I am glad this talk went up so soon, while the movie "Temple Grandin" is still currently showing on HBO, and I'd encourage everyone to watch them both. Temple Grandin was one of those TED speakers with presence and approachability as an attendee at the conference itself, and whose story is one of those you'll find yourself connecting at many levels.

One of my favorite lines (paraphrasing): "If it weren't for the autism gene, there would be no Silicon Valley."

Well, yesterday was Day 0, with TED University and activities. But on Day 1, here are some snippets:

Daniel Kahneman: The experiencing self is far different from the remembering self. That difference has a significance in many systems based around memories. We think of the future as anticipated memories. If you could go on a vacation knowing that you'd have no photos and your memories would be erased, would that change your choice of vacation? What defines a story: changes, significant moments, and endings. Mostly endings. You live so many seconds, but most don't leave a trace. Shouldn't they count? What then determines happiness - experience or memories?

David Cameron, soon to be PM of UK?: The global public debt is $32 trillion and rising. Which means, no matter what you want to do, there isn't any money for it. Sorry. So what are you going to do? That's what redefines government in the 2010s. Combine political thinking with the information revolution and develop systems that reinforce transparency, accountability, and choice. And this is from the British Conservative Party. Would that we had conservatives in America that could stand on real conservative values and not just exploit and celebrate ignorance.

Jake Shimabukuro. "The Ukulule is an instrument of peace." before storming into variations on flamenco, Ave Maria, and Bohemian Rhapsody to a standing ovation.

Esther Duflo: 9 million children under age 5 die each year, which is like a Haiti earthquake every 5 days. Love that she's drawing that comparison, as I've tried to equate smoking deaths each year to having a 9/11 every three days. She's mastered the use of controlled experiments in social programs to see what really works or not, independent of political axes.

Michael Shermer: "Belief is the natural state of things" - Evolutionary psychology gave us a belief engine because false positives - we heard a rustling in the bushes, thought it was a tiger and ran even though it was just the wind - didn't harm us. False negatives - we heard a rustling in the bushes, thought it was the wind, but it was a tiger, did us in. That's why we believe in all sorts of things like aliens, wolfmen, and gods.

William Li. Angiogenesis. It's why blood vessels grow not to much but not too little. Grow too much, they get cut short. If they get hurt they grow back. Oops - 70 diseases (including the big ones) are affected by angiogenesis not working, so not just drugs, but the right foods, will get things back in whack.

Dan Barber of Blue Hill Restaurant lost his love for the "sustainable fish" that was fed on chicken pellets, but found a perfect farm in Spain where you don't have to feed the fish (imagine a farm where you don't have to feed the animals), where the health of the preditors is good for the overall crop (imagine that on a farm!) and the water leaving the farm comes out cleaner than the water entering it. How to make that a global pattern? Wait and see. Funny and engaging.

Philip Kaplan of Blippy, a startup, has a credit card + social network that puts every detail of every purchase you make on the public site. Crazy? Effective? Keep watching.

IMHO it's bad form to automatically feed your Facebook status with your Twitter tweets as a one-way toss over the transom. I'm seeing an increasing number of Facebook accounts where my newsfeed shows someone's status update along with replies and ensuing conversations, but where the original poster is oblivious to this because they don't check in on Facebook.

It's OK to connect your services, but be responsible for the conversations you start.

Just saying.