Chris Abani wasn’t the last speaker of the day, but he kicks so much ass, I’m blogging him last.

Chris Anderson introduces him, saying, “Ten minutes into student production Abani was participating in, the soldiers came in. They gave him a statment to sign. He could either confess to treason, punishable by death, or he could send his classmates to prison. He’d already been to prison twice for a novel he’d written. So he signed the statement, and went to jail for the third time, this time to sit on death row.” Chris waits a beat. “He’s got material to write about.”

Abani tells us that when he grew up in Nigeria in the 1980s, a whole generation was protesting military dictatorship, not just him. Their protests taught him that the world is never saved in grand gestures, buth through small, soft acts of compassion. He tells us the South African word “Ubuntu” - the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back to me. We tend to feel like our humanity is transparent most of the time, like a window - sometimes we don’t notice the reflection until we catch an insect or a smudge on it.

He tells us of his mother, an English woman who was 5′2″ and incredibly feisty. Before she passed away she visited Abani in LA, and was disappointed by Malibu, he says. “Chad the surfer dude told us about the specials - it’s this great salmon in pistacio with a wasabi glaze, dude. My mother said, ‘What language is he speaking?’ and I said, ‘English, Mom.’ She said, ‘Oh these americans, we gave them a language, why don’t they use it?’”

His mother converted from Church of England to Catholicism to marry his father. And that’s how she found herself teaching the Billings ovulation method to Ibo women. Unfortunately her Ibo wasn’t very good, so she took Abani along to translate. He was seven. He points out that Ibo women never discussed these matters with their own husbands, so they found it a little odd to have a boy asking them, “how swolen is your vulva?” His father was afraid the experience would make him too feminine, but his mother declared, “Anything a man can do, I can fix.”

He, his siblings and his mother fled the Biafran war, travelling from camp to camp, fending off soliders who want to take his nine year old brother as a boy soldier. His mother didn’t cry that whole year. But as they were flying to England, stopping in Lisbon, his mother was stopped by a woman who wanted to know why her clothes were so threadbare. She explained their story, and the woman emptied her suitcases, giving the family all the clothes and toys she carried. Her mother wept then, saying, “the simple act of kindness from a complete stranger will not stitch you.”

His father stayed behind. And when they returned to the village, each year, they sang the names of the war dead when planting rice. And when they harvested, they sang the names of children who had been born that year. “In this way, the women enacted a lot of transformation.”

“Before the genocide in Rwanda, the word for rape and for marriage was the same. But now it’s the women who are rebuilding that nation.” Under Apartheid in South Africa, the government buildings had no women’s toilets. “Apartheid was the matter of men.”

To become an Ibo man, men are taught to be men in ways that means they are not women, which mostly means killing animals. “Hey, it’s an agricultural lifestyle - you can’t go to Whole Foods.” As a young man, he was told to kill a goat. He brough a friend, a former child soldier named Emmanuel. His friend saw him, unable to kill the goat “which had eyes like a child, and bleated like a human being.” And then Emmanuel covered the mouth and the eyes of the goat, allowing him to kill it. “To someone who’s seen so much, this must seem like such a quotidian experience, but he found a way to help me. He never made fun of me. He just said, ‘It will always be difficult, but if you cry like this every time, you will die of heartbreak.”"

Abani’s birthday is two days after Christmas, so he rarely got presents. A visiting priest asked him where his birthday present was, so his father, embarrased, sent the boy upstairs, saying, “Take one thing from my suitcase and that will be your present.” his father figured he’d choose a book; he chose an inflatable sheep, and carried it downstairs, “with my finger where it shouldn’t be.” His mother was agitated, but the priest said, “It’s alright, Daphne - I’m Scottish.”

As the room stops roaring from that joke, he tells us about his cellmate in prison that last time. His name was John James and he was 14 years old. He was being held for ransom, because someone in his family had committed a crime. And he was a comics nut, who had smuggled a copy of X-Men and one of Spiderman with him. In the evenings, he taught the hard men on death row to read - “There were these hardened criminals reciting’ ‘Take that, Spidey.’”

John James didn’t really understand death row and believed they’d get out. “They killed him. They handcuffed him to a chair, nailed his penis to a table, and let him bleed to death. That’s how I ended up in solitary, because I made my feelings known.”

The Ibo, he tells us, would build their own gods. “If the god became unruly and asked for human sacrifice, the Ibos would destroy the god. This is how they came to reclaim their humanity.”

“Every day, we are building gods that have gone rampant. We should start knocking them down and forgetting their names.”

Ben Zander is introduced as the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra - he corrects Chris twice. He’s the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic, and you get the sense that people mix the two up a lot. (I heard him do the same thing over lunch today.)

He begins with a story: Two salesmen went to Africa in 1900s to see if there was any opportunity to sell shoes. One wires home, “Situation hopeless - they don’t wear shoes.” The other wired back, “Wonderful opportunity - great need for shoes.” There’s a similar situation with classical music, he says, “Either it’s dying, or you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Sitting down at the piano, he offers a short piece, played as if by a seven year old. It’s a struggle. He offers other interpretations, as older and older students… and then finally as an eleven year old, plays it fluently. “It’s about impulse,” he explains. The young students are putting an impulse on every note, then on every other, then every fourth or eight. Finally, the maturing student puts on one impulse per phrase, allowing a fluent rendition.

As he plays fluently he finds himself tipped over to the side. “The music pushed me over.” When you move with a phrase, your body moves in front of the piano. He tells the story of critiquing a performer - “You’re on both buttocks. You need to play on one buttock.” An entrepreneur watching the class told him later he’d re-tooled his entire business to “a one buttock venture”.

He estimates that of the 1600 people attenting TED, 45 are passionate about classical music. A larger group probably doesn’t mind classical music. And an even bigger group never listens to it. Finally, there’s a group that thinks they’re tone deaf. “You cannot be tone deaf. If so, you couldn’t drive stick shift or tell an Englishmen from a Texan.”

Throwing down a challenge, he tells us he’s not leaving until we all love classical music. A leader can do this because he truly believes others will believe his vision. “Imagine Martin Luther King saying, ‘I have a dream - I don’t know if the others will buy it.’”

He plays a Chopin prelude, working throught the logic of the piece, the tension between the B and the C… the deceptive cadences at the end of the piece… the resolution that reminds us “we all know where home is.” He announces, “That’s one buttock playing.”

When he performs it, he asks us to think of someone we lost. Doing this exercise at a school in Ireland, during the troubles, he wondered if people would appreciate the piece. A young man came to us afterwards and said, “My brother got shot in the troubles last year. I didn’t cry for him, but when you played that shopping piece, I cried.”

He closes his presentation, telling the story about a woman who was taken to Auchswitz with her brother. On the train, she scolded her younger brother for forgetting his shoes. As it happened, it was the last thing she ever said to him. When she survived the camps, she declared, “I will never say anthing that couldn’t stand as the last thing I ever said.” It’s not possible, he tells us, but “it’s a possibility to live into - and that’s why we’re at TED.”

Zander has more tricks up his sleeve. Chris asks him back to the stage and he teaches us to sign Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, giving us a phonetic spelling of the piece on the screen. As we begin to learn the piece, he tells us a story about a student, who was auditioning for a cello job in Spain. He played well, but not well enough. Zander told him to let go, play with his heart, and he attacked the piece, sweating and thrashing and played beautiful. Zander told him, “Play that way.”

The student went to an audition and blew it. Zander asked what happened and he said, “I played the first way. But they I was so focking pissed, I went an auditioned for a first cello job in Madrid and played the second way. I got that one, for twice the money.” Zander advises us to “get beyond the fock” and sing with passion, and we all do.

David Griffin is the director of photography for National Geographic magazine. To talk about the power of images, he shows us some of the best photojournalistic images published in National Geographic. Of twelve images, including Steve McCurry’s famous photo of an Afghan refugee, and an amazing shot by Nick Nichols of Jane Goodal touching an ape, one was an amateur, submitted through Geographic’s new amateur site, Your Shot.

Photography is a reminder of how the mind freezes a significant moment. He tells us a personal story - he was teaching his son to swim, and was pulled out by a riptide. “I have a flashbulb memory of the jetty”, and his son’s terror, the specific wave that broke over him as he rescued his son. That sense of flashbulb memory is what happens when a photo connects with a viewer.

Griffin believes that everyone has one or two great photos in them, but that the powerful narratives that can be created by photojournalism require being able to get these great shots all the time, and to be able to put them together into narratives.

A National Geographic photographer travelled to Zakouma National Park in Chad, thinking he might get a picturesque story about wildlife. Much of the photography was done with “trigger traps” that catch movement past a camera. In snapping thousands of wildlife images, the photographer decided to focus on a matriarch elephant, who they named “Annie”. They follow Annie and her herd as they migrated out of the park, into the arms of hunters, and she was killed for her tusks, along with twenty members of her herd. The photographs told a long, complex story that couldn’t be told any other way.

Sometimes you need a sweeping picture to understand a story, like the devestation of overfishing. A photo series included pictures of the bycatch, shot from below - dead, waste fish being dumped into water. It includes photos taken at incredible risk of a trawler net scraping the ocean bottom. And we see African fish markets, where traders sell heads and spines, because the fillets have all been exported to Europe.

James Natchwey told a story about the system used to treat injured soldiers in Iraq, “a tube that runs from the battlefield back into the States.” He shot field hospitals, the hospitals in Germany where people were reunited with their families, the recouperation in VA hospitals in the US. It ends with pictures of people being fitted with high-tech prosthesis, and attempting to get on with their lives.

And sometimes these stories are just plain fun. Paul Nicklen went to shoot a story on leopard seals, some of the most feared predators in Antarctic Oceans, known for harming researchers. The seals specialize in eating penguins - “Think of it as the Munch of the penguins.” As he swam in the ocean with these seals, a mother seal took pity on him and began bringing him live penguins. Evidently she wondered, “What is this big thing doing in the water, not eating penguins?” She dropped penguins on his head until she finally gave up in frustration.

There’s nothing like a picture to capture stories like this one.

Peter Diamandis shares a wonderful, brief story with us, and a terrific photo. He runs a business that allows people to experience weightlessness via parabolic flight. He was able to give professor Stephen Hawking the chance to experience weightlessness - they brought a large medical team, expecting that Hawking might have physiological problems in space. He had such fun, the team ended up taking him through eight different parabolas.

It’s pretty unmistakeable that that’s joy on his face.

Anthropologist Helen Fisher is always a popular speaker - she appeared at TED two years ago, speaking about her research on the brain functions associated with love. Her talks alternate between MRI images and long quotes from romantic poetry.

She’s studied people who are happily in love, people who’ve been dumped recently and people who are still in love, twenty years into marriage - she puts them into functional MRI machines and studies their brain structure, trying to understand what parts of the brain are triggered by love.

She offers the story of a Mayan leader, who had temples built in his honor and that of his wife. On the solstice every year, his temple shadows hers at sunrise, and hers shadows his at sunset. “After 1300 years, these lovers still touch and kiss from their tomb.”

Love, she tells us, is dangerous. In college students, 95% report that they had dumped someone who really loved them. The same bnumber had been dumped by someone they really loved. “Most people don’t get out of love alive.” Love can be pain - she quotes a Kwakaiutal Indian poem told to a missionary: “Fire runs through my body with the pain of loving you, Pain runs through my body with the fire of loving you.” Emily Dickinson told us “Parting is all we need to know of hell.”

In her research on people in love, she’s seen activity in the VTA area of the brain, a center that produces dopamine. Dopamine is part of the brain’s reward system, part of the reptilian core which is associated with wanting, motivation, focus and craving. The high from it can be as powerful as cocaine - you literally
can’t stop thinking of that other human being.

She’s also put people who’ve been recently dumped into a functional MRI - “it’s hard to do - some of them are a real mess”. Their brain areas also show activity in this area associated with romantic love. It’s hard to give up on “life’s greatest prize - an inappropriate mating partner.” She says it’s easy to understand crimes of passion - these chemicals give us great energy, focus and motivation, including a willingness to take inappropriate risks.

This love drive, she tells us, is different from the sex drive. That drive simply wants us to spread our genes around, finding as many partners as possible. In love, we’re more selective. All animals are, she believes. Animals will reject partners as “too old, too young, too stupid.” In a box in a lab, one might mate with any partner, but in the wild, there’s some sort of attraction, even if it’s only seconds long.

Why do people fall in love with specific others? There are extensive studies demonstrating that we tend to marry people from similar backgrounds. But who within that set of people with similar socioeconomics? She’s now running an experiment on Chemistry.com, her dating website, which asks questions that try to determine the levels of four brain chemicals and see how they’re related to who you choose to date and marry.

She closes by talking about the ancient nature of love. Women’s intimacy, she tells us, is face to face, perhaps because women are nursing children, splitting attention between them and their friends. Men’s intimacy tends to be side by side, probably from looking at prey. “Love is deeply embedded in the brain.”

Historian Walter Isaacson, the president of Aspen Institute, wonders what the future of narrative will bring. He points out that narrative has gotten the short end of the stick lately - people complain that narratives are “imposed” on facts. He likes to believe that we weave a narrative instead.

History is chronology, ahd chronologic time is linear, which tends to work better in an analog world. Isaacson points out that storytelling used to be significantly more collaborative. When Homer wrote his masterworks, they were told aloud, and could be augmented and extended by hs listeners. In the middle ages, it was common for scribes to add to the tales they told. And when actors took the stage at The Globe Theatre in London, they would elaborate and improvise around the Bard’s prose.

“The printing press makes narrative less collaborative and less iterative. It’s carved in lead, if not in stone.” The same thing happens in cinema - we’re set in celluloid, and performance is no longer participatory.

Digital media isn’t much different, Isaacson believes - “it’s old wine in new skins.” Much online writing is just old forms moved online - blogs are not that different from opeds, and Youtube isn’t much more than video.

Collaborative narratives like Wikipedia are different. Isaacson approves of the Wikipedia biography of Einstein, as he’s written his own biography, and he’s impressed by the ability of groups to create new novels and narratives in a collective way. He promises that his new book - on Louis Armstron - will be written specifically for an electronic reader. Not only will it have embedded multimedia, but it will allow for footnoting and opinion added to the text. He admits he’s not sure of the model for making money from these new texts. He’s also optimistic about vitual reality games and second life, where users control the narrative.

Ze Frank isn’t very collaborative, but he’s certainly entertaining. He tells us that Chris Anderson asked him whether to call the conference ” Big Questions” or “Big Answers”. He points out that “Big Answers” has a lot fewer hits on Google, because many people don’t what to hear the answers to big questions. “Schrodinger’s wife: ‘Honey, where’s the cat?’”

“A question is a complicated way of announcing your stupidity.” He invites us to consider different versions of the question mark. including the hanging question mark. You’re not supposed to answer it, and pretend you never heard it: “Does this blank make my blank look blank?”

His mother asked, “Are you really that much of an idiot?” The answer - “Yes I am. And if you ever start thinking differently, start asking more questions.”

We get two quick talks on the future of automobiles. Felix Kramer fom Calcars.org shows off his amazing hacked vehicle, a Toyota Prius that’s been modified to plug into 120 volt power. For short commutes, the electric power provides all the power, but “if I want to go to the mountains, I’ve still got gas.”

The vehicle gets 100 miles per gallon on average. And the power generated by electric utilities is a lot cleaner than burning fossil fuels and getting cleaner as electric utilities upgrade their facilities. He wonders why hackers need to build these cars and why manufacturers aren’t working hard to bring them to market.

Larry Burns from GM Research shows some of what the auto companies are up to. He shows off a Chevy Tahoe, modified by researchers at CMU, to compete in the DARPA urban challenge. The car literally drives itself, moving completely autonomously.

The competition involved eighty teams, each of whom thought they could build a vehicle that could navigate a sixty mile urban course, obeying all traffic laws, stopping in intersectoions and merging. Eleven teams made it to the finals, and the Chevy Tahoe - named “Boss” - won the $2m prize, completing the course in less than six hours.

Why does this matter? It could make driving much safer, give people their commuting time back and allow us to use our transportation infrastructure better, “bringing sustainabile mobility to more people.”

Chris Anderson knows better than to screw around with MacArthur “genius grant” winner Sue Goldie - she’s a third degree blackbelt in Tae Kwon Do. She gives us some of her life story - the child of a young teen mother, a foster child, a medical student who studied public health by taking a train back and forth from New Haven to Boston while raising two children. “it reflects the tension in my life between caring for individual patients and working on the big problems through public health.”

Her talk focuses on the effectiveness of various public health strategies. She studies HIV, Hepatitis and HPV - Human papilomavirus - but focuses on HPV for the sake of this talk. All these diseases affect low, middle and high income countries, and all have long latency periods, which is a very serious challenge for epidemiologists to model.

Of the many strains of HPV, two have a high chance of causing cervical cancer through persistent infection. As a decision scientist, she’s interested in figuring out what interventions are most appropriate and cost effective around the world. Right now, the US tests for HPV and cervical cancer via annual pap smears - this is very effective, but very expensive. She’s interested in three other interventions:
- a low tech visual inspection screening that costs $2
- a higher tech test that requires $4.50
- a vaccine against two types of HPV that costs $120

To decide between these interventions, you need to build and test models that “simulate the natural history of the disease.” These models need to match the real world. In Kenya, for instance, the cost of administrating tests for HPV is hugely affected by the travel time and costs for the women affected. If you don’t go into the field and test these models, you simply get them wrong. She and colleagues test their models against real-world data, like cancer incidence by age.

The goal of these models is to test cost effectiveness of these interventions. The ratio considered is the gain in health over the cost od intervention. She looks at the difference of these interventions in different environments. “$50,000 would buy a total of 23 weeks of life expectancy in the US, but would buy 1000 years of life expectancy in Kenya” by buying new interventions.

These sorts of models are useful in negotiating with drug companies. She’s been able to discover that bringing the HPV vaccine down to $12.25 a dose is quite unhelpful in the developing world - at $0.55, it’s quite realistic. This allows negotiators to set intelligent targets for drug prices.

She reminds us that, as a decision scientist, waiting has a cost - HPV will kill thousands of women and cost years of productivity. With a little work, she can tell you precisely how many lives lost and how little money we’d need to screen for HPV around the world.

Chris Anderson - the other one, the guy who edits Wired Magazine and wrote The Long Tail - takes the stage with a misbehaving mini-blimp. It’s the latest iteration of “the minimum UAV project”. UAV is “unmanned aerial vehicle”, and Anderson is basically trying to build a predator surveillance drone for far less than the $4 million they cost.

“Geeks like solving problems. And geeks like robots.” He and his geeky friends have built prototypes - first around model airplanes and cellphones, now around mini-blimps. The blimps have cameras, sensors and can navigate courses defined by radio beacons. They’re being developed open source by a community located at DIYdrones.

Futurist Peter Schwartz is needled gently as he takes the stage. He authored “The Long Boom”, which host Chris Anderson observes, “sold very well in 1999, and no so well in 2000″. Schwartz isn’t afraid of making very big statements about the future, and starts with a quote from Paul Valery - “The future isn’t what it used to be.”

He observes that many smart, successful people are pessimistic about the future. He asks the audience who believes the future will be worse than the present - half the hands go up. “Many people have lost confidence in the future,” he tells us. “But I have a mother who survived Auchswitz and a father who was a slave laborer - it would be churlish and ungrateful of me not to provide a better future for my kids.”

The future is very different from the past, because we reinvent the future. But we can often learn from history - he recommends looking back twice as long as you’d like to look into the future, looking back a century to predict the next fifty years, due to the pace of change. If we look back a century, we see an amazing technological boom - the radio, the telephone, airplanes. The world was integrating and it looked incredibly positive. Then we faced the worst half century in history - a great depression and two world wars. And lately, it’s been pretty decent.

Extrapolating from that, he tries to ask four big questions about the future?

- Will we have another huge global war?
- Will economic groth continue?
- Will the fruits of growth be evenly spread?
- Will we destroy our environment?

Schwartz goes on to give quite optimistic answers to each of these questions. He predicts that there will be no global war because the interests of major global powers are aligned, and because wars are caused by “honor, fear and interest”. China lends us money and builds stuff - we buy it. “They save, we spend”. He argues that “China and India are the beneficiaries of the world system: and have no desire to upset it. And it’s good news for us - “what if China hadn’t rescued Morgan Stanley?” Militarily, we want to avoid conflict with China, and we now see China and the US cooperate with joint naval exercises to protect the straits of Malaca.

He’s optimistic about economic growth, believing we can create a global knowledge economy. He pulls up the old “Nigeria versus Singapore” slide and explains that Nigeria squandered its natural resources, while Singapore invested in knowledge industries and has boomed.

He’s less optmistic about closing the gap between rich and poor. “The rich will continue to get rich faster, The question is whether we can deliver people out of poverty.” Here he’s inspired by China and India and their ability to deliver people out of poverty. And he argues that the BRIC countries will deliver at least 3 billion people from poverty by 2050. “Wikipedia is the most important anti-poverty tool” because it allows people in poor countries to experience the cutting edge of knowledge.

Technology, he believes, will allow us to continue growing without wiping out the planet. The human population will top off at 9 million, and we’ll all get more affluent. So we need to build technology that uses less and less energy to give us increased quality of life. He sees hope in the technologies talked about today at TED. “How dare we be pessimistic? Maybe the future is better than it used to be.”

Chris isn’t convinced, and asks whether people will want higher affluence as they see how the rest of the world lives. Schwartz assures us that most people just want to see their children have better lives and that we won’t descend into global class warfare.

We’re not the only bloggers working here at blogger alley. There’s a team from Perceptive Pixel and from Autodesk, who’ve got a gorgeous multitouch display. They’re filling it with computer-generated sketches, summarizing these sessions. It’s a lovely interface and I’m glad we’re getting some Peter Durand-style graphic summaries of these sessions as well.

The afternoon begins with a product demonstration from Jim Marggraff. He asks some large, goofy salesman questions:
“What would you say to yourself as a child? What if a severely aphasic person could learn to speak better?
What if you could learn a second language for les than $50? What if you could instantly recall anything you wrote or spoke?”

His new product, Livecribe, is a computer in a pen. It captures what you write and records what you speak, using audio inputs and 1 or 2 gigabytes of memory. Hook the pen up to a computer with a USB cable, and you can do lovely things, like hear what you were saying when you wrote a certain phrase, or translate words on the page into different language and hear them read to you. It will launch in a month for $149, and with a toolkit designed to help developers build novel applications around it.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has a thing against randomness. In his book, the The Black Swan, offers a very simple argument. To prove it’s simplicity, he tells us that Israeli investor Yossi Vardi challenged him to explain what he was talking about while standing on one foot. He’d had a bunch to drink, so he declined. But he offers his argument no:

“Everything I talk about is the difference between Mediocristan and Extremistan. In Mediocristan, the median matters. In Extremistan, the extremes matter.” The rest of his book, he tells us, is simply driving that message home. He explains further - take a group of a thousand people. Add one really fat guy. How much does the median weight change - not much. This is the basic principle of science, the law of large numbers. Add a very wealthy person to the mix - he changes the mean a great deal. That’e extremistan.

Nassim is formerly a wall-street derivatives trader. He argues that stock option trading is all about extremistan. Unfortunately, financial people believe we live in mediocristan. But no one believed there were black swans until someone discovered one in New Zealand.

He offers a difference between industries. A dentist has to drill teeth - even if you’re very good, you’re not going to drill 2-3 million teeth in a year and make a huge amount of money. But authors can - JK Rowling wrote one book, but made immense amounts of money because people kept printing copies. “Information is from extremistan - it’s subject to winner-take-all effects.” Five to forty-five novel a year are responsible for half of all book sales. Eight to 250 companies combined have half the total market capitalization. And this appears to be getting worse.

Nassim speaks of “the ludic falacy” - the real world is not random like dice. People fall victim to
“the turkey fallacy”. The butcher lets you live for a thousand days, but he kills you on the final day - it’s a surprise for you, a black swan. But it isn’t a surprise for the butcher. The moral is, ‘Don’t be a turkey.’”

in finance, past rare events don’t predict future rare events. He tells us that investors make money for ten years, then lose it all in year 11 - they claim they faced a “once in ten thousand years scenario”. But actually, they’re in a turkey industry, an industry subject to lots of black swans. “Banks have never made money - they give up all their money in ‘rare events’” like the 1982 banks crash. He urges us to invest in reverse-turkey businesses, ones that benefit from black swans.

Most of his scorn is reserved for economic pundits. “Never take advice from someone wearing a tie - the experts are not experts.” He believes that economic forecasting is totally unbelievable. “We live in a world that’s like driving a car blindfolded.”

His advice - don’t disturb a complex system. “You don’t see the links between action and consequences” - you invade Iraq and you can’t possibly imagine what happens. Leave nature alone, and lean on people with wisdom and great age to help navigate the shoals of history. He closes with images of Plato and Marx. “They wanted to force us to use our knowledge to make decisions. I want us to use our lack of knowledge, our understanding of our ignorance.”

Chris Anderson is frustrated with the talk, and asks for concrete advice on how to tell mediocristan from extremistan - he doesn’t get much help working through those questions.

Richard Preston, the author of the best-selling The Hot Zone, has a thing for redwood trees. It’s easy to understand the attraction. The sequoias found in the temparate rain forest of the north coast of California, are the tallest living organisms on earth, at over 380 feet tall.

These trees are in intense danger from liquation logging. And the removal of these trees is the destruction of complex and unexplored ecosystems. The way to explore them is to climb them, which requires an amazing array of techniques that Preston, his family and friends have begun specializing in. He tells us that “t the base of a redwood tree, you’re not seeing the organism,” just a tiny part of it.

The leading redwood researchers, Preston tells us, are Steve Sillett and Marie Antoinne. Sillett became fascinated by the trees when told in a biology class that the redwood canopy was a “redwood desert”. He and a friend climbed one tree with aids, then leapt across to a giant redwood and climbed to the canopy with their fingers in the bark. His companion, who followed him, made a similar leap and landed on a wasp’s nest. He almost fell to his death fighting off the insects.

The techniques are better refined these days - Sillett and other climbers use a bow and arrow to shoot fishing line into the trees, then pull climbing lines up on the fishline. Preston has begun climbing the trees with his children, and is discovering ways to combat his fear of heights -”humans appear to be the only primates afraid of trees.” His children, who climb with them, are so unafraid that they camp out in “treeboats”, platforms hundreds of feet about the ground.

At these heights, the ecosystem of redwoods is anything but a desert. The trees are filled with epiphytes, lichens and other organisms that crowd the branches and make it difficult to move around. “It’s like scubadiving on a coral reef, but you’re going up, not down.” In some of the higher canopies, you’ll find huckleberry bushes which form “huckleberry afros”.

When redwoods grow, they do so by “reiteration”, a fractaline process where branches grow like tree trunks, with limbs turning into smaller trees. “If humans did this, we’d have five litte people on each hand,” says Preston. (Maybe he can ask Craig Vetner for help with that project.) Branches can form flying buttresses, supporting the huge masses leaning up against on another.

The trees are capable of amazing ecological feats. When the tree rots, it can send rots into its own rot, drawing nutrients - “It’s like we could draw sustenace from ourselves if we had gangrene.” In the canopy of these trees, there can be “canopy soil” up to a meter deep. In that soil, we can find unnamed species, including thousands of crustaceans - copepods that we usually are used to seeing in the deep ocean.

These ecosystems can be destroyed amazingly quickly. He shows us photos of the damage that’s happened to eastern Hemlock forests from the Hemlock Wooly Adelgid, an Asian parasite that’s caused enormous damage to southeastern forests. “It’s the ebola of the trees. And it might not just kill all eastern hemlock, but kill off a complex ecosystem.”