TED stands for “Technology, Entertainment and Design. TED talks, in case you haven’t heard me rave about them (or watched one in a previous post) are short talks given by people on interesting ideas. Their motto is “Ideas worth spreading”.  TEDTalks came from TED conferences (I’d love to attend one one day) where a bunch of people get together to share ideas.

Here’s a quick handful that give you an idea of some of the incredible things that people present at TED talks. About the only ones I think fairly consistently suck are the song and poetry ones. Haven’t yet found a good one of either of those categories.

Mike Rowe celebrates dirty jobs
Captivating, engaging talk about how dirty jobs get a bad image.

Gever Tully teaches life lessons through Tinkering
Kids doing what they used to do before helicopter parenting and the death of fun.

Josh Silver demos adjustable liquid filled eye glasses
Amazing idea on self optometry for the masses.

Robert Full: Learning from the gecko’s tail
Nature is an incredible thing with surprising lessons for Engineers coming out about why the gecko needs a tail.

Jane Poynter: Life in Biosphere 2
I remember watching the Biosphere 2 people heading into the structure. Interesting to hear how things played out.

Aubrey de Grey says we can avoid aging
Aging need not be inevitable. Reasons why we should strive to beat aging. I first came across this idea under the banner “Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS)“.

Jay Walker on the world’s English mania
English really is the international language. Scarily so!

Johnny Lee demos Wii Remote hacks
Unashamed geekery: making cool stuff with the wiimote.

Hans Rosling shows the best stats you’ve ever seen
Statistics done right!

Ed Ulbrich: How Benjamin Button got his face
Interesting technology used to age Brad Pitt.

Like any safe rider I decided I was spending too much time worrying about something and not enough about riding itself.

My solution (courtesy of my trusty roll of Gaffer tape):