We are never too old to learn

This article is not about Kennedy’s Disease, or research, or personal experiences while living with this disease.  Today I am just saying that there is so much going on around us that we need to continually broaden our horizons.

If you have not tried TED – Ideas Worth Spreading, you are missing something.  I love to visit this site once a week and watch the latest presentations that peak my interest.  Some of the presentations are educational, others are entertaining, and some are just ‘WOW’.  Below are just four random examples of things you might expect to see on TED.

A Car for the Blind:

This nine minute presentation was interesting and provided the ‘WOW’ factor.  Dennis Hong: Making a Car for Blind Drivers really goes to the extreme of what modern scientists are capable of doing once they set their mind to something.  Watching the demo of an actual blind person driving the car around a track with obstacles being thrown in front of him is amazing.  No, it is not a robotic self-driving car, but a car that can actually be driven by a blind person.  Speed, route and other normal driving practices can all be controlled by the sightless driver.  Dr. Hong ended the presentation by revealing some of his emails and letters he has received about the vehicle.  One, for example, was so funny.  “Now I understand why there is Braille on a drive-up ATM machine.”  

Dennis Hong doesn’t plan on making these type vehicles available to the blind.  Yet, he emphasized that the spin-off applications that were discovered in building this vehicle could be used to make cars safer and might help make the sightless person live life more fully.

Innovations in Medicine

Daniel Kraft: Medicine’s Future offers a fast paced look of what to expect over the next few years in medicine that are powered by new tools, tests and applications that bring diagnostic information right to the patient’s bedside.

Icebergs

A few minutes ago I watched a five minute video on icebergs.  Camille Seaman: Haunting Photos of Polar Ice is fascinating in a strange way.  Ms. Seaman has given these icebergs a personality and a history with some photographed that are as young as a 1,000 years old and others that are over a hundred thousand years old.  The last scene of an iceberg rolling over in the ocean is astonishing.  Amazing stuff!

Music Anyone?

Cellist Maya Beiser plays for you in Maya Beiser and her Cello.  She is modern and inventive in her works and transforms sound in many ways.  Again, it is not what I was expecting and that is what makes it interesting.

Ted - Ideas Worth Spreading
 
These are just four random examples of dozens of presentations on technology, entertainment, design, business science, global issues and creativity.  The beauty is that TED is free.

I think you get the idea why I am excited about this website.  It keeps me coming back each week to peruse their directory because I want to learn and experience more.  Try it and let me know what you think.