Music at TED

During the TED conference there is not only food for thought.

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.

Tags: article, music, TED

Sustainability on TED

As my plane was leaving LA  after TED2010 and I watched the curious man-made landscape of circling streets and repetitive housing, I though of the provoking book by Stewart Brand called Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto which stated some environmental heresies. The first one, and the one I will examine here, was that cities are green. It is hard to think about New York City, for instance, as a model for sustainability but let’s examine the lifestyle of organic eating, juice sucking, prius driving  southern californians for a minute. They all live 30 to 90 minutes away from their jobs, so each family has at least one car, usually two, with a big commute two times a day. If we do some math with this calculator from the EPA we’ll see that a tipical californian household emits between 20,000 to 35,000 Kg of CO2 a year.

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.

My first TED experience

My first TED experience

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.

Tags: article, Chris Anderson, experience, TED

“What do you do?”

I hear this question often enough when I go events where other people go. For many, is a straight-forward answer like Architect, Lawyer, Firefighter. For me, it is a little bit of a problem.

This last week I attended TED and I got asked this question so many times that I started realizing I need to give this question some thought. Not only for myself, but to free the people of the world of the chains of “boxing”. This is not a rant against the wonderfully violent sport of box, because I use the term when others want to put you inside a box. A box they can neatly organize in their heads along lots of other boxes they have. It is also useful to know if their box is bigger or better than mine.

Of course I usually devise a quick answer taylor-made to the “audience”. I’ve been known to answer anything from: business man, Founder of a telecommunications company, Mountaineer, technology entrepeneur, aikidoist, nothing much, etc. It is not that any of those is untrue, but anyone of those is incomplete and misleading. I know that this happens for most people that simply have a wide range of interests as I do. I have known many people like this in my life. But I also have found people who are so focused, so determined by one goal that seem to blend into their own actions. I don’t see that there is just one right way to go, both approaches seem fine to me.

I am exagerating the point a little bit because the question is just a conversation starter and I find myself asking it quite often. I don’t know exactly what the replacement question should be, but maybe the real replacement is not a question, just an open comment in a conversation: “please, tell me about you”. This statement can include many diverse parts of our life. The answer can include your families, your passions, your fears, what happened yesterday, your views and your opinions. Or maybe you can just answer: “I’m an architect”.

Tags: article, cocktail, Connections, funny, Life, opinion, party, people, TED