Tag Archives: tedyouth

Components

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Here’s the first slide of my TEDYouth talk from Saturday. It was time consuming but fun to draw all those hands and tiny items of various sorts. The whole talk was about what I call “hidden structures”, which in a sense is what my field (high energy physics, particle physics, cosmology, string theory, etc.,) is all about. To help motivate it all, I started by talking about opening up your smart phone and figuring out how it works by taking it apart and discovering the components inside, and using the rules of how to put them together to deduce the structure of other things (see that second stage of the slide being delivered on stage*).

Since I’m hugely into getting people to learn by really getting stuck into things […] Click to continue reading this post →

So Good They Named It Twice

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Well, it is great to be back in New York. Multiple times this year – hurrah! I’ve just got back from the Times Center where all the speakers have been running through their talks to smooth out kinks of various kinds (technical glitches, run time, etc). The senior TED people are here sitting in the auditorium and one by one we come up and go through things to give us a chance to get familiar with the stage, and to hear any thoughts or comments. (See tiny picture on the left.) People have done really good jobs preparing, and so most comments are simply ones of congratulations, with some small suggestions here and there with regards points of confusion, or sound levels, or run time. We’ve got six minutes. You heard me right – I must explain all of particle physics and research in string theory in six minutes. I like my challenges… Well, I spent a lot of time designing the content of the talk […] Click to continue reading this post →

Slow but steady…

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…Progress? I hope so. I lost about 7 hours yesterday. Hours that I’d planned for working on the slides for TEDYouth and (mostly) finishing them. There was a weird problem on the computer I use that seemed to seep into Illustrsator as well. Somehow dragging a file to copy or move it somewhere else would not work, and this meant that in Illustrator if you tried to drag an object to a new position, it would fail to complete the operation, generating a copy in the place you moved it to but not erasing the original… It would then freeze. I tested this out in so many different ways to see that it was not damaged objects or files… then eventually decided to reinstall the entire operating system (Lion). Of course, this is no […] Click to continue reading this post →

Magnify!

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Somewhere in there, somehow, I am keeping my head above water…just. But then I decide on something equivalent to tying extra weight to my ankles. Last week, while deciding on what I would talk about in the short time I have, I decided to do the whole TEDYouth talk graphic novel style of course… Which means hundreds of drawings… Why do I do this to myself? (I can recycle some of this for The Project, I suppose…) So I sat in the sun on Saturday afternoon […] Click to continue reading this post →

TEDYouth Approaching!

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Ack! As you know, it has been an incredibly busy semester for me, but I still try to find time to tell you a bit of what is going on. Not long ago I got an email from the TED people asking me if I’d like to talk at one of their events. This event is for young people, called TEDYouth. It’ll be on November 17th. Well, this is such a good cause – how can I not do this?

TEDYouth speakers photoYou can see the announcement of the “incredible lineup” of speakers on TED’s site here. (I linked the photomontage they used there.) I’m looking forward to being in the audience to hear some of these guys talk!

So of course, I now find myself a week behind where I should be in terms of preparation, and in the middle of a whole bunch of other deadines… […] Click to continue reading this post →