In praise of TED

TED is a series of conferences in which a stellar array of speakers are given 18 minutes to give 'the talk of their lives'.

Everything is available freely as downloadable video or audio. Everyone's there: Tim Berners-Lee, Al Gore, Billy Graham, Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond, Martin Rees (whom I nearly bumped into on King's Parade in Cambridge on Christmas Day), Bill Gates. There's Hans Rosling, the man who makes statistics dance, and scores of others.

Dare I say, the breadth of lectures available, it's even better than living in Cambridge.

The whole thing is the brainchild of someone called Chris Anderson who founded a series of computer magazines in the UK and then moved to the States, but is a different Chris Anderson from his good friend Chris Anderson who is also UK born and also moved to the states and edits Wired magazine and has already appeared in this blog. So good, God made two of them evidently.