I’m at the EG conference the rest of the week in beautiful Monterey CA. Let me know if ya have any must go to tips in Monterey, otherwise swing by to say hi though I’ll be indoors watching speakers and performances most of the time.

Last year I helped organized TEDxCambridge and starting this week we’ll be releasing a few of the amazing talks held during that event.

“Neuroscientist Don Katz uses experiments with rats to shed light on where taste preferences come from and, when it comes to food, why we like what we like.”
via YouTube

Amazing! Just a reminder in how breath-taking and beautiful nature is. I still need to watch the documentary movie Oceans as well which I posted about 2 years ago.

“In 2008, Sandra Critelli shot this excellent photo of Golden Rays off the Mexican coast:

She said: “It was an unreal image, very difficult to describe. The surface of the water was covered by warm and different shades of gold and looked like a bed of autumn leaves gently moved by the wind.

“It’s hard to say exactly how many there were but in the range of a few thousand.

“We were surrounded by them without seeing the edge of the school and we could see many under the water surface too.

Golden Rays grow up to seven feet across and migrate within the Caribbean.”

Photo Link and Article Link via reddit (via Neatorama)

Wow! This just made my jaws drop!(while thinking up 50 ideas) Autonomous flying helicopters that detect a ping pong ball and juggle it quite a few times. Watch the video to understand. Can I actually play ping pong with a robot finally? Will there be flying little robots to go fetch the hit ball back to me down the road? haha, this is awesome!

via youtube video
“Ball juggling experiments in the ETH Flying Machine Arena
By Mark Müller, Sergei Lupashin and Raffaello D’Andrea
http://www.flyingmachinearena.org
IDSC, ETH Zürich, Switzerland”

Also be sure to see the piano playing one.

I don’t often post things that just make you smile, but here it is! A little dog with a tiny outfit that makes it seem like a flying superman!
via

This is how it should feel like when you recycle and do good!!!(watch video on youtube) Reminds me in Charlie Todd from Improv Everywheres Welcome Back project.

This guy wants to put 3000 toothpicks in his beard! He is close. I find it amusing when he shakes them all out!

youtube video
via boingboing

Photographer Stephan Tillmans project “Luminant Point Arrays” captures the flicker of CRT monitor screens right when you turn it off. The results are rather beautiful or perhaps nostalgic. Great series.

LUMINANT POINT ARRAYS
“The Luminant Point Arrays show tube televisions in the moment they are swithed off. The television picture breaks down and creates a structure of light. The pictures refuse external reference and broach the issue of the difference between abstraction and concretion in photography. The breakdown of the television picture discribes the breakdown of the reference. The product is self-referential photography.”

See the images after the jump.

(more…)

Duane Keiser originated the phenomenon known as “painting a day“.
Keiser recently posted on his blog a short time-lapse video called Peel where he paints the process in peeling apart a tangerine, repainting over the the same painting where the past vanishes just like in real life. He’s also auctioning his final piece which at the moment of the post is at $225.

I’ve seen paintings repainted over, but too paint over purposefully and retain the history through video is a great  addition  and a great story! If this was done digitally, a buyer could go through each stroke forwards and backwards, but to make it something non-digital retains a history and mystery which at times can be more valuable than information.

“Volunteer firefighter Mark Bezos tells a story of an act of heroism that didn’t go quite as expected — but that taught him a big lesson: Don’t wait to be a hero.”

“If I should have a daughter, instead of Mom, she’s gonna call me Point B … ” began spoken word poet Sarah Kay, in a talk that inspired two standing ovations at TED2011. She tells the story of her metamorphosis — from a wide-eyed teenager soaking in verse at New York’s Bowery Poetry Club to a teacher connecting kids with the power of self-expression through Project V.O.I.C.E. — and gives two breathtaking performances of “B” and “Hiroshima.”

Super Size Me creator, Morgan Spurlock brings us, The Greatest Movie Ever Sold (presented by Pom). I can’t wait to see this. Brilliant idea! In Theaters April 22nd.