TED

I had heard about TED some time ago, but never really investigated much. I spend an unhealthy amount of my time in front of a computer screen, and so countless possibly interesting things come across without my wholehearted investigation, for varying reasons. Sometimes I'm in the middle of more important things, or maybe it just doesn't look interesting at the time. I'm not sure which explanation to blame for my missing TED, but for whatever reason, I just didn't look into it.

Then, a month or two ago, a politically-aware friend sent me a link to a talk on TED called "Scenes From The War Tapes", given by a filmmaker named Deborah Scranton who gave cameras to American soldiers in Iraq. In the roughly eighteen minute long presentation, Scranton shows you a bit of what the result looks like, as well as some of the reactions of people who have seen it, including soldiers themselves. I'll give you a bit of a warning - near the end, the soldier's reaction she talks about is gut-wrenching. This talk alone got me interested, and TED was back on the back burner of my mind, to look at in more detail later.

Skip forward to a couple of weeks ago. I'm idling in the WSULUG IRC channel, and someone (I believe it was Jason, but I'm not positive) tosses up a link from TED again. This time it's Larry Lessig, and he's talking about "How creativity is being strangled by the law", and it's nothing short of brilliant. I'm a fan of Creative Commons, and if you'll notice, I use a license of theirs for this blog and even all the photos on my Flickr site are CC licensed. Suffice it to say, I have a passing interest in the topic, even if I'm not exactly an expert. In any case, his talk was an excellent introduction to not Creative Commons, but the reasons why something like Creative Commons exists.

So then, three related incidents - what's my point? My point is simply that if you have more intelligence than a turnip, you ought to browse through their site, and start watching some of these people speak. TED has talks by leading minds in their fields, and the fields covered span dozens of topics. They're also fairly accessible, so you don't need a Ph.D. in physics to watch Nobel Prize winner Murray Gell-Mann talk about "Beauty and truth in physics", for example.

I'll even meet you halfway, and get you started. I have yet to look though all of the talks available because it's finals week and there's over 150 of them, but here's the ones I've seen so far (besides the ones linked above) that were of interest to me, or that are on my personal "to watch" list. They're in no particular order.

• Steven Pinker, "A Brief History Of Violence".
  
• Richard Dawkins, "An Atheist's Call To Arms"
• Richard Baraniuk, "Goodbye, textbooks; hello, open-source learning"
• Richard Dawkins, "The universe is queerer than we can suppose"

There you go. Four of them, plus the three linked before the list. Get a beer, snack on some broccoli, and watch them. Then find more, because this is just the tip of the TED iceberg.