I’ve been a little busy for the usual diatribe these last couple of days (a fact for which no doubt the Intertubes will be grateful) so for the moment my spleen will have to simply tolerate the increased pressure in anticipation of future venting .
In the meantime, here’s an interesting site I found recently: TED. It’s made up of a ton of videos of presentations from quite interesting people on a variety of subjects including creativity, technology and politics. All round great bloke Johnny Lee even makes a short appearance with his Wii hacks in one of them - the head-tracking I’d already seen of course, the digital whiteboard & touchscreen I hadn’t. But you can pretty much grab any video from the site and get a 20 minute talk about something that’s usually mentally stimulating and perhaps a bit tangental to what you might normally watch.
April 30th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Thanks for the heads up
April 30th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Checkout miro — http://www.getmiro.com/
It’s “internet tv software”. You can subscribe to channels and it auto downloads the latest episodes. The reason I mention it is because my two favorite channels are TED talks and google tech talks.
It’s run by a non profit and the code is GPL so no ads anywhere.
April 30th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
I’m a big, big fan of TED.
I use Miro to automatically download those TED videos, which are are indeed very enlightening.
The good news for non-native english is that TED is working on transcripts ( http://blog.ted.com/transcript/ )
Personnal favorites are Rosling (2 talks, really great on world statistic), Levitt (gang economy), Pinker (2 talks, language and violence), Robinson (education) and ‘Ramachandran’ on neuroscience.
Computer oriented are Alan Key presenting his educational ‘Etoys’ and an Indian using a single computer with internet in poor village to check impacts. Others on open source, long trail or Google founder or executive were less interesting as we techies know already a lot about that.
About More ‘technical’ talk, “google talks” on google video are worth watching.
April 30th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
Wow, I’m surprised there are people that do NOT know about TED ;-).
Anyways, personally I think the most interesting speech was given about 2 years ago by Sir Ken Robinson, it’s an absolute MUST SEE.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/66
May 1st, 2008 at 10:03 am
Ok, clearly I’ve been in the dark
Thanks for the suggestions, I’ll be sure to check those out.