TED, I think, serves as a modern version of high-brow oration as the middle letter suggests: Entertainment. It's a double-ended marketplace platform of content providers (speakers) and content consumers (paid attendees and non-paid viewers). Since the cost is high to paid attendees, the content must be as good and fresh as humanly possible. From what I've seen as a non-paid viewer, I think TED accomplishes this reasonably well. It seems hard to have perfect criterion to choose whom to select and whom to not, when there is an abundance of interesting of voices, but unselected folks can always speak and publish on other platforms.
(Forward thinking can be controversial, but in order to not offend audiences and prevent attracting the wrong elements, it seems customary that such topics are passed on because the forum (e.g., intended audience/speaker experience) is inappropriate, although the topic may be vital, insightful and have a legitimate fora elsewhere. (Blasphemy, politics, etc.))
TED talks are predigested intellectual pablum that make the people hearing them feel smart. Seeing one is mildly entertaining. Seeing two is cloying. Seeing three makes you aware of how intolerably formulaic they are. In fairness I've only seen half of a few, because they bored me stupid by the time they were half way through and it had become apparent that the whole schtick was to make the audience feel special and insightful. So I may be missing something wonderful.
TED suffers from the same malaise as all "cutting edge" forums: it has no apparent effect on the world, other than transfering money from attendees to speakers and organizers. Which is great: taking money from willing dupes is as old a humanity, but as the years role by it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain that anything more interesting than the release of the latest forumlaic blockbuster is going on.
Refuting this claim is easy: all you have to do is show a dozen or two cases of people who came away from TED changed in a some permenant and actionable way. People who didn't just go back to the same jobs doing the same thing in pretty much the same way. Does anyone have any data rather than anecdotes on this? It would be easy to prove my judgement wrong using it.
Besides deliberate job skill training and radical religious conversion, what educational media satisfy the "obvious change in lifestyle" test? Like any nonfictional media, the value is in perspective. Maybe you criticize newspapers and Scientific American on the same grounds, but otherwise I suspect you're holding TED to an unfair standard.
FWIW, I know my dad has taken useful insights from the occasional TED talk. The one about how the first follower is as important as a leader comes to mind.
> Seeing three makes you aware of how intolerably formulaic they are.
This is certainly true of you and me. However, I believe this is not true of the vast majority of people.
Making people think they are thinking while turning off their critical thinking skills is an accomplishment in propaganda, for sure, but I don't think most people realize it's happening.
Really cutting edge forums or salons do have a measurable impact on the world-- but they are simultaneously more exclusive (because the vast majority are not aware of them) and less exclusive (Because the vast majority are simply not interested, not because they're actually excluded.)
"taking money from willing dupes is as old a humanity"
I love that line. Well put. Reminds me of how Mark Twain actually made far, far more money on the public speaking circuit than as a writer. Granted, the writing is what got his name and celebrity going, but from what I read about him and his thoughts, it kind of surprised him that people would be willing to pay as much as they did just to hear him get up on stage and do his thing. Genius!
Turbo/Borland Pascal used a NUL-optional string format of length (byte IIRC) followed by data. [0]
Java IIRC also uses a length-oriented format for string constants in .class files. [1] It's been a while since I wrote a .java to MIPS asm compiler in C++ from scratch (don't ask).
This is because real-world strings may contain 0 to N NULs and escaping them is too much of a PITA for serialized formats, so it's easier and common to do things like TYPE LENGTH DATA de/serialization. For modern, efficient binary de/ser, check out binc and msgpack [2,3].
Low-level code often omits high-level intended behavior (description, pseduocode, documentation, test cases, etc.) and semantic meaning like variable names. In such styled codebases, the absence of these makes it harder to refactor, reuse and/or modify than say concisely & precisely documented codebases in higher-level languages (Python, Ruby, Go) or quality asm.
As an aside: Michelin Red guides are like Yelp, but Francophile-centric, uses dedicated reviewers instead of crowdsourcing and without the extortion. The issue with Michelin is that places outside France aren't rated very often (6 months to 2 years). And like a newspaper, the physical Red guides get outdated as soon as they're printed. Most people are better off with Yelp, especially if they can determine whether an establishment pays the Yelp "tax" or not. Speaking of which, a great personal project would be an invite-only, private Yelp scraper that doesn't play by the "tax" ranking rules (don't get busted by keeping it anonymous, obviously).
Try this at home (and only at home), on a signal generator:
EAS combined tone (TV) 853 Hz sine-wave + 960 Hz sine-wave ("+" means simply combine both waves together, neither modulation nor any other fancy convolutions)
Stanford has its own cogen steam and chilled water (underground "ice cube") capabilities, in addition to power generation. Many such campuses use the industrial central plant model because it's cheaper and more efficient at scale. Residential areas could leverage this and other utilities (like internet) if people get out there, organize and develop compelling, sustainable operational (quasi-business) models that can compete with for-profit. Because it doesn't make sense to have an entire neighborhood with excess internet capacity and individual wifi boxes, having to have one "own" of everything is demonstrably wasteful compared to "sharing economy" alternatives. (Steam and chilled water as well, since temperature regulation is usually the number one energy consumer in a household without an EV.)
People with the least power tend to desire assertion of control of minutia and others (probably a sizable portion of LEOs). By contrast, people with more power delegate and are fine to live with the decision of others because it doesn't matter. It's like the guy that won't pull over and ask for directions, or the small coffee shop that has a key to use a restroom (permission-based, control-freak culture, e.g., dog people) instead of an internal lock (delegation, freedom, e.g., cat people).
Wasted energy is the absence of strategic laziness.
