(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California.)
Robert J. Lang is an origami artist (origami: the ancient Japanese art of
paper-folding). He uses maths to analyze folding patterns and create
origamis with hundreds of folds and sophisticated curves. Most people still think that origami is flapping birds made of paper, but it's really become something much more sophisticated -- thank to mathematics. Origamis, Lang explains, revolve around crease patterns, and they all have to obey four laws: colorability (you can color them so that two colors never touch), always even folds (the number of folds always varies by two), alternate angles; and layer ordering (no matter how you stack a sheet, it can never penetrate a fold). If you obey these laws, you can do amazing things. And indeed, here are some of the origamis showed by Lang -- they're all single-sheet folds:
This has also allowed the creation of origami on-demand, including graphics, ads, and commercials. This for example is a video ad for Mitsubishi: everything in the ad is an origami, except the car:
The "extreme folding" structures developed for origamis turn out to have applications in medicine, science, and engineering: things like packing airbags, heart implants and spaceship and space telescope parts into the smallest possible places. "An origami, someday, may even save a life".
Writer Amy Tan -- American of Chinese descent -- has written a series of bestselling novels, including "The Bonesetter's Daughter" and "The Kitchen God's Wife". She's also written children books and has appeared in The Simpsons. She focuses on the creative process, journeying through her childhood and family history looking for hints of where her own creativity comes from. The value of nothing: out of nothing comes something. That's an essay she wrote when she was 11 and got a B+. How do we create? She shows a triangle with corners at Nature, Nurture and Nightmares. Some people would say that we're born with it; others that creativity may be a function of some neurological quirk; part of it also begins with a sense of identity crisis (why I am not Black like everything else in my school class?), with childhood traumas, with expectations. "This led to my big questions: why do things happen, how do they happen, and how do I make them happen? When I look at creativity, my inability to repress associations with everything about me is key". She goes off doing a comparison between quantum mechanics and creativity: "you've alot of unknown; dark energy and dark matter; the observer effect -- if you try too hard what you're hoping to find by serendipity at the end is no longer there; ambiguity; multi-dimensions. Much has to do with intention. You notice disturbing hints from the universe, and then in a way I knew that they've always been there. What I need in effect is a focus. When I have a question, I have a focus, and all these object go through that question. You think that there is some coincidence or serendipity that you're getting all this help from the universe, but it really is that now you've a focus. Why am I here? When I look at all these things that are morally ambiguous, it seems so obvious, and yet it is not. We all hate moral ambiguity, and yet it is so necessary in writing a story, it's the place where I begin. Luck, chance of course, and accidents also play a role, often a mysterious role. How do I create something out of nothing? By questioning, and acknowledging that there are no absolute truths. By thinking about luck and fate, coincidences and accidents, God's will and the synchrony of mysterious forces. By thinking about our role. By imagining fully and becoming what is imagined. And that's how I find particles of truth. So there are never complete answers. Or if there is one is it to remind myself that there is uncertainty in everything, and that's good. And if there is a more complete answer, it is to simply imagine. Imagination is the closest thing to feeling compassion"..
Richard Preston is one of the few humans to have climbed Hyperion, a nearly 115-meter-tall redwood tree that is the tallest thing living on Earth. Discovered in 2006, it is located in a remote area of the Redwood National Park in California (the exact location has not been disclosed to protect the tree's ecosystem). He is the author of "The wild trees", about the still-not-well-known forests of the American Northwest.
The north coast of California has rainforests. Sequoias (photo left) are the tallest organisms on Earth, these are trees that could stand out in midtown Manhattan. The oldest living redwoods are perhaps 2500 years old, roughly the age of the Parthenon. In the 1970s to the early 1990s, most of that forest has been cut down in bursts of logging. Now about 4% of the original rainforest remains -- and it's still under-explored. About 30 feet (10 meters) is the diameter of a big redwood, articulating itself upwards into space for over 330 feet (110 meters). This species moves at "redwood time". To us they seem to be immobile, but they continue to move, to develop. Preston began climbing these threes with his children, sleeping there, discovering a whole ecology in their branches (Preston calls it "canopy soil") with growing complexity, flying buttresses (redwoods grow back into themselves to strengthen the crown of the tree), a fractal-like capacity to reiterate (to repeat their shape again and again), but also deadly parasites that are killing off trees and possibly a whole ecosystem of Eastern hemlocks in the Northwest.
What can the redwoods tell us about ourselves? They can tell us about human time, the flickering and the shortness of it.
Chris Abani is a Nigerian writer and political activist (twice imprisoned and tortured in his country). His 2004 novel "GraceLand" is a bitterly funny tale of a young Nigerial Elvis impersonator in Lagos. Abani was a speaker at TEDGLOBAL in Tanzania, last year.
My search is to find stories of everyday people that transcend us, that don't look away at the reality: we are never more beautiful than when we are ugly. What I've come to learn is that the world is never seen in the grand gestures, but in the accumulation of the simple, soft, selfless acts of compassion. In South Africa they say "Ubuntu": the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me. Which means that there is no way for us to be human without other people.
So Abani tells stories of people. People standing up to soldiers wanting to kill them. People being compassionate. People being human, reclaiming their humanity, recognizing that we are surrounded by amazing people, who offer all of us the mirror to a whole humanity.
Benjamin Zander has been for almost 30 years the conductor of the Boston Philarmonic -- and a speaker on leadership. He uses music to help people open their minds.
"There are people that think that classical music is dying, and others who think that we haven't seen anything yet. Rather than going into statistics of orchestras dying, we should do an experiment." He is on stage with a piano, and uses it to play Chopin and tell stories of musical learning and amazement, walking around on stage and down into the audience, and at the end of his speech, he gets the TEDsters to stand and sing Beethoven's "Ode to Joy". (They distribute the text written phonetically, but as a German speaker, I can't read it -- I'd never realized that if you speak a language, it's very difficult to read its phonetic rendering -- so I have to look up the original text: "Freude, schoener Goetterfunken...")
