Ideas worth watching

So Sunday I was waiting for the Lost finale I decided I was going to watch a bunch of TED videos.  (

You may remember TED from a previous post.)  Well I thought I would review a couple of them for you so you can watch them is you want.

•  Mosquito zap.  This was recently discussed in the IEEE Spectrum.  Basically this guy works at a place which just thinks of cool stuff and they made a laser mosquito zapper.  Pretty cool.
• Coral Reefs.  Maybe skip this one.  The guy basically talks about the problems of coral reefs dying.  If you are up on the problems this won't give you any new information.
• Schools and Creativity.  Funny, worth a watch.  This is about how schools kill creativity and how we need to encourage this.
• Eating to Starve Cancer.  Totally worth watching.  Basically this is about how blood vessels grow around cancer (and fat cells which was really interesting).  The thesis is that by starving the area of blood vessel growth you can prevent the growth of cancer (and keep you skinny).  This is really worth watching, really interesting.  Made me eat my tomatoes this week.  :-)
• Dangers of Science Denial.  This is interesting.  I think there is a balance between blindly believing science and blindly rejecting science.  However I feel like this guy may be too blindly non-questioning.  Interesting video.
• Spaghetti Sauce.  I know I have posted this before I am pretty sure.  This is presenting Malcolm Gladwell.  This is an interesting one to watch just because it is thought provoking.
• Danger of Choice.  I think everyone knows that too much choice is paralyzing.  Interesting discussion if nothing else.
• Family Tree of you and Me.  This is a video about the efforts to map the family tree of humanity.  What is most interesting to me is that there have only been about 2000 generations since the 'adam' and 'eve' moments in human history.  Amazing to think how much diversity there is in such a small time.

Those were a selection of the ones I watched.  Have fun, watch the laser one it is neat, watch the spaghetti sauce one it is thought-provoking, and watch the eating to starve cancer one because it is important.

Have you meet 'TED'?

So I am sure many readers of my blog know about TED.  The Wikipedia page is here.  Basically the website is a collection of people talking about things.  :-)  I know sounds boring but the people are really engaging and innovative with their talks in general.  I have added TED to the list of videos to watch with this post.

So today I want to talk briefly about a video staring Philip K. Howard.  He is a long time lawyer and advocate of fixing the justice system. It is a provocative lecture about what is wrong with the current system and what it should be like in theory.  It is interesting.  I think there is a very interesting discussion there and I may go out and buy his book.  It is interesting to think of the difference between the intent of justice and laws and the implication of justice and law, as compared with current justice and laws.  I think there is a real area where things can be improved here.  This is an area I haven't blogged about a lot, usually I blog about reducing overhead of laws and taxes because it infringes on liberties and is counter to productive economic growth.  (Everyone knows I am a fan of less intervention.)  So this is from a different view and is more ethereal, what should it looks like and how do we get there.  Anyway, well worth the 18 minutes to watch.

Updated: Added 'TED' label.