1 post tagged “ted”

Other than seeing my life flash before my eyes as the old lady in the car next to me began to change lanes into me and as I inched ever closer to the tanker truck inches off my left flank on 80W/580E (don't get me started on the idiocy of our highways going E and W at the same time), it's been a good day so far. 101 is really a rather enjoyable freeway in the middle of the day with no traffic. The phenomenon is similar to the "poor-man's tour of Oakland", as my father called it, that I used to get taking the 15 from east oakland to downtown Berkeley every day in grades 4-6. Except that in this case one is picking up on the "gestalt" of the valley, rather than east, downtown, and north Oakland. Still, you pass, if not the major landmarks, at least signs pointing to many of the landmarks of the peninsula and you get nice views of two major airports plus Moffett field, and you get the feeling of the growth of the whole bay area as you drive in the carpool lane (single driver, off-carpool hours, of course) down in Morgan Hill. Who knew the carpool lanes went that far south? It's good to see though.

Anyway, I only almost died once and I eventually made it to TED. Which is an experience. I'm still suffering some sort of culture shock as I try to figure out "why am I here?" and "why is everyone else here?".

Jonathan Widom gave a good took on the nucleosome positioning code to which Chris Anderson's response was "what does this all mean?" While I get what Chris was trying to ask, personally, I was much more interested in the details, but perhaps I'm in the minority. But, come to think of it, I think more people than you might expect are interested in the details, not just the high-level platitudes. Then again one can only do so much in 20 minutes, especially to such a diverse audience as this one.

The pixel-perspective guys gave an _amazing_ demo of the "multi-touch" stuff. I've been somewhat skeptical of this in the past, thinking that it's just "teh shiny" and not necessarily generally useful. But, I've drunk the kool-aid. The demo was mind-blowing. The question I have is what is the API? How does one write applications for this? A collaborative genome annotation tool with this would be phenomenal.

More later. Right now it's off to the Grey Goose Party. Personally I would have preferred the local fare from, say, Santa Lucia Highlands, but, hey, you can't have everything.

Oh, one last thing. That new ls600h lexus looked pretty neat. 435 HP and low-to-mid-20's MPG. not a bad combo.