Home from Long Beach

Blaise and I spent the last few days at TED in Long Beach. The usual fun.

Briefly, this year's best of show: Willie Smits, who founded a orangutan conservation area in Borneo which evolved into an extraordinary social experiment in community-based sustainable agriculture, restoring grasslands to forest, providing an income and jobs for a town, vastly increasing plant diversity, creating safe space for the orangutans, and altering the local rainfall, enhancing fertility and suppressing fires. Shai Agassi outlined a scheme for swappable car batteries, separating the electric car from the miles driven--more like the cell phone model-- increasing range and efficiency. Renault is building the car, and Israel and Australia are apparently going to try it out. Al Gore gave a gloomy update on the melting of the polar caps. Bonnie Bassler, a Princeton colleague, rocked with her beautifully accessible science talk about bacterial inter- and intra-species communication. Bob Full on why geckos have tails and how this is guiding robot design. Ray Anderson (featured in The Corporation), the carpet CEO who turned his company into an almost completely zero waste cycle, while increasing profit and market share. Some cool new medical inventions, including a much improved system for bone marrow extraction. Still not leaping up to volunteer. Bill Gates talked about the problems his foundation is concentrating on: malaria and schools. He is a surprisingly charming speaker. He brought a canister of mosquitoes and let them out into the room ("Why should this be only a problem of poor people?"). Rejoinder from the chair: "Headline for this talk: Bill Gates releases more bugs into the world."

That was the practical stuff.. also plenty of crazy beauty: Erik Smith on the piano.. Ueli someone, a fanatic skydiver and "wingsuit flyer" on an endless flight down a Swiss mountainside to the sea.. Margaret Wertheim and her crocheted coral reef, with lessons about hyperbolic geometry, and, best of all, Herbie Hancock.

Meanwhile, the kids were doing very well at home with Patricia, who provided Anselm with the first and last lines of the above list. They made the pictures yesterday evening at Art/Not Terminal while Patricia was hanging her new show.