Ted

Do you watch Ted?

From the website:

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984)as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. Almost 200 talks from our archive are now available, with more added each week. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.

I found this website several months ago, and I've found some of the most fascinating lectures there. Just today I watched Jill Bolte Taylor's lecture on her personal experience regarding brain function in the midst of a stroke and Dave Eggers' lecture explaining how a group of writers began a program to encourage creative writing in a new and different way.

(How new and different? The storefront for the first tutoring center is a pirate supply shop; the second center's storefront is a superhero supply shop. For reals.)

Even Spyder enjoys them. His current favorite is Malcolm Gladwell's lecture on food science.

While the idea of watching lectures doesn't sound all that great, all of the ones I've seen there are engaging and challenging. I can't recommend the website highly enough.