b a t t l e c a t . n e t

As part of BarCampSheff I quickly curated an hour’s worth of videos from the brilliant TED.com. If you know me personally you’ve probably already heard me rave on about TED. If you’re coming to battlecat.net as a result of meeting me recently you’re probably not yet converted.

TED initially stood for the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference, but now the requirement for their speakers seems to just be passion, whether the topic is physics, mushrooms or the developing world.

I could have chosen an entire day’s worth of TED talks – but these are the four I chose:

• Johnny Lee Demos Wii Remote Hacks - The most truly geek video in the selection… But Bar Camp’s not just about geeks… Right?
• Hans Rosling – The Best Stats You’ve Ever Seen – At a data representation level, this is also pretty geeky and very cool. Primarily it’s great information about the variations of poverty in the developing world. And Hans Rosling is just so passionate – I want to give him a hug.
• Malcolm Gladwell on Spaghetti Sauce – Great talk about flavour, food science, marketing and design. Though I feel Malcolm Gladwell is at his best when he’s writing.
• Sir Ken Robinson on Do Schools Kill Creativity? – A huge shout out to Guy Dickinson who insisted that I include this video. This talk always brings tears to my eyes.  Ken Robinson’s talk was first video to be featured on the TED vodcast and is a great start to the many hours of passionate and interesting talks available in the TED archives.

Thanks to TED’s great usage policy we were able to show the videos without breaking any laws.