Technology, Entertainment, Design

Since 1984, the TED Conference has organized many of the worlds great thinkers, artists, scientists, architects and performers for an annual gathering. Each presenter gets only 18 minutes to give a talk. This forces them to crystallize their ideas into a direct and efficient performance.

Recently TED has embarked on an ambitious web initiative. They have digitized many of these speakers and are offering their talks free to the world via their website.

Some of my favorite talks include:

Dutch artist Theo Jansen demonstrates his amazingly lifelike kinetic sculptures, built from plastic tubes and lemonade bottles.

Planetary scientist Carolyn Porco shows breathtaking images from the Cassini voyage to Saturn.

In a friendly, high-speed presentation, Will Wright demos his newest game, Spore, which promises to dazzle users even more than his previous masterpieces.

Jonathan Harris wants to make sense of the infinite world on the Web -- so he builds dazzling graphic interfaces that help us visualize the data floating around out there.

After sweetly confessing that he never meant to be a performance artist, Golan Levin explains that his art is all about the quest to find a personal way to use a computer.

Bill Stone, the maverick cave explorer who invented robots and dive equipment that have allowed him to plumb Earth's deepest abysses, explains his efforts to build a robot to explore Jupiter's moon Europa.

Kevin Kelly uses evolutionary theory to discuss the purpose and value of technology.

Also, don't miss The Future We Will Create: Inside the World of TED, a documentary about the conference, available from Netflix thru their "Watch Instantly" online streaming video service.