Showing posts with label TED. Show all posts
Showing posts with label TED. Show all posts

Sunday, March 22, 2009

Adam Savage and his obsessions


I think this is my obsession, talking with other people about their obsessions or seeing them speak about them. And is it sad or weird that the great lengths he went to made perfect sense to me?

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Mike Rowe at TED

i'll only post the link for this video instead of the embed so you can choose to view it on your own, but i think you should.
I think that the TED conference talks are at the same time fascinating and galling. What you will find quite often on the stage are bourgeois ideas about the world being fed by a bourgeois to other bourgeois. These are often nebulous, meaningless, and sadly impractical talks of importance to only the people in the audience. And that impracticality, that wasted time, money and energy, that is often used for nothing more that intellectual masturbation, hurts me. Take the General Tso's chicken video i posted a while ago. While it was an amazing talk, and while it left me thinking about the impact culture has on foods new to it, what i was ultimately left with was a feeling of "so what?" Yes, it added to the wealth of human knowledge, but what is the value of such an idea?
What is often left out of these talks is practical application. Not always, many of the talks detail real world applications for new technologies or the impact thinkers and innovators are having on their communities and the world. But not often enough. This talk by Mike Rowe, i think, sets a necessary precedence. The main idea of his speech can have lasting, national importance and affect. I think it lives up to the promise made by conferences like TED. It makes me want to look at more TED talks to prove myself wrong and to watch Dirty Jobs.
tell me what you think.

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Friday, September 19, 2008

Clifford Stoll at TED

18 minutes of rambling lucidity and bubbling inspiration. So, what's the difference between this guy, who squeaks when he's frustrated, and the guys i see around campus who do the same thing? Can mouth breathing, random hopping, and just plain mania be equivocated by a Phd?