TED Day One

Well, hey guys, good morning. It's Tom Guarriello out here at the TED conference in lovely Monterey, California. Excuse me if my voice sounds a little hoarser than usual. It's because it's, as it always is when I come to California, 5 o'clock in the morning and I've been up for a half hour. So let me do a quick overview of day 1 of TED, you know, the TED conference. And I'll put links up here for you. TED conference is a great experience every year. This is my 7th TED, and day 1 is always, you know, after traveling and so on, is always kind of a jump start. So, and yesterday was a little special because as I mentioned in some previous videos, I'd been asked to do a little mini seminar about— I volunteered to do a little mini seminar on video blogging on YouTube. So I did that seminar yesterday morning and it was a lot of fun. It really was great to watch people who have not spent a lot of time on YouTube come to understand a little bit more about what it is that's going on here. And I'll see if somehow or other I can get that presentation up, up here on my channel so you guys can see it as well. But there was one funny moment, which was we— each of us who presented presented twice, and in the second Go around to the presentation about, oh, I don't know, a minute or two into it. Small room, maybe in this session, maybe 20 people or so. In the first session, maybe 30 or so. And in this session, I'm up there yacking away and who walks in but Chad and Steve. What a rip that was. I mean, that was a very funny moment to watch those guys come in. They sat there and watched the whole presentation and they were laughing in the appropriate places. I hope appropriate places. And after the presentation, I got to meet them and to chat a bit and good guys. And, you know, they're here at TED conference for their first time, so they're— I saw them a little bit later during the during the day. You can always tell when people are, you know, the first TED is always a great experience. They're all great, but the first one is really like a mind-blower because there's so many fascinating people here. That was great fun. So I'm going to be blogging about the conference as well. Take a look over here. I'll give you links to my blogs. But let me just say that a couple of real highlights for me yesterday were the designer Philippe Starck, who did a great job, the Cassini project astronomer Carolyn Porco, who's a remarkable person and just showed some fantastic views of the— from the Cassini spaceship, some fantastic views of Saturn and some of Saturn's moons. And that was terrific. Philippe Starck was amazing talking about design and the way that design fits into evolution from his standpoint, not a presentation that I think a lot of people expected. The psychologist Steven Pinker, who does work on— brilliant guy who has written several books about the brain and did a very nice presentation about why we are living in the least violent time in human history, you know, kind of a counterintuitive idea, and he does a very nice job of explaining what he means by that. And the one wonderful Hans Rosling, who is a, uh, uh, just an amazing, uh, uh, medical information, health information researcher who uses an incredible array of data visualization techniques to really demonstrate, uh, the ideas in, in his research. So, uh, there were a lot more. I'll, I'll talk in another, uh, I'm gonna blog later on about, uh, The second session— that was only the first session. The second session, which included the Nobel physicist Murray Gell-Mann, Jonathan Windham, who was a geneticist who somebody last night told me is probably in line for a Nobel Prize, Jeff Han, who's a data visualization guy, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and a wonderful musician named Raoul Midon, a blind young fella who was just incredible guitarist and wonderful singer. So anyway, I'm gonna knock it off here and see if I can't, I don't know, get some coffee. I think would probably be a great idea. So I'll see you guys soon and take care. Bye-bye.