If you haven't been over to the relaunched TED website this week you owe it to yourself to stop by. I love the redesign and how it enables you to drill down into the areas you're most interested in. At the same time it also encourages even more exploration and makes things more discoverable than ever before. Well done!
TED fans will also want to read this NY Times article featuring June Cohen, director of TED Media.
Looking for some inspiration? Want to hear some of the brightest people around talk about what they're most passionate about? If so, you need to check out the TED Talks.
TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, is an annual conference featuring the best and brightest speakers on the planet. I just finished watching this session with Malcolm Gladwell.
Fortunately for those of us who can't attend the conference, the kind folks at TED offer freely accessible audio and video archives of every speaker. Isn't that the way every conference should be, btw?! I've often wondered why more conferences don't do this sort of thing. Yeah, I know...they're afraid it will affect the in-person attendance rates, and those fees are where the hosts really make their money. Maybe they ought to consider more sponsorships to help fund the operation. TED obviously benefits from both in-person attendees and loads of virtual attendees after the show.
You say you don't have the time to sit around watching this sort of thing? Then do what my friend Bryan Gray (CEO of MediaSauce) did: Download the audio versions, put them on a CD and listen to them on your way to/from the office. Do it. You won't regret it.
Regardless of your beliefs, you owe it yourself to read Gerald Schroeder’s The Science of God. My son (the science buff) recommended it to me, saying it’s one of his favorite books; in fact, the copy I just finished reading was a gift he gave me a few months ago. I was intrigued to see how Schroeder went about tying the Bible to science.
I wasn’t disappointed. You often hear about how science has exposed flaws in many of the stories that appear in the Bible. Schroeder goes into detail to show how many of these events can actually be explained with science. For example, he uses Einstein’s theory of relativity to support the creation of and age of the universe. Those two chapters alone were worth the price of this one.
Although this book may not cause you to change your beliefs, it will undoubtedly get you thinking differently about creationism, the origins of life, evolution, free will and much more.
I finally finished reading The Case for a Creator. It took me much longer than I originally thought, mostly because I got halfway through it, let it sit for awhile, then picked it back up again a couple of weeks ago. I also found that the first third and the last third of the book were the most interesting. It took me a lot longer to work through the middle third of the book.
Don’t let my slow reading mislead you… This is a great book. Regardless of your beliefs, you owe it to yourself to read this one. Through the use of “expert witness” interviews, a model that Strobel uses in other books, I learned quite a bit along the way.