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.

One of the highlights of TED 2008 for me was watching “visual cartographers” David Sibbet and Kevin Richards capture the essence of the presentations with their amazing illustrations, sketched, posted and shared in real time using Autodesk’s BIGVIZ system. From a practical point of view, a lot of my post-TED blues is trying to sort out all the ideas from my scribbles. BIGVIZ is a perfect transactive memory because it is a clear notation of what I remember from the talks.

Thanks to Autodesk, the BIGVIZ document is available for all to download as a PDF (along with a movie).

I was familiar with David Sibbert’s work through his work as Sunseed Bardeen at “The Grove” in Second Life, where he’s using yet another remarkable canvas for visualization. It’s worth a visit to see what he’s done there, as well.

One thing leads to another: I came back from the TED Conference inspired to write some software to find connections between the different TED speakers (something I do manually while listening to each speaker). While looking for concordance software, I stumbled upon DMDigest that led me to the We Feel Fine project.

You'll have to check it out, but basically they have scraped millions of blogs, etc. identifying sentences proclaiming feelings: "I feel..." "I am feeling...". They then go to town on the mining and interface of this, and turn it all into playable art. Mashable art, as it turns out, because they have open APIs. Which got me thinking....

And I threw together the "Theater of Feeling" in Second Life and I've installed it on Clear Ink Island. It's a work in progress as I'm also experimenting with the image and color data served up by the wefeelfine.org people. It's easy to use, but addictive. Just go up and chat "/feel" and a feeling. "/feel good" "/feel lousy" "/feel generous" and see 10 excerpts elaborating on those feelings floating above platforms. Click the platform to go to the source. That's it! But it offers both an insight into what people think they need to share with the world for all time, as well as the mashability of Second Life. Come take a look for yourself.

Oh, and I do feel good about this experiment!

Cameron Sinclair, 2006 TED Prize winner, Executive Director of Architecture for Humanity, co-editor of the book 'Design Like You Give A Damn' and contributing writer for Worldchanging.com will be joined by Sun Microsystems founder John Gage in a live audio discussion in Second Life.

They will discuss collaboration and participation in 3D environments, as well as the newly launched 'Open Architecture Network' - which represents the fulfillment of Cameron's 2006 TED wish. The event will feature a virtual version of the 'Porchdog' and the Global Village Shelters - both of which are contributions to the Open Architecture Network.

The event will be held on Clear Ink's Allston sim HERE (SLurl) on Tuesday, April 24th at 10:00 am PDT (SL-time). Installations and live audio stream will also be available at the University Project sim (SLurl), and the live audio can also be heard on Clear Ink Island (SLurl).

Sponsored by Sun Professional Services, coordinated by Clear Ink.