Giving this talk wasn’t as wasy as I though. The subject, which I care very deeply about is our knowledge of health but it also involved the sad memory of my father’s illness. Once I was on stage, and received the energy in the room, I felt better and better. I stayed throughout the event and saw most of the talks. It was really enjoyable and left me with a feeling of hope.

Here is the video of the talk in spanish, I promise an english translation soon:

Do check out the other talks in their web site, I thought they were awesome

Here is a list of the top 10 songs(I left many out):

1) Woods – Bon Iver: The Hymn of the summer. I played it so many times it became a mantra.

2) Runaway - Kanye West: The new @kanyewest album is awesome, and the video even more so. The Black Swan of music videos. The whole record has been playing a lot.

3) Blame Game – Kanye West: Listen carefully and try not to laugh to the fabulous Chris Rock monologue at the end. Kanye has a twisted sense of humor. John Legend is incredible.

4) Song For You – Alexi Murdoch: A beautiful little song. Enchanting.

5) Elusive – Scott Mathews: Another increidble song that I’ve been listening for a while now.

6) Horchata – Vampire Weekend: A fun and upbeat song that sounds like Indian music.

7) Words – Guillemots: Fantastic lyrics and a mellow voice make this song a winner.

8 ) Twice – Little Dragon: She is a mix of Bjork and Erykah Badu. Great voice and taste.

9) Eet – Regina Spektor: A pop star with real talent. Really love her voice.

10) Something’s going to Come – Adem: What a great song. It makes me feel better.

I just started listening to the new Radiohead algum The King of Limbs. It is not included in this list, but it probably should.

Love to listen to new songs if you let me know your favorites.

Next winter I will post the Winter Songs.

Here is a short film I created while studying with Jose Martinez Suarez, a wonderful man and cinema teacher. Starring: Diego Claps and Juan Mora y Araujo. With music by Lulu Gueron and Matias Loizaga. Filmed in Buenos Aires and in spanish only (sorry)

Este es un pequeño corto creado mientras estudiaba con Jose Martinez Suarez , un gran hombre y profesor de cine. Actuan: Diego Claps y Juan Mora y Araujo. Musica de Lulu Gueron y Matias Loizaga. Filmada en Buenos Aires.

I love you all. Although I have my favorite ones, even a little hill makes me feel better. I love to be around you, to adore your beautiful sunsets, to feel the roaring wind when you are angry. I try to spend most of my free time with you. I am sorry I have to leave you for months at a time. It breaks my heart when I drive away and see your indifference in my rearview mirror.

You see, I live in the Pampas, a poet once spontaneously said “the horizontal abyss” when looking at the flat endless grasslands around Buenos Aires. In the flatlands it is very hard to have perspective, your view being blocked by any obstacle. It is in the flatlands were many people live and I believe in the aphorism “more people, less freedom”. In the flats, I feel trapped in one dimension, in one long and irritating view I cannot escape.

In order to prove my love I have many pictures of you in different moments of the year. In my humble opinion you are most beautiful covered in snow, all round and fluffy, ready to be cruised with my skis as my ultimate expression of this love I can’t and won’t deny.

But if beauty is just one of your traits, wisdom and patience is your landmark. I think I have learned more about myself when I am walking on a mountain than with years of therapy. After walking 8-9 hours to reach a summit most of the endless chatter in my head stops and I feel a warm sense of achievement and peace. For many years I have done Buddhist meditation and Yoga, only once or twice I have felt the same inner calmness that you can give me with just a few rays of light shining through the clouds.

Nowadays, I have brought to you my new family, and watching my kids enjoy you has been a revelation and surely, a new and more intense form of love that it will grow along with them.

See you next summer in Patagonia and next winter in Los Molles.

Love
D

I practice Aikido as much as I can. I have done it almost for two years now, on and off.

Aikido is a modern (1930s) japanese martial art created by Morihei Ueshiba. He was a small man that learned most of traditional Japanese martial arts and handled weapons (sword and spear). He was a deeply spiritual man and had a very interesting life, one of the last grand masters in martial arts. You can watch him in a 1935 film performing here or watch this video when he is older.

Today, there are many workout options to keep your body healthy, lean, flexible. Yoga, Pilates, Karate, Tae-Bo, etc.,etc. In addition there are several meditation and breathing techniques to keep the mind healthy: Buddhist or Vipassana, Transcendental meditation, even meditation in motion like Tai Chi, etc.

How can you choose the right one for you? Naturally, I don’t think that one is better than the other, they all have merits and it is way better to do any of them than to watch TV. But you have to find the one that best suits you, and usually that means the activity you can sustain over time. After more than 12 years of trying out and actively practicing many of those disciplines I have settled on Aikido as my main practice for mind and body.

Let me give you 5 reasons:

1) Timeless: Aikido can be practiced from the age of 6 until very old age, if you do it continously. An injury takes a lot of time to recover after you are 40 and sometimes you don’t recover at all. If Aikido is practiced correctly, it is very hard to have injuries and if you are a good aikidoist, it is very hard to get injured doing any other sport due to enhanced sensibility and suppleness.

2) Non-competitive and Non-confrontative: There is no competition in Aikido. No tournaments, no points, no separation of levels, no fighting. Learning to compete and fight between each other is already a full time job for almost everybody in the business world and the world in general. Training yourself NOT to fight and NOT to compete as a response to the world pressures is a relief and if you do practice a lot this becomes a natural response in life.

3) Dynamic suppleness: Aikido movements are very natural and enhance mobility and flexibility, as well a strength and precision. After training an hour, you feel different about the space around you, the way you walk is more solid and direct. You gain consciousness about your own body and the space around you. It is a very addictive feeling.

4) Skill Learning: Instead of just mindlessly doing spinning or running, the workout of Aikido leaves you with something very valuable: a special skill that is yours and nobody can take away. As an example, in a typical Aikido class you fall and roll 30-50 times, so you really learn how to fall and get up again in an instant unharmed. This is not only a useful skill for doing sports or even walking on the street but think about it symbolically and you’ll see that having confidence in falling is an essential skill for life.

5) Fun and social: I’ve done Karate when I was young (from 12 to 16 years old) and although I felt very close to my training partners, it was an exception  to actually practice the moves with them. Punching and Kicking arts can never be practiced intensely between two people, because of the inevitable tear and wear of the body subjected to blows and kicks. The grabbing arts (Judo, Aikido, Jiu Jitsu) can be practiced in pairs without fear of injury and with full force. This creates an engaging atmosphere and it’s just plain fun.

Ki (Chi for the chinese) is the name of the vital energy of the universe and Aikido means “The Way of Harmony with Ki”. It is quite surprising to find the way Ki manifest itself in a very tangible and practical way when you unify mind and body. There are several “tests” you can do to see what this energy can do. But I’ll leave that for a different article in the future. If you want to know more about Ki, then follow the path of Koichi Tohei and I specially like his book: “Ki in daily life“. You can watch him practice Ki exercises and Aikido in these 5 videos. Notice de quality of his movements.

Is Aikido perfect? Far from it. You need a bunch of other people that want to practice Aikido to even start to train so the chances of doing it in a small town are slim. You have to go to the dojo at the right times, this is not a gym that you show up whenever you want to. Also, the quality of the people practicing is as important as the quality of the master because, most of the time, they are your hands-on teachers.

In Buenos Aires I have trained with three masters, Kurata , Corbal and Jiterman and all of them are great teachers with very big differences in approach and method. Even though many aikidoists become quite fanatic to defend their own special style of Aikido, there are a lot more coincidences than differences. Aikido is Aikido.

Whatever you do, do not sit all day in chair! That is a recipe for disaster.

I am trying to recall some of the best moments. I’ll start with Session One and I won’t go over all of them, just the one that caught my attention and still lingers in my mind.

Michael Martin had a very interesting talk about driving into a Tornado and he compared it with driving into this economic crisis. To sum it up: stay positive, provide leadership, look for a safe place, hang in there, it will pass. The photos of tornados were cool.

Catherine Mohr was a delight and did a wonderful talk called “Adventures in Green Housebuilding for Nerds”. She is the one that made the comment about walking back from TED to avoid the incredibly costly carbon footprint of airplane travel that inspired my other post. Her analisis on how insulation, material choice and other elements affect carbon emissions and energy comsumption were just excellent.

Felix Kramer told us to start running barefoot. It makes a lot of sense because it is less trouble for your knees and, this is added by me, it improves your perception of your foot and how you connect to the world. If people in Kenya do it….

Daniel Kraft was a doctor from the future. He not only invented this bone marrow extraction machine, but used a shock and awe technique of showing a dazzling display of nano-machines that will co-exist with us, cleaning arteries, and sending signals to the outside world about our internal state. I really wish he will prepare a full TED talk about this fascinating subject (for me anyway). We met at night and had a small chat over some drinks and music by Ethel, a great guy.

Kevin Stone presented a new way to fix ankles, knees and other body parts using animal joints from horses, pigs, etc. For a soccer player and skier like me, this is great news. I imagine a knee from a horse must be really hard to break. Check out more here.

David Bolinsky from Xvivo presented dazzling images from inside our body done with CGI. A must see TEDtalk was followed with more footage that I hope they make available soon. There are more samples at his company web site. How enlightening to actually “see” what is going on inside our bodies.

Frederik Balaggade showed us how diagnostics can be done in third world countries with a simple, inexpensive method and procedures. I think we can learn some things in southamerica from the africans, instead of looking at resource wasteful solutions from Europe/US.

Jessica Green explored the invisible in her talk. She thinks that exploring the biodiversity and biogeography in our homes and workspaces will give us very important information for our own health. In essence, we spend 90% of our lives indoors, what we are living with might be quite important. Fantastic pictures.

Jonathan Drori, which gave this tedtalk in 2007, explained us the incredible characteristic of pollen which is tiny, has promiscuous sex, is biologically active and extremely diverse. Whem blow-up by electronic microscopes it’s just stunningly beautiful. It also shows that C.S.I. has new tools because it can be used to track forensic evidence in a very accurate way.

Juliana Machado Ferreira, a native of Sao Paulo, works in restoring rescued birds to their habitats. Surprinsingly, that is not always what happens once the birds are rescued, most of them are euthanized. She was very passionate and convincing. I am never buying a parrot for myself!

Phil Zimbardo, the great Stanford professor with a very prolific life started a new venture to help train and find heroes. He thinks we need a lot more heroes in the world and it’s very hard to disagree with him. Check out more about his Hero Construction Company.

The last talk was from Cindy Gallop called If I ran the world presented a web site that can playfully set on to generate concrete action to change the world in a collaborative way. Very interesting stuff indeed.

As you can see the TED U session are as enganging (or even more) than the main stage TED talks. I hope you have a feel for them now.

Let me know what you think.

Every session started with Thomas Dolby and Ethel doing covers of well known tunes. You can read his side of the story in his blog post.

We also heard David Byrne talk about music and arquitecture, what an interesting and talented guy. The wonderfully refreshing Andrew Bird and the new work with poetry by Natalie Merchant , the vocalist and leader of 10,000 maniacs, which I found a little boring and depressing (sorry Natalie).

During the TED U sessions there was the magnificent violin of Robert Gupta who almost made me cry.

The best of the music came when some of the musicians there started jamming together in the night parties. Specially the magically gifted Jake Shimabukuro with his Ukelele. Check this out. I am on the floor on first row, enjoying it like crazy.

Each house has to receive (at least) water, electricity and some bandwidth so pipes, copper cables and fiber optics have to be deployed to cover miles and miles of land. Furthermore, all those lawns require massive amounts of water and fertilizers, let’s not forget we are actually on a desert with almost no rain. Each time they need groceries they go to a supermarket, you need quite a bit of them to cover such big areas, and they all needs truckloads (literally) of food and supplies. The amount of energy and other resources consumed by this design is monstrous.

The contrast of this way of living with Californian’s love for anything green is startling. At the TED conference we received an aluminum bottle to refill from filtered water dispensers instead of the typical and stupid water bottle. If 1500 persons consume 3 bottles of water a day for 5 days we would have fabricated a mountain of 22500 plastic bottles. Although you could argue that they can be recycled if properly disposed, it takes quite a bit of energy and carbon emissions to turn that amount of slightly used plastic into usable bottles. I personally think that it is a catastrophe that after installing all those water pipes, people everywhere in the world still consume bottled water. The plastic have to be fabricated from oil using energy to melt and take it’s shape, then sent to a spring, if you are lucky, and then back to supermarkets all over the world. Then you grab those waters, haul them to your trunk, take them home, drink them, throw them away and probably end in a landfill nearby.

TED had also on display Hybrid Cars by Lexus, and although I applaud Hybrid’s oil efficiency I hardly think that they constitute a solution for a zero-emissions, green way of transportation. There where a few Segways and a few bicycles but most people there had arrived either by car (bad) or by plane (the worst), including myself. I took a flight from Buenos Aires, to Dallas and then to LA. The carbon emissions of that flight was roughly 2,825 Kg of CO2. You can calculate them here.  As one TED U session said, if you wanted to be green going to TED you would have to go walking.

I’d better start walking now to reach TED2011 on time.

I am traveling on a plane home to Buenos Aires, after spending four amazing days in the TED2010 Conference in Long Beach. My blown-away mind is still trying to come around the experience I just had. As Nobel laureate Daniel Kanheman put forward in the first session, there is an experiencing self and memorizing self, and they seem a world apart right now.  Let me try to explain what TED is as I listen to the beautiful Arvo Pärt piece Alina.

TED is a non-profit organization with a simple mission summarized in “Ideas worth spreading”. It’s leader is Business 2.0 magazine founder Chris Anderson, not to be confused by Wired editor Chris Anderson, which I’ve done myself for years. Every year 1500 intellectually hungry, world changing heterogeneous people from all over the world are gathered to listen to lectures from remarkable people. This year, with the theme “What the world needs now…”, we listened to a mathematic giant, to the largest philanthropist in the world, to the best graphic designer, to a innovative musician, to the film director of the biggest films ever, to a prominent reformer of education, and even the next prime minister of the UK, all impressive world leaders in their domain. But we also heard a prodigy 12-year old, a spider scientist, an autistic cow facilities designer, an african environmentalist, to an indian cartoonist/painter and a wonderful man determined to end slavery in the world of today. Did you know there are 27 millions slaves today, in the XXI century? I didn’t.

The format is very interesting and unique. A typical lecture has an 18 minute duration, although there are smaller 3 to 7 minutes talks, and all is well seasoned by fantastic music, dancing and impressive technology demos. Sometimes some of these talks are not exactly in the domain expertise you would expect from the speaker. The space where the talks are held is a theatre but the whole experience is designed for interaction between the participants, including the speakers themselves. Everybody watches every talk. Just to do same gratuitous name dropping I saw and even chatted with the likes of Tim Berners-Lee, Matt Groening, Cameron Diaz, Will Smith, Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Bill Gates, Al Gore, etc.

When the sessions end, there are lunches, cocktail parties and dinners to continue the conversation. Big name tags allow for immediate engagement and there is warm sense of belonging and openness that is truly unique. TEDsters want to be engaged by others, they want to know who you are, what do you do and why are you there. They want to have your contact information to be able to follow-up and keep connected. It is a wonderful feeling to weave a real social network, instead of looking at a computer screen, actually be talking to real breathing people.

In the following days I will be trying to write more articles and reflections. Meanwhile, you may start feasting on this talk by 2010 TED Prize Winner Jamie Oliver. Or, if you are a more technically oriented person (I guess is the politically correct way to refer to a geek) you might enjoy this awesome demo by Blaise Aguera y Arcas. Or simply go to ted.com and navigate the impressive number of talks available from past year conferences, since it’s been going on like this for many years.

When I arrived and I explained other participants that it was my first time they called me, appropriately, a TED virgin. That is a term I haven’t heard in a long while. After having survived the experience which many people regard as life changing, I can attest to the intelectual and emotional shock received. I don’t know if there will be a permanent effect on my world view but I suspect that is very hard to go through it and remain unchanged. I am definitely ready for more and TED2011 already awaits for me.

Life After Ted begins today and this made me start a blog, so I guess a tiny change has already occurred.