Working with his father, Ron Sears, Nick Sears is designing and building the Orb, a rotating LED display that uses persistence of vision to produce moving images in 3D space.
Tag Archives: ted-talk
The Web as a city
Outside.in’s Steven Johnson says the Web is like a city: built by many people, completely controlled by no one, intricately interconnected and yet functioning as many independent parts. While disaster strikes in one place, elsewhere, life goes on. This is a pretty old ted talk from back in 2003, it’s only been released this month. Much of what Steven talks about would feel far more important and powerful if you were listening to this talk five years ago Web culture in particular has advanced far beyond this already. So although dated its still a wonderfully inspiring talk.
Architecture is a special effects machine …
Absolutely fantastic talk by Liz Diller, in which she shares her firm DS+R’s more unusual work, like the Blur Building, whose walls are made of fog:
Her firm’s work is cutting edge, innovative and truly inspiring.
truly inspiring …
Chris Abani tells stories of people: People standing up to soldiers. People being compassionate. People being human and reclaiming their humanity. It’s “ubuntu,” he says: the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me.
This is one of the most touching Ted Talks I have ever seen. With just a few simple, and unbelievably powerful stories, Chris Abani delivers messages of hope, human compassion and what I think he sees as the essential goodness within each of us.
Every day, all of us here, are building gods that have gone rampant. And it's time we started knocking them down. And forgetting their names.
Institution vs Collaboration
Been doing a lot of thinking recently about network effects, participation and collaboration. This Ted talk by Clay Shirky, although three years old, was made available a few day’s ago and might seem a bit dated to some, but Shirky demonstrates and explains how closed groups and companies will give way to looser networks where small, often individual, contributors have a significant roles and their fluid cooperation replaces rigid, institutional, planning.
This is hugely relevant to our thinking in our Xiphos division and the projects I’m currently working on.
Memes and “temes’
Susan Blackmore studies memes: ideas that replicate themselves from brain to brain like a virus. She makes a bold new argument: Humanity has spawned a new kind of meme, the teme, which spreads itself via technology — and invents ways to keep itself alive
A fascinating TED Talk, if we believe Susan then Darwin’s idea’s around evolution are not just applicable to biology they also apply to culture. “Memetics” is a neo-Darwinian approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer based on the concept of the meme. This is the theory that, like living things, ideas or ‘memes’ – naturally vary and that the fittest ideas survive and are absorbed into a our psyche and replicated across generations. Susan argues that Earth now has three replicators – genes (the basis of life), memes (the basis of human culture) and temes (the basis of technology). Technology, through temes, she argues, is now driving us forward as a species, whether we like it or not.
You can read more about this over on Susan’s site.
A life of fascinations
Truly inspirational … Nathan Myhrvold talks about a few of his latest fascinations — animal photography, archeology, BBQ and generally being an eccentric genius multimillionaire. Listen for wild stories from the (somewhat raunchy) edge of the animal world.
The amazing intelligence of Crows
Hacker and writer Joshua Klein is fascinated by crows. (Notice the gleam of intelligence in their little black eyes?) After a long amateur study of corvid behavior, he’s come up with an elegant machine that may form a new bond between animal and human.
I was amazed watching this fascinating Ted Talk, you have to see it to believe just how much Crows as a species have adapted to human beings.
The universe on a string
In clear, nontechnical language, string theorist Brian Greene explains how our understanding of the universe has evolved from Einstein’s notions of gravity and space-time to Superstring Theory, where minuscule strands of energy vibrating in 11 dimensions create every particle and force in the universe. This is a wonderfully visual and accessible Ted Talk.
Open Source Economics
Law professor Yochai Benkler explains how collaborative projects like Wikipedia and Linux represent the next stage of human organization. By disrupting traditional economic production, copyright law and established competition, they’re paving the way for a new set of economic laws, where empowered individuals are put on a level playing field with industry giants.
Hugely informative and passionate – an amazing talk that should be heard by ANYONE even remotely interested in the future of the internet and any form of social organisation.