This is part 2 of Richard Tierney's report from the TED talks meeting in Monterey recently:
One talk which I personally didn’t like, but almost everyone I spoke to admired, was by Wade Davies. His 2008 presentation is not yet online, but you can see a talk he gave a couple of years ago. He’s very unusual in being invited to speak at TED twice.
A big part of the event was the awarding of the three annual TED prizes, this is where three individuals are given an award of $100,000 plus (and this is the big bit) the support of the TED community in realising some dream. There’s a related web site of the three winners this year.
Two really appealed to me;
Karen Armstrong and Dave Eggers. Oh now I feel guilty for leaving out the third: Neil Turrok.
There were also about 50 shorter presentations – less than 3 minutes each which I found more variable in quality, but also showed the difference between the accomplished presenters and those less familiar with the stage. I’ve not seen these online at all so I’ll be interested to see if I get copies of them.
Two more talks which are online already are Craig Venter, who talks about creating artificial life, but manages to avoid the “acting as god” accusation. I was inspired.
The World Wide Telescope is a new product from Microsoft and it’s a kind of Google Earth for the stars, although I’m sure Microsoft would hate my using the G word. The demo on the video really does not do it justice, so listen to the talk and then go play when it comes live in a couple of months.
Finally, when they come online watch out for Chris Abani, Nassim Nicholas Taleb (some didn’t like him – I did), Paul Stamets, and most especially Richard Preston when they come on line. I remarked to another delegate that if Richard Preston’s talk about the forest canopy above the redwood trees in Northern California had been on at my local town hall I probably would not have gone, yet in the TED environment I sat transfixed by his description of a climb with his children over three days; yes they slept in the trees. Magical!
Thanks, Richard.
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