12 replies to this topic

[Live Forever]

As a spinoff from The Best TED Talks, here is a place to list some of the best Google Talks you have seen.

There are currently a ton o Google Tech Talks videos listed on YouTube, as well as @ Google videos (Authors@Google, Candidates@Google, etc.) listed, so I would like to hear what people's favorites are. (and this isn't even including some of the older ones that are still on Google videos, but haven't been moved to YouTube yet, like one of Aubrey de Grey's 2 appearances)

You can either embed them or just link to them, but here is a place to discuss them.

Edited by Live Forever, 16 July 2008 - 06:48 AM.

[Live Forever]

First off, I suppose I will put both of Aubrey's talks for anyone that hasn't seen them yet.

"Prospects for extending healthy life - a lot":

(this one is only available on Google Vids, because it hasn't been moved to YouTube yet)

and

"Aging of the Other Genome: A Decisive but Ambitious Solution":

[Live Forever]

Also, I was watching a discussion of an Authors@Google talk with Ken Jennings, the guy who won so much on Jeopardy (plus has done a lot of other stuff since, writing books, going on other game shows, doing commercials, etc). It was pretty interesting to get his take on a lot of "nerdy" things.

[Athanasios]

I have to add "Winning the DARPA Grand Challenge"

and "7 Ways to Ruin a Tech Revolution"
Note: Watcher beware this is a lawyer speaking so there is a lot of talk of patent law, etc.

[modelcadet]

It's pretty imperative that everyone here check out the Science Commons introduction @ Google. It's about patent/copyright law, but such things are direly important right now.

Another favorite is Thad Starner's living testimony on the current state of cyborg technology and culture. He has many useful ideas for transhumans regarding interfaces in mobile computing.

Edited by modelcadet, 29 May 2008 - 08:04 AM.

[Live Forever]

Great ones so far, guys. Thanks for mentioning that Darpa Grand Challenge one, Chris; That is one of my all time favorites. (If people find it interesting, they should follow up with the information on the Urban Challenge that followed it, which was discussed on Imminst when it happened.)

I haven't watched the ones you posted yet, modelcadet, but I intend to this weekend. I am sure they are good.

Edited by Live Forever, 29 May 2008 - 05:50 PM.

[Mind]

I thought this one was pretty interesting, about how to use untapped human brainpower to help computers with tasks such as image recognition. He (Luis von Ahn) threw out some pretty funny one-liners in the beginning.

[Live Forever]

Aah, yes. That is another terrific one, Mind. I remember seeing it awhile back and was astonished at the level of productivity that you can get from it.

Along the same lines of using untapped brainpower (or at the very least, tapped to do something productive when they would be doing the task anyway) was the motivation for my suggestion on ImmInst adopting reCaptcha to help with their project on digitizing books. (using the captcha when someone signs up for a new account since we use a captcha system anyway) Unfortunately, like many of my great ideas, it didn't go anywhere.

Edited by Live Forever, 29 May 2008 - 07:17 PM.

[Live Forever]

Crossover post with this one from The Best TED Talks thread on ants. This one is much more in depth than the other one and is entitled "How Ant Colonies Get Things Done". I find ants extremely interesting, so I might have liked this more than some people.

[Live Forever]

Here is one that will interest a lot of people here. It is a talk from a true cyborg on coming human enhancements in the near future. (medical and otherwise)

[Live Forever]

I found this talk on digital disease detection pretty interesting:

[Live Forever]

Professor Charles Bamforth (Author of "Grape vs Grain") on beer and beer making. (and why beer is so much better than wine) I learned a lot about the world's greatest drink from this video.

(Note: The video skipped for me 3 or 4 times at about the 3 minute mark or so, but the rest of the video was smooth.)

[eternaltraveler]

Robbert Bussard "Should google go nuclear?"