrogen. It's in our lungs. And there's a phenomenon called Henry's law, that says gases will dissolve into a fluid in proportion to the partial pressures you're exposing them to. So, basically the gas dissolves into our body. The oxygen is bound by metabolism, we use it for energy. The nitrogen sort of floats around in our blood and tissues. That's fine, it's how we're designed. The problem happens when you go underwater. The deeper you go underwater, the higher the pressure is. If you were to go down to a depth of about 130 feet, which is the recommended limit for most scuba divers, you'd get this pressure effect. The effect of that pressure is you have an increased density of gas molecules in every breath you take. Over time, those gas molecules dissolve into your blood and tissues and start to fill you up. Now, if you were to go down to, say, 300 feet, you don't have five times as many gas molecules in your lungs, you've got 10 times as many gas molecules in your lungs. And, sure enough, they dissolve into your blood and tissues as well. And if you were to go down to where there's 15 times as much — the deeper you go, the more exacerbating the problem becomes. The limitation of diving with air is all those dots in your body, all the nitrogen and all the oxygen. There are three basic limitations of scuba diving. The first limitation is the oxygen — oxygen toxicity. Now, we all know the song: "Love is like oxygen. You get too much, you get too high. Not enough, and you're gonna die." Well, in the context of diving, you get too much, you die also. You die because oxygen toxicity can cause a seizure. It makes you convulse underwater — not a good thing to happen underwater. It happens because there's too much concentration of oxygen in your body. The nitrogen has two problems. One of them is what Jacques Cousteau called "rapture of the deep." It's nitrogen narcosis. It makes you loopy; the deeper you go, the loopier you get. You don't want to drive drunk, you don't want to dive drunk. So that's a real big problem. And of course, the third problem is the one I found out the hard way in Palau, which is the bends. One thing I forgot to mention is that to obviate the problem of nitrogen narcosis — all of those blue dots in our body — you remove the nitrogen and replace it with helium. Helium's a gas; there're a lot of reasons why helium's good, it's a tiny molecule, it's inert, it doesn't give you narcosis. So that's the basic concept we use. But the theory's relatively easy. The tricky part is the implementation. So this is how I began about 15 years ago. I'll admit, it wasn't exactly the smartest of starts, but you've got to start somewhere. (Laughter) At the time, I wasn't the only one who didn't know what I was doing. Almost nobody did. This rig was actually used for a dive of 300 feet. But over time we got better at it, and we came up with this really sophisticated-looking rig with four scuba tanks, five regulators and all the right gas mixtures, all that good stuff. It was fine and dandy, it allowed us to go down and find new species. This picture was taken at 300 feet, catching new species of fish. The problem was it didn't allow us much time. For all its bulk and size, it only gave us about 15 minutes at most down at those sorts of depths. We needed more time. There had to be a better way. And indeed, there is a better way. In 1994, I was fortunate enough to get access to these prototype closed-circuit rebreathers. Closed-circuit rebreather: what makes it different from scuba, and why is it better? Well, there are three main advantages to a rebreather. One, they're quiet, they don't make any noise. Two, they allow you to stay underwater longer. Three, they allow you to go deeper. How is it that they do that? In order to really understand how they do that, you have to look underneath the hood and see what's going on. There are three basic systems to a closed-circuit rebreather. The most fundamental is called the breathing loop. It's a breathing loop because you breathe off of it; it's a closed loop, and you breathe the same gas around and around. There's a mouthpiece that you put in your mouth, and there's a counter lung, or in this case, two counter lungs. The counter lungs aren't high tech, they're simply flexible bags. They allow you to mechanically breathe, mechanically ventilate. When you exhale, it goes in the exhale counter lung; when you inhale, it comes from the inhale counter lung. It's just pure mechanics, allowing you to cycle air through this breathing loop. The other component on a breathing loop is the carbon-dioxide-absorbent canister. Now, as we breathe, we produce carbon dioxide, and that carbon dioxide needs to be scrubbed out of the system. There's a chemical filter in there that pulls the carbon dioxide out of the breathing gas, so that when it comes back to us, it's safe to breathe again. That's the breathing loop in a nutshell. The second main component of a closed-circuit rebreather is the gas system. The primary purpose of the gas system is to provide oxygen, to replenish the oxygen that your body consumes. So the main tank, the main critical thing, is this oxygen gas supply cylinder we have here. But if we only had an oxygen gas supply cylinder, we wouldn't be able to go very deep, because we'd run into oxygen toxicity very quickly. So we need another gas, something to dilute the oxygen with. And that, fittingly enough, is called the diluent gas supply. In our applications, we generally put air inside this diluent gas supply, because it's a very cheap and easy source of nitrogen. So that's where we get our nitrogen from. But if we want to go deeper, of course, we need another gas supply, and helium is what we really need to go deep. Usually we'll have a slightly larger cylinder, mounted exterior on the rebreather, like this. That's what we use to inject, as we start to do our deep dives. We also have a second oxygen cylinder, solely as a backup; if there's a problem with our first oxygen supply, we can continue to breathe. The way you manage all these different gases and different gas supplies is this really high-tech, sophisticated gas block up on the front here, where it's easy to reach. It's got the valves and knobs and things you need to inject the right gases at the right time. Normally, you don't have to do that, because all of it's done automatically with the electronics, the third system of a rebreather. The most critical part of a rebreather are the oxygen sensors. You need three, so if one goes bad, you know which one it is. You need voting logic. You also have three microprocessors. Any one of those computers can run the entire system, so if you have to lose two of them, there's back-up power supplies. And there are multiple displays, to get the information to the diver. This is the high-tech gadgetry that allows us to do what we do on these deep dives. I can talk about it all day — just ask my wife — but I want to move on to something much more interesting. I'm going to take you on a deep dive, and show you what it's like to do one. We start up on the boat, For all this high-tech, expensive equipment, this is still the best way to get in the water, just flop over the side of the boat. Now, as I showed you in the earlier diagram, these reefs that we dive on start out near the surface and they go almost vertically, completely straight down. So we drop in the water and go over the edge of this cliff, and then we start dropping, dropping, dropping. People ask if it takes a long time to get there. No; it only takes a couple minutes to get down to three or four hundred feet, which is what we're aiming for. It's like skydiving in slow motion. It's really very interesting. You ever see "The Abyss," where Ed Harris is sinking down along the side of the wall? That's what it feels like. Amazing. And down there, you find that the water is very clear, extremely clear, because there's hardly any plankton. When you turn on your light and look around the caves, you're confronted with a tremendous amount of diversity, much more than anyone used to believe. Now, not all of it is new species — that fish you see with the white stripe, that's a known species. But if you look carefully into the cracks and crevices, you'll see little things scurrying all over the place. There's a just unbelievable diversity. It's not just fish, either. These are crinoids, sponges, black corals. There're some more fishes. Those fishes that you see now are new species. They're still new species, because I had a video camera instead of my net, so they're still waiting down there for someone to go find them. But this is what it looks like. And this kind of habitat just goes on and on and on for miles. This is Papua, New Guinea. Now little fishes and invertebrates aren't the only things we see down there. We also see sharks, much more regularly than I would have expected to. We're not quite sure why. What I want you to do now is imagine yourself 400 feet underwater, with all this high-tech gear on your back, you're in a remote reef off Papua, New Guinea, thousands of miles from the nearest recompression chamber, and you're completely surrounded by sharks. (Video) Diver 1: (In squeaky voice) Look at those ... Diver 2: Uh, oh ... Uh, oh! Audience: (Laughter) (Video) Diver 1: I think we have their attention ... Richard Pyle: When you start talking like Donald Duck, there's no situation in the world that can seem tense. (Laughter) So we're down there — this is at 400 feet. That's looking straight up, by the way, to give a sense of how far the surface is. And if you're a biologist and know about sharks, and you want to assess, how much jeopardy am I really in here, there's one question that sort of jumps to the forefront of your mind immediately, which is — (Video) Diver 1: What kind of sharks? Diver 2: Silvertip sharks. Diver 1: Oh. RP: There are actually three species of sharks here. The silvertips are the ones with the white edges on the fins, and there're also gray reef sharks and hammerheads off in the distance. And yes, it's a little nerve-racking. (Video) Diver 2: Hoo! That little guy is frisky! Audience: (Laughter) Now, you've seen video like this on TV a lot, and it's very intimidating. I think it gives the wrong impression about sharks; they're actually not very dangerous animals. That's why we weren't worried much and were joking around. More people are killed by pigs, by lightning strikes, more people are killed at soccer games in England. There's a lot of other ways you can die. And I'm not making that stuff up. Coconuts! You can get killed by a coconut more likely than killed by a shark. So sharks aren't quite as dangerous as most people make them out to be. Now, I don't know if any of you get US News and World Report — I got the recent issue. There's a cover story about the great explorers of our time. The last article is entitled, "No New Frontiers." It questions whether or not there really are any new frontiers out there, whether there are any true, hardcore discoveries that can still be made. My favorite line from the article: [... 'discovery' can mean finding a guppy with an extra spine in its dorsal fin."] I have to laugh; they don't call us fish nerds for nothing. We actually do get excited about finding a new dorsal spine in a guppy. But it's much more than that. I want to show you a few of the guppies we've found over the years. This one — you can see how ugly it is. (Laughter) Even if you ignore the scientific value of this thing, look at the monetary value of this thing. A couple of these were sold through the aquarium trade to Japan, where they sold for 15,000 dollars apiece. That's half a million dollars a pound. Here's another new angelfish we discovered. This one we first discovered back in the air days — the bad old air days, when we were doing these kind of dives with air. We were at 360 feet. I remember coming up from one of these deep dives and I had this fog, and the narcosis takes a little while to fade away, sort of like sobering up. I had this vague recollection of seeing this yellow fish with a black spot, and thought, "Damn, I should have caught one — I think that's a new species." Eventually, I looked in my bucket. Sure enough, I had caught one, I just completely forgot. So this one, we decided to give the name Centropyge narcosis to. That's its official scientific name, in reference to its deep-dwelling habits. This is another neat one. When we first found it, we weren't even sure what family it belonged to, so we just called it the Dr. Seuss fish, since it looked like something from one of those books. Now, this one's pretty cool. If you go to Papua, New Guinea and go down 300 feet, you'll see these big mounds. This may be hard to see, but they're a couple meters in diameter. If you look closely, you'll see there's a little white and gray fish that hangs out near them. It turns out this little white fish builds these giant mounds, one pebble at a time. It's extraordinary to find something like this. It's not just new species, it's new behaviors, new ecology, all kind of new things. What I'm going to show you now, quickly, is a sampling of the new species we've discovered. What's extraordinary is not just the number of species we're finding — though as you can see, that's pretty amazing; this is only half of what we've found — what's extraordinary is how quickly we find them. We're up to seven new species per hour of time we spend at that depth. If you go to an Amazon jungle and fog a tree, you may get a lot of bugs, but for fishes, there's nowhere in the world you can get seven new species per hour of time. Now, we've done some back-of-the-envelope calculations, and we're predicting there are probably about 2,000 to 2,500 new species in the Indo-Pacific alone. There are only five to six thousand known species, so a very large percentage of what is out there isn't really known. We thought we had a handle on all the reef fish diversity — evidently not. I'm going to just close on a very somber note. At the beginning, I said I'd show you two extraordinary photographs. This is the second extraordinary photograph I'm going to show you. This one was taken at the exact moment I was down there filming those sharks. This was taken exactly 300 feet above my head. The reason this photograph is extraordinary is because it captures a moment in the very last minute of a person's life. Less than 60 seconds after this picture was taken, this guy was dead. When we recovered his body, we figured out what had gone wrong. He had made a very simple mistake; he turned the wrong valve when he filled his cylinder. he had 80 percent oxygen in his tank when he should have had 40. He had an oxygen toxicity seizure and he drowned. The reason I show this — not to put a downer on everything — but I just want to use it to key off my philosophy of life in general, which is that we all have two goals. The first goal we share with every other living thing on this planet, which is to survive. I call it perpetuation: the survival of the species and survival of ourselves, And those are both about perpetuating the genome. The second goal, for those of us who have mastered the first goal — call it spiritual fulfillment, call it financial success, you can call it any number of different things. I call it seeking joy, this pursuit of happiness. So, I guess my theme on this is this guy lived his life to the fullest, he absolutely did. You have to balance those two goals. If you live your whole life in fear — I mean, life is a sexually transmitted disease with 100 percent mortality. So you can't live your life in fear. (Laughter) I thought that was an old one! (Applause) But at the same time, you don't want to get so focused on rule number two, goal number two, that you neglect goal number one. Because once you're dead, you really can't enjoy anything after that. So I wish you all the best of luck in maintaining that balance in your future endeavors. Thanks.

My underground art explorations

Miru Kim

{0: 'Miru Kim'}

{0: ['photographer and explorer']}

{0: "Miru Kim is a fearless explorer of abandoned and underground places. Her photography underscores the vulnerable nature of the human explorer in these no-woman's-lands."}

2008-12-12

2009-02-26

EG 2008

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['art', 'beauty', 'cities', 'entertainment', 'exploration', 'photography', 'Best of the Web']

{2078: 'A park underneath the hustle and bustle of New York City', 1966: 'How public spaces make cities work', 1182: 'Building a park in the sky', 8: 'A memorial at Ground Zero', 1846: 'Ingenious homes in unexpected places', 213: 'A song of the city'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/miru_kim_my_underground_art_explorations/

At the 2008 EG Conference, artist Miru Kim talks about her work. Kim explores industrial ruins underneath New York and then photographs herself in them, nude -- to bring these massive, dangerous, hidden spaces into sharp focus.

I was raised in Seoul, Korea, and moved to New York City in 1999 to attend college. I was pre-med at the time, and I thought I would become a surgeon because I was interested in anatomy and dissecting animals really piqued my curiosity. At the same time, I fell in love with New York City. I started to realize that I could look at the whole city as a living organism. I wanted to dissect it and look into its unseen layers. And the way to it, for me, was through artistic means. So, eventually I decided to pursue an MFA instead of an M.D. and in grad school I became interested in creatures that dwell in the hidden corners of the city. In New York City, rats are part of commuters' daily lives. Most people ignore them or are frightened of them. But I took a liking to them because they dwell on the fringes of society. And even though they're used in labs to promote human lives, they're also considered pests. I also started looking around in the city and trying to photograph them. One day, in the subway, I was snapping pictures of the tracks hoping to catch a rat or two, and a man came up to me and said, "You can't take photographs here. The MTA will confiscate your camera." I was quite shocked by that, and thought to myself, "Well, OK then. I'll follow the rats." Then I started going into the tunnels, which made me realize that there's a whole new dimension to the city that I never saw before and most people don't get to see. Around the same time, I met like-minded individuals who call themselves urban explorers, adventurers, spelunkers, guerrilla historians, etc. I was welcomed into this loose, Internet-based network of people who regularly explore urban ruins such as abandoned subway stations, tunnels, sewers, aqueducts, factories, hospitals, shipyards and so on. When I took photographs in these locations, I felt there was something missing in the pictures. Simply documenting these soon-to-be-demolished structures wasn't enough for me. So I wanted to create a fictional character or an animal that dwells in these underground spaces, and the simplest way to do it, at the time, was to model myself. I decided against clothing because I wanted the figure to be without any cultural implications or time-specific elements. I wanted a simple way to represent a living body inhabiting these decaying, derelict spaces. This was taken in the Riviera Sugar Factory in Red Hook, Brooklyn. It's now an empty, six-acre lot waiting for a shopping mall right across from the new Ikea. I was very fond of this space because it's the first massive industrial complex I found on my own that is abandoned. When I first went in, I was scared, because I heard dogs barking and I thought they were guard dogs. But they happened to be wild dogs living there, and it was right by the water, so there were swans and ducks swimming around and trees growing everywhere and bees nesting in the sugar barrels. The nature had really reclaimed the whole complex. And, in a way, I wanted the human figure in the picture to become a part of that nature. When I got comfortable in the space, it also felt like a big playground. I would climb up the tanks and hop across exposed beams as if I went back in time and became a child again. This was taken in the old Croton Aqueduct, which supplied fresh water to New York City for the first time. The construction began in 1837. It lasted about five years. It got abandoned when the new Croton Aqueducts opened in 1890. When you go into spaces like this, you're directly accessing the past, because they sit untouched for decades. I love feeling the aura of a space that has so much history. Instead of looking at reproductions of it at home, you're actually feeling the hand-laid bricks and shimmying up and down narrow cracks and getting wet and muddy and walking in a dark tunnel with a flashlight. This is a tunnel underneath Riverside Park. It was built in the 1930s by Robert Moses. The murals were done by a graffiti artist to commemorate the hundreds of homeless people that got relocated from the tunnel in 1991 when the tunnel reopened for trains. Walking in this tunnel is very peaceful. There's nobody around you, and you hear the kids playing in the park above you, completely unaware of what's underneath. When I was going out a lot to these places, I was feeling a lot of anxiety and isolation because I was in a solitary phase in my life, and I decided to title my series "Naked City Spleen," which references Charles Baudelaire. "Naked City" is a nickname for New York, and "Spleen" embodies the melancholia and inertia that come from feeling alienated in an urban environment. This is the same tunnel. You see the sunbeams coming from the ventilation ducts and the train approaching. This is a tunnel that's abandoned in Hell's Kitchen. I was there alone, setting up, and a homeless man approached. I was basically intruding in his living space. I was really frightened at first, but I calmly explained to him that I was working on an art project and he didn't seem to mind and so I went ahead and put my camera on self-timer and ran back and forth. And when I was done, he actually offered me his shirt to wipe off my feet and kindly walked me out. It must have been a very unusual day for him. (Laughter) One thing that struck me, after this incident, was that a space like that holds so many deleted memories of the city. That homeless man, to me, really represented an element of the unconscious of the city. He told me that he was abused above ground and was once in Riker's Island, and at last he found peace and quiet in that space. The tunnel was once built for the prosperity of the city, but is now a sanctuary for outcasts, who are completely forgotten in the average urban dweller's everyday life. This is underneath my alma mater, Columbia University. The tunnels are famous for having been used during the development of the Manhattan Project. This particular tunnel is interesting because it shows the original foundations of Bloomingdale Insane Asylum, which was demolished in 1890 when Columbia moved in. This is the New York City Farm Colony, which was a poorhouse in Staten Island from the 1890s to the 1930s. Most of my photos are set in places that have been abandoned for decades, but this is an exception. This children's hospital was closed in 1997; it's located in Newark. When I was there three years ago, the windows were broken and the walls were peeling, but everything was left there as it was. You see the autopsy table, morgue trays, x-ray machines and even used utensils, which you see on the autopsy table. After exploring recently-abandoned buildings, I felt that everything could fall into ruins very fast: your home, your office, a shopping mall, a church — any man-made structures around you. I was reminded of how fragile our sense of security is and how vulnerable people truly are. I love to travel, and Berlin has become one of my favorite cities. It's full of history, and also full of underground bunkers and ruins from the war. This was taken under a homeless asylum built in 1885 to house 1,100 people. I saw the structure while I was on the train, and I got off at the next station and met people there that gave me access to their catacomb-like basement, which was used for ammunition storage during the war and also, at some point, to hide groups of Jewish refugees. This is the actual catacombs in Paris. I explored there extensively in the off-limits areas and fell in love right away. There are more than 185 miles of tunnels, and only about a mile is open to the public as a museum. The first tunnels date back to 60 B.C. They were consistently dug as limestone quarries and by the 18th century, the caving-in of some of these quarries posed safety threats, so the government ordered reinforcing of the existing quarries and dug new observation tunnels in order to monitor and map the whole place. As you can see, the system is very complex and vast. It's very dangerous to get lost in there. And at the same time, there was a problem in the city with overflowing cemeteries. So the bones were moved from the cemeteries into the quarries, making them into the catacombs. The remains of over six million people are housed in there, some over 1,300 years old. This was taken under the Montparnasse Cemetery where most of the ossuaries are located. There are also phone cables that were used in the '50s and many bunkers from the World War II era. This is a German bunker. Nearby there's a French bunker, and the whole tunnel system is so complex that the two parties never met. The tunnels are famous for having been used by the Resistance, which Victor Hugo wrote about in "Les Miserables." And I saw a lot of graffiti from the 1800s, like this one. After exploring the underground of Paris, I decided to climb up, and I climbed a Gothic monument that's right in the middle of Paris. This is the Tower of Saint Jacques. It was built in the early 1500s. I don't recommend sitting on a gargoyle in the middle of January, naked. It was not very comfortable. (Laughter) And all this time, I never saw a single rat in any of these places, until recently, when I was in the London sewers. This was probably the toughest place to explore. I had to wear a gas mask because of the toxic fumes — I guess, except for in this picture. And when the tides of waste matter come in it sounds as if a whole storm is approaching you. This is a still from a film I worked on recently, called "Blind Door." I've become more interested in capturing movement and texture. And the 16mm black-and-white film gave a different feel to it. And this is the first theater project I worked on. I adapted and produced "A Dream Play" by August Strindberg. It was performed last September one time only in the Atlantic Avenue tunnel in Brooklyn, which is considered to be the oldest underground train tunnel in the world, built in 1844. I've been leaning towards more collaborative projects like these, lately. But whenever I get a chance I still work on my series. The last place I visited was the Mayan ruins of Copan, Honduras. This was taken inside an archaeological tunnel in the main temple. I like doing more than just exploring these spaces. I feel an obligation to animate and humanize these spaces continually in order to preserve their memories in a creative way — before they're lost forever. Thank you.

The voices of Twitter users

Evan Williams

{0: 'Evan Williams'}

{0: ['twitter co-founder']}

{0: 'Evan Williams is the co-founder of Twitter, the addictive messaging service that connects the world 140 characters at a time.'}

2009-02-05

2009-02-27

TED2009

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fi', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'hy', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sr', 'th', 'tr', 'uk', 'uz', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['business', 'communication', 'culture', 'entertainment', 'social change', 'social media', 'technology']

{63: 'The era of open innovation', 434: 'What consumers want', 28: 'How to get your ideas to spread', 1958: 'Protecting Twitter users (sometimes from themselves)', 1841: 'Adventures in Twitter fiction', 916: 'Listening to global voices'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/evan_williams_the_voices_of_twitter_users/

In the year leading up to this talk, the web tool Twitter exploded in size (up 10x during 2008 alone). Co-founder Evan Williams reveals that many of the ideas driving that growth came from unexpected uses invented by the users themselves.

Four years ago, on the TED stage, I announced a company I was working with at the time called Odeo. And because of that announcement, we got a big article in The New York Times, which led to more press, which led to more attention, and me deciding to become CEO of that company — whereas I was just an adviser — and raising a round of venture capital and ramping up hiring. One of the guys I hired was an engineer named Jack Dorsey, and a year later, when we were trying to decide which way to go with Odeo, Jack presented an idea he'd been tinkering around with for a number of years that was based around sending simple status updates to friends. We were also playing with SMS at the time at Odeo, so we kind of put two and two together, and in early 2006 we launched Twitter as a side project at Odeo. Now, it's hard to justify doing a side project at a startup, where focus is so critical, but I had actually launched Blogger as a side project to my previous company, thinking it was just a little thing we'd do on the side, and it ended up taking over not only the company, but my life for the next five or six years. So I learned to follow hunches even though you can't necessarily justify them or know where they're going to go. And that's kind of what's happened with Twitter, time after time. So, for those of you unfamiliar, Twitter is based around a very simple, seemingly trivial concept. You say what you're doing in 140 characters or less, and people who are interested in you get those updates. If they're really interested, they get the update as a text message on their cell phone. So, for instance, I may Twitter right now that I'm giving a talk at TED. And in my case, when I hit send, up to 60,000 people will receive that message in a matter of seconds. Now, the fundamental idea is that Twitter lets people share moments of their lives whenever they want, be they momentous occasions or mundane ones. It is by sharing these moments as they're happening that lets people feel more connected and in touch, despite distance, and in real time. This is the primary use we saw of Twitter from the beginning, and what got us excited. What we didn't anticipate was the many, many other uses that would evolve from this very simple system. One of the things we realized was how important Twitter could be during real-time events. When the wildfires broke out in San Diego, in October of 2007, people turned to Twitter to report what was happening and to find information from neighbors about what was happening around them. But it wasn't just individuals. The L.A. Times actually turned to Twitter to dispense information as well, and put a Twitter feed on the front page, and the L.A. Fire Department and Red Cross used it to dispense news and updates as well. At this event, dozens of people here are Twittering and thousands of people around the world are following along because they want to know what it feels like to be here and what's happening. Among the other interesting things that have cropped up are many things from businesses, from marketing and communications and predictable things, to an insanely popular Korean-barbecue taco truck that drives around L.A. and Twitters where it stops, causing a line to form around the block. Politicians have recently begun Twittering. In fact, there are 47 members of Congress who currently have Twitter accounts. And they're tweeting, in some cases, from behind closed-door sessions with the President. In this case, this guy's not liking what he's hearing. The President himself is our most popular Twitter user, although his tweets have dropped off as of late, while Senator McCain's have picked up. As have this guy's. Twitter was originally designed as a broadcast medium: you send one message and it goes out to everybody, and you receive the messages you're interested in. One of the many ways that users shaped the evolution of Twitter was by inventing a way to reply to a specific person or a specific message. So, this syntax, the "@username" that Shaquille O'Neal's using here to reply to one of his fans, was completely invented by users, and we didn't build it into the system until it already became popular and then we made it easier. This is one of the many ways that users have shaped the system. Another is via the API. We built an application-programming interface, which basically means that programmers can write software that interacts with Twitter. We currently know about over 2,000 pieces of software that can send Twitter updates — interfaces for Mac, Windows, your iPhone, your BlackBerry — as well as things like a device that lets an unborn baby Twitter when it kicks or a plant Twitter when it needs water. Probably the most important third-party development came from a little company in Virginia called Summize. Summize built a Twitter search engine. And they tapped into the fact that, if you have millions of people around the world talking about what they're doing and what's around them, you have an incredible resource to find out about any topic or event while it's going on. This really changed how we perceived Twitter. For instance, here's what people are saying about TED. This is another way that our mind was shifted, and Twitter wasn't what we thought it was. We liked this so much we actually bought the company and are folding it into the main product. This not only lets you view Twitters in different ways, but it introduces new use cases as well. One of my favorites is what happened a few months ago when there was a gas shortage in Atlanta. Some users figured out that they would Twitter when they found gas — where it was, and how much it cost — and then appended the keyword "#atlgas" which let other people search for that and find gas themselves. And this trend of people using this communication network to help each other out goes far beyond the original idea of just keeping up with family and friends. It's happened more and more lately, whether it's raising money for homeless people or to dig wells in Africa or for a family in crisis. People have raised tens of thousands of dollars over Twitter in a matter of days on several occasions. It seems like when you give people easier ways to share information, more good things happen. I have no idea what will happen next with Twitter. I've learned to follow the hunch, but never assume where it will go. Thanks. (Applause) Chris Anderson: We're not quite done yet. So, look, if we could have this screen live. This is actually the most terrifying thing that any speaker can do after they've been to an event. It's totally intimidating. So, this would be the Twitter search screen. So we're going to just type a couple of random words into Twitter. For example: "Evan Williams." "Evan Williams, give people more good ways to share information and follow your hunch at TED." "Currently listening to Evan Williams." "Currently listening to Evan Williams." "Evan Williams —" Oh. "Evan Williams is just dying on stage here at TED. Worst talk ever!" (Laughter) Evan Williams: Nice. Thanks. CA: Just kidding. But, literally in the eight minutes he was talking, there are about fifty tweets that already came on the talk. So he'll see every aspect of the reaction: the fact that Barack Obama is the biggest Twitterer, the fact that it came out of TED. I don't think there's any other way of getting instant feedback that way. You have build something very fascinating, and it looks like its best times are still ahead of it. So, thank you very much, Evan. EW: Thank you. CA: That was very interesting.

Why not make video games for girls?

Brenda Laurel

{0: 'Brenda Laurel'}

{0: ['designer and theorist']}

{0: 'Brenda Laurel has been part of several major revolutions in the way humans use computers: virtual reality, interactive narratives and some fresh approaches to gaming.'}

1998-02-02

2009-03-02

TED1998

en

['ar', 'bg', 'ca', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'ku', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'sv', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['children', 'culture', 'design', 'entertainment', 'gaming', 'technology', 'women', 'history']

{361: 'Are games better than life?', 202: '5 dangerous things you should let your kids do', 66: 'Do schools kill creativity?', 751: 'Embrace your inner girl', 1403: 'Unlock the intelligence, passion, greatness of girls', 1646: 'A father-daughter dance ... in prison'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/brenda_laurel_why_not_make_video_games_for_girls/

At TED in 1998, Brenda Laurel asks: Why are all the top-selling videogames aimed at little boys? She spent two years researching the world of girls (and shares amazing interviews and photos) to create a game that girls would love.

Back in 1992, I started working for a company called Interval Research, which was just then being founded by David Lidell and Paul Allen as a for-profit research enterprise in Silicon Valley. I met with David to talk about what I might do in his company. I was just coming out of a failed virtual reality business and supporting myself by being on the speaking circuit and writing books — after twenty years or so in the computer game industry having ideas that people didn't think they could sell. And David and I discovered that we had a question in common, that we really wanted the answer to, and that was, "Why hasn't anybody built any computer games for little girls?" Why is that? It can't just be a giant sexist conspiracy. These people aren't that smart. There's six billion dollars on the table. They would go for it if they could figure out how. So, what is the deal here? And as we thought about our goals — I should say that Interval is really a humanistic institution, in the classical sense that humanism, at its best, finds a way to combine clear-eyed empirical research with a set of core values that fundamentally love and respect people. The basic idea of humanism is the improvable quality of life; that we can do good things, that there are things worth doing because they're good things to do, and that clear-eyed empiricism can help us figure out how to do them. So, contrary to popular belief, there is not a conflict of interest between empiricism and values. And Interval Research is kind of the living example of how that can be true. So David and I decided to go find out, through the best research we could muster, what it would take to get a little girl to put her hands on a computer, to achieve the level of comfort and ease with the technology that little boys have because they play video games. We spent two and a half years conducting research; we spent another year and a half in advance development. Then we formed a spin-off company. In the research phase of the project at Interval, we partnered with a company called Cheskin Research, and these people — Davis Masten and Christopher Ireland — changed my mind entirely about what market research was and what it could be. They taught me how to look and see, and they did not do the incredibly stupid thing of saying to a child, "Of all these things we already make you, which do you like best?" — which gives you zero answers that are usable. So, what we did for the first two and a half years was four things: We did an extensive review of the literature in related fields, like cognitive psychology, spatial cognition, gender studies, play theory, sociology, primatology. Thank you Frans de Waal, wherever you are, I love you and I'd give anything to meet you. After we had done that with a pretty large team of people and discovered what we thought the salient issues were with girls and boys and playing — because, after all, that's really what this is about — we moved to the second phase of our work, where we interviewed adult experts in academia, some of the people who'd produced the literature that we found relevant. Also, we did focus groups with people who were on the ground with kids every day, like playground supervisors. We talked to them, confirmed some hypotheses and identified some serious questions about gender difference and play. Then we did what I consider to be the heart of the work: interviewed 1,100 children, boys and girls, ages seven to 12, all over the United States — except for Silicon Valley, Boston and Austin because we knew that their little families would have millions of computers in them and they wouldn't be a representative sample. And at the end of those remarkable conversations with kids and their best friends across the United States, after two years, we pulled together some survey data from another 10,000 children, drew up a set up of what we thought were the key findings of our research, and spent another year transforming them into design heuristics, for designing computer-based products — and, in fact, any kind of products — for little girls, ages eight to 12. And we spent that time designing interactive prototypes for computer software and testing them with little girls. In 1996, in November, we formed the company Purple Moon which was a spinoff of Interval Research, and our chief investors were Interval Research, Vulcan Northwest, Institutional Venture Partners and Allen and Company. We launched a website on September 2nd that has now served 25 million pages, and has 42,000 registered young girl users. They visit an average of one and a half times a day, spend an average of 35 minutes a visit, and look at 50 pages a visit. So we feel that we've formed a successful online community with girls. We launched two titles in October — "Rockett's New School" — the first of a series of products — is about a character called Rockett beginning her first day of school in eighth grade at a brand new place, with a blank slate, which allows girls to play with the question of, "What will I be like when I'm older?" "What's it going to be like to be in high school or junior high school? Who are my friends?"; to exercise the love of social complexity and the narrative intelligence that drives most of their play behavior; and which embeds in it values about noticing that we have lots of choices in our lives and the ways that we conduct ourselves. The other title that we launched is called "Secret Paths in the Forest," which addresses the more fantasy-oriented, inner lives of girls. These two titles both showed up in the top 50 entertainment titles in PC Data — entertainment titles in PC Data in December, right up there with "John Madden Football," which thrills me to death. So, we're real, and we've touched several hundreds of thousands of little girls. We've made half-a-billion impressions with marketing and PR for this brand, Purple Moon. Ninety-six percent of them, roughly, have been positive; four percent of them have been "other." I want to talk about the other, because the politics of this enterprise, in a way, have been the most fascinating part of it, for me. There are really two kinds of negative reviews that we've received. One kind of reviewer is a male gamer who thinks he knows what games ought to be, and won't show the product to little girls. The other kind of reviewer is a certain flavor of feminist who thinks they know what little girls ought to be. And so it's funny to me that these interesting, odd bedfellows have one thing in common: they don't listen to little girls. They haven't looked at children and they're certainly not demonstrating any love for them. I'd like to play you some voices of little girls from the two-and-a-half years of research that we did — actually, some of the voices are more recent. And these voices will be accompanied by photographs that they took for us of their lives, of the things that they value and care about. These are pictures the girls themselves never saw, but they gave to us This is the stuff those reviewers don't know about and aren't listening to and this is the kind of research I recommend to those who want to do humanistic work. Girl 1: Yeah, my character is usually a tomboy. Hers is more into boys. Girl 2: Uh, yeah. Girl 1: We have — in the very beginning of the whole game, always we do this: we each have a piece of paper; we write down our name, our age — are we rich, very rich, not rich, poor, medium, wealthy, boyfriends, dogs, pets — what else — sisters, brothers, and all those. Girl 2: Divorced — parents divorced, maybe. Girl 3: This is my pretend [unclear] one. Girl 4: We make a school newspaper on the computer. Girl 5: For a girl's game also usually they'll have really pretty scenery with clouds and flowers. Girl 6: Like, if you were a girl and you were really adventurous and a real big tomboy, you would think that girls' games were kinda sissy. Girl 7: I run track, I played soccer, I play basketball, and I love a lot of things to do. And sometimes I feel like I can't really enjoy myself unless it's like a vacation, like when I get Mondays and all those days off. Girl 8: Well, sometimes there is a lot of stuff going on because I have music lessons and I'm on swim team — all this different stuff that I have to do, and sometimes it gets overwhelming. Girl 9: My friend Justine kinda took my friend Kelly, and now they're being mean to me. Girl 10: Well, sometimes it gets annoying when your brothers and sisters, or brother or sister, when they copy you and you get your idea first and they take your idea and they do it themselves. Girl 11: Because my older sister, she gets everything and, like, when I ask my mom for something, she'll say, "No" — all the time. But she gives my sister everything. Brenda Laurel: I want to show you, real quickly, just a minute of "Rockett's Tricky Decision," which went gold two days ago. Let's hope it's really stable. This is the second day in Rockett's life. The reason I'm showing you this is I'm hoping that the scene that I'm going to show you will look familiar and sound familiar, now that you've listened to some girls' voices. And you can see how we've tried to incorporate the issues that matter to them in the game that we've created. Miko: Hey Rockett! C'mere! Rockett: Hi Miko! What's going on? Miko: Did you hear about Nakilia's big Halloween party this weekend? She asked me to make sure you knew about it. Nakilia invited Reuben too, but — Rockett: But what? Isn't he coming? Miko: I don't think so. I mean, I heard his band is playing at another party the same night. Rockett: Really? What other party? Girl: Max's party is going to be so cool, Whitney. He's invited all the best people. BL: I'm going to fast-forward to the decision point because I know I don't have a lot of time. After this awful event occurs, Rocket gets to decide how she feels about it. Rockett: Who'd want to show up at that party anyway? I could get invited to that party any day if I wanted to. Gee, I doubt I'll make Max's best people list. BL: OK, so we're going to emotionally navigate. If we were playing the game, that's what we'd do. If at any time during the game we want to learn more about the characters, we can go into this hidden hallway, and I'll quickly just show you the interface. We can, for example, go find Miko's locker and get some more information about her. Oops, I turned the wrong way. But you get the general idea of the product. I wanted to show you the ways, innocuous as they seem, in which we're incorporating what we've learned about girls — their desires to experience greater emotional flexibility, and to play around with the social complexity of their lives. I want to make the point that what we're giving girls, I think, through this effort, is a kind of validation, a sense of being seen. And a sense of the choices that are available in their lives. We love them. We see them. We're not trying to tell them who they ought to be. But we're really, really happy about who they are. It turns out they're really great. I want to close by showing you a videotape that's a version of a future game in the Rockett series that our graphic artists and design people put together, that we feel would please that four percent of reviewers. "Rockett 28!" Rockett: It's like I'm just waking up, you know? BL: Thanks.

How to restore a rainforest

Willie Smits

{0: 'Willie Smits'}

{0: ['conservationist']}

{0: 'Willie Smits has devoted his life to saving the forest habitat of orangutans, the "thinkers of the jungle." As towns, farms and wars encroach on native forests, Smits works to save what is left.'}

2009-02-06

2009-03-03

TED2009

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['animals', 'biodiversity', 'global issues', 'green', 'science', 'trees', 'plants', 'ecology', 'fungi']

{340: 'How humans and animals can live together', 76: 'The gentle genius of bonobos', 91: "Invest in Africa's own solutions", 2546: 'How to grow a forest in your backyard', 2558: 'How trees talk to each other', 409: 'The mysterious lives of giant trees'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/willie_smits_how_to_restore_a_rainforest/

By piecing together a complex ecological puzzle, biologist Willie Smits believes he has found a way to re-grow clearcut rainforest in Borneo, saving local orangutans — and creating a thrilling blueprint for restoring fragile ecosystems. NOTE: The core content of this talk has been challenged on a number of grounds. For details, and Willie Smits' response, please see "A challenge to Willie Smits' talk" below.

I was walking in the market one day with my wife, and somebody stuck a cage in my face. And in between those slits were the saddest eyes I've ever seen. There was a very sick orangutan baby, my first encounter. That evening I came back to the market in the dark and I heard "uhh, uhh," and sure enough I found a dying orangutan baby on a garbage heap. Of course, the cage was salvaged. I took up the little baby, massaged her, forced her to drink until she finally started breathing normally. This is Uce. She's now living in the jungle of Sungai Wain, and this is Matahari, her second son, which, by the way, is also the son of the second orangutan I rescued, Dodoy. That changed my life quite dramatically, and as of today, I have almost 1,000 babies in my two centers. (Applause) No. No. No. Wrong. It's horrible. It's a proof of our failing to save them in the wild. It's not good. This is merely proof of everyone failing to do the right thing. Having more than all the orangutans in all the zoos in the world together, just now like victims for every baby, six have disappeared from the forest. The deforestation, especially for oil palm, to provide biofuel for Western countries is what's causing these problems. And those are the peat swamp forests on 20 meters of peat, the largest accumulation of organic material in the world. When you open this for growing oil palms you're creating CO2 volcanoes that are emitting so much CO2 that my country is now the third largest emitter of greenhouse gasses in the world, after China and the United States. And we don't have any industry at all — it's only because of this deforestation. And these are horrible images. I'm not going to talk too long about it, but there are so many of the family of Uce, which are not so fortunate to live out there in the forest, that still have to go through that process. And I don't know anymore where to put them. So I decided that I had to come up with a solution for her but also a solution that will benefit the people that are trying to exploit those forests, to get their hands on the last timber and that are causing, in that way, the loss of habitat and all those victims. So I created the place Samboja Lestari, and the idea was, if I can do this on the worst possible place that I can think of where there is really nothing left, no one will have an excuse to say, "Yeah, but ..." No. Everyone should be able to follow this. So we're in East Borneo. This is the place where I started. As you can see there's only yellow terrain. There's nothing left — just a bit of grass there. In 2002 we had about 50 percent of the people jobless there. There was a huge amount of crime. People spent so much of their money on health issues and drinking water. There was no agricultural productivity left. This was the poorest district in the whole province and it was a total extinction of wildlife. This was like a biological desert. When I stood there in the grass, it's hot — not even the sound of insects — just this waving grass. Still, four years later we have created jobs for about 3,000 people. The climate has changed. I will show you: no more flooding, no more fires. It's no longer the poorest district, and there is a huge development of biodiversity. We've got over 1,000 species. We have 137 bird species as of today. We have 30 species of reptiles. So what happened here? We created a huge economic failure in this forest. So basically the whole process of destruction had gone a bit slower than what is happening now with the oil palm. But we saw the same thing. We had slash and burn agriculture; people cannot afford the fertilizer, so they burn the trees and have the minerals available there; the fires become more frequent, and after a while you're stuck with an area of land where there is no fertility left. There are no trees left. Still, in this place, in this grassland where you can see our very first office there on that hill, four years later, there is this one green blop on the Earth's surface ... (Applause) And there are all these animals, and all these people happy, and there's this economic value. So how's this possible? It was quite simple. If you'll look at the steps: we bought the land, we dealt with the fire, and then only, we started doing the reforestation by combining agriculture with forestry. Only then we set up the infrastructure and management and the monetary. But we made sure that in every step of the way the local people were going to be fully involved so that no outside forces would be able to interfere with that. The people would become the defenders of that forest. So we do the "people, profit, planet" principles, but we do it in addition to a sure legal status — because if the forest belongs to the state, people say, "It belongs to me, it belongs to everyone." And then we apply all these other principles like transparency, professional management, measurable results, scalability, [unclear], etc. What we did was we formulated recipes — how to go from a starting situation where you have nothing to a target situation. You formulate a recipe based upon the factors you can control, whether it be the skills or the fertilizer or the plant choice. And then you look at the outputs and you start measuring what comes out. Now in this recipe you also have the cost. You also know how much labor is needed. If you can drop this recipe on the map on a sandy soil, on a clay soil, on a steep slope, on flat soil, you put those different recipes; if you combine them, out of that comes a business plan, comes a work plan, and you can optimize it for the amount of labor you have available or for the amount of fertilizer you have, and you can do it. This is how it looks like in practice. We have this grass we want to get rid of. It exudes [unclear]-like compounds from the roots. The acacia trees are of a very low value but we need them to restore the micro-climate, to protect the soil and to shake out the grasses. And after eight years they might actually yield some timber — that is, if you can preserve it in the right way, which we can do with bamboo peels. It's an old temple-building technique from Japan but bamboo is very fire-susceptible. So if we would plant that in the beginning we would have a very high risk of losing everything again. So we plant it later, along the waterways to filter the water, provide the raw products just in time for when the timber becomes available. So the idea is: how to integrate these flows in space, over time and with the limited means you have. So we plant the trees, we plant these pineapples and beans and ginger in between, to reduce the competition for the trees, the crop fertilizer. Organic material is useful for the agricultural crops, for the people, but also helps the trees. The farmers have free land, the system yields early income, the orangutans get healthy food and we can speed up ecosystem regeneration while even saving some money. So beautiful. What a theory. But is it really that easy? Not really, because if you looked at what happened in 1998, the fire started. This is an area of about 50 million hectares. January. February. March. April. May. We lost 5.5 million hectares in just a matter of a few months. This is because we have 10,000 of those underground fires that you also have in Pennsylvania here in the United States. And once the soil gets dried, you're in a dry season — you get cracks, oxygen goes in, flames come out and the problem starts all over again. So how to break that cycle? Fire is the biggest problem. This is what it looked like for three months. For three months, the automatic lights outside did not go off because it was that dark. We lost all the crops. No children gained weight for over a year; they lost 12 IQ points. It was a disaster for orangutans and people. So these fires are really the first things to work on. That was why I put it as a single point up there. And you need the local people for that because these grasslands, once they start burning ... It goes through it like a windstorm and you lose again the last bit of ash and nutrients to the first rainfall — going to the sea killing off the coral reefs there. So you have to do it with the local people. That is the short-term solution but you also need a long-term solution. So what we did is, we created a ring of sugar palms around the area. These sugar palms turn out to be fire-resistant — also flood-resistant, by the way — and they provide a lot of income for local people. This is what it looks like: the people have to tap them twice a day — just a millimeter slice — and the only thing you harvest is sugar water, carbon dioxide, rain fall and a little bit of sunshine. In principle, you make those trees into biological photovoltaic cells. And you can create so much energy from this — they produce three times more energy per hectare per year, because you can tap them on a daily basis. You don't need to harvest [unclear] or any other of the crops. So this is the combination where we have all this genetic potential in the tropics, which is still unexploited, and doing it in combination with technology. But also your legal side needs to be in very good order. So we bought that land, and here is where we started our project — in the middle of nowhere. And if you zoom in a bit you can see that all of this area is divided into strips that go over different types of soil, and we were actually monitoring, measuring every single tree in these 2,000 hectares, 5,000 acres. And this forest is quite different. What I really did was I just followed nature, and nature doesn't know monocultures, but a natural forest is multilayered. That means that both in the ground and above the ground it can make better use of the available light, it can store more carbon in the system, it can provide more functions. But, it's more complicated. It's not that simple, and you have to work with the people. So, just like nature, we also grow fast planting trees and underneath that, we grow the slower growing, primary-grain forest trees of a very high diversity that can optimally use that light. Then, what is just as important: get the right fungi in there that will grow into those leaves, bring back the nutrients to the roots of the trees that have just dropped that leaf within 24 hours. And they become like nutrient pumps. You need the bacteria to fix nitrogen, and without those microorganisms, you won't have any performance at all. And then we started planting — only 1,000 trees a day. We could have planted many, many more, but we didn't want to because we wanted to keep the number of jobs stable. We didn't want to lose the people that are going to work in that plantation. And we do a lot of work here. We use indicator plants to look at what soil types, or what vegetables will grow, or what trees will grow here. And we have monitored every single one of those trees from space. This is what it looks like in reality; you have this irregular ring around it, with strips of 100 meters wide, with sugar palms that can provide income for 648 families. It's only a small part of the area. The nursery, in here, is quite different. If you look at the number of tree species we have in Europe, for instance, from the Urals up to England, you know how many? 165. In this nursery, we're going to grow 10 times more than the number of species. Can you imagine? You do need to know what you are working with, but it's that diversity which makes it work. That you can go from this zero situation, by planting the vegetables and the trees, or directly, the trees in the lines in that grass there, putting up the buffer zone, producing your compost, and then making sure that at every stage of that up growing forest there are crops that can be used. In the beginning, maybe pineapples and beans and corn; in the second phase, there will be bananas and papayas; later on, there will be chocolate and chilies. And then slowly, the trees start taking over, bringing in produce from the fruits, from the timber, from the fuel wood. And finally, the sugar palm forest takes over and provides the people with permanent income. On the top left, underneath those green stripes, you see some white dots — those are actually individual pineapple plants that you can see from space. And in that area we started growing some acacia trees that you just saw before. So this is after one year. And this is after two years. And that's green. If you look from the tower — this is when we start attacking the grass. We plant in the seedlings mixed with the bananas, the papayas, all the crops for the local people, but the trees are growing up fast in between as well. And three years later, 137 species of birds are living here. (Applause) So we lowered air temperature three to five degrees Celsius. Air humidity is up 10 percent. Cloud cover — I'm going to show it to you — is up. Rainfall is up. And all these species and income. This ecolodge that I built here, three years before, was an empty, yellow field. This transponder that we operate with the European Space Agency — it gives us the benefit that every satellite that comes over to calibrate itself is taking a picture. Those pictures we use to analyze how much carbon, how the forest is developing, and we can monitor every tree using satellite images through our cooperation. We can use these data now to provide other regions with recipes and the same technology. We actually have it already with Google Earth. If you would use a little bit of your technology to put tracking devices in trucks, and use Google Earth in combination with that, you could directly tell what palm oil has been sustainably produced, which company is stealing the timber, and you could save so much more carbon than with any measure of saving energy here. So this is the Samboja Lestari area. You measure how the trees grow back, but you can also measure the biodiversity coming back. And biodiversity is an indicator of how much water can be balanced, how many medicines can be kept here. And finally I made it into the rain machine because this forest is now creating its own rain. This nearby city of Balikpapan has a big problem with water; it's 80 percent surrounded by seawater, and we have now a lot of intrusion there. Now we looked at the clouds above this forest; we looked at the reforestation area, the semi-open area and the open area. And look at these images. I'll just run them very quickly through. In the tropics, raindrops are not formed from ice crystals, which is the case in the temperate zones, you need the trees with [unclear], chemicals that come out of the leaves of the trees that initiate the raindrops. So you create a cool place where clouds can accumulate, and you have the trees to initiate the rain. And look, there's now 11.2 percent more clouds — already, after three years. If you look at rainfall, it was already up 20 percent at that time. Let's look at the next year, and you can see that that trend is continuing. Where at first we had a small cap of higher rainfall, that cap is now widening and getting higher. And if we look at the rainfall pattern above Samboja Lestari, it used to be the driest place, but now you see consistently see a peak of rain forming there. So you can actually change the climate. When there are trade winds of course the effect disappears, but afterwards, as soon as the wind stabilizes, you see again that the rainfall peaks come back above this area. So to say it is hopeless is not the right thing to do, because we actually can make that difference if you integrate the various technologies. And it's nice to have the science, but it still depends mostly upon the people, on your education. We have our farmer schools. But the real success of course, is our band — because if a baby is born, we will play, so everyone's our family and you don't make trouble with your family. This is how it looks. We have this road going around the area, which brings the people electricity and water from our own area. We have the zone with the sugar palms, and then we have this fence with very thorny palms to keep the orangutans — that we provide with a place to live in the middle — and the people apart. And inside, we have this area for reforestation as a gene bank to keep all that material alive, because for the last 12 years not a single seedling of the tropical hardwood trees has grown up because the climatic triggers have disappeared. All the seeds get eaten. So now we do the monitoring on the inside — from towers, satellites, ultralights. Each of the families that have sold their land now get a piece of land back. And it has two nice fences of tropical hardwood trees — you have the shade trees planted in year one, then you underplanted with the sugar palms, and you plant this thorny fence. And after a few years, you can remove some of those shade trees. The people get that acacia timber which we have preserved with the bamboo peel, and they can build a house, they have some fuel wood to cook with. And they can start producing from the trees as many as they like. They have enough income for three families. But whatever you do in that program, it has to be fully supported by the people, meaning that you also have to adjust it to the local, cultural values. There is no simple one recipe for one place. You also have to make sure that it is very difficult to corrupt — that it's transparent. Like here, in Samboja Lestari, we divide that ring in groups of 20 families. If one member trespasses the agreement, and does cut down trees, the other 19 members have to decide what's going to happen to him. If the group doesn't take action, the other 33 groups have to decide what is going to happen to the group that doesn't comply with those great deals that we are offering them. In North Sulawesi it is the cooperative — they have a democratic culture there, so there you can use the local justice system to protect your system. In summary, if you look at it, in year one the people can sell their land to get income, but they get jobs back in the construction and the reforestation, the working with the orangutans, and they can use the waste wood to make handicraft. They also get free land in between the trees, where they can grow their crops. They can now sell part of those fruits to the orangutan project. They get building material for houses, a contract for selling the sugar, so we can produce huge amounts of ethanol and energy locally. They get all these other benefits: environmentally, money, they get education — it's a great deal. And everything is based upon that one thing — make sure that forest remains there. So if we want to help the orangutans — what I actually set out to do — we must make sure that the local people are the ones that benefit. Now I think the real key to doing it, to give a simple answer, is integration. I hope — if you want to know more, you can read more. (Applause)

Conserving the canopy

Nalini Nadkarni

{0: 'Nalini Nadkarni'}

{0: ['tree researcher']}

{0: 'Called "the queen of canopy research," Nalini Nadkarni explores the rich, vital world found in the tops of trees. She communicates what she finds to non-scientists -- with the help of poets, preachers and prisoners.'}

2009-02-06

2009-03-04

TED2009

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'et', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['activism', 'animals', 'biodiversity', 'biology', 'children', 'environment', 'insects', 'trees', 'plants', 'ecology']

{475: 'How to restore a rainforest', 299: 'A hero of the Congo forest', 409: 'The mysterious lives of giant trees', 2546: 'How to grow a forest in your backyard', 2558: 'How trees talk to each other', 2075: "An engineer's vision for tiny forests, everywhere"}

https://www.ted.com/talks/nalini_nadkarni_conserving_the_canopy/

A unique ecosystem of plants, birds and monkeys thrives in the treetops of the rainforest. Nalini Nadkarni explores these canopy worlds -- and shares her findings with the world below, through dance, art and bold partnerships.

Trees are wonderful arenas for discovery because of their tall stature, their complex structure, the biodiversity they foster and their quiet beauty. I used to climb trees for fun all the time and now, as a grown-up, I have made my profession understanding trees and forests, through the medium of science. The most mysterious part of forests is the upper tree canopy. And Dr. Terry Erwin, in 1983, called the canopy, "the last biotic frontier." I'd like to take you all on a journey up to the forest canopy, and share with you what canopy researchers are asking and also how they're communicating with other people outside of science. Let's start our journey on the forest floor of one of my study sites in Costa Rica. Because of the overhanging leaves and branches, you'll notice that the understory is very dark, it's very still. And what I'd like to do is take you up to the canopy, not by putting all of you into ropes and harnesses, but rather showing you a very short clip from a National Geographic film called "Heroes of the High Frontier." This was filmed in Monteverde, Costa Rica and I think it gives us the best impression of what it's like to climb a giant strangler fig. (Music) (Growling) (Rustling) So what you'll see up there is that it's really like the atmosphere of an open field, and there are tremendous numbers of plants and animals that have adapted to make their way and their life in the canopy. Common groups, like the sloth here, have clear adaptations for forest canopies, hanging on with their very strong claws. But I'd like to describe to you a more subtle kind of diversity and tell you about the ants. There are 10,000 species of ants that taxonomists — people who describe and name animals — have named. 4,000 of those ants live exclusively in the forest canopy. One of the reasons I tell you about ants is because of my husband, who is in fact an ant taxonomist and when we got married, he promised to name an ant after me, which he did — Procryptocerus nalini, a canopy ant. We've had two children, August Andrew and Erika and actually, he named ants after them. So we may be the only family that has an ant named after each one of us. But my passion — in addition to Jack and my children — are the plants, the so-called epiphytes, those plants that grow up on trees. They don't have roots that go into trunks nor to the forest floor. But rather, it is their leaves that are adapted to intercept the dissolved nutrients that come to them in the form of mist and fog. These plants occur in great diversity, over 28,000 species around the world. They grow in tropical forests like this one and they also grow in temperate rainforests, that we find in Washington state. These epiphytes are mainly dominated by the mosses. One thing I want to point out is that underneath these live epiphytes, as they die and decompose, they actually construct an arboreal soil, both in the temperate zone and in the tropics. And these mosses, generated by decomposing, are like peat moss in your garden. They have a tremendous capacity for holding on to nutrients and water. One of the surprising things I discovered is that, if you pull back with me on those mats of epiphytes, what you'll find underneath them are connections, networks of what we call canopy roots. These are not epiphyte roots: these are roots that emerge from the trunk and branch of the host trees themselves. And so those epiphytes are actually paying the landlord a bit of rent in exchange for being supported high above the forest floor. I was interested, and my canopy researcher colleagues have been interested in the dynamics of the canopy plants that live in the forest. We've done stripping experiments where we've removed mats of epiphytes and looked at the rates of recolonization. We had predicted that they would grow back very quickly and that they would come in encroaching from the side. What we found, however, was that they took an extremely long time — over 20 years — to regenerate, starting from the bottom and growing up. And even now, after 25 years, they're not up there, they have not recolonized completely. And I use this little image to say this is what happens to mosses. If it's gone, it's gone, and if you're really lucky you might get something growing back from the bottom. (Laughter) So, recolonization is really very slow. These canopy communities are fragile. Well, when we look out, you and I, over that canopy of the intact primary forest, what we see is this enormous carpet of carbon. One of the challenges that canopy researchers are attacking today is trying to understand the amount of carbon that is being sequestered. We know it's a lot, but we do not yet know the answers to how much, and by what processes, carbon is being taken out of the atmosphere, held in its biomass, and moving on through the ecosystem. So I hope I've showed you that canopy-dwellers are not just insignificant bits of green up high in the canopy that Tarzan and Jane were interested in, but rather that they foster biodiversity contribute to ecosystem nutrient cycles, and they also help to keep our global climate stable. Up in the canopy, if you were sitting next to me and you turned around from those primary forest ecosystems, you would also see scenes like this. Scenes of forest destruction, forest harvesting and forest fragmentation, thereby making that intact tapestry of the canopy unable to function in the marvelous ways that it has when it is not disturbed by humans. I've also looked out on urban places like this and thought about people who are disassociated from trees in their lives. People who grew up in a place like this did not have the opportunity to climb trees and form a relationship with trees and forests, as I did when I was a young girl. This troubles me. Here in 2009, you know, it's not an easy thing to be a forest ecologist, gripping ourselves with these kinds of questions and trying to figure out how we can answer them. And especially, you know, as a small brown woman in a little college, in the upper northwest part of our country, far away from the areas of power and money, I really have to ask myself, "What can I do about this? How can I reconnect people with trees?" Well, I think that I can do something. I know that as a scientist, I have information and as a human being, I can communicate with anybody, inside or outside of academia. And so, that's what I've begin doing, and so I'd like to unveil the International Canopy Network here. We consult to the media about canopy questions; we have a canopy newsletter; we have an email LISTSERV. And so we're trying to disseminate information about the importance of the canopy, the beauty of the canopy, the necessity of intact canopies, to people outside of academia. We also recognize that a lot of the products that we make — those videos and so forth — you know, they don't reach everybody, and so we've been fostering projects that reach people outside of academia, and outside of the choir that most ecologists preach to. Treetop Barbie is a great example of that. What we do, my students in my lab and I, is we buy Barbies from Goodwill and Value Village, we dress her in clothes that have been made by seamstresses and we send her out with a canopy handbook. And my feeling is — (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) — that we've taken this pop icon and we have just tweaked her a little bit to become an ambassador who can carry the message that being a woman scientist studying treetops is actually a really great thing. We've also made partnerships with artists, with people who understand and can communicate the aesthetic beauty of trees and forest canopies. And I'd like to just tell you one of our projects, which is the generation of Canopy Confluences. What I do is I bring together scientists and artists of all kinds, and we spend a week in the forest on these little platforms; and we look at nature, we look at trees, we look at the canopy, and we communicate, and exchange, and express what we see together. The results have been fantastic. I'll just give you a few examples. This is a fantastic installation by Bruce Chao who is chair of the Sculpture and Glass Blowing Department at Rhode Island School of Design. He saw nests in the canopy at one of our Canopy Confluences in the Pacific Northwest, and created this beautiful sculpture. We've had dance people up in the canopy. Jodi Lomask, and her wonderful troupe Capacitor, joined me in the canopy in my rainforest site in Costa Rica. They made a fabulous dance called "Biome." They danced in the forest, and we are taking this dance, my scientific outreach communications, and also linking up with environmental groups, to go to different cities and to perform the science, the dance and the environmental outreach that we hope will make a difference. We brought musicians to the canopy, and they made their music — and it's fantastic music. We had wooden flutists, we had oboists, we had opera singers, we had guitar players, and we had rap singers. And I brought a little segment to give you of Duke Brady's "Canopy Rap." (Music) That's Duke! (Applause) This experience of working with Duke also led me to initiate a program called Sound Science. I saw the power of Duke's song with urban youth — an audience, you know, I as a middle-aged professor, I don't have a hope of getting to — in terms of convincing them of the importance of wildlands. So I engaged Caution, this rap singer, with a group of young people from inner-city Tacoma. We went out to the forest, I would pick up a branch, Caution would rap on it, and suddenly that branch was really cool. And then the students would come into our sound studios, they would make their own rap songs with their own beats. They ended up making a CD which they took home to their family and friends, thereby expressing their own experiences with nature in their own medium. The final project I'll talk about is one that's very close to my heart, and it involves an economic and social value that is associated with epiphytic plants. In the Pacific Northwest, there's a whole industry of moss-harvesting from old-growth forests. These mosses are taken from the forest; they're used by the floriculture industry, by florists, to make arrangements and make hanging baskets. It's a 265 million dollar industry and it's increasing rapidly. If you remember that bald guy, you'll know that what has been stripped off of these trunks in the Pacific Northwest old-growth forest is going to take decades and decades to come back. So this whole industry is unsustainable. What can I, as an ecologist, do about that? Well, my thought was that I could learn how to grow mosses, and that way we wouldn't have to take them out of the wild. And I thought, if I had some partners that could help me with this, that would be great. And so, I thought perhaps incarcerated men and women — who don't have access to nature, who often have a lot of time, they often have space, and you don't need any sharp tools to work with mosses — would be great partners. And they have become excellent partners. The best I can imagine. They were very enthusiastic. (Applause) They were incredibly enthusiastic about the work. They learned how to distinguish different species of mosses, which, to tell you the truth, is a lot more than my undergraduate students at the Evergreen College can do. And they embraced the idea that they could help develop a research design in order to grow these mosses. We've been successful as partners in figuring out which species grow the fastest, and I've just been overwhelmed with how successful this has been. Because the prison wardens were very enthusiastic about this as well, I started a Science and Sustainability Seminar in the prisons. I brought my scientific colleagues and sustainability practitioners into the prison. We gave talks once a month, and that actually ended up implementing some amazing sustainability projects at the prisons — organic gardens, worm culture, recycling, water catchment and beekeeping. (Applause) Our latest endeavor, with a grant from the Department of Corrections at Washington state, they've asked us to expand this program to three more prisons. And our new project is having the inmates and ourselves learn how to raise the Oregon spotted frog which is a highly endangered amphibian in Washington state and Oregon. So they will raise them — in captivity, of course — from eggs to tadpoles and onward to frogs. And they will have the pleasure, many of them, of seeing those frogs that they've raised from eggs and helped develop, helped nurture, move out into protected wildlands to augment the number of endangered species out there in the wild. And so, I think for many reasons — ecological, social, economic and perhaps even spiritual — this has been a tremendous project and I'm really looking forward to not only myself and my students doing it, but also to promote and teach other scientists how to do this. As many of you are aware, the world of academia is a rather inward-looking one. I'm trying to help researchers move more outward to have their own partnerships with people outside of the academic community. And so I'm hoping that my husband Jack, the ant taxonomist, can perhaps work with Mattel to make Taxonomist Ken. Perhaps Ben Zander and Bill Gates could get together and make an opera about AIDS. Or perhaps Al Gore and Naturally 7 could make a song about climate change that would really make you clap your hands. So, although it's a little bit of a fantasy, I think it's also a reality. Given the duress that we're feeling environmentally in these times, it is time for scientists to reach outward, and time for those outside of science to reach towards academia as well. I started my career with trying to understand the mysteries of forests with the tools of science. By making these partnerships that I described to you, I have really opened my mind and, I have to say, my heart to have a greater understanding, to make other discoveries about nature and myself. When I look into my heart, I see trees — this is actually an image of a real heart — there are trees in our hearts, there are trees in your hearts. When we come to understand nature, we are touching the most deep, the most important parts of our self. In these partnerships, I have also learned that people tend to compartmentalize themselves into IT people, and movie star people, and scientists, but when we share nature, when we share our perspectives about nature, we find a common denominator. Finally, as a scientist and as a person and now, as part of the TED community, I feel that I have better tools to go out to trees, to go out to forests, to go out to nature, to make new discoveries about nature — and about humans' place in nature wherever we are and whomever you are. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Learning from dirty jobs

Mike Rowe

{0: 'Mike Rowe'}

{0: ['tv host']}

{0: 'Mike Rowe is the host of "Dirty Jobs" -- an incredibly entertaining and heartfelt tribute to hard labor.'}

2008-12-12

2009-03-05

EG 2008

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'et', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'ku', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'sv', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['economics', 'entertainment', 'work', 'Best of the Web']

{499: 'The jungle search for viruses', 141: "Inside the world's deepest caves", 406: 'A foie gras parable', 2332: 'How to find work you love', 27622: 'Confessions of a recovering micromanager', 1347: 'The secret structure of great talks'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_learning_from_dirty_jobs/

Mike Rowe, the host of "Dirty Jobs," tells some compelling (and horrifying) real-life job stories. Listen for his insights and observations about the nature of hard work, and how it's been unjustifiably degraded in society today.

The "Dirty Jobs" crew and I were called to a little town in Colorado, called Craig. It's only a couple dozen square miles. It's in the Rockies. And the job in question was sheep rancher. My role on the show, for those of you who haven't seen it — it's pretty simple. I'm an apprentice, and I work with the people who do the jobs in question. And my responsibilities are to simply try and keep up, and give an honest account of what it's like to be these people for one day in their life. The job in question: herding sheep. Great. We go to Craig and we check into a hotel, and I realize the next day that castration is going to be an absolute part of this work. Normally, I never do any research at all. But this is a touchy subject, and I work for the Discovery Channel, and we want to portray accurately whatever it is we do. And we certainly want to do it with a lot of respect for the animals. So I call the Humane Society and I say, "Look, I'm going to be castrating some lambs. Can you tell me the deal?" And they're like, "Yeah, it's pretty straightforward." They use a band, basically, a rubber band, like this, only a little smaller. This one was actually around the playing cards I got yesterday — (Laughter) But it had a certain familiarity to it. And I said, "Well, what exactly is the process?" And they said, "The band is applied to the tail, tightly. And then another band is applied to the scrotum, tightly. Blood flow is slowly retarded; a week later the parts in question fall off. "Great — got it." OK, I call the SPCA to confirm this. They confirm it. I also call PETA just for fun, and they don't like it, but they confirm it. OK, that's basically how you do it. So the next day I go out. And I'm given a horse and we go get the lambs and we take them to a pen that we built, and we go about the business of animal husbandry. Melanie is the wife of Albert. Albert is the shepherd in question. Melanie picks up the lamb, one hand on both legs on the right, likewise on the left. Lamb goes on the post, she opens it up. Alright. Great. Albert goes in, I follow Albert, the crew is around. I always watch the process done the first time before I try it. Being an apprentice, you know, you do that. Albert reaches in his pocket to pull out, you know, this black rubber band, but what comes out instead is a knife. And I'm like, "Hmm, that's not rubber at all," you know? (Laughter) And he kind of flicked it open in a way that caught the sun that was just coming over the Rockies, it was very — (Laughter) It was ... it was impressive. In the space of about two seconds, Albert had the knife between the cartilage of the tail, right next to the butt of the lamb, and very quickly, the tail was gone and in the bucket that I was holding. A second later, with a big thumb and a well-calloused forefinger, he had the scrotum firmly in his grasp. And he pulled it toward him, like so, and he took the knife and he put it on the tip. "Now, you think you know what's coming, Michael, You don't, OK?" (Laughter) He snips it, throws the tip over his shoulder, and then grabs the scrotum and pushes it upward, and then his head dips down, obscuring my view. But what I hear is a slurping sound, and a noise that sounds like Velcro being yanked off a sticky wall, and I am not even kidding. Can we roll the video? No, I'm kidding, we don't — (Laughter) I thought it best to talk in pictures. I do something now I've never, ever done on a "Dirty Jobs" shoot, ever. I say, "Time out. Stop." You guys know the show, we use take one; we don't do take two. There's no writing, there's no scripting, there's no nonsense. We don't fool around, we don't rehearse — we shoot what we get! I said, "Stop. This is nuts." I mean — (Laughter) "This is crazy. We can't do this." And Albert's like, "What?" And I'm like, "I don't know what just happened, but there are testicles in this bucket, and that's not how we do it." He said "Well, that's how we do it." I said, "Why would you do it this way?" And before I even let him explain, I said, "I want to do it the right way, with the rubber bands." And he says, "Like the Humane Society?" I said, "Yes, like the Humane Society. Let's do something that doesn't make the lamb squeal and bleed. We're on in five continents, dude! We're on twice a day on the Discovery — we can't do this." He says, "OK." He goes to his box and pulls out a bag of these little rubber bands. Melanie picks up another lamb, puts it on the post, band goes on the tail, band goes on the scrotum. Lamb goes on the ground, lamb takes two steps, falls down, gets up, shakes a little, takes another couple steps, falls down. I'm like, this is not a good sign for this lamb, at all. Gets up, walks to the corner. It's quivering, and it lies down and it's in obvious distress. And I'm looking at the lamb and I say, "Albert, how long? When does he get up?" He's like, "A day?" I said, "A day! How long does it take them to fall off?" "A week." Meanwhile, the lamb that he had just done his little procedure on is, you know, he's just prancing around, bleeding stopped. He's, you know, nibbling on some grass, frolicking. And I was just so blown away at how completely wrong I was, in that second. And I was reminded how utterly wrong I am, so much of the time. (Laughter) And I was especially reminded of what a ridiculously short straw I had that day, because now I had to do what Albert had just done, and there are like 100 of these lambs in the pen. And suddenly, this whole thing's starting to feel like a German porno, and I'm like — (Laughter) Melanie picks up the lamb, puts it on the post, opens it up. Albert hands me the knife. I go in, tail comes off. I go in, I grab the scrotum, tip comes off. Albert instructs, "Push it way up there." I do. "Push it further." I do. The testicles emerge. They look like thumbs, coming right at you. And he says, "Bite 'em. Just bite 'em off." (Laughter) And I heard him, I heard all the words — (Laughter) Like, how did I get here? How did — I mean — how did I get here? It's just — it's one of those moments where the brain goes off on its own, and suddenly, I'm standing there in the Rockies, and all I can think of is the Aristotelian definition of a tragedy. You know, Aristotle says a tragedy is that moment when the hero comes face to face with his true identity. (Laughter) And I'm like, "What is this jacked-up metaphor? I don't like what I'm thinking right now." And I can't get this thought out of my head, and I can't get that vision out of my sight, so I did what I had to do. I went in and I took them. I took them like this, and I yanked my head back. And I'm standing there with two testicles on my chin. (Laughter) And now I can't get — I can't shake the metaphor. I'm still in "Poetics," in Aristotle, and I'm thinking — out of nowhere, two terms come crashing into my head, that I hadn't heard since my classics professor in college drilled them there. And they are "anagnorisis" and "peripeteia." Anagnorisis and peripeteia. Anagnorisis is the Greek word for discovery. Literally, the transition from ignorance to knowledge is anagnorisis. It's what our network does; it's what "Dirty Jobs" is. And I'm up to my neck in anagnorises every single day. Great. The other word, peripeteia, that's the moment in the great tragedies — Euripides and Sophocles. That's the moment where Oedipus has his moment, where he suddenly realizes that hot chick he's been sleeping with and having babies with is his mother. That's peripety, or peripeteia. And this metaphor in my head — I've got anagnorisis and peripeteia on my chin — (Laughter) I've got to tell you, it's such a great device, though. When you start to look for peripeteia, you find it everywhere. I mean, Bruce Willis in "The Sixth Sense," right? Spends the whole movie trying to help the little kid who sees dead people, and then — boom! — "Oh, I'm dead." Peripeteia. You know? It's crushing when the audience sees it the right way. Neo in "The Matrix," you know? "Oh, I'm living in a computer program. That's weird." These discoveries that lead to sudden realizations. And I've been having them, over 200 dirty jobs, I have them all the time, but that one — that one drilled something home in a way that I just wasn't prepared for. And, as I stood there, looking at the happy lamb that I had just defiled — but it looked OK; looking at that poor other little thing that I'd done it the right way on, and I just was struck by — if I'm wrong about that, and if I'm wrong so often, in a literal way, what other peripatetic misconceptions might I be able to comment upon? Because, look — I'm not a social anthropologist, but I have a friend who is. And I talk to him. (Laughter) And he says, "Hey Mike, look. I don't know if your brain is interested in this sort of thing or not, but do you realize you've shot in every state? You've worked in mining, you've worked in fishing, you've worked in steel, you've worked in every major industry. You've had your back shoulder to shoulder with these guys that our politicians are desperate to relate to every four years, right?" I can still see Hillary doing the shots of rye, dribbling down her chin, with the steel workers. I mean, these are the people that I work with every single day. "And if you have something to say about their thoughts, collectively, it might be time to think about it. Because, dude, you know, four years." So, that's in my head, testicles are on my chin, thoughts are bouncing around. And, after that shoot, "Dirty Jobs" really didn't change, in terms of what the show is, but it changed for me, personally. And now, when I talk about the show, I no longer just tell the story you heard and 190 like it. I do, but I also start to talk about some of the other things I got wrong; some of the other notions of work that I've just been assuming are sacrosanct, and they're not. People with dirty jobs are happier than you think. As a group, they're the happiest people I know. And I don't want to start whistling "Look for the Union Label," and all that happy-worker crap. I'm just telling you that these are balanced people who do unthinkable work. Roadkill picker-uppers whistle while they work, I swear to God — I did it with them. They've got this amazing sort of symmetry to their life. And I see it over and over and over again. So I started to wonder what would happen if we challenged some of these sacred cows? Follow your passion — we've been talking about it here for the last 36 hours. Follow your passion — what could possibly be wrong with that? It's probably the worst advice I ever got. (Laughter) Follow your dreams and go broke, right? I mean, that's all I heard growing up. I didn't know what to do with my life, but I was told if you follow your passion, it's going to work out. I can give you 30 examples right now. Bob Combs, the pig farmer in Las Vegas who collects the uneaten scraps of food from the casinos and feeds them to his swine. Why? Because there's so much protein in the stuff we don't eat, his pigs grow at twice the normal speed, and he's one rich pig farmer. He's good for the environment, he spends his days doing this incredible service, and he smells like hell, but God bless him. He's making a great living. You ask him, "Did you follow your passion here?" and he'd laugh at you. The guy's worth — he just got offered like 60 million dollars for his farm and turned it down, outside of Vegas. He didn't follow his passion. He stepped back and he watched where everybody was going, and he went the other way. And I hear that story over and over. Matt Freund, a dairy farmer in New Canaan, Connecticut, who woke up one day and realized the crap from his cows was worth more than their milk, if he could use it to make these biodegradable flowerpots. Now he's selling them to Walmart, right? Follow his passion? The guy's — come on. So I started to look at passion, I started to look at efficiency vs. effectiveness. As Tim talked about earlier, that's a huge distinction. I started to look at teamwork and determination. And basically, all those platitudes they call "successories" that hang with that schmaltzy art in boardrooms around the world right now, that stuff — it's suddenly all been turned on its head. Safety. Safety first is ... Going back to OSHA and PETA and the Humane Society: What if OSHA got it wrong? I mean — this is heresy, what I'm about to say — but what if it's really safety third? Right? (Laughter) No, I mean, really. What I mean to say is: I value my safety on these crazy jobs as much as the people that I'm working with, but the ones who really get it done — they're not out there talking about safety first. They know that other things come first — the business of doing the work comes first, the business of getting it done. And I'll never forget, up in the Bering Sea, I was on a crab boat with the "Deadliest Catch" guys — which I also work on in the first season. We were about 100 miles off the coast of Russia: 50-foot seas, big waves, green water coming over the wheelhouse, right? Most hazardous environment I'd ever seen, and I was back with a guy, lashing the pots down. So I'm 40 feet off the deck, which is like looking down at the top of your shoe, you know, and it's doing this in the ocean. Unspeakably dangerous. I scamper down, I go into the wheelhouse and I say, with some level of incredulity, "Captain — OSHA?" And he says, "OSHA? Ocean." And he points out there. (Laughter) But in that moment, what he said next can't be repeated in the Lower 48. It can't be repeated on any factory floor or any construction site. But he looked at me and said, "Son," — he's my age, by the way, he calls me "son," I love that — he says, "Son, I'm the captain of a crab boat. My responsibility is not to get you home alive. My responsibility is to get you home rich." (Laughter) You want to get home alive, that's on you." And for the rest of that day — safety first. I mean, I was like — So, the idea that we create this sense of complacency when all we do is talk about somebody else's responsibility as though it's our own, and vice versa. Anyhow, a whole lot of things. I could talk at length about the many little distinctions we made and the endless list of ways that I got it wrong. But what it all comes down to is this: I've formed a theory, and I'm going to share it now in my remaining 2 minutes and 30 seconds. It goes like this: we've declared war on work, as a society — all of us. It's a civil war. It's a cold war, really. We didn't set out to do it and we didn't twist our mustache in some Machiavellian way, but we've done it. And we've waged this war on at least four fronts, certainly in Hollywood. The way we portray working people on TV — it's laughable. If there's a plumber, he's 300 pounds and he's got a giant butt crack, admit it. You see him all the time. That's what plumbers look like, right? We turn them into heroes, or we turn them into punch lines. That's what TV does. We try hard on "Dirty Jobs" not to do that, which is why I do the work and I don't cheat. But, we've waged this war on Madison Avenue. So many of the commercials that come out there in the way of a message — what's really being said? "Your life would be better if you could work a little less, didn't have to work so hard, got home a little earlier, could retire a little faster, punch out a little sooner." It's all in there, over and over, again and again. Washington? I can't even begin to talk about the deals and policies in place that affect the bottom-line reality of the available jobs, because I don't really know; I just know that that's a front in this war. And right here, guys — Silicon Valley. I mean — how many people have an iPhone on them right now? How many people have their BlackBerry? We're plugged in; we're connected. I would never suggest for a second that something bad has come out of the tech revolution. Good grief, not to this crowd. (Laughter) But I would suggest that innovation without imitation is a complete waste of time. And nobody celebrates imitation the way "Dirty Jobs" guys know it has to be done. Your iPhone without those people making the same interface, the same circuitry, the same board, over and over — all of that — that's what makes it equally as possible as the genius that goes inside of it. So, we've got this new toolbox. You know? Our tools today don't look like shovels and picks. They look like the stuff we walk around with. And so the collective effect of all of that has been this marginalization of lots and lots of jobs. And I realized, probably too late in this game — I hope not, because I don't know if I can do 200 more of these things — but we're going to do as many as we can. And to me, the most important thing to know and to really come face to face with, is that fact that I got it wrong about a lot of things, not just the testicles on my chin. I got a lot wrong. So, we're thinking — by "we," I mean me — (Laughter) that the thing to do is to talk about a PR campaign for work — manual labor, skilled labor. Somebody needs to be out there, talking about the forgotten benefits. I'm talking about grandfather stuff, the stuff a lot us probably grew up with but we've kind of — you know, kind of lost a little. Barack wants to create two and a half million jobs. The infrastructure is a huge deal. This war on work that I suppose exists, has casualties like any other war. The infrastructure is the first one, declining trade school enrollments are the second one. Every single year, fewer electricians, fewer carpenters, fewer plumbers, fewer welders, fewer pipe fitters, fewer steam fitters. The infrastructure jobs that everybody is talking about creating are those guys — the ones that have been in decline, over and over. Meanwhile, we've got two trillion dollars, at a minimum, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers, that we need to expend to even make a dent in the infrastructure, which is currently rated at a D minus. So, if I were running for anything — and I'm not — I would simply say that the jobs we hope to make and the jobs we hope to create aren't going to stick unless they're jobs that people want. And I know the point of this conference is to celebrate things that are near and dear to us, but I also know that clean and dirty aren't opposites. They're two sides of the same coin, just like innovation and imitation, like risk and responsibility, like peripeteia and anagnorisis, like that poor little lamb, who I hope isn't quivering anymore, and like my time that's gone. It's been great talking to you. And get back to work, will you? (Applause)

3 ways good design makes you happy

Don Norman

{0: 'Don Norman'}

{0: ['cognitive scientist and design critic']}

{0: 'Don Norman studies how real people interact with design, exploring the gulf between what a designer intends and what a regular person actually wants. His work has resulted in some classic books, including "The Design of Everyday Things."'}

2003-02-02

2009-03-09

TED2003

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'hy', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'th', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['creativity', 'design', 'happiness']

{50: 'Happiness by design', 266: 'Designing objects that tell stories', 2: 'Simple designs to save a life', 1243: 'How beauty feels', 5: 'Great cars are great art', 8419: "You aren't at the mercy of your emotions -- your brain creates them"}

https://www.ted.com/talks/don_norman_3_ways_good_design_makes_you_happy/

In this talk from 2003, design critic Don Norman turns his incisive eye toward beauty, fun, pleasure and emotion, as he looks at design that makes people happy. He names the three emotional cues that a well-designed product must hit to succeed.

The new me is beauty. (Laughter) Yeah, people used to say, "Norman's OK, but if you followed what he said, everything would be usable but it would be ugly." Well, I didn't have that in mind, so ... This is neat. Thank you for setting up my display. I mean, it's just wonderful. And I haven't the slightest idea of what it does or what it's good for, but I want it. And that's my new life. My new life is trying to understand what beauty is about, and "pretty," and "emotions." The new me is all about making things kind of neat and fun. And so this is a Philippe Starck juicer, produced by Alessi. It's just neat; it's fun. It's so much fun I have it in my house — but I have it in the entryway, I don't use it to make juice. (Laughter) In fact, I bought the gold-plated special edition and it comes with a little slip of paper that says, "Don't use this juicer to make juice." The acid will ruin the gold plating. (Laughter) So actually, I took a carton of orange juice and I poured it in the glass to take this picture. (Laughter) Beneath it is a wonderful knife. It's a Global cutting knife made in Japan. First of all, look at the shape — it's just wonderful to look at. Second of all, it's really beautifully balanced: it holds well, it feels well. And third of all, it's so sharp, it just cuts. It's a delight to use. And so it's got everything, right? It's beautiful and it's functional. And I can tell you stories about it, which makes it reflective, and so you'll see I have a theory of emotion. And those are the three components. Hiroshi Ishii and his group at the MIT Media Lab took a ping-pong table and placed a projector above it, and on the ping-pong table they projected an image of water with fish swimming in it. And as you play ping-pong, whenever the ball hits part of the table, the ripples spread out and the fish run away. But of course, then the ball hits the other side, the ripples hit the — poor fish, they can't find any peace and quiet. (Laughter) Is that a good way to play ping-pong? No. But is it fun? Yeah! Yeah. Or look at Google. If you type in, oh say, "emotion and design," you get 10 pages of results. So Google just took their logo and they spread it out. Instead of saying, "You got 73,000 results. This is one through 20. Next," they just give you as many o's as there are pages. It's really simple and subtle. I bet a lot of you have seen it and never noticed it. That's the subconscious mind that sort of notices it — it probably is kind of pleasant and you didn't know why. And it's just clever. And of course, what's especially good is, if you type "design and emotion," the first response out of those 10 pages is my website. (Laughter) Now, the weird thing is Google lies, because if I type "design and emotion," it says, "You don't need the 'and.' We do it anyway." So, OK. So I type "design emotion" and my website wasn't first again. It was third. Oh well, different story. There was this wonderful review in The New York Times about the MINI Cooper automobile. It said, "You know, this is a car that has lots of faults. Buy it anyway. It's so much fun to drive." And if you look at the inside of the car — I mean, I loved it, I wanted to see it, I rented it, this is me taking a picture while my son is driving — and the inside of the car, the whole design is fun. It's round, it's neat. The controls work wonderfully. So that's my new life; it's all about fun. I really have the feeling that pleasant things work better, and that never made any sense to me until I finally figured out — look ... I'm going to put a plank on the ground. So, imagine I have a plank about two feet wide and 30 feet long and I'm going to walk on it, and you see I can walk on it without looking, I can go back and forth and I can jump up and down. No problem. Now I'm going to put the plank 300 feet in the air — and I'm not going to go near it, thank you. Intense fear paralyzes you. It actually affects the way the brain works. So, Paul Saffo, before his talk said that he didn't really have it down until just a few days or hours before the talk, and that anxiety was really helpful in causing him to focus. That's what fear and anxiety does; it causes you to be — what's called depth-first processing — to focus, not be distracted. And I couldn't force myself across that. Now some people can — circus workers, steel workers. But it really changes the way you think. And then, a psychologist, Alice Isen, did this wonderful experiment. She brought students in to solve problems. So, she'd bring people into the room, and there'd be a string hanging down here and a string hanging down here. It was an empty room, except for a table with a bunch of crap on it — some papers and scissors and stuff. And she'd bring them in, and she'd say, "This is an IQ test and it determines how well you do in life. Would you tie those two strings together?" So they'd take one string and they'd pull it over here and they couldn't reach the other string. Still can't reach it. And, basically, none of them could solve it. You bring in a second group of people, and you say, "Oh, before we start, I got this box of candy, and I don't eat candy. Would you like the box of candy?" And turns out they liked it, and it made them happy — not very happy, but a little bit of happy. And guess what — they solved the problem. And it turns out that when you're anxious you squirt neural transmitters in the brain, which focuses you makes you depth-first. And when you're happy — what we call positive valence — you squirt dopamine into the prefrontal lobes, which makes you a breadth-first problem solver: you're more susceptible to interruption; you do out-of-the-box thinking. That's what brainstorming is about, right? With brainstorming we make you happy, we play games, and we say, "No criticism," and you get all these weird, neat ideas. But in fact, if that's how you always were you'd never get any work done because you'd be working along and say, "Oh, I got a new way of doing it." So to get work done, you've got to set a deadline, right? You've got be anxious. The brain works differently if you're happy. Things work better because you're more creative. You get a little problem, you say, "Ah, I'll figure it out." No big deal. There's something I call the visceral level of processing, and there will be visceral-level design. Biology — we have co-adapted through biology to like bright colors. That's especially good that mammals and primates like fruits and bright plants, because you eat the fruit and you thereby spread the seed. There's an amazing amount of stuff that's built into the brain. We dislike bitter tastes, we dislike loud sounds, we dislike hot temperatures, cold temperatures. We dislike scolding voices. We dislike frowning faces; we like symmetrical faces, etc., etc. So that's the visceral level. In design, you can express visceral in lots of ways, like the choice of type fonts and the red for hot, exciting. Or the 1963 Jaguar: It's actually a crummy car, falls apart all the time, but the owners love it. And it's beautiful — it's in the Museum of Modern Art. A water bottle: You buy it because of the bottle, not because of the water. And when people are finished, they don't throw it away. They keep it for — you know, it's like the old wine bottles, you keep it for decoration or maybe fill it with water again, which proves it's not the water. It's all about the visceral experience. The middle level of processing is the behavioral level and that's actually where most of our stuff gets done. Visceral is subconscious, you're unaware of it. Behavioral is subconscious, you're unaware of it. Almost everything we do is subconscious. I'm walking around the stage — I'm not attending to the control of my legs. I'm doing a lot; most of my talk is subconscious; it has been rehearsed and thought about a lot. Most of what we do is subconscious. Automatic behavior — skilled behavior — is subconscious, controlled by the behavioral side. And behavioral design is all about feeling in control, which includes usability, understanding — but also the feel and heft. That's why the Global knives are so neat. They're so nicely balanced, so sharp, that you really feel you're in control of the cutting. Or, just driving a high-performance sports car over a demanding curb — again, feeling that you are in complete control of the environment. Or the sensual feeling. This is a Kohler shower, a waterfall shower, and actually, all those knobs beneath are also showerheads. It will squirt you all around and you can stay in that shower for hours — and not waste water, by the way, because it recirculates the same dirty water. (Laughter) Or this — this is a really neat teapot I found at high tea at The Four Seasons Hotel in Chicago. It's a Ronnefeldt tilting teapot. That's kind of what the teapot looks like but the way you use it is you lay it on its back, and you put tea in, and then you fill it with water. The water then seeps over the tea. And the tea is sitting in this stuff to the right — the tea is to the right of this line. There's a little ledge inside, so the tea is sitting there and the water is filling it up like that. And when the tea is ready, or almost ready, you tilt it. And that means the tea is partially covered while it completes the brewing. And when it's finished, you put it vertically, and now the tea is — you remember — above this line and the water only comes to here — and so it keeps the tea out. On top of that, it communicates, which is what emotion does. Emotion is all about acting; emotion is really about acting. It's being safe in the world. Cognition is about understanding the world, emotion is about interpreting it — saying good, bad, safe, dangerous, and getting us ready to act, which is why the muscles tense or relax. And that's why we can tell the emotion of somebody else — because their muscles are acting, subconsciously, except that we've evolved to make the facial muscles really rich with emotion. Well, this has emotions if you like, because it signals the waiter that, "Hey, I'm finished. See — upright." And the waiter can come by and say, "Would you like more water?" It's kind of neat. What a wonderful design. And the third level is reflective, which is, if you like the superego, it's a little part of the brain that has no control over what you do, no control over the — doesn't see the senses, doesn't control the muscles. It looks over what's going on. It's that little voice in your head that's watching and saying, "That's good. That's bad." Or, "Why are you doing that? I don't understand." It's that little voice in your head that's the seat of consciousness. Here's a great reflective product. Owners of the Hummer have said, "You know I've owned many cars in my life — all sorts of exotic cars, but never have I had a car that attracted so much attention." It's about attention. It's about their image, not about the car. If you want a more positive model — this is the GM car. And the reason you might buy it now is because you care about the environment. And you'll buy it to protect the environment, even though the first few cars are going to be really expensive and not perfected. But that's reflective design as well. Or an expensive watch, so you can impress people — "Oh gee, I didn't know you had that watch." As opposed to this one, which is a pure behavioral watch, which probably keeps better time than the $13,000 watch I just showed you. But it's ugly. This is a clear Don Norman watch. And what's neat is sometimes you pit one emotion against the other, the visceral fear of falling against the reflective state saying, "It's OK. It's OK. It's safe. It's safe." If that amusement park were rusty and falling apart, you'd never go on the ride. So, it's pitting one against the other. The other neat thing ... (Laughter) So Jake Cress is this furniture maker, and he makes this unbelievable set of furniture. And this is his chair with claw, and the poor little chair has lost its ball and it's trying to get it back before anybody notices. And what's so neat about it is how you accept that story. And that's what's nice about emotion. So that's the new me. I'm only saying positive things from now on. (Laughter) (Applause)

Meet the SixthSense interaction

Pattie Maes

{0: 'Pattie Maes', 1: 'Pranav Mistry'}

{0: ['researcher'], 1: ['director of research', 'samsung research america']}

{0: "As head of the MIT Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces Group, Pattie Maes researches the tools we use to work with information and connect with one another.", 1: 'As an MIT grad student, Pranav Mistry invented SixthSense, a wearable device that enables new interactions between the real world and the world of data.'}

2009-02-06

2009-03-10

TED2009

en

['ar', 'bg', 'bn', 'ca', 'cs', 'da', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'eo', 'es', 'eu', 'fa', 'fi', 'fil', 'fr', 'gu', 'he', 'hi', 'hr', 'hu', 'hy', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'ku', 'lv', 'mk', 'nb', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sr', 'ta', 'te', 'th', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['demo', 'design', 'interface design', 'technology']

{457: 'Toy tiles that talk to each other', 129: "How PhotoSynth can connect the world's images", 131: 'Rethink the desktop with BumpTop', 685: 'The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology', 65: 'The radical promise of the multi-touch interface', 2410: 'Shape-shifting tech will change work as we know it'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/pattie_maes_pranav_mistry_meet_the_sixthsense_interaction/

This demo -- from Pattie Maes' lab at MIT, spearheaded by Pranav Mistry -- was the buzz of TED. It's a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment. Imagine "Minority Report" and then some.

I've been intrigued by this question of whether we could evolve or develop a sixth sense — a sense that would give us seamless access and easy access to meta-information or information that may exist somewhere that may be relevant to help us make the right decision about whatever it is that we're coming across. And some of you may argue, "Well, don't today's cell phones do that already?" But I would say no. When you meet someone here at TED — and this is the top networking place, of course, of the year — you don't shake somebody's hand and then say, "Can you hold on for a moment while I take out my phone and Google you?" Or when you go to the supermarket and you're standing there in that huge aisle of different types of toilet papers, you don't take out your cell phone, and open a browser, and go to a website to try to decide which of these different toilet papers is the most ecologically responsible purchase to make. So we don't really have easy access to all this relevant information that can just help us make optimal decisions about what to do next and what actions to take. And so my research group at the Media Lab has been developing a series of inventions to give us access to this information in a sort of easy way, without requiring that the user changes any of their behavior. And I'm here to unveil our latest effort, and most successful effort so far, which is still very much a work in process. I'm actually wearing the device right now and we've sort of cobbled it together with components that are off the shelf — and that, by the way, only cost 350 dollars at this point in time. I'm wearing a camera, just a simple web cam, a portable, battery-powered projection system with a little mirror. These components communicate to my cell phone in my pocket which acts as the communication and computation device. And in the video here we see my student Pranav Mistry, who's really the genius who's been implementing and designing this whole system. And we see how this system lets him walk up to any surface and start using his hands to interact with the information that is projected in front of him. The system tracks the four significant fingers. In this case, he's wearing simple marker caps that you may recognize. But if you want a more stylish version, you could also paint your nails in different colors. And the camera basically tracks these four fingers and recognizes any gestures that he's making so he can just go to, for example, a map of Long Beach, zoom in and out, etc. The system also recognizes iconic gestures such as the "take a picture" gesture, and then takes a picture of whatever is in front of you. And when he then walks back to the Media Lab, he can just go up to any wall and project all the pictures that he's taken, sort through them and organize them, and re-size them, etc., again using all natural gestures. So, some of you most likely were here two years ago and saw the demo by Jeff Han, or some of you may think, "Well, doesn't this look like the Microsoft Surface Table?" And yes, you also interact using natural gestures, both hands, etc. But the difference here is that you can use any surface, you can walk up to any surface, including your hand, if nothing else is available, and interact with this projected data. The device is completely portable, and can be — (Applause) (Applause ends) So, one important difference is that it's totally mobile. Another even more important difference is that in mass production, this would not cost more tomorrow than today's cell phones and would actually not sort of be a bigger packaging — could look a lot more stylish than this version that I'm wearing around my neck. But other than letting some of you live out your fantasy of looking as cool as Tom Cruise in "Minority Report," the reason why we're really excited about this device is that it really can act as one of these sixth-sense devices that gives you relevant information about whatever is in front of you. So we see Pranav here going into the supermarket and he's shopping for some paper towels. And, as he picks up a product, the system can recognize the product that he's picking up, using either image recognition or marker technology, and give him the green light or an orange light. He can ask for additional information. So this particular choice here is a particularly good choice, given his personal criteria. Some of you may want the toilet paper with the most bleach in it rather than the most ecologically responsible choice. (Laughter) If he picks up a book in the bookstore, he can get an Amazon rating — it gets projected right on the cover of the book. This is Juan's book, our previous speaker, which gets a great rating, by the way, at Amazon. And so, Pranav turns the page of the book and can then see additional information about the book — reader comments, maybe sort of information by his favorite critic, etc. If he turns to a particular page, he finds an annotation by maybe an expert or a friend of ours that gives him a little bit of additional information about whatever is on that particular page. Reading the newspaper — it never has to be outdated. (Laughter) You can get video annotations of the events that you're reading about. You can get the latest sports scores, etc. This is a more controversial one. (Laughter) As you interact with someone at TED, maybe you can see a word cloud of the tags, the words that are associated with that person in their blog and personal web pages. In this case, the student is interested in cameras, etc. On your way to the airport, if you pick up your boarding pass, it can tell you that your flight is delayed, that the gate has changed, etc. And, if you need to know what the current time is, it's as simple as drawing a watch — (Laughter) (Applause) on your arm. So that's where we're at so far in developing this sixth sense that would give us seamless access to all this relevant information about the things that we may come across. My student Pranav, who's really, like I said, the genius behind this. (Applause and cheering) (Applause ends) He does deserve a lot of applause, because I don't think he's slept much in the last three months, actually. And his girlfriend is probably not very happy about him either. But it's not perfect yet, it's very much a work in progress. And who knows, maybe in another 10 years we'll be here with the ultimate sixth sense brain implant. Thank you. (Applause)

My 12 pairs of legs

Aimee Mullins

{0: 'Aimee Mullins'}

{0: ['athlete and actor']}

{0: 'A record-breaker at the Paralympic Games in 1996, Aimee Mullins has built a career as a model, actor and advocate for women, sports and the next generation of prosthetics. '}

2009-02-05

2009-03-11

TED2009

en

['ar', 'bg', 'ca', 'cs', 'da', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fi', 'fr', 'fr-ca', 'he', 'hi', 'hr', 'hu', 'hy', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'lt', 'mr', 'ms', 'nl', 'nn', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sl', 'sr', 'sv', 'th', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['activism', 'design', 'fashion', 'future', 'prosthetics', 'sports', 'technology', 'bionics']

{443: 'Changing my legs - and my mindset', 103: 'How to truly listen', 396: 'Fashion and creativity', 1285: 'Living beyond limits', 1971: 'The sore problem of prosthetic limbs', 2017: "I'm not your inspiration, thank you very much"}

https://www.ted.com/talks/aimee_mullins_my_12_pairs_of_legs/

Athlete, actor and activist Aimee Mullins talks about her prosthetic legs -- she's got a dozen amazing pairs -- and the superpowers they grant her: speed, beauty, an extra 6 inches of height ... Quite simply, she redefines what the body can be.

I was speaking to a group of about 300 kids, ages six to eight, at a children's museum, and I brought with me a bag full of legs, similar to the kinds of things you see up here, and had them laid out on a table for the kids. And, from my experience, you know, kids are naturally curious about what they don't know, or don't understand, or is foreign to them. They only learn to be frightened of those differences when an adult influences them to behave that way, and maybe censors that natural curiosity, or you know, reins in the question-asking in the hopes of them being polite little kids. So I just pictured a first grade teacher out in the lobby with these unruly kids, saying, "Now, whatever you do, don't stare at her legs." But, of course, that's the point. That's why I was there, I wanted to invite them to look and explore. So I made a deal with the adults that the kids could come in without any adults for two minutes on their own. The doors open, the kids descend on this table of legs, and they are poking and prodding, and they're wiggling toes, and they're trying to put their full weight on the sprinting leg to see what happens with that. And I said, "Kids, really quickly — I woke up this morning, I decided I wanted to be able to jump over a house — nothing too big, two or three stories — but, if you could think of any animal, any superhero, any cartoon character, anything you can dream up right now, what kind of legs would you build me?" And immediately a voice shouted, "Kangaroo!" "No, no, no! Should be a frog!" "No. It should be Go Go Gadget!" "No, no, no! It should be the Incredibles." And other things that I don't — aren't familiar with. And then, one eight-year-old said, "Hey, why wouldn't you want to fly too?" And the whole room, including me, was like, "Yeah." (Laughter) And just like that, I went from being a woman that these kids would have been trained to see as "disabled" to somebody that had potential that their bodies didn't have yet. Somebody that might even be super-abled. Interesting. So some of you actually saw me at TED, 11 years ago. And there's been a lot of talk about how life-changing this conference is for both speakers and attendees, and I am no exception. TED literally was the launch pad to the next decade of my life's exploration. At the time, the legs I presented were groundbreaking in prosthetics. I had woven carbon fiber sprinting legs modeled after the hind leg of a cheetah, which you may have seen on stage yesterday. And also these very life-like, intrinsically painted silicone legs. So at the time, it was my opportunity to put a call out to innovators outside the traditional medical prosthetic community to come bring their talent to the science and to the art of building legs. So that we can stop compartmentalizing form, function and aesthetic, and assigning them different values. Well, lucky for me, a lot of people answered that call. And the journey started, funny enough, with a TED conference attendee — Chee Pearlman, who hopefully is in the audience somewhere today. She was the editor then of a magazine called ID, and she gave me a cover story. This started an incredible journey. Curious encounters were happening to me at the time; I'd been accepting numerous invitations to speak on the design of the cheetah legs around the world. And people would come up to me after the conference, after my talk, men and women. And the conversation would go something like this, "You know Aimee, you're very attractive. You don't look disabled." (Laughter) I thought, "Well, that's amazing, because I don't feel disabled." And it really opened my eyes to this conversation that could be explored, about beauty. What does a beautiful woman have to look like? What is a sexy body? And interestingly, from an identity standpoint, what does it mean to have a disability? I mean, people — Pamela Anderson has more prosthetic in her body than I do. Nobody calls her disabled. (Laughter) So this magazine, through the hands of graphic designer Peter Saville, went to fashion designer Alexander McQueen, and photographer Nick Knight, who were also interested in exploring that conversation. So, three months after TED I found myself on a plane to London, doing my first fashion shoot, which resulted in this cover — "Fashion-able"? Three months after that, I did my first runway show for Alexander McQueen on a pair of hand-carved wooden legs made from solid ash. Nobody knew — everyone thought they were wooden boots. Actually, I have them on stage with me: grapevines, magnolias — truly stunning. Poetry matters. Poetry is what elevates the banal and neglected object to a realm of art. It can transform the thing that might have made people fearful into something that invites them to look, and look a little longer, and maybe even understand. I learned this firsthand with my next adventure. The artist Matthew Barney, in his film opus called the "The Cremaster Cycle." This is where it really hit home for me — that my legs could be wearable sculpture. And even at this point, I started to move away from the need to replicate human-ness as the only aesthetic ideal. So we made what people lovingly referred to as glass legs even though they're actually optically clear polyurethane, a.k.a. bowling ball material. Heavy! Then we made these legs that are cast in soil with a potato root system growing in them, and beetroots out the top, and a very lovely brass toe. That's a good close-up of that one. Then another character was a half-woman, half-cheetah — a little homage to my life as an athlete. 14 hours of prosthetic make-up to get into a creature that had articulated paws, claws and a tail that whipped around, like a gecko. (Laughter) And then another pair of legs we collaborated on were these — look like jellyfish legs, also polyurethane. And the only purpose that these legs can serve, outside the context of the film, is to provoke the senses and ignite the imagination. So whimsy matters. Today, I have over a dozen pair of prosthetic legs that various people have made for me, and with them I have different negotiations of the terrain under my feet, and I can change my height — I have a variable of five different heights. (Laughter) Today, I'm 6'1". And I had these legs made a little over a year ago at Dorset Orthopedic in England and when I brought them home to Manhattan, my first night out on the town, I went to a very fancy party. And a girl was there who has known me for years at my normal 5'8". Her mouth dropped open when she saw me, and she went, "But you're so tall!" And I said, "I know. Isn't it fun?" I mean, it's a little bit like wearing stilts on stilts, but I have an entirely new relationship to door jams that I never expected I would ever have. And I was having fun with it. And she looked at me, and she said, "But, Aimee, that's not fair." (Laughter) (Applause) And the incredible thing was she really meant it. It's not fair that you can change your height, as you want it. And that's when I knew — that's when I knew that the conversation with society has changed profoundly in this last decade. It is no longer a conversation about overcoming deficiency. It's a conversation about augmentation. It's a conversation about potential. A prosthetic limb doesn't represent the need to replace loss anymore. It can stand as a symbol that the wearer has the power to create whatever it is that they want to create in that space. So people that society once considered to be disabled can now become the architects of their own identities and indeed continue to change those identities by designing their bodies from a place of empowerment. And what is exciting to me so much right now is that by combining cutting-edge technology — robotics, bionics — with the age-old poetry, we are moving closer to understanding our collective humanity. I think that if we want to discover the full potential in our humanity, we need to celebrate those heartbreaking strengths and those glorious disabilities that we all have. I think of Shakespeare's Shylock: "If you prick us, do we not bleed, and if you tickle us, do we not laugh?" It is our humanity, and all the potential within it, that makes us beautiful. Thank you. (Applause)

Play is more than just fun

Stuart Brown

{0: 'Stuart Brown'}

{0: ['play researcher', 'psychiatrist']}

{0: "Stuart Brown's research shows play is not just joyful and energizing -- it's deeply involved with human development and intelligence. Through the National Institute for Play, he's working to better understand its significance."}

2008-05-08

2009-03-12

Serious Play 2008

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'da', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'hy', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'ku', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'th', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['brain', 'children', 'education', 'entertainment', 'gaming', 'happiness', 'health', 'play', 'psychology', 'science', 'Best of the Web']

{202: '5 dangerous things you should let your kids do', 366: 'Flow, the secret to happiness', 392: 'Tales of creativity and play', 1170: 'A manifesto for play, for Bulgaria and beyond', 1102: "Evolution's gift of play, from bonobo apes to humans", 36110: 'How to recover from activism burnout'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/stuart_brown_play_is_more_than_just_fun/

A pioneer in research on play, Dr. Stuart Brown says humor, games, roughhousing, flirtation and fantasy are more than just fun. Plenty of play in childhood makes for happy, smart adults -- and keeping it up can make us smarter at any age.

So, here we go: a flyby of play. It's got to be serious if the New York Times puts a cover story of their February 17th Sunday magazine about play. At the bottom of this, it says, "It's deeper than gender. Seriously, but dangerously fun. And a sandbox for new ideas about evolution." Not bad, except if you look at that cover, what's missing? You see any adults? Well, lets go back to the 15th century. This is a courtyard in Europe, and a mixture of 124 different kinds of play. All ages, solo play, body play, games, taunting. And there it is. And I think this is a typical picture of what it was like in a courtyard then. I think we may have lost something in our culture. So I'm gonna take you through what I think is a remarkable sequence. North of Churchill, Manitoba, in October and November, there's no ice on Hudson Bay. And this polar bear that you see, this 1200-pound male, he's wild and fairly hungry. And Norbert Rosing, a German photographer, is there on scene, making a series of photos of these huskies, who are tethered. And from out of stage left comes this wild, male polar bear, with a predatory gaze. Any of you who've been to Africa or had a junkyard dog come after you, there is a fixed kind of predatory gaze that you know you're in trouble. But on the other side of that predatory gaze is a female husky in a play bow, wagging her tail. And something very unusual happens. That fixed behavior — which is rigid and stereotyped and ends up with a meal — changes. And this polar bear stands over the husky, no claws extended, no fangs taking a look. And they begin an incredible ballet. A play ballet. This is in nature: it overrides a carnivorous nature and what otherwise would have been a short fight to the death. And if you'll begin to look closely at the husky that's bearing her throat to the polar bear, and look a little more closely, they're in an altered state. They're in a state of play. And it's that state that allows these two creatures to explore the possible. They are beginning to do something that neither would have done without the play signals. And it is a marvelous example of how a differential in power can be overridden by a process of nature that's within all of us. Now how did I get involved in this? John mentioned that I've done some work with murderers, and I have. The Texas Tower murderer opened my eyes, in retrospect, when we studied his tragic mass murder, to the importance of play, in that that individual, by deep study, was found to have severe play deprivation. Charles Whitman was his name. And our committee, which consisted of a lot of hard scientists, did feel at the end of that study that the absence of play and a progressive suppression of developmentally normal play led him to be more vulnerable to the tragedy that he perpetrated. And that finding has stood the test of time — unfortunately even into more recent times, at Virginia Tech. And other studies of populations at risk sensitized me to the importance of play, but I didn't really understand what it was. And it was many years in taking play histories of individuals before I really began to recognize that I didn't really have a full understanding of it. And I don't think any of us has a full understanding of it, by any means. But there are ways of looking at it that I think can give you — give us all a taxonomy, a way of thinking about it. And this image is, for humans, the beginning point of play. When that mother and infant lock eyes, and the infant's old enough to have a social smile, what happens — spontaneously — is the eruption of joy on the part of the mother. And she begins to babble and coo and smile, and so does the baby. If we've got them wired up with an electroencephalogram, the right brain of each of them becomes attuned, so that the joyful emergence of this earliest of play scenes and the physiology of that is something we're beginning to get a handle on. And I'd like you to think that every bit of more complex play builds on this base for us humans. And so now I'm going to take you through sort of a way of looking at play, but it's never just singularly one thing. We're going to look at body play, which is a spontaneous desire to get ourselves out of gravity. This is a mountain goat. If you're having a bad day, try this: jump up and down, wiggle around — you're going to feel better. And you may feel like this character, who is also just doing it for its own sake. It doesn't have a particular purpose, and that's what's great about play. If its purpose is more important than the act of doing it, it's probably not play. And there's a whole other type of play, which is object play. And this Japanese macaque has made a snowball, and he or she's going to roll down a hill. And — they don't throw it at each other, but this is a fundamental part of being playful. The human hand, in manipulation of objects, is the hand in search of a brain; the brain is in search of a hand; and play is the medium by which those two are linked in the best way. JPL we heard this morning — JPL is an incredible place. They have located two consultants, Frank Wilson and Nate Johnson, who are — Frank Wilson is a neurologist, Nate Johnson is a mechanic. He taught mechanics in a high school in Long Beach, and found that his students were no longer able to solve problems. And he tried to figure out why. And he came to the conclusion, quite on his own, that the students who could no longer solve problems, such as fixing cars, hadn't worked with their hands. Frank Wilson had written a book called "The Hand." They got together — JPL hired them. Now JPL, NASA and Boeing, before they will hire a research and development problem solver — even if they're summa cum laude from Harvard or Cal Tech — if they haven't fixed cars, haven't done stuff with their hands early in life, played with their hands, they can't problem-solve as well. So play is practical, and it's very important. Now one of the things about play is that it is born by curiosity and exploration. (Laughter) But it has to be safe exploration. This happens to be OK — he's an anatomically interested little boy and that's his mom. Other situations wouldn't be quite so good. But curiosity, exploration, are part of the play scene. If you want to belong, you need social play. And social play is part of what we're about here today, and is a byproduct of the play scene. Rough and tumble play. These lionesses, seen from a distance, looked like they were fighting. But if you look closely, they're kind of like the polar bear and husky: no claws, flat fur, soft eyes, open mouth with no fangs, balletic movements, curvilinear movements — all specific to play. And rough-and-tumble play is a great learning medium for all of us. Preschool kids, for example, should be allowed to dive, hit, whistle, scream, be chaotic, and develop through that a lot of emotional regulation and a lot of the other social byproducts — cognitive, emotional and physical — that come as a part of rough and tumble play. Spectator play, ritual play — we're involved in some of that. Those of you who are from Boston know that this was the moment — rare — where the Red Sox won the World Series. But take a look at the face and the body language of everybody in this fuzzy picture, and you can get a sense that they're all at play. Imaginative play. I love this picture because my daughter, who's now almost 40, is in this picture, but it reminds me of her storytelling and her imagination, her ability to spin yarns at this age — preschool. A really important part of being a player is imaginative solo play. And I love this one, because it's also what we're about. We all have an internal narrative that's our own inner story. The unit of intelligibility of most of our brains is the story. I'm telling you a story today about play. Well, this bushman, I think, is talking about the fish that got away that was that long, but it's a fundamental part of the play scene. So what does play do for the brain? Well, a lot. We don't know a whole lot about what it does for the human brain, because funding has not been exactly heavy for research on play. I walked into the Carnegie asking for a grant. They'd given me a large grant when I was an academician for the study of felony drunken drivers, and I thought I had a pretty good track record, and by the time I had spent half an hour talking about play, it was obvious that they were not — did not feel that play was serious. I think that — that's a few years back — I think that wave is past, and the play wave is cresting, because there is some good science. Nothing lights up the brain like play. Three-dimensional play fires up the cerebellum, puts a lot of impulses into the frontal lobe — the executive portion — helps contextual memory be developed, and — and, and, and. So it's — for me, its been an extremely nourishing scholarly adventure to look at the neuroscience that's associated with play, and to bring together people who in their individual disciplines hadn't really thought of it that way. And that's part of what the National Institute for Play is all about. And this is one of the ways you can study play — is to get a 256-lead electroencephalogram. I'm sorry I don't have a playful-looking subject, but it allows mobility, which has limited the actual study of play. And we've got a mother-infant play scenario that we're hoping to complete underway at the moment. The reason I put this here is also to queue up my thoughts about objectifying what play does. The animal world has objectified it. In the animal world, if you take rats, who are hardwired to play at a certain period of their juvenile years and you suppress play — they squeak, they wrestle, they pin each other, that's part of their play. If you stop that behavior on one group that you're experimenting with, and you allow it in another group that you're experimenting with, and then you present those rats with a cat odor-saturated collar, they're hardwired to flee and hide. Pretty smart — they don't want to get killed by a cat. So what happens? They both hide out. The non-players never come out — they die. The players slowly explore the environment, and begin again to test things out. That says to me, at least in rats — and I think they have the same neurotransmitters that we do and a similar cortical architecture — that play may be pretty important for our survival. And, and, and — there are a lot more animal studies that I could talk about. Now, this is a consequence of play deprivation. (Laughter) This took a long time — I had to get Homer down and put him through the fMRI and the SPECT and multiple EEGs, but as a couch potato, his brain has shrunk. And we do know that in domestic animals and others, when they're play deprived, they don't — and rats also — they don't develop a brain that is normal. Now, the program says that the opposite of play is not work, it's depression. And I think if you think about life without play — no humor, no flirtation, no movies, no games, no fantasy and, and, and. Try and imagine a culture or a life, adult or otherwise without play. And the thing that's so unique about our species is that we're really designed to play through our whole lifetime. And we all have capacity to play signal. Nobody misses that dog I took a picture of on a Carmel beach a couple of weeks ago. What's going to follow from that behavior is play. And you can trust it. The basis of human trust is established through play signals. And we begin to lose those signals, culturally and otherwise, as adults. That's a shame. I think we've got a lot of learning to do. Now, Jane Goodall has here a play face along with one of her favorite chimps. So part of the signaling system of play has to do with vocal, facial, body, gestural. You know, you can tell — and I think when we're getting into collective play, its really important for groups to gain a sense of safety through their own sharing of play signals. You may not know this word, but it should be your biological first name and last name. Because neoteny means the retention of immature qualities into adulthood. And we are, by physical anthropologists, by many, many studies, the most neotenous, the most youthful, the most flexible, the most plastic of all creatures. And therefore, the most playful. And this gives us a leg up on adaptability. Now, there is a way of looking at play that I also want to emphasize here, which is the play history. Your own personal play history is unique, and often is not something we think about particularly. This is a book written by a consummate player by the name of Kevin Carroll. Kevin Carroll came from extremely deprived circumstances: alcoholic mother, absent father, inner-city Philadelphia, black, had to take care of a younger brother. Found that when he looked at a playground out of a window into which he had been confined, he felt something different. And so he followed up on it. And his life — the transformation of his life from deprivation and what one would expect — potentially prison or death — he become a linguist, a trainer for the 76ers and now is a motivational speaker. And he gives play as a transformative force over his entire life. Now there's another play history that I think is a work in progress. Those of you who remember Al Gore, during the first term and then during his successful but unelected run for the presidency, may remember him as being kind of wooden and not entirely his own person, at least in public. And looking at his history, which is common in the press, it seems to me, at least — looking at it from a shrink's point of view — that a lot of his life was programmed. Summers were hard, hard work, in the heat of Tennessee summers. He had the expectations of his senatorial father and Washington, D.C. And although I think he certainly had the capacity for play — because I do know something about that — he wasn't as empowered, I think, as he now is by paying attention to what is his own passion and his own inner drive, which I think has its basis in all of us in our play history. So what I would encourage on an individual level to do, is to explore backwards as far as you can go to the most clear, joyful, playful image that you have, whether it's with a toy, on a birthday or on a vacation. And begin to build to build from the emotion of that into how that connects with your life now. And you'll find, you may change jobs — which has happened to a number people when I've had them do this — in order to be more empowered through their play. Or you'll be able to enrich your life by prioritizing it and paying attention to it. Most of us work with groups, and I put this up because the d.school, the design school at Stanford, thanks to David Kelley and a lot of others who have been visionary about its establishment, has allowed a group of us to get together and create a course called "From Play to Innovation." And you'll see this course is to investigate the human state of play, which is kind of like the polar bear-husky state and its importance to creative thinking: "to explore play behavior, its development and its biological basis; to apply those principles, through design thinking, to promote innovation in the corporate world; and the students will work with real-world partners on design projects with widespread application." This is our maiden voyage in this. We're about two and a half, three months into it, and it's really been fun. There is our star pupil, this labrador, who taught a lot of us what a state of play is, and an extremely aged and decrepit professor in charge there. And Brendan Boyle, Rich Crandall — and on the far right is, I think, a person who will be in cahoots with George Smoot for a Nobel Prize — Stuart Thompson, in neuroscience. So we've had Brendan, who's from IDEO, and the rest of us sitting aside and watching these students as they put play principles into practice in the classroom. And one of their projects was to see what makes meetings boring, and to try and do something about it. So what will follow is a student-made film about just that. Narrator: Flow is the mental state of apparition in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing. Characterized by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement and success in the process of the activity. An important key insight that we learned about meetings is that people pack them in one after another, disruptive to the day. Attendees at meetings don't know when they'll get back to the task that they left at their desk. But it doesn't have to be that way. (Music) Some sage and repeatedly furry monks at this place called the d.school designed a meeting that you can literally step out of when it's over. Take the meeting off, and have peace of mind that you can come back to me. Because when you need it again, the meeting is literally hanging in your closet. The Wearable Meeting. Because when you put it on, you immediately get everything you need to have a fun and productive and useful meeting. But when you take it off — that's when the real action happens. (Music) (Laughter) (Applause) Stuart Brown: So I would encourage you all to engage not in the work-play differential — where you set aside time to play — but where your life becomes infused minute by minute, hour by hour, with body, object, social, fantasy, transformational kinds of play. And I think you'll have a better and more empowered life. Thank You. (Applause) John Hockenberry: So it sounds to me like what you're saying is that there may be some temptation on the part of people to look at your work and go — I think I've heard this, in my kind of pop psychological understanding of play, that somehow, the way animals and humans deal with play, is that it's some sort of rehearsal for adult activity. Your work seems to suggest that that is powerfully wrong. SB: Yeah, I don't think that's accurate, and I think probably because animals have taught us that. If you stop a cat from playing — which you can do, and we've all seen how cats bat around stuff — they're just as good predators as they would be if they hadn't played. And if you imagine a kid pretending to be King Kong, or a race car driver, or a fireman, they don't all become race car drivers or firemen, you know. So there's a disconnect between preparation for the future — which is what most people are comfortable in thinking about play as — and thinking of it as a separate biological entity. And this is where my chasing animals for four, five years really changed my perspective from a clinician to what I am now, which is that play has a biological place, just like sleep and dreams do. And if you look at sleep and dreams biologically, animals sleep and dream, and they rehearse and they do some other things that help memory and that are a very important part of sleep and dreams. The next step of evolution in mammals and creatures with divinely superfluous neurons will be to play. And the fact that the polar bear and husky or magpie and a bear or you and I and our dogs can crossover and have that experience sets play aside as something separate. And its hugely important in learning and crafting the brain. So it's not just something you do in your spare time. JH: How do you keep — and I know you're part of the scientific research community, and you have to justify your existence with grants and proposals like everyone else — how do you prevent — and some of the data that you've produced, the good science that you're talking about you've produced, is hot to handle. How do you prevent either the media's interpretation of your work or the scientific community's interpretation of the implications of your work, kind of like the Mozart metaphor, where, "Oh, MRIs show that play enhances your intelligence. Well, let's round these kids up, put them in pens and make them play for months at a time; they'll all be geniuses and go to Harvard." How do you prevent people from taking that sort of action on the data that you're developing? SB: Well, I think the only way I know to do it is to have accumulated the advisers that I have who go from practitioners — who can establish through improvisational play or clowning or whatever — a state of play. So people know that it's there. And then you get an fMRI specialist, and you get Frank Wilson, and you get other kinds of hard scientists, including neuroendocrinologists. And you get them into a group together focused on play, and it's pretty hard not to take it seriously. Unfortunately, that hasn't been done sufficiently for the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Mental Health or anybody else to really look at it in this way seriously. I mean you don't hear about anything that's like cancer or heart disease associated with play. And yet I see it as something that's just as basic for survival — long term — as learning some of the basic things about public health. JH: Stuart Brown, thank you very much. (Applause)

The next web

Tim Berners-Lee

{0: 'Tim Berners-Lee'}

{0: ['inventor']}

{0: "Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. He leads the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), overseeing the Web's standards and development."}

2009-02-05

2009-03-13

TED2009

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'lt', 'lv', 'ms', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sq', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['business', 'communication', 'design', 'invention', 'technology', 'web']

{92: "The best stats you've ever seen", 23878: 'Big Data', 2094: 'Big data is better data', 2727: 'How we can find ourselves in data', 788: 'The year open data went worldwide', 783: 'Is Pivot a turning point for web exploration?'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_the_next_web/

20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he's building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together.

Time flies. It's actually almost 20 years ago when I wanted to reframe the way we use information, the way we work together: I invented the World Wide Web. Now, 20 years on, at TED, I want to ask your help in a new reframing. So going back to 1989, I wrote a memo suggesting the global hypertext system. Nobody really did anything with it, pretty much. But 18 months later — this is how innovation happens — 18 months later, my boss said I could do it on the side, as a sort of a play project, kick the tires of a new computer we'd got. And so he gave me the time to code it up. So I basically roughed out what HTML should look like: hypertext protocol, HTTP; the idea of URLs, these names for things which started with HTTP. I wrote the code and put it out there. Why did I do it? Well, it was basically frustration. I was frustrated — I was working as a software engineer in this huge, very exciting lab, lots of people coming from all over the world. They brought all sorts of different computers with them. They had all sorts of different data formats, all sorts, all kinds of documentation systems. So that, in all that diversity, if I wanted to figure out how to build something out of a bit of this and a bit of this, everything I looked into, I had to connect to some new machine, I had to learn to run some new program, I would find the information I wanted in some new data format. And these were all incompatible. It was just very frustrating. The frustration was all this unlocked potential. In fact, on all these discs there were documents. So if you just imagined them all being part of some big, virtual documentation system in the sky, say on the Internet, then life would be so much easier. Well, once you've had an idea like that it kind of gets under your skin and even if people don't read your memo — actually he did, it was found after he died, his copy. He had written, "Vague, but exciting," in pencil, in the corner. (Laughter) But in general it was difficult — it was really difficult to explain what the web was like. It's difficult to explain to people now that it was difficult then. But then — OK, when TED started, there was no web so things like "click" didn't have the same meaning. I can show somebody a piece of hypertext, a page which has got links, and we click on the link and bing — there'll be another hypertext page. Not impressive. You know, we've seen that — we've got things on hypertext on CD-ROMs. What was difficult was to get them to imagine: so, imagine that that link could have gone to virtually any document you could imagine. Alright, that is the leap that was very difficult for people to make. Well, some people did. So yeah, it was difficult to explain, but there was a grassroots movement. And that is what has made it most fun. That has been the most exciting thing, not the technology, not the things people have done with it, but actually the community, the spirit of all these people getting together, sending the emails. That's what it was like then. Do you know what? It's funny, but right now it's kind of like that again. I asked everybody, more or less, to put their documents — I said, "Could you put your documents on this web thing?" And you did. Thanks. It's been a blast, hasn't it? I mean, it has been quite interesting because we've found out that the things that happen with the web really sort of blow us away. They're much more than we'd originally imagined when we put together the little, initial website that we started off with. Now, I want you to put your data on the web. Turns out that there is still huge unlocked potential. There is still a huge frustration that people have because we haven't got data on the web as data. What do you mean, "data"? What's the difference — documents, data? Well, documents you read, OK? More or less, you read them, you can follow links from them, and that's it. Data — you can do all kinds of stuff with a computer. Who was here or has otherwise seen Hans Rosling's talk? One of the great — yes a lot of people have seen it — one of the great TED Talks. Hans put up this presentation in which he showed, for various different countries, in various different colors — he showed income levels on one axis and he showed infant mortality, and he shot this thing animated through time. So, he'd taken this data and made a presentation which just shattered a lot of myths that people had about the economics in the developing world. He put up a slide a little bit like this. It had underground all the data OK, data is brown and boxy and boring, and that's how we think of it, isn't it? Because data you can't naturally use by itself But in fact, data drives a huge amount of what happens in our lives and it happens because somebody takes that data and does something with it. In this case, Hans had put the data together he had found from all kinds of United Nations websites and things. He had put it together, combined it into something more interesting than the original pieces and then he'd put it into this software, which I think his son developed, originally, and produces this wonderful presentation. And Hans made a point of saying, "Look, it's really important to have a lot of data." And I was happy to see that at the party last night that he was still saying, very forcibly, "It's really important to have a lot of data." So I want us now to think about not just two pieces of data being connected, or six like he did, but I want to think about a world where everybody has put data on the web and so virtually everything you can imagine is on the web and then calling that linked data. The technology is linked data, and it's extremely simple. If you want to put something on the web there are three rules: first thing is that those HTTP names — those things that start with "http:" — we're using them not just for documents now, we're using them for things that the documents are about. We're using them for people, we're using them for places, we're using them for your products, we're using them for events. All kinds of conceptual things, they have names now that start with HTTP. Second rule, if I take one of these HTTP names and I look it up and I do the web thing with it and I fetch the data using the HTTP protocol from the web, I will get back some data in a standard format which is kind of useful data that somebody might like to know about that thing, about that event. Who's at the event? Whatever it is about that person, where they were born, things like that. So the second rule is I get important information back. Third rule is that when I get back that information it's not just got somebody's height and weight and when they were born, it's got relationships. Data is relationships. Interestingly, data is relationships. This person was born in Berlin; Berlin is in Germany. And when it has relationships, whenever it expresses a relationship then the other thing that it's related to is given one of those names that starts HTTP. So, I can go ahead and look that thing up. So I look up a person — I can look up then the city where they were born; then I can look up the region it's in, and the town it's in, and the population of it, and so on. So I can browse this stuff. So that's it, really. That is linked data. I wrote an article entitled "Linked Data" a couple of years ago and soon after that, things started to happen. The idea of linked data is that we get lots and lots and lots of these boxes that Hans had, and we get lots and lots and lots of things sprouting. It's not just a whole lot of other plants. It's not just a root supplying a plant, but for each of those plants, whatever it is — a presentation, an analysis, somebody's looking for patterns in the data — they get to look at all the data and they get it connected together, and the really important thing about data is the more things you have to connect together, the more powerful it is. So, linked data. The meme went out there. And, pretty soon Chris Bizer at the Freie Universitat in Berlin who was one of the first people to put interesting things up, he noticed that Wikipedia — you know Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia with lots and lots of interesting documents in it. Well, in those documents, there are little squares, little boxes. And in most information boxes, there's data. So he wrote a program to take the data, extract it from Wikipedia, and put it into a blob of linked data on the web, which he called dbpedia. Dbpedia is represented by the blue blob in the middle of this slide and if you actually go and look up Berlin, you'll find that there are other blobs of data which also have stuff about Berlin, and they're linked together. So if you pull the data from dbpedia about Berlin, you'll end up pulling up these other things as well. And the exciting thing is it's starting to grow. This is just the grassroots stuff again, OK? Let's think about data for a bit. Data comes in fact in lots and lots of different forms. Think of the diversity of the web. It's a really important thing that the web allows you to put all kinds of data up there. So it is with data. I could talk about all kinds of data. We could talk about government data, enterprise data is really important, there's scientific data, there's personal data, there's weather data, there's data about events, there's data about talks, and there's news and there's all kinds of stuff. I'm just going to mention a few of them so that you get the idea of the diversity of it, so that you also see how much unlocked potential. Let's start with government data. Barack Obama said in a speech, that he — American government data would be available on the Internet in accessible formats. And I hope that they will put it up as linked data. That's important. Why is it important? Not just for transparency, yeah transparency in government is important, but that data — this is the data from all the government departments Think about how much of that data is about how life is lived in America. It's actual useful. It's got value. I can use it in my company. I could use it as a kid to do my homework. So we're talking about making the place, making the world run better by making this data available. In fact if you're responsible — if you know about some data in a government department, often you find that these people, they're very tempted to keep it — Hans calls it database hugging. You hug your database, you don't want to let it go until you've made a beautiful website for it. Well, I'd like to suggest that rather — yes, make a beautiful website, who am I to say don't make a beautiful website? Make a beautiful website, but first give us the unadulterated data, we want the data. We want unadulterated data. OK, we have to ask for raw data now. And I'm going to ask you to practice that, OK? Can you say "raw"? Audience: Raw. Tim Berners-Lee: Can you say "data"? Audience: Data. TBL: Can you say "now"? Audience: Now! TBL: Alright, "raw data now"! Audience: Raw data now! Practice that. It's important because you have no idea the number of excuses people come up with to hang onto their data and not give it to you, even though you've paid for it as a taxpayer. And it's not just America. It's all over the world. And it's not just governments, of course — it's enterprises as well. So I'm just going to mention a few other thoughts on data. Here we are at TED, and all the time we are very conscious of the huge challenges that human society has right now — curing cancer, understanding the brain for Alzheimer's, understanding the economy to make it a little bit more stable, understanding how the world works. The people who are going to solve those — the scientists — they have half-formed ideas in their head, they try to communicate those over the web. But a lot of the state of knowledge of the human race at the moment is on databases, often sitting in their computers, and actually, currently not shared. In fact, I'll just go into one area — if you're looking at Alzheimer's, for example, drug discovery — there is a whole lot of linked data which is just coming out because scientists in that field realize this is a great way of getting out of those silos, because they had their genomics data in one database in one building, and they had their protein data in another. Now, they are sticking it onto — linked data — and now they can ask the sort of question, that you probably wouldn't ask, I wouldn't ask — they would. What proteins are involved in signal transduction and also related to pyramidal neurons? Well, you take that mouthful and you put it into Google. Of course, there's no page on the web which has answered that question because nobody has asked that question before. You get 223,000 hits — no results you can use. You ask the linked data — which they've now put together — 32 hits, each of which is a protein which has those properties and you can look at. The power of being able to ask those questions, as a scientist — questions which actually bridge across different disciplines — is really a complete sea change. It's very very important. Scientists are totally stymied at the moment — the power of the data that other scientists have collected is locked up and we need to get it unlocked so we can tackle those huge problems. Now if I go on like this, you'll think that all the data comes from huge institutions and has nothing to do with you. But, that's not true. In fact, data is about our lives. You just — you log on to your social networking site, your favorite one, you say, "This is my friend." Bing! Relationship. Data. You say, "This photograph, it's about — it depicts this person. " Bing! That's data. Data, data, data. Every time you do things on the social networking site, the social networking site is taking data and using it — re-purposing it — and using it to make other people's lives more interesting on the site. But, when you go to another linked data site — and let's say this is one about travel, and you say, "I want to send this photo to all the people in that group," you can't get over the walls. The Economist wrote an article about it, and lots of people have blogged about it — tremendous frustration. The way to break down the silos is to get inter-operability between social networking sites. We need to do that with linked data. One last type of data I'll talk about, maybe it's the most exciting. Before I came down here, I looked it up on OpenStreetMap The OpenStreetMap's a map, but it's also a Wiki. Zoom in and that square thing is a theater — which we're in right now — The Terrace Theater. It didn't have a name on it. So I could go into edit mode, I could select the theater, I could add down at the bottom the name, and I could save it back. And now if you go back to the OpenStreetMap. org, and you find this place, you will find that The Terrace Theater has got a name. I did that. Me! I did that to the map. I just did that! I put that up on there. Hey, you know what? If I — that street map is all about everybody doing their bit and it creates an incredible resource because everybody else does theirs. And that is what linked data is all about. It's about people doing their bit to produce a little bit, and it all connecting. That's how linked data works. You do your bit. Everybody else does theirs. You may not have lots of data which you have yourself to put on there but you know to demand it. And we've practiced that. So, linked data — it's huge. I've only told you a very small number of things There are data in every aspect of our lives, every aspect of work and pleasure, and it's not just about the number of places where data comes, it's about connecting it together. And when you connect data together, you get power in a way that doesn't happen just with the web, with documents. You get this really huge power out of it. So, we're at the stage now where we have to do this — the people who think it's a great idea. And all the people — and I think there's a lot of people at TED who do things because — even though there's not an immediate return on the investment because it will only really pay off when everybody else has done it — they'll do it because they're the sort of person who just does things which would be good if everybody else did them. OK, so it's called linked data. I want you to make it. I want you to demand it. And I think it's an idea worth spreading. Thanks. (Applause)

Cute, sexy, sweet, funny

Dan Dennett

{0: 'Dan Dennett'}

{0: ['philosopher', 'cognitive scientist']}

{0: 'Dan Dennett thinks that human consciousness and free will are the result of physical processes.'}

2009-02-05

2009-03-16

TED2009

en

['ar', 'bg', 'bn', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'eo', 'es', 'fa', 'fi', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'hy', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ka', 'ko', 'lt', 'nb', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'th', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['animals', 'biology', 'children', 'comedy', 'evolution', 'food', 'humanity', 'humor', 'primates', 'sex']

{341: 'The moral roots of liberals and conservatives', 102: 'The illusion of consciousness', 16: 'Why we love, why we cheat', 1241: 'What do babies think?', 2747: 'How sugar affects the brain', 630: "How we read each other's minds"}

https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_cute_sexy_sweet_funny/

Why are babies cute? Why is cake sweet? Philosopher Dan Dennett has answers you wouldn't expect, as he shares evolution's counterintuitive reasoning on cute, sweet and sexy things (plus a new theory from Matthew Hurley on why jokes are funny).

I’m going around the world giving talks about Darwin, and usually what I’m talking about is Darwin’s strange inversion of reasoning. Now that title, that phrase, comes from a critic, an early critic, and this is a passage that I just love, and would like to read for you. "In the theory with which we have to deal, Absolute Ignorance is the artificer; so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole system, that, in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it. This proposition will be found on careful examination to express, in condensed form, the essential purport of the Theory, and to express in a few words all Mr. Darwin’s meaning; who, by a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to think Absolute Ignorance fully qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom in the achievements of creative skill." Exactly. Exactly. And it is a strange inversion. A creationist pamphlet has this wonderful page in it: "Test Two: Do you know of any building that didn’t have a builder? Yes/No. Do you know of any painting that didn’t have a painter? Yes/No. Do you know of any car that didn’t have a maker? Yes/No. If you answered 'Yes' for any of the above, give details." A-ha! I mean, it really is a strange inversion of reasoning. You would have thought it stands to reason that design requires an intelligent designer. But Darwin shows that it’s just false. Today, though, I’m going to talk about Darwin’s other strange inversion, which is equally puzzling at first, but in some ways just as important. It stands to reason that we love chocolate cake because it is sweet. Guys go for girls like this because they are sexy. We adore babies because they’re so cute. And, of course, we are amused by jokes because they are funny. This is all backwards. It is. And Darwin shows us why. Let’s start with sweet. Our sweet tooth is basically an evolved sugar detector, because sugar is high energy, and it’s just been wired up to the preferer, to put it very crudely, and that’s why we like sugar. Honey is sweet because we like it, not "we like it because honey is sweet." There’s nothing intrinsically sweet about honey. If you looked at glucose molecules till you were blind, you wouldn’t see why they tasted sweet. You have to look in our brains to understand why they’re sweet. So if you think first there was sweetness, and then we evolved to like sweetness, you’ve got it backwards; that’s just wrong. It’s the other way round. Sweetness was born with the wiring which evolved. And there’s nothing intrinsically sexy about these young ladies. And it’s a good thing that there isn’t, because if there were, then Mother Nature would have a problem: How on earth do you get chimps to mate? Now you might think, ah, there’s a solution: hallucinations. That would be one way of doing it, but there’s a quicker way. Just wire the chimps up to love that look, and apparently they do. That’s all there is to it. Over six million years, we and the chimps evolved our different ways. We became bald-bodied, oddly enough; for one reason or another, they didn’t. If we hadn’t, then probably this would be the height of sexiness. Our sweet tooth is an evolved and instinctual preference for high-energy food. It wasn’t designed for chocolate cake. Chocolate cake is a supernormal stimulus. The term is owed to Niko Tinbergen, who did his famous experiments with gulls, where he found that that orange spot on the gull’s beak — if he made a bigger, oranger spot the gull chicks would peck at it even harder. It was a hyperstimulus for them, and they loved it. What we see with, say, chocolate cake is it’s a supernormal stimulus to tweak our design wiring. And there are lots of supernormal stimuli; chocolate cake is one. There's lots of supernormal stimuli for sexiness. And there's even supernormal stimuli for cuteness. Here’s a pretty good example. It’s important that we love babies, and that we not be put off by, say, messy diapers. So babies have to attract our affection and our nurturing, and they do. And, by the way, a recent study shows that mothers prefer the smell of the dirty diapers of their own baby. So nature works on many levels here. But now, if babies didn’t look the way they do — if babies looked like this, that’s what we would find adorable, that’s what we would find — we would think, oh my goodness, do I ever want to hug that. This is the strange inversion. Well now, finally what about funny. My answer is, it’s the same story, the same story. This is the hard one, the one that isn’t obvious. That’s why I leave it to the end. And I won’t be able to say too much about it. But you have to think evolutionarily, you have to think, what hard job that has to be done — it’s dirty work, somebody’s got to do it — is so important to give us such a powerful, inbuilt reward for it when we succeed. Now, I think we've found the answer — I and a few of my colleagues. It’s a neural system that’s wired up to reward the brain for doing a grubby clerical job. Our bumper sticker for this view is that this is the joy of debugging. Now I’m not going to have time to spell it all out, but I’ll just say that only some kinds of debugging get the reward. And what we’re doing is we’re using humor as a sort of neuroscientific probe by switching humor on and off, by turning the knob on a joke — now it’s not funny ... oh, now it’s funnier ... now we’ll turn a little bit more ... now it’s not funny — in this way, we can actually learn something about the architecture of the brain, the functional architecture of the brain. Matthew Hurley is the first author of this. We call it the Hurley Model. He’s a computer scientist, Reginald Adams a psychologist, and there I am, and we’re putting this together into a book. Thank you very much.

Our buggy moral code

Dan Ariely

{0: 'Dan Ariely'}

{0: ['behavioral economist']}

{0: 'The dismal science of economics is not as firmly grounded in actual behavior as was once supposed. In "Predictably Irrational," Dan Ariely told us why.'}

2009-02-07

2009-03-17

TED2009

en

['ar', 'bg', 'ca', 'cs', 'da', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fi', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'is', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'lt', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sq', 'sr', 'sv', 'th', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['brain', 'culture', 'economics', 'evil', 'motivation', 'psychology', 'science', 'self', 'society']

{420: 'Why we make bad decisions', 102: 'The illusion of consciousness', 341: 'The moral roots of liberals and conservatives', 1087: 'How state budgets are breaking US schools', 880: 'Sweat the small stuff', 1836: "Why we shouldn't trust markets with our civic life"}

https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_our_buggy_moral_code/

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely studies the bugs in our moral code: the hidden reasons we think it's OK to cheat or steal (sometimes). Clever studies help make his point that we're predictably irrational -- and can be influenced in ways we can't grasp.

I want to talk to you today a little bit about predictable irrationality. And my interest in irrational behavior started many years ago in the hospital. I was burned very badly. And if you spend a lot of time in hospital, you'll see a lot of types of irrationalities. And the one that particularly bothered me in the burn department was the process by which the nurses took the bandage off me. Now, you must have all taken a Band-Aid off at some point, and you must have wondered what's the right approach. Do you rip it off quickly — short duration but high intensity — or do you take your Band-Aid off slowly — you take a long time, but each second is not as painful — which one of those is the right approach? The nurses in my department thought that the right approach was the ripping one, so they would grab hold and they would rip, and they would grab hold and they would rip. And because I had 70 percent of my body burned, it would take about an hour. And as you can imagine, I hated that moment of ripping with incredible intensity. And I would try to reason with them and say, "Why don't we try something else? Why don't we take it a little longer — maybe two hours instead of an hour — and have less of this intensity?" And the nurses told me two things. They told me that they had the right model of the patient — that they knew what was the right thing to do to minimize my pain — and they also told me that the word patient doesn't mean to make suggestions or to interfere or ... This is not just in Hebrew, by the way. It's in every language I've had experience with so far. And, you know, there's not much — there wasn't much I could do, and they kept on doing what they were doing. And about three years later, when I left the hospital, I started studying at the university. And one of the most interesting lessons I learned was that there is an experimental method that if you have a question you can create a replica of this question in some abstract way, and you can try to examine this question, maybe learn something about the world. So that's what I did. I was still interested in this question of how do you take bandages off burn patients. So originally I didn't have much money, so I went to a hardware store and I bought a carpenter's vice. And I would bring people to the lab and I would put their finger in it, and I would crunch it a little bit. (Laughter) And I would crunch it for long periods and short periods, and pain that went up and pain that went down, and with breaks and without breaks — all kinds of versions of pain. And when I finished hurting people a little bit, I would ask them, so, how painful was this? Or, how painful was this? Or, if you had to choose between the last two, which one would you choose? (Laughter) I kept on doing this for a while. (Laughter) And then, like all good academic projects, I got more funding. I moved to sounds, electrical shocks — I even had a pain suit that I could get people to feel much more pain. But at the end of this process, what I learned was that the nurses were wrong. Here were wonderful people with good intentions and plenty of experience, and nevertheless they were getting things wrong predictably all the time. It turns out that because we don't encode duration in the way that we encode intensity, I would have had less pain if the duration would have been longer and the intensity was lower. It turns out it would have been better to start with my face, which was much more painful, and move toward my legs, giving me a trend of improvement over time — that would have been also less painful. And it also turns out that it would have been good to give me breaks in the middle to kind of recuperate from the pain. All of these would have been great things to do, and my nurses had no idea. And from that point on I started thinking, are the nurses the only people in the world who get things wrong in this particular decision, or is it a more general case? And it turns out it's a more general case — there's a lot of mistakes we do. And I want to give you one example of one of these irrationalities, and I want to talk to you about cheating. And the reason I picked cheating is because it's interesting, but also it tells us something, I think, about the stock market situation we're in. So, my interest in cheating started when Enron came on the scene, exploded all of a sudden, and I started thinking about what is happening here. Is it the case that there was kind of a few apples who are capable of doing these things, or are we talking a more endemic situation, that many people are actually capable of behaving this way? So, like we usually do, I decided to do a simple experiment. And here's how it went. If you were in the experiment, I would pass you a sheet of paper with 20 simple math problems that everybody could solve, but I wouldn't give you enough time. When the five minutes were over, I would say, "Pass me the sheets of paper, and I'll pay you a dollar per question." People did this. I would pay people four dollars for their task — on average people would solve four problems. Other people I would tempt to cheat. I would pass their sheet of paper. When the five minutes were over, I would say, "Please shred the piece of paper. Put the little pieces in your pocket or in your backpack, and tell me how many questions you got correctly." People now solved seven questions on average. Now, it wasn't as if there was a few bad apples — a few people cheated a lot. Instead, what we saw is a lot of people who cheat a little bit. Now, in economic theory, cheating is a very simple cost-benefit analysis. You say, what's the probability of being caught? How much do I stand to gain from cheating? And how much punishment would I get if I get caught? And you weigh these options out — you do the simple cost-benefit analysis, and you decide whether it's worthwhile to commit the crime or not. So, we try to test this. For some people, we varied how much money they could get away with — how much money they could steal. We paid them 10 cents per correct question, 50 cents, a dollar, five dollars, 10 dollars per correct question. You would expect that as the amount of money on the table increases, people would cheat more, but in fact it wasn't the case. We got a lot of people cheating by stealing by a little bit. What about the probability of being caught? Some people shredded half the sheet of paper, so there was some evidence left. Some people shredded the whole sheet of paper. Some people shredded everything, went out of the room, and paid themselves from the bowl of money that had over 100 dollars. You would expect that as the probability of being caught goes down, people would cheat more, but again, this was not the case. Again, a lot of people cheated by just by a little bit, and they were insensitive to these economic incentives. So we said, "If people are not sensitive to the economic rational theory explanations, to these forces, what could be going on?" And we thought maybe what is happening is that there are two forces. At one hand, we all want to look at ourselves in the mirror and feel good about ourselves, so we don't want to cheat. On the other hand, we can cheat a little bit, and still feel good about ourselves. So, maybe what is happening is that there's a level of cheating we can't go over, but we can still benefit from cheating at a low degree, as long as it doesn't change our impressions about ourselves. We call this like a personal fudge factor. Now, how would you test a personal fudge factor? Initially we said, what can we do to shrink the fudge factor? So, we got people to the lab, and we said, "We have two tasks for you today." First, we asked half the people to recall either 10 books they read in high school, or to recall The Ten Commandments, and then we tempted them with cheating. Turns out the people who tried to recall The Ten Commandments — and in our sample nobody could recall all of The Ten Commandments — but those people who tried to recall The Ten Commandments, given the opportunity to cheat, did not cheat at all. It wasn't that the more religious people — the people who remembered more of the Commandments — cheated less, and the less religious people — the people who couldn't remember almost any Commandments — cheated more. The moment people thought about trying to recall The Ten Commandments, they stopped cheating. In fact, even when we gave self-declared atheists the task of swearing on the Bible and we give them a chance to cheat, they don't cheat at all. Now, Ten Commandments is something that is hard to bring into the education system, so we said, "Why don't we get people to sign the honor code?" So, we got people to sign, "I understand that this short survey falls under the MIT Honor Code." Then they shredded it. No cheating whatsoever. And this is particularly interesting, because MIT doesn't have an honor code. (Laughter) So, all this was about decreasing the fudge factor. What about increasing the fudge factor? The first experiment — I walked around MIT and I distributed six-packs of Cokes in the refrigerators — these were common refrigerators for the undergrads. And I came back to measure what we technically call the half-lifetime of Coke — how long does it last in the refrigerators? As you can expect it doesn't last very long; people take it. In contrast, I took a plate with six one-dollar bills, and I left those plates in the same refrigerators. No bill ever disappeared. Now, this is not a good social science experiment, so to do it better I did the same experiment as I described to you before. A third of the people we passed the sheet, they gave it back to us. A third of the people we passed it to, they shredded it, they came to us and said, "Mr. Experimenter, I solved X problems. Give me X dollars." A third of the people, when they finished shredding the piece of paper, they came to us and said, "Mr Experimenter, I solved X problems. Give me X tokens." We did not pay them with dollars; we paid them with something else. And then they took the something else, they walked 12 feet to the side, and exchanged it for dollars. Think about the following intuition. How bad would you feel about taking a pencil from work home, compared to how bad would you feel about taking 10 cents from a petty cash box? These things feel very differently. Would being a step removed from cash for a few seconds by being paid by token make a difference? Our subjects doubled their cheating. I'll tell you what I think about this and the stock market in a minute. But this did not solve the big problem I had with Enron yet, because in Enron, there's also a social element. People see each other behaving. In fact, every day when we open the news we see examples of people cheating. What does this cause us? So, we did another experiment. We got a big group of students to be in the experiment, and we prepaid them. So everybody got an envelope with all the money for the experiment, and we told them that at the end, we asked them to pay us back the money they didn't make. OK? The same thing happens. When we give people the opportunity to cheat, they cheat. They cheat just by a little bit, all the same. But in this experiment we also hired an acting student. This acting student stood up after 30 seconds, and said, "I solved everything. What do I do now?" And the experimenter said, "If you've finished everything, go home. That's it. The task is finished." So, now we had a student — an acting student — that was a part of the group. Nobody knew it was an actor. And they clearly cheated in a very, very serious way. What would happen to the other people in the group? Will they cheat more, or will they cheat less? Here is what happens. It turns out it depends on what kind of sweatshirt they're wearing. Here is the thing. We ran this at Carnegie Mellon and Pittsburgh. And at Pittsburgh there are two big universities, Carnegie Mellon and University of Pittsburgh. All of the subjects sitting in the experiment were Carnegie Mellon students. When the actor who was getting up was a Carnegie Mellon student — he was actually a Carnegie Mellon student — but he was a part of their group, cheating went up. But when he actually had a University of Pittsburgh sweatshirt, cheating went down. (Laughter) Now, this is important, because remember, when the moment the student stood up, it made it clear to everybody that they could get away with cheating, because the experimenter said, "You've finished everything. Go home," and they went with the money. So it wasn't so much about the probability of being caught again. It was about the norms for cheating. If somebody from our in-group cheats and we see them cheating, we feel it's more appropriate, as a group, to behave this way. But if it's somebody from another group, these terrible people — I mean, not terrible in this — but somebody we don't want to associate ourselves with, from another university, another group, all of a sudden people's awareness of honesty goes up — a little bit like The Ten Commandments experiment — and people cheat even less. So, what have we learned from this about cheating? We've learned that a lot of people can cheat. They cheat just by a little bit. When we remind people about their morality, they cheat less. When we get bigger distance from cheating, from the object of money, for example, people cheat more. And when we see cheating around us, particularly if it's a part of our in-group, cheating goes up. Now, if we think about this in terms of the stock market, think about what happens. What happens in a situation when you create something where you pay people a lot of money to see reality in a slightly distorted way? Would they not be able to see it this way? Of course they would. What happens when you do other things, like you remove things from money? You call them stock, or stock options, derivatives, mortgage-backed securities. Could it be that with those more distant things, it's not a token for one second, it's something that is many steps removed from money for a much longer time — could it be that people will cheat even more? And what happens to the social environment when people see other people behave around them? I think all of those forces worked in a very bad way in the stock market. More generally, I want to tell you something about behavioral economics. We have many intuitions in our life, and the point is that many of these intuitions are wrong. The question is, are we going to test those intuitions? We can think about how we're going to test this intuition in our private life, in our business life, and most particularly when it goes to policy, when we think about things like No Child Left Behind, when you create new stock markets, when you create other policies — taxation, health care and so on. And the difficulty of testing our intuition was the big lesson I learned when I went back to the nurses to talk to them. So I went back to talk to them and tell them what I found out about removing bandages. And I learned two interesting things. One was that my favorite nurse, Ettie, told me that I did not take her pain into consideration. She said, "Of course, you know, it was very painful for you. But think about me as a nurse, taking, removing the bandages of somebody I liked, and had to do it repeatedly over a long period of time. Creating so much torture was not something that was good for me, too." And she said maybe part of the reason was it was difficult for her. But it was actually more interesting than that, because she said, "I did not think that your intuition was right. I felt my intuition was correct." So, if you think about all of your intuitions, it's very hard to believe that your intuition is wrong. And she said, "Given the fact that I thought my intuition was right ..." — she thought her intuition was right — it was very difficult for her to accept doing a difficult experiment to try and check whether she was wrong. But in fact, this is the situation we're all in all the time. We have very strong intuitions about all kinds of things — our own ability, how the economy works, how we should pay school teachers. But unless we start testing those intuitions, we're not going to do better. And just think about how better my life would have been if these nurses would have been willing to check their intuition, and how everything would have been better if we just start doing more systematic experimentation of our intuitions. Thank you very much.

My obsession with objects and the stories they tell

Adam Savage

{0: 'Adam Savage'}

{0: ['maker', 'critical thinker']}

{0: 'Adam Savage is an internationally renowned television producer, host and public speaker.'}

2008-12-12

2009-03-18

EG 2008

en

['ar', 'bg', 'ca', 'da', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fi', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'lv', 'mk', 'my', 'nb', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sl', 'sq', 'sr', 'sv', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['animals', 'art', 'birds', 'creativity', 'entertainment', 'exploration', 'film', 'technology', 'Best of the Web']

{271: 'Archeology, animal photography, BBQ ...', 90: 'Unleash your creativity in a Fab Lab', 477: 'Learning from dirty jobs', 122: 'Human-centered design', 1703: 'How a dead duck changed my life', 350: 'Playtime with Pleo, your robotic dinosaur friend'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_savage_my_obsession_with_objects_and_the_stories_they_tell/

Adam Savage talks about his fascination with the dodo bird, and how it led him on a strange and surprising double quest. It's an entertaining adventure through the mind of a creative obsessive.

About four years ago, the New Yorker published an article about a cache of dodo bones that was found in a pit on the island of Mauritius. Now, the island of Mauritius is a small island off the east coast of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, and it is the place where the dodo bird was discovered and extinguished, all within about 150 years. Everyone was very excited about this archaeological find, because it meant that they might finally be able to assemble a single dodo skeleton. See, while museums all over the world have dodo skeletons in their collection, nobody — not even the actual Natural History Museum on the island of Mauritius — has a skeleton that's made from the bones of a single dodo. Well, this isn't exactly true. The fact is, is that the British Museum had a complete specimen of a dodo in their collection up until the 18th century — it was actually mummified, skin and all — but in a fit of space-saving zeal, they actually cut off the head and they cut off the feet and they burned the rest in a bonfire. If you go look at their website today, they'll actually list these specimens, saying, the rest was lost in a fire. Not quite the whole truth. Anyway. The frontispiece of this article was this photo, and I'm one of the people that thinks that Tina Brown was great for bringing photos to the New Yorker, because this photo completely rocked my world. I became obsessed with the object — not just the beautiful photograph itself, and the color, the shallow depth of field, the detail that's visible, the wire you can see on the beak there that the conservator used to put this skeleton together — there's an entire story here. And I thought to myself, wouldn't it be great if I had my own dodo skeleton? (Laughter) I want to point out here at this point that I've spent my life obsessed by objects and the stories that they tell, and this was the very latest one. So I began looking around for — to see if anyone sold a kit, some kind of model that I could get, and I found lots of reference material, lots of lovely pictures. No dice: no dodo skeleton for me. But the damage had been done. I had saved a few hundred photos of dodo skeletons into my "Creative Projects" folder — it's a repository for my brain, everything that I could possibly be interested in. Any time I have an internet connection, there's a sluice of stuff moving into there, everything from beautiful rings to cockpit photos. The key that the Marquis du Lafayette sent to George Washington to celebrate the storming of the Bastille. Russian nuclear launch key: The one on the top is the picture of the one I found on eBay; the one on the bottom is the one I made for myself, because I couldn't afford the one on eBay. Storm trooper costumes. Maps of Middle Earth — that's one I hand-drew myself. There's the dodo skeleton folder. This folder has 17,000 photos — over 20 gigabytes of information — and it's growing constantly. And one day, a couple of weeks later, it might have been maybe a year later, I was in the art store with my kids, and I was buying some clay tools — we were going to have a craft day. I bought some Super Sculpeys, some armature wire, some various materials. And I looked down at this Sculpey, and I thought, maybe, yeah, maybe I could make my own dodo skull. I should point out at this time — I'm not a sculptor; I'm a hard-edged model maker. You give me a drawing, you give me a prop to replicate, you give me a crane, scaffolding, parts from "Star Wars" — especially parts from "Star Wars" — I can do this stuff all day long. It's exactly how I made my living for 15 years. But you give me something like this — my friend Mike Murnane sculpted this; it's a maquette for "Star Wars, Episode Two" — this is not my thing — this is something other people do — dragons, soft things. However, I felt like I had looked at enough photos of dodo skulls to actually be able to understand the topology and perhaps replicate it — I mean, it couldn't be that difficult. So, I started looking at the best photos I could find. I grabbed all the reference, and I found this lovely piece of reference. This is someone selling this on eBay; it was clearly a woman’s hand, hopefully a woman's hand. Assuming it was roughly the size of my wife's hand, I made some measurements of her thumb, and I scaled them out to the size of the skull. I blew it up to the actual size, and I began using that, along with all the other reference that I had, comparing it to it as size reference for figuring out exactly how big the beak should be, exactly how long, etc. And over a few hours, I eventually achieved what was actually a pretty reasonable dodo skull. And I didn't mean to continue, I — it's kind of like, you know, you can only clean a super messy room by picking up one thing at a time; you can't think about the totality. I wasn't thinking about a dodo skeleton; I just noticed that as I finished this skull, the armature wire that I had been used to holding it up was sticking out of the back just where a spine would be. And one of the other things I'd been interested in and obsessed with over the years is spines and skeletons, having collected a couple of hundred. I actually understood the mechanics of vertebrae enough to kind of start to imitate them. And so button by button, vertebrae by vertebrae, I built my way down. And actually, by the end of the day, I had a reasonable skull, a moderately good vertebrae and half of a pelvis. And again, I kept on going, looking for more reference, every bit of reference I could find — drawings, beautiful photos. This guy — I love this guy! He put a dodo leg bones on a scanner with a ruler. This is the kind of accuracy that I wanted, and I replicated every last bone and put it in. And after about six weeks, I finished, painted, mounted my own dodo skeleton. You can see that I even made a museum label for it that includes a brief history of the dodo. And TAP Plastics made me — although I didn't photograph it — a museum vitrine. I don't have the room for this in my house, but I had to finish what I had started. And this actually represented kind of a sea change to me. Again, like I said, my life has been about being fascinated by objects and the stories that they tell, and also making them for myself, obtaining them, appreciating them and diving into them. And in this folder, "Creative Projects," there are tons of projects that I'm currently working on, projects that I've already worked on, things that I might want to work on some day, and things that I may just want to find and buy and have and look at and touch. But now there was potentially this new category of things that I could sculpt that was different, that I — you know, I have my own R2D2, but that's — honestly, relative to sculpting, to me, that's easy. And so I went back and looked through my "Creative Projects" folder, and I happened across the Maltese Falcon. Now, this is funny for me: to fall in love with an object from a Hammett novel, because if it's true that the world is divided into two types of people, Chandler people and Hammett people, I am absolutely a Chandler person. But in this case, it's not about the author, it's not about the book or the movie or the story, it's about the object in and of itself. And in this case, this object is — plays on a host of levels. First of all, there's the object in the world. This is the "Kniphausen Hawk." It is a ceremonial pouring vessel made around 1700 for a Swedish Count, and it is very likely the object from which Hammett drew his inspiration for the Maltese Falcon. Then there is the fictional bird, the one that Hammett created for the book. Built out of words, it is the engine that drives the plot of his book and also the movie, in which another object is created: a prop that has to represent the thing that Hammett created out of words, inspired by the Kniphausen Hawk, and this represents the falcon in the movie. And then there is this fourth level, which is a whole new object in the world: the prop made for the movie, the representative of the thing, becomes, in its own right, a whole other thing, a whole new object of desire. And so now it was time to do some research. I actually had done some research a few years before — it's why the folder was there. I'd bought a replica, a really crappy replica, of the Maltese Falcon on eBay, and had downloaded enough pictures to actually have some reasonable reference. But I discovered, in researching further, really wanting precise reference, that one of the original lead birds had been sold at Christie's in 1994, and so I contacted an antiquarian bookseller who had the original Christie's catalogue, and in it I found this magnificent picture, which included a size reference. I was able to scan the picture, blow it up to exactly full size. I found other reference. Avi [Ara] Chekmayan, a New Jersey editor, actually found this resin Maltese Falcon at a flea market in 1991, although it took him five years to authenticate this bird to the auctioneers' specifications, because there was a lot of controversy about it. It was made out of resin, which wasn't a common material for movie props about the time the movie was made. It's funny to me that it took a while to authenticate it, because I can see it compared to this thing, and I can tell you — it's real, it's the real thing, it's made from the exact same mold that this one is. In this one, because the auction was actually so controversial, Profiles in History, the auction house that sold this — I think in 1995 for about 100,000 dollars — they actually included — you can see here on the bottom — not just a front elevation, but also a side, rear and other side elevation. So now, I had all the topology I needed to replicate the Maltese Falcon. What do they do, how do you start something like that? I really don't know. So what I did was, again, like I did with the dodo skull, I blew all my reference up to full size, and then I began cutting out the negatives and using those templates as shape references. So I took Sculpey, and I built a big block of it, and I passed it through until, you know, I got the right profiles. And then slowly, feather by feather, detail by detail, I worked out and achieved — working in front of the television and Super Sculpey — here's me sitting next to my wife — it's the only picture I took of the entire process. As I moved through, I achieved a very reasonable facsimile of the Maltese Falcon. But again, I am not a sculptor, and so I don't know a lot of the tricks, like, I don't know how my friend Mike gets beautiful, shiny surfaces with his Sculpey; I certainly wasn't able to get it. So, I went down to my shop, and I molded it and I cast it in resin, because in the resin, then, I could absolutely get the glass smooth finished. Now there's a lot of ways to fill and get yourself a nice smooth finish. My preference is about 70 coats of this — matte black auto primer. I spray it on for about three or four days, it drips to hell, but it allows me a really, really nice gentle sanding surface and I can get it glass-smooth. Oh, finishing up with triple-zero steel wool. Now, the great thing about getting it to this point was that because in the movie, when they finally bring out the bird at the end, and they place it on the table, they actually spin it. So I was able to actually screen-shot and freeze-frame to make sure. And I'm following all the light kicks on this thing and making sure that as I'm holding the light in the same position, I'm getting the same type of reflection on it — that's the level of detail I'm going into this thing. I ended up with this: my Maltese Falcon. And it's beautiful. And I can state with authority at this point in time, when I'd finished it, of all of the replicas out there — and there is a few — this is by far the most accurate representation of the original Maltese Falcon than anyone has sculpted. Now the original one, I should tell you, is sculpted by a guy named Fred Sexton. This is where it gets weird. Fred Sexton was a friend of this guy, George Hodel. Terrifying guy — agreed by many to be the killer of the Black Dahlia. Now, James Ellroy believes that Fred Sexton, the sculptor of the Maltese Falcon, killed James Elroy's mother. I'll go you one stranger than that: In 1974, during the production of a weird comedy sequel to "The Maltese Falcon," called "The Black Bird," starring George Segal, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art had a plaster original of the Maltese Falcon — one of the original six plasters, I think, made for the movie — stolen out of the museum. A lot of people thought it was a publicity stunt for the movie. John's Grill, which actually is seen briefly in "The Maltese Falcon," is still a viable San Francisco eatery, counted amongst its regular customers Elisha Cook, who played Wilmer Cook in the movie, and he gave them one of his original plasters of the Maltese Falcon. And they had it in their cabinet for about 15 years, until it got stolen in January of 2007. It would seem that the object of desire only comes into its own by disappearing repeatedly. So here I had this Falcon, and it was lovely. It looked really great, the light worked on it really well, it was better than anything that I could achieve or obtain out in the world. But there was a problem. And the problem was that: I wanted the entirety of the object, I wanted the weight behind the object. This thing was made of resin and it was too light. There's this group online that I frequent. It's a group of prop crazies just like me called the Replica Props Forum, and it's people who trade, make and travel in information about movie props. And it turned out that one of the guys there, a friend of mine that I never actually met, but befriended through some prop deals, was the manager of a local foundry. He took my master Falcon pattern, he actually did lost wax casting in bronze for me, and this is the bronze I got back. And this is, after some acid etching, the one that I ended up with. And this thing, it's deeply, deeply satisfying to me. Here, I'm going to put it out there, later on tonight, and I want you to pick it up and handle it. You want to know how obsessed I am. This project's only for me, and yet I went so far as to buy on eBay a 1941 Chinese San Francisco-based newspaper, in order so that the bird could properly be wrapped ... like it is in the movie. (Laughter) Yeah, I know! (Laughter) (Applause) There you can see, it's weighing in at 27 and a half pounds. That's half the weight of my dog, Huxley. But there's a problem. Now, here's the most recent progression of Falcons. On the far left is a piece of crap — a replica I bought on eBay. There's my somewhat ruined Sculpey Falcon, because I had to get it back out of the mold. There's my first casting, there's my master and there's my bronze. There's a thing that happens when you mold and cast things, which is that every time you throw it into silicone and cast it in resin, you lose a little bit of volume, you lose a little bit of size. And when I held my bronze one up against my Sculpey one, it was shorter by three-quarters of an inch. Yeah, no, really, this was like aah — why didn't I remember this? Why didn't I start and make it bigger? So what do I do? I figure I have two options. One, I can fire a freaking laser at it, which I have already done, to do a 3D scan — there's a 3D scan of this Falcon. I had figured out the exact amount of shrinkage I achieved going from a wax master to a bronze master and blown this up big enough to make a 3D lithography master of this, which I will polish, then I will send to the mold maker and then I will have it done in bronze. Or: There are several people who own originals, and I have been attempting to contact them and reach them, hoping that they will let me spend a few minutes in the presence of one of the real birds, maybe to take a picture, or even to pull out the hand-held laser scanner that I happen to own that fits inside a cereal box, and could maybe, without even touching their bird, I swear, get a perfect 3D scan. And I'm even willing to sign pages saying that I'll never let anyone else have it, except for me in my office, I promise. I'll give them one if they want it. And then, maybe, then I'll achieve the end of this exercise. But really, if we're all going to be honest with ourselves, I have to admit that achieving the end of the exercise was never the point of the exercise to begin with, was it. Thank you.