Personal Musings for Public Consumption

Pretty cool to watch small numbers yield big numbers. Traffic wonks will enjoy this 6min video.

Fifty percent of traffic accidents happen at intersections. Gary Lauder shares a brilliant and cheap idea for helping drivers move along smoothly: a new traffic sign that combines the properties of "Stop" and "Yield" -- and asks drivers to be polite.

I've been waiting for this to come out. Excellent performance.

The LXD (the Legion of Extraordinary Dancers) electrify the TED2010 stage with an emerging global street-dance culture, revved up by the Internet. In a preview of Jon Chu’s upcoming Web series, this astonishing troupe show off their superpowers.

If you're a data geek, you'll love this presentation. It's a blatent "we invented this at Microsoft" talk, but look past the corporate nod and you'll see a really interesting technology that lets you visualize information as a web. Very pleased to see information represented in some kind of multi-dimension interface.

Gary Flake demos Pivot, a new way to browse and arrange massive amounts of images and data online. Built on breakthrough Seadragon technology, it enables spectacular zooms in and out of web databases, and the discovery of patterns and links invisible in standard web browsing.

This video was fantastic.  Educators should most certainly watch this.

Temple Grandin, diagnosed with autism as a child, talks about how her mind works -- sharing her ability to "think in pictures," which helps her solve problems that neurotypical brains might miss. She makes the case that the world needs people on the autism spectrum: visual thinkers, pattern thinkers, verbal thinkers, and all kinds of smart geeky kids.