Thoughts on leanring and getting more thoughts

While you’re in high-school you are given what I’ve always called a shotgun education. This is an education where you sit while teachers fire huge amounts of information at you. When the bell rings you are vomited out into the halls, and then you’re inundated with a fire hose more of information. Not only information from friends on who like whom, or what they’re doing on the weekend, but also an education on how to act in a society or merely how to act in a social environment. Then you graduate and go into college, and again you’re in a complete learning environment. It’s almost as if being in college, or even just living around a college will promote learning exponetionly. Is it because everyone around is focused on learning; therefore, you can’t help but learn something. For example, when I was in college my buddies and I were bored so we decided to attach our beds outside, and create a way to get off the 4th floor without having to use the stairs or get our of bed. After many hours of trial and error, really bad math, and a lot of alcohol (to make sure if it all went bad it wouldn’t hurt when it hit the ground) we created an advance dumb-waiter system that allowed us to get the bed out, and take it down solely on the power of the amount of weight in the bed. Of course the weight was created by books that we would pick up at the bottom after having thrown them out. This type of inventionesque attitude and creativity just doesn’t exist outside of school, and there is no way to find the information that we used to accomplish this outside of the school environment. So the questions is: How do you get the cutting edge info of the world when you’re not in school?

News? No, they’re telling you about who’s being killed and who has paid to be on there. Remember, news is based on ratings not information.

The net? Sounds good, except that in order to find “good” info, you have to spend a lot fo time deciphering what is good or what isn’t. And you have to also stop yourself from watching the videos that populate the web these days.

The place to find the most cutting edge, right now info on millions of different thing s is

Ted.com.

Ted is a invitation only 3 day meeting of the most intelligent and innovative people in the world right now. All of the latest, biggest, and grandest inventions that have hit our society have been introduced on Ted, and now after 30m years we have the ability to watch these presentations.

To give you a few examples of what has been presented there: This was the place where Bill made is monumental promise to have “a computer on every desk in America”. It’s the first place that Al Gore presented an Inconvenient truth. It’s also the first place that apple showed off their unique and innovative IPod device that has revolutionized the music industry. These things were introduced in their ingfancy,3 -5 years before they were ever introduced to the world.

A few examples of what is now on: Technology that has enabled us to make robots that walk on wals, and walk on the ceiling. That’s right, it’s out there. A system that allows a quadriplegic to make music with his mere head movements, and body actions. The new monitors that are not only touch and moveable, but also anticipate what you’re going to be doing and does it for you- very much like the T9 function of the cell phone. The amount of information out there is phenomenal!