Some of you may be familiar with the TED conference. Others may not. For the latter of you, it is essentially a grand conference based on a noble goal: it was formed by a non-profit organization specifically to disseminate "ideas worth spreading".

These ideas run the full gamut between nifty little gimmicks such a Mathemagic to incredible presentations done by the most intelligent, knowledgeable, and eloquent men and women of our generation and generations past. The best of these presentations (in my opinion) take a simple idea or concept and turn it into an enlightening message... often one of hope.

One particularly amazing presentation is done by Hans Rosling, a Swedish medical doctor, academic, statistician and public speaker. And an utterly brilliant man with an utterly brilliant message about population growth and the gap between "the west and the rest", which we all know to be some of the biggest problems facing humanity today and in the future. He also gives us all a very real view about the state of the world and what the trends say about how it will progress.

If you have 10 minutes to spare, watch the whole presentation. You won't regret it, and it'll all make perfect sense by the end, I promise.

And, while you're at it, watch a bunch more TED talks... including Hans Rosling and the Magic Washing Machine, which I also found both entertaining and enlightening. It's about global industrialization. Yeah... you kind of have to watch it to understand.

Other interesting videos:

Hans Rosling: Let my dataset change your mindset

Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?

Stephen Hawking: Asking big questions about the universe

Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story <-- This one is 19 mins but particularly worth watching.

In hindsight, I should have done a whole thread on "Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story".

Chimamanda Adichie is a Nigerian novelist with an astounding message. It's utterly fascinating and inspiring, and absolutely everyone should watch it.

Here's a quote from 13-ish minutes into the presentation, when she talks about some of the hardships her and her family had to suffer living in Africa: "... all of these stories make me who I am. But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience, and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are not true... but that they are incomplete."

That speech by Chimamanda Adichie is amazing.

Thanks for sharing.

I absolutely love the TED stuff... it really gives me hope for the future of this blue ball of psychos. Not too long ago I saw one of them in which the presenter showed this neat survival thing which could basically purify muck into water and cost like, pennies. His solution to getting clean water to people who need it? Don't rely on expensive and slow shipping of clean water, give people the filtrative means to create their own clean water from existing water supplies, and ship that.

Awesome presentations.

305547 I really have to thank you on that! I needed something like that kind of analytic projection by which to know what kind of world the future is in. It helps to give me ideas such as what countries would be friendlier to Equestria, what kind of markets there will be, and what countries would the HLF be capable of hiding in or more to the point, who would be willing to shelter them from the bronies and their allies? That presentation on "the danger of one story" was also helpful. It reminded me to make my bad guys three dimensional characters. (Some of them at least.)