Dear Prime Minister Harper, Please Watch This Now

Whatever your feelings about Bill Gates and Microsoft, you have to admit that the dude is smart.  This is a long clip at ~30 minutes, but the meat is all in the first 20.  It’s about the need to develop new electricity production NOW, and how a new nuclear technology looks like a good bet.

Throwing a bone to the Marketing angle, Bill does a great job of presenting PhD-level concepts at an undergraduate pace:  he preserves the academic authority but illustrates it in a joe-average way.  Know your audience.

Advertisement

Child Endangerment – I’m All For It

If you have 9 minutes, 20 seconds to spare, I highly recommend that you watch this video, especially if you have young children.

It’s a talk given by a fellow named Gever Tulley, a (childless) computer scientist who also runs a summer camp where he teaches kids to “tinker.”

He’s not a super-great speaker, but I think he makes some excellent points. His talk is called, “5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kid Do.”

As an aside, and related to my old post about how not to use PowerPoint (or Karaoke), note that there are no words in his slide show, other than the section titles.

This talk is hosted on the TED site. TED stands for technology, entertainment, design. It is an annual conference that features really interesting people sharing amazing ideas in less than 18 minutes. (This one by Gever isn’t an “official” TED talk, which is why it’s shorter. It’s also why he’s not nearly as riveting as most TED speakers.) The 240+ past presenters include magicians, activists, scientists, businesspeople, artists, musicians, and much more. Bono, Branson and Bezos are a sampling just from the letter B. It’s a leisure-time black hole – every single session on this site is one I want to watch, but alas even 18 minutes is often too much to carve out of a day.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to teach my 7-year old daughter to drive.