{"id":5920,"date":"2010-12-16T12:02:20","date_gmt":"2010-12-16T20:02:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/?p=5920"},"modified":"2010-12-16T12:02:20","modified_gmt":"2010-12-16T20:02:20","slug":"tedxcaltech","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2010\/12\/16\/tedxcaltech\/","title":{"rendered":"TEDxCaltech"},"content":{"rendered":"

Everyone knows about the TED talks<\/a> — the great, and mercifully short, presentations whose videos are among the most-shared on the web. Even clicking on a completely random talk, you’re likely to be rewarded with something interesting. Part of that is the extraordinary level of quality control — not only in choosing speakers, but in working with speakers ahead of time to fine-tune their presentations. And holding them to a time limit.<\/p>\n

Besides the big TED conferences, there are also independently-organized events known as TEDx<\/a>. Caltech is going to host such an event for the first time, TEDxCaltech, on January 14<\/a>. The theme is “Feynman’s Vision: The Next 50 Years.” In practice that means three groups of talks: Conceptualization and Visualization in Science, Frontiers of Physics, and Nanoscience and Future Biology. Check out the list of speakers<\/a>. If it weren’t for the fact that I am on it myself, I’d emphasize what a great program this is — any event that includes both Scott Aaronson<\/a> and Lyle Mays<\/a> shows quite a bit of promise. Throw in Leonard Susskind and Craig Venter, and it might be worth a special trip.<\/p>\n

All are welcome to come! The flip side of the fact that so much work goes into making the talks successful is that a corresponding level of commitment is asked of the audience — so you don’t simply buy a ticket, you apply<\/a>, and it does cost money. But who can put a price on inspiration?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Everyone knows about the TED talks — the great, and mercifully short, presentations whose videos are among the most-shared on the web. Even clicking on a completely random talk, you’re likely to be rewarded with something interesting. Part of that is the extraordinary level of quality control — not only in choosing speakers, but in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellany"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5920"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5920\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}