TED Day 2: What is Life?

The day begins at 8:15 with a presentation from Craig Ventner who is creating synthetic life!!! followed by a DNA expert that spoke for 18 min about folding DNA. I had no idea what he was saying but the session closed with an incredible presentation from Doris Kearns Goodwin the phenomenal biographer of Abraham Lincoln, JFK, LBJ and the Roosevelts. Clever to have a biographer close a session on "what is life?" She spoke beautifully about history, but won the audience over with her story about how she as a young girl would race home from school and listen to the Dodgers games on the radio keeping score and recording the game so that she could tell her father every detail of the game when he got home.

Thomas Krens, the Director of the Guggenheim Foundation talked about what is beautiful about art. An evolutionary psychologist spoke about why we find things beautiful. Another Physicist spoke about why gravity and matter is beautiful (not sure what he was saying either)

The afternoon was all about Evil.

A terrorism expert on how poorly prepared we are for an attack, a journalist who spoke about human rights and doing things differently who pitched for Obama too much and Philip Zimbardo who is conducted the now famous Stanford Prison Experiments that studied the psychology of evil and power. He showed horrific pictures from Abu Ghraib where the soldiers acted exactly as they had in his experiments from the 70s when he put a group of students in charge of a group of prisoners with no supervision. He at least ended with some hope that people can learn heroism the same way they learn evil.

The day ended with the TEDprize winners. Inspired.

At the after party, a very funny moment when John Hodgman from the Daily Show and the PC from the MAC commercials told me that he loves Netflix but cant stream movies because he only has a MAC.

Cool party- Matt Groening who created the Simpson was telling jokes and drawing autographs all night. (he is holding court in the picture above. Joy Luck Club author Amy Tan in yukking it up)