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Religion is not about belief, or at least not always. It's about compassion. Belief is what got us into this mess.

Wrong video (g), I meant this one: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/228

Before you start trashing OLPC, see it how it's meant to be used:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/41

This reminds me of the myth of the platonic dish, "milky weak coffee" versus the "rich, dark, hearty roast", and many other things from Malcolm Gladwell's famous TED Talk. There is no such thing as a perfect pepsi...

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/39

the current calendar isn't arbitrary, it is based on observations in nature. Time isn't arbitrary either, it is also based on nature. If it was just arbitrary you couldn't use it for anything else.

arbitrary: capricious; unreasonable; unsupported

It is none of those things.

• Cell loss, cell atrophy
• Nuclear [epi]mutations (only cancer matters)
• Mutant mitochondria
• Death-resistant cells
• Extracellular crosslinks
• Extracellular junk
• Intracellular junk

Yes, clearly an underestimated "invention". If it ever is discovered, it will be a turning point for humanity, atleast as important as fire and agriculture. Everything would change if death wasn't certain.

You've probably already seen it, but...

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/39

"If I were a person who were interested in preserving religious faith, I would be very afraid of the positive power of evolutionary science, and science generally...to inspire and enthrall precisely because it is atheistic."

"A recent article by Paul G Bell in the Mensa Magazine provides some straw in the wind...From a meta-analysis of the literature Bell concludes, and I quote 'of 43 studies carried out since 1927 on the relationship between religious belief and ones intelligence or educational level, all but 4 found an inverse connection. That is, the higher ones intelligence or education level the less one is likely to be religious.'"

And I'm sure there are thousands of people more qualified than me that would too. The current plans to send a team of people and return them to Earth have a team size of 5 or 6 people and a stay of about 18 months. If you remove the equipment needed for the return journey, the same size mission can support 20-24 people for 18 months. If the team size is reduced to 1 person you could send enough supplies to last for 30-36 years. That's plenty of time to find some way of extending it by building a greenhouse or whatever.

It's not accurate to compare the Biosphere 2 project with this mission. The biggest problem with Biosphere 2 is that concrete was used in the construction and it absorbs oxygen for years after it is first poured. I'm sure that the work done on the In-Situ Resource Utilisation by Bob Zubrin and others would be the preferred approach for this mission. google ISRU and you'll get plenty of info on that.

Bill Stone is currently planning something similar. If you've never heard of Bill Stone and you're interested in space exploration you have to watch this presentation by him at TED. Bill Stone at TED.

johno

Here are a couple of talks/demos by Hans Rosling - who I think (but I could be wrong) was the developer of gapminder. Very interesting analyses of poverty and development based on the UN databases. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/92 http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/140

Here are a couple of talks/demos by Hans Rosling - who I think (but I could be wrong) was the developer of gapminder. Very interesting analyses of poverty and development based on the UN databases. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/92 http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/140

Love the gapminder, figured someone would post that. If anyone is not familiar, this presentation from TED should shed some light on why this UN development is important.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/92
I also encourage you to check out their podcast, just search "gapminder" on iTunes.

He asked for this and it's finally here!

I believe it's using the Photosynth engine. I think the beauty of photosynth is that it is a self organising system for seamlessly navigating between photographs that gives you the illusion of animation. Microsoft's system can crawl web pages for material to add to the collage. So it does seem to be better" than google sky as this system will be allowed continue to collect images published in astronomical papers and add these pages to the world wide telescope system.

Make no mistake about it Photosynth is a world changing technology.

I saw a documentary with a prawn who could recognize its owner when he came into the room - despite the distortions of the glass tank, etc.

And monkeys/apes can count more then 4. Watch this TED presentation - they've got bonobos who figured out how to write all by themselves.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/76

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/90
Is a working video

Jeff Han: Unveiling the genius of multi-touch interface design

Feb 2006 talk. Publicly posted Aug 2006. No "Patent pending" anywhere.

Right, if you are thinking of it in terms of probabilities, the probability of someone needing to take out their car seat is independent of the probability of someone killing their wife/ex-wife. The two acts being related is specious. Consider this: Of all the instances of someone removing their car seat, what is the percentage that it was to get rid of the evidence of a murder? Of all the instances that someone killed their wife/ex-wife in the passenger seat of their car, how often did that lead to them removing the seat as opposed to say abandoning it somewhere or torching it? You could go on for ever. I'm no authority but I would imagine that statistics generally confuse a subject in a courtroom more than help. That's an unfounded statement on my part but there is certainly a significant number of cases where expert witnesses were brought in and presented statistical data incorrectly to the jury.

There's no doubt that the car situation is going to be seen as a mighty strange coincidence to the jury, but the reasoning of the parent post is wrong. Juries get duped by this kind of thing quite frequently. A really great video of Peter Donnelly talking about this subject at TED can be found at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/67

Which is why typical electric cars don't get traction in the US.

A majority of people live in suburban areas - not cities. The way these areas of the country are laid out, one must drive 5-10 minutes to your grocery store, 10-20 minutes to work (usually on a highway requiring speeds of 60+mph / 96kph), 5-10 minutes to the local big-box store (walmart, target, kohls, best buy, etc). This is one of the reasons I hate suburbia - it truly condones and perpetuates impracticality. Imagine riding your bicycle 12 miles to work along a four-lane-wide highway with cars whizzing past at 70mph! The solution to this, of course, is to get people to move out of suburbia and into "new urban" style developments - but people see their houses as an investment instead of a liability (which many houses are proving to be) and are loathe to give them up. Even if they are poorly built McMansions. To learn more about this phenomena, see: TED Talks James Howard Kunstler: The tragedy of suburbia.

That is why this car is so important. It has a decent speed, a long range, and can fill up at regular gas stations.

Congress is frighteningly clueless about many of the issues combining technology, law, and culture that face them today. I can't think of any one man who could better fill this vacuum.

Learn about Lessig's ideas, and his very effective style of presenting them, by watching a talk he gave at the TED conference in March 2007: How creativity is being strangled by the law.

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Speak.to is about communication.

Kamen talks about the origin of this arm in a brief TEDtalk, here.

The video includes a brief demo.

- RG>

More background: Dean Kamen's introductory video here.

No mater my hate for Microsoft, I can not bring myself to feel anything but love for a video originating from the TED Conference!

That was a great site you mentioned with all sorts of fun activities:
http://www.poissonrouge.com/
If a younger kid is going to play video games, those are probably the best sorts of them. So too with the other one you mentioned (though it is more about reading):
http://www.starfall.com/

And certainly YouTube offers access to lots of interesting stuff for young kids (buildings being demolished, tornadoes, firetrucks, bagger 288, visualization of new ideas, etc.). Example:
"Take a seat concept: a library seat that follows you"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Dgaz6NIUFk
And for slightly older kids there is lots of educational video online like from the Annenberg CPB project like "The World of Chemistry"
http://www.learner.org/resources/series61.html
or for younger kids stuff on energy:
http://www.learner.org/resources/series160.html

The late Fred Rogers' "Family Communications" non-profit has lots of good resources too both for kids and parents (CDs, DVDs, web pages, and books):
http://www.fci.org/parenting.asp

Kids can also learn a lot from Rokenbok and other RC toys (even at age four or so).
http://www.rokenbok.com/
The benefits of RC over video games is that the physical RC vehicles can also be pushed around by hand or used with other toys. And a child's eye site continues to develop normally instead of being used at a common fixed distance to the screen.

But there remains a lot to be said for learning from the real world. See:
"Gever Tulley: 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do"
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/202
"Nature deficit disorder"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_deficit_disorder

The Greeks suggests a good life involves "moderation in all things, including moderation". Or in other words, balance. Might kids grow healthiest at a certain pace? Perhaps too much of one thing (video games, broadcast tv) can mean too little of something else (health, creativity)? See:
http://www.openwaldorf.com/media.html
It's certainly a complex topic, but again, if kids are going to use video games, then the links you pointed to are fantastic ones, and much more likely to promote creativity than staring at less engaging and less interactive fare than advertisement and fear/sarcasm driven broadcast TV.

Also, now that you've gone and helped your kid get smarter than average, :-) why dump him into the day-prison euphemistically called "school"? :-) "Schooling" has only a tangential relationship to "Educating" in practice.

See John Taylor Gatto:
"The Underground History of American Education":
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue.htm
"The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher"
http://hometown.aol.com/tma68/7lesson.htm

John Holt:
"Teach your own"
http://www.holtgws.com/

Unschooling:
http://www.unschooling.info/articles.htm

_Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Batteri

Its fairly logical to think that if its so expensive to get stuff into space, just build it there. While manned missions to the moon and on to mars would certainly be amazing, I fail to see the point of a manned mission to an asteroid. Just send a probe and play around with altering a small asteroid's orbit and bring it into a lunar orbit. Creating an automated system that collects small asteroids (small enough that they'd burn up in atmosphere) and bring them to the moon to be processed would be a tremendous step forward in human expansion into space. Unfortunately, I don't think anything like this would happen until commercial space missions start making it further out there.

For anyone that hasn't heard of him, I'd strongly recommend you check out Bill Stone's TED talk. The whole thing is pretty cool, but its the last chapter in the video thats really amazing.

Not an identical argument, but good and relevant nonetheless is Lessig's TED Talk on creativity versus law http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/187

Hans Rosling has shown that the fundamental variable in the development of society is the improvement of health care. Once the health of a country is improved it moves inexorably towards a better standard of life.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/92%3E%3E%3E%3E%3E%3E%3E+.r1885 - it's a 21 minute video that also proves monkeys are smarter than Professors.

Karl Marx, held the opinion that improvements in society were a result of the invention of the railways which provided low cost travel for activists to travel around encouraging the creation of trade unions and cooperatives. Andrew Carnegie's donation of libraries to Scotland and his other philanthropic activities are often presented as evidence of the effects of a fair distribution of knowledge. Neither of these innovations provided the level of observable improvement in living conditions for the average Scottish citizen. Improvements to living standards only began to appear post 1947 when universal free health care became a canon of British society. Children were vaccinated, millk and vitamins were provided free, schools dinners were subsidised or free and health checks were a normal event at primary school. So while I welcome the development of low-priced gadgets and anything else that might have a useful application anywhere in the world and have no doubt that it will be important, I would encourage everyone not to assume what impact sexy products such as these will have.

Bjorn Lomborg begs to differ with you in this TED Talk he presented entitled "Our priorities for saving the world."

Matt Jeppsen
www.FreshDV.com

"a thousand options for customisation so that all the users are pleased" This statement is fundamentally wrong. A thousand options guarantees that nobody is pleased. See "The Paradox of Choice" by Barry Schwartz.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/93

And only giving the franchise to people who have previously served in the military? Screw you! What gives you the right to decide that? What gives those citizens the right to decide how everyone else gets to live? Nothing whatsoever.

In theory, democratic legitimacy grants those citizens the authority to prompt everyone for military service. In the case of the US, our constitution would need to be rewritten to award citizenship after service, but nothing prevents forced participation in the military (save public opinion).

I also share he viewpoint that service in the public sphere, particularly the armed forces should be the duty of each citizen. Service imbues several values that I believe would serve our citizenry well, a sense of duty and honor. If we tie civic responsibility to patriotism in that manner, I believe that civic participation would benefit as a result. That said, the armed forces should not only fight wars. There should be branches dedicated to community service, "state building", & disaster recovery, and these branches should vastly supersede the "war" branch. (particularly in public perception and numbers. Yes, we fight wars, but 3/4 of our forces are used for "light-side" activities).

The military split needs to occur for several reasons. One is mentioned in the TED presentation listed above. Another is to remove the objections raised by pacifists and conscientious objectors. The final reason is to prevent conflation of powers, purpose, & jurisdiction between them.

--
*However, everyone receives proper military training--physical, emergency, weapons, etc. This is for two reasons. If "shit goes down", we're better prepared for it. Less people will lose their heads, coordination will increase (increased teamwork), and improved response quality. More importantly, the government needs to put more tools necessary to overthrow itself in the hands of the citizenry. Our government isn't afraid of the people, which allows them to get away with more than they should.

And illegal immigration is a form of theft. It just is.

Did anyone go out and ask the third world what they really wanted?

'Cause there is, of course, a Third World out there that can return an answer to that sort of question, right?

(Nevermind that there's good reason to be somewhat skeptical about the whole concept of 'the Third World' in general these days...)

Dvorak needs to head over to ted.com and learn a thing or two.

For example: Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, former Finance Minister of Nigeria gives a talk on Aid versus trade:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/152

Hurray for the revolution. When (outdated/corrupted) law stops following common sense, people start willfully violating it.

I highly recommend this video by Thomas Barnett. He is highly partisan (Democrat), but some really good ideas from a party not known for them:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/33

Today's world is every bit as dangerous and violent as the ancient one, and it is rather sad that only the military are given "survival skills".

Are you sure? Have any data to back that claim?

Where's Jeff Han's lightbox multi-touch stuff?

Oh, btw, if you go directly to Harvard to view this video, you will see this notice:

For educational use only.
The use, distribution, or duplication
of this material for any commercial
purpose is strictly prohibited.

Gee. For educational use only. I guess by the definition of our submitter, a conference which includes a session led by a Ph.D. couldn't possibly be for educational use.

And did you know that the initial versions of this video only had a music sound track? The creator of this video talks, David Bolinsky, talks to an early version of this video here. And it is very possible that the sound track used at the Dembski presentation pre-dated the later soundtrack(s) added by Harvard. In any case, this would not have violated the "For educational use only" policy.

But don't let the facts interfere with your smear campaign.

Er, before you start foaming at your mouth, I recommend that you actually watch the original video with the original narration. Listen to every word carefully (I'm not a biologist, but I could understand most of it, so unless you are stupid or utterly unqualified to make the remarks you did, you should be able to also), and ask yourself: "Which part of that original narration supports Darwinian evolution?"

Your integrity ought to be questioned if your answer is anything other than "Nothing!" The video does look like a ... very sophisticated computer animation with probably biologically correct description of the cell. But that's where it stops. It describes what happens in the cell TODAY, not what might have happened over last couple billion years (or, in the interest of fairness, whether it just had to be designed by a creator).

Given this fact, your characterization of the modified presentation as "distorted and misrepresented" is ... well, let's say over-zealous. I'm not saying that the creationist is right in not correctly attributing the Harvard biologist who made the original animation. But, given that the original says nothing about "Creation vs. Evolution" debate, would his presentation have been any less effective if he made the correct attribution? No. After, all, creationists also claim to be (I'm not supporting or denying their claim) scientists, and it is no shame to refer to another scientist's work.

As for the copyright aspect ... well, I am not a lawyer and I wouldn't be able to make a cogent argument for or against this particular use. But let me just say, what the creationist did looks very similar to what some people do to make those anime "music videos" on the YouTube. If you condemn him as "distorting and misrepresenting" the original work, by the same measure, you should condemn the people creating those music videos because they are putting the animation together with music that was never designed to be put together and creating possibly misleading atmosphere. Is that what you want to do?

The whole "creation vs. evolution" argument has an effect on people that makes them utterly stupid and unable to make intelligent, rational arguments (yes, that goes for rabid creationists, as well as rabid evolutionists). If you want to save what is left of your intelligence, I advise you to take a step back and look at the debate from a distance. That's what I do as a believing scientist.

As for what copyright ought to allow people to do and ought not, I invite you to watch Lessig's wonderful presentation and make up your own mind: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/187.

Thats a dangerous approach. Larry Lessig has some good ideas about this.

They just want to feed the machine!

-Grey

You haven't seen Jeff Han's talk.

What is the reason for this level of suffering ? Is there something else you are not telling besides depression ?

Watch http://www.ted.com/index.php/themes/view/id/33

This story is a bit old (well, it's from Roland after all). There was a demo of this tech by Blaise Aguera y Arcas at TED earlier this year. the two underlying components are Seadragon and Photosynth, both of which are mighty impressive. Also, despite the Mozilla-esque name 'Seadragon', both of these technologies are actually owned by Microsoft. There is a tech preview of Photosynth up for download, but I don't think Seadragon is available yet.

There is a video of the TED demo, which shows off some of the things Seadragon and Photosynth can do, the including Notre Dame example mentioned in T(second)FA. The talk is also on YouTube.

You might want to watch this TED-talk about statistics before you say something like that:
Peter Donnelly: How juries are fooled by statistics

People referring to average people tend to undershoot what average people need and underestimate the average person. The sooner we stop dealing with averages, the better.

There is a quite good talk that summarizes this in another context. It is worth watching in my opinion. The relevant gist of it is that we shouldn't cater for the average or "the biggest group" because the average is usually, only a relative majority of the market.

What we should be doing is to look for clusters of users, not just the biggest cluster you can generally find, and say: "Hey! If we try to follow the mythical average, a lot of people won't like it! They'll be left unhappy and their needs aren't catered to, even though they are not small groups. Let's find out what our users really want, take the top 4-5 clusters and market to those groups independently. This will cover 90-95% of the people on the market instead of 45-65%!".

A survey might not give accurate results because what people say they like is not always what they respond to. There's a pretty great presentation by Malcolm Gladwell about this.

For example, everyone says they dislike blue underlined links. But in my (admittedly anecdotal) experience there is no better way to let a user know where to click.

So I'd like to see the data you're looking for too... but I bet a test vs. a survey would yield very different results.

She discusses the Cassini mission in detail, including what we've learned about Titan and this strange behavior on Enceladus. It beats reading dead text.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/178

*cough* http://www.ted.com/index.php/speakers/view/id/2