Clearing The Air

Have you heard about TED?......

Sounds like just another gathering of the minds for trivia at Keegan's to me.

....'Here' is TED, which is a conference. Sort of. Actually, it's quite difficult to describe precisely what TED is. It stands for Technology, Entertainment & Design, but it's about more than any of those subjects.....

Like I said trivia night at Keegan's

....it attracts 'some of the smartest, richest and most talented people on earth' and the stated aim, this time round, was to find 'Ideas Big Enough to Change the World'.....

My favorite part of the story was one of the attendee's observations:

'The problem with some of the people here is that they're so brilliant they're almost retarded.'

Again triv at Keegan's?

The writer continues:

Which sounds, well, if not hopelessly ambitious, faintly implausible. But almost everybody does seem to have a big idea....
...In 1984, it introduced the world to the first Macintosh computer and the first CD-rom.....
..It's regularly attended by the likes of Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon, and Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin .....

Some of the attendees sound so remarkably familiar....like I've met them at Keegan's.


.....when I sat down next to a beardy scientist whose name-tag identified him as Craig.
'What do you do, Craig?' I asked......

...... he of course writes about the scientific link between thimerosal & autism for the St. Paul Pioneer Press..


...architect William 'Did I tell you that I'm designing seven entirely sustainable Chinese cities from scratch...

I am certain I heard this very same conversation from Atomizer a few weeks back.


Afghanistan's finance minister, Ashraf 'I'm rebuilding my country's infrastructure, but let me tell you it's pretty tricky because you lot are so bloody selfish and just don't give a damn'
Ghani......

I overheard this from King while I audited his econ class at St. Cloud State


David 'There are about a trillion parallel universes out there and I've got the proof' Deutsch, an Oxford physicist.

We know him by his real name Sisyphus


......the Chinese government has just adopted my teachings as state policy?'

Hmm....doesn't exactly sound like something Strom would take credit for.


Dawkins opened the conference by telling us that science is 'queerer than we can suppose'.

Perhaps he is better able to make that comparison than we can suppose.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the conference has a knack for introducing the world to the Next Big Thing

It all sounds very grandiose, but we all know the cold hard fact is that it will probably simply mean another Guinness trophy for the Frater's.

posted by marcus aurelius @ 7:50 PM