When film critic Roger Ebert lost his lower jaw to cancer, he lost the ability to eat and speak. But he did not lose his voice. In a moving talk from TED2011, Ebert and his wife, Chaz, with friends Dean Ornish and John Hunter, come together to tell his remarkable story. [Ted Talk video - 20minutes]
posted by hippybear on Apr 21, 2011 - 10 comments

Am I supposed to be laughing or taking notes? Comic Charles Fleischer, who played Carvelli on Welcome Back, Kotter and voiced Roger Rabbit, gives a Ted talk which degenerates into what appears to be a dissertation about the number 37 and its relationship to string theory, delivered in a rapidly shifting sequence of accents; watch the audience get more and more uncomfortable as they try to figure out whether they're watching a stand-up routine, a Kaufmannesque prank, or a guy going crazy right before their eyes. TED should have known what they were getting; Fleischer has been performing some form of this routine for decades. (Warning: numbered suit.) Transcript of the routine. Fleischer's strange myspace page. (Warning: strange music/talking on click which I can't figure out how to turn off.)
posted by escabeche on Aug 12, 2010 - 17 comments

Tan Le shows off a headset that reads your brainwaves in action. [more inside]
posted by cthuljew on Jul 23, 2010 - 34 comments

UC Irvine neuroscientist James Fallon gives talks about the biological traits of psychopathic killers using brain scans and genetics. When his mother suggested he should look into his own biological traits, Dr. Fallon discovered that he has an inactive orbital cortex -- a common trait for psychopaths (pdf). He also found that he has all five gene variants linked to aggression, and is related to two infamous murderers. So, why isn't he a killer? He attributes it to nuture.
posted by jabberjaw on Mar 18, 2010 - 52 comments

"Kcymaerxthaere is the name of a parallel universe that shares, to some degree, our physical planet." Its historical markers can be found on the sea floor off Scotland, in Berlin, or all over America; historical sites include Embassy Row in Paris, Illinois, Krblin Jihn Kabin at Joshua Tree in California, and the Rock Wall of Stoan Orange Glef in Spain. A blog chronicles new installations. (via "The Believer") [more inside]
posted by Zed on Feb 4, 2010 - 22 comments

Mike Rowe gives a Ted Talk about an epiphany he experienced on Dirty Jobs and what he considers modern American society's war on work. [more inside]
posted by Turtles all the way down on Dec 9, 2009 - 99 comments

As turmoil continues in Iran, with protesters and members of the opposition party empowered by Twitter and camera-equipped cell phones, Clay Shirky gives a TED Talk on the emerging global era of bottom-up journalism, including the phenomenon of the transfer of social technology patterns from the second and third world to the first. Previously
posted by macross city flaneur on Jun 16, 2009 - 48 comments

No matter their approach, the typical French physician who accepted the notion of male hysteria continued to think that its victims were in some way sexually abnormal: "Thus, despite Charcot's innovative work, the male victim of hysteria in late-nineteenth century French medical imagination was still frequently envisioned as an effeminate heterosexual, an overt homosexual, or a physical or emotional hermaphrodite." If not different sexually, male hysterics were said to be different in other ways, such as race or nationality, among whom African, African-American, south Asian, Arab, or Eastern European Jewish men predominated. Outside of France, other methods of denial appeared, such as the suggestion that male hysteria was restricted to Frenchmen. The medical literature of the time is full of evasions and denials and contradictions of the truths that Charcot had quite obviously demonstrated.

- Macho Misery, an extensive and interesting review of Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness. [more inside]
posted by Kattullus on Apr 26, 2009 - 8 comments