TED video list

Beautiful TED videos I have seen till date:

1. Emily Levine: She is a trickster (I am still unaware of what that is) but she looks to be beautifully open minded lady. awfully witty, loves connections (me too me too!), likes to cross boundaries.
http://www.ted.com/talks/emily_levine_s_theory_of_everything.html

2. Jill Bolte Taylor: Simply what our brain is capable of is shown here! recites her experience of a stroke. beautiful possibilities !
http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

3.David Gallo: Underwater astonishments.
Life that you've never seen before! short clip
http://www.ted.com/talks/david_gallo_shows_underwater_astonishments.html

4. Karen Bass: Informative, beautiful. Nature. BBC and NATGEO footage. short clip

 http://www.ted.com/talks/karen_bass_unseen_footage_untamed_nature.html

5. VS Ramachandran. Simple and ingenious! [brain]
http://www.ted.com/talks/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_mind.html

6. Daniel Wolpert: why we developed brains in the first place. for movement he says. nice, simple and brilliant experiment
http://www.ted.com/playlists/1/how_does_my_brain_work.html

7. this whole playlist. a brilliant one on how we learn to see... by pawan sinha
sarah jayne blackmore- workings of adolescent brains
allan jones- map of the brain.

http://www.ted.com/playlists/1/how_does_my_brain_work.html

8. oh yes. Boaz Almog- quantum locking and levitation!
http://www.ted.com/talks/boaz_almog_levitates_a_superconductor.html

The whimsical kid with constraints!

Suppose there is a boy, 15-16 years of age, in a moderate sized city, just out of X grade. He wears Reebook, Woodland shoes; Wrangler, Lee jeans; Levi's Tee Shirts; drives a brand new Honda automatic scooter/ motorcycle. He has a wallet in his jeans pockets, yes he has, and it contains money of the order of hundreds of rupees. (this is to be inflation-adjusted to present time from like 2003-04; yes it is gonna need significant fucking adjustment! Add a touch screen mobile phone as well.) Mobile phones in itself were new, and even if kids did have them, it wasn't expected to be any higher-end than a nokia 1100.

So yes, this boy. He has friends from school. When there were uniforms. The great thing about uniforms is that it is by and large uniform! The cloth quality might differ, but your innocence has yet not been ripped apart by consumerism, hence, to the child's eye they are pretty much the same. Now, these uniforms did a wonderful job, a job of screening out affluence (or the lack of it) as a decisive factor for friendship. Friendships were friendships. Then, we graduate school. Then, we move to the realm of no uniforms. To the realm of tuitions and travelling and "hanging out".

Where you hung out, depended on- very critically- the amount of dough on your person. I say on your person to include the case of not owning wallets at all; for what do you need a wallet for if all you need to store couldn't exceed 10 rupees? That too was in case of a flat tyre. . . on your cycle. Coming to the hanging out bit, once or twice for the sake of school friendship, the above mentioned kid (the one without the wallet on his person) would hang out with the kid mentioned higher above, at cool and chic places. Now these places had menu cards designed to make the eyes pop out, of the kid mentioned above. And the kid mentioned above, for some inexplicable reason, did not like much the process of popping-out-of-eyes. Whimsical, one might find this peculiar dislike!

So, in a alarmingly short course of time, he learns to forget his old friends. No, it is not all bad; he meets friends, lets just say, more closer to the constraints of boy # 2! There could be two broad kinds of kids facing these constraints- those naturally forced on the kid, or artificially by their guardians. Now the nuances of the existence of constraints matter not; and that matters greatly. Because, in the falling out mentioned in the previous paragraph, it is a matter of great debate and discussion as to who might lose out more, but I opine kid # 1. And because #2 - the guardians of type b, who artificially forced constraints on their kid, advertantly or inadvertantly helped them reach a larger base of fellow kids, quite simply.

Parents of kid #1, or the kid #1 himself when turned a parent (let's hope in the course of time never had to face constraints) would not, nay might not, understand the significance of not fucking loading up his kid with cash or kind (kind being accessories bought by cash, ample of it), and could quite simply skip reading this write up, but having known real gems falling in the type of kid#2, I would urge anybody considering rearing kids, to give this write up a tiddy-biddy bit of thought. Just saying.