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.
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