Ominous Clicking Sound…

So you may have seen the talks online or maybe you’ve been lucky enough to have attended one of the TED evenings in New York. I can say now that I have officially lost my TED virginity that there’s nothing, and I mean nothing like the real thing. Until this afternoon I was trying to keep up with all the amazing talks by keeping “notes to self” on what was going on but I’ve officially reached brain overload and now I’m just letting it wash over me like a great wave of wonder, excitement and overwhelm. Here are a couple of my TED highlights:

John Hodgeman (best known as the actor who brilliantly plays “The PC” on the PC vs. Mac ads) gave a great talk about his multiple encounters with UFOs. I bumped into him in outside the conference center and I asked him what type of computer he uses. Without a pause he replied “Oh, I use a Mac”. I knew it!

The MIT MediaLab professor Tod Machover did a talk about “personal instruments”. His work is to make the composition of music accessible to everyone. He designed a an amazing piece of software called Hyper Score that has allowed Dan
Ellesy who has Cerebral Palsy compose and perform incredible music. This was the most moving 20 minutes talk I think I’ve ever seen.

I bumped into one of my heroes, Tony Robbins, in the hallway between talks and ended up getting an invite to a special meditation session with him and his wife Sage. What an amazing experience.

Robert Lang’s talk about Extreme Origami made me remember that the impossible is really just a problem of incomplete understanding of the problem. This model is made out of one piece of paper. wow.

My favorite quote today was also from Robert Lang: “The secret to productivity is to let dead people to do your work for you”. Damn, I wish I had paid more attention during Necromancy 101…