Fine Structure

The TED conference is a fascinating duality to me. I really appreciate the talks that some of their invited scientists give, like Jill Bolte Taylor's talk on the science of strokes and her experience with one. They're incredibly fascinating and these scientists must put in hours of work to make sure that the diverse audience of TED attendees can really grasp every last minute of their presentations.

Of course, TED has a multitude of different types of people that speak and scientists are just one of them. Their technology talks are usually hit-or-miss in that they're always cool to look at but only half the time are they actually useful. Their political message talks don't really do it for me, but I would imagine that half of them are probably pie in the sky and the rest are actually realistically achievable.

I'm generally in favor of ideas that are really ambitious but it seems like the visually impressive talks are the ones of least realism. It's as though TED needs to send the attendees away with a sense that they were part of something amazing and world changing, regardless of how realistic it was (and they do, considering the price attendees pay to get in). In fact, it's probably the more subtle ideas that really make a difference on the world.

At any rate, I do look forward to the talks they release on their site (since I won't be attending... this year) and the speaker lineup for 2010 was just released. Here are some of the interesting speakers from my perspective:

• Cheryl Hayashi - Spider silk scientist
• moot - 4chan founder
• Nathan Myhrvold - Polymath (kind of a pretentious title)
• John Underkoffler - Interface Designer
• Bill Gates - He's always an excellent speaker, though hopefully he'll show up without mosquitos this time
• Benoit Mandelbrot - Mathematician (obviously)

Videos tend to slowly make their way out on to the TED site so hopefully I'll be able to link to each one of these talks individually as they're viewable to everyone.