Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the "golden age of piracy" - from 1650 to 1730 - the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda-heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can't? In his book Villains of All nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence to find out. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then - plucked from the docks of London's East End, young and hungry - you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O' Nine Tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.

Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied against their tyrannical captains - and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls "one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century." They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed "quite clearly - and subversively - that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy." This is why they were popular, despite being unproductive thieves.

PirateMonkey

The words of one pirate from that lost age - a young British man called William Scott - should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: "What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirating to live." In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."

ToARRisPirate

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish-stocks by over-exploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea-life is being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia's unprotected seas. The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."

This is the context in which the men we are calling "pirates" have emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a 'tax' on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia - and it's not hard to see why. In a surreal telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was "to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters... We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas." William Scott would understand those words.

No, this doesn't make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters - especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But the "pirates" have the overwhelming support of the local population for a reason. The independent Somalian news-site WardherNews conducted the best research we have into what ordinary Somalis are thinking - and it found 70 percent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence of the country's territorial waters." During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington and America's founding fathers paid pirates to protect America's territorial waters, because they had no navy or coastguard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is this so different?

Pirate Chicken

Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn't act on those crimes - but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world's oil supply, we begin to shriek about "evil." If we really want to deal with piracy, we need to stop its root cause - our crimes - before we send in the gun-boats to root out Somalia's criminals.

The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know "what he meant by keeping possession of the sea." The pirate smiled, and responded: "What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor." Once again, our great imperial fleets sail in today - but who is the robber?

POSTSCRIPT: Some commenters seem bemused by the fact that both toxic dumping and the theft of fish are happening in the same place - wouldn't this make the fish contaminated? In fact, Somalia's coastline is vast, stretching to 3300km. Imagine how easy it would be - without any coastguard or army - to steal fish from Florida and dump nuclear waste on California, and you get the idea. These events are happening in different places - but with the same horrible effect: death for the locals, and stirred-up piracy. There's no contradiction.

Thanks to Huffington Post for the article, to Darin for the link & to the anonymous image creators for the fun :)

Worldwide one of a kind, the Vegetable Orchestra performs on instruments made of fresh vegetables. The utilization of various ever refined vegetable instruments creates a musically and aesthetically unique sound universe.

The Vegetable Orchestra was founded in 1998. Based in Vienna, the Vegetable Orchestra plays concerts in all over the world.

There are no musical boundaries for the Vegetable Orchestra. The most diverse music styles fuse here - contemporary music, beat-oriented House tracks, experimental Electronic, Free Jazz, Noise, Dub, Clicks'n'Cuts - the musical scope of the ensemble expands consistently, and recently developed vegetable instruments and their inherent sounds often determine the direction.

Although selecting the chimpanzee as the touchstone of hominid evolution represented a great improvement, at least one aspect of the former model did not need to be revised: male superiority remained the natural state of affairs. In both baboons and chimpanzees, males are conspicuously dominant over females; they reign supremely and often brutally. It is highly unusual for a fully grown male chimpanzee to be dominated by any female.

Enter the bonobo. Despite their common name--the pygmy chimpanzee--bonobos cannot be distinguished from the chimpanzee by size. Adult males of the smallest subspecies of chimpanzee weigh some 43 kilograms (95 pounds) and females 33 kilograms (73 pounds), about the same as bonobos. Although female bonobos are much smaller than the males, they seem to rule.

Sex, it turned out, is the key to the social life of the bonobo. The first suggestion that the sexual behavior of bonobos is different had come from observations at European zoos. Wrapping their findings in Latin, primatologists Eduard Tratz and Heinz Heck reported in 1954 that the chimpanzees at Hellabrun mated more canum (like dogs) and bonobos more hominum (like people). In those days, face-to- face copulation was considered uniquely human, a cultural innovation that needed to be taught to preliterate people (hence the term "missionary position"). These early studies, written in German, were ignored by the international scientific establishment. The bonobo's humanlike sexuality needed to be rediscovered in the 1970s before it became accepted as characteristic of the species.

Bonobos become sexually aroused remarkably easily, and they express this excitement in a variety of mounting positions and genital contacts. Although chimpanzees virtually never adopt face-to-face positions, bonobos do so in one out of three copulations in the wild. Furthermore, the frontal orientation of the bonobo vulva and clitoris strongly suggest that the female genitalia are adapted for this position.

BonoboSexPlay

Another similarity with humans is increased female sexual receptivity. The tumescent phase of the female's genitals, resulting in a pink swelling that signals willingness to mate, covers a much longer part of estrus in bonobos than in chimpanzees. Instead of a few days out of her cycle, the female bonobo is almost continuously sexually attractive and active.

Perhaps the bonobo's most typical sexual pattern, undocumented in any other primate, is genito-genital rubbing (or GG rubbing) between adult females. The diversity of erotic contacts in bonobos includes sporadic oral sex, massage of another individual's genitals and intense tongue-kissing. Lest this leave the impression of a pathologically oversexed species, I must add, based on hundreds of hours of watching bonobos, that their sexual activity is rather casual and relaxed. It appears to be a completely natural part of their group life. Like people, bonobos engage in sex only occasionally, not continuously. Furthermore, with the average copulation lasting 13 seconds, sexual contact in bonobos is rather quick by human standards.

That sex is connected to feeding, and even appears to make food sharing possible, has been observed not only in zoos but also in the wild. Nancy Thompson-Handler, then at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, saw bonobos in Zaire's Lomako Forest engage in sex after they had entered trees loaded with ripe figs or when one among them had captured a prey animal, such as a small forest duiker. The flurry of sexual contacts would last for five to 10 minutes, after which the apes would settle down to consume the food.

One explanation for the sexual activity at feeding time could be that excitement over food translates into sexual arousal. This idea may be partly true. Yet another motivation is probably the real cause: competition. There are two reasons to believe sexual activity is the bonobo's answer to avoiding conflict.

First, anything, not just food, that arouses the interest of more than one bonobo at a time tends to result in sexual contact. If two bonobos approach a cardboard box thrown into their enclosure, they will briefly mount each other before playing with the box. Such situations lead to squabbles in most other species. But bonobos are quite tolerant, perhaps because they use sex to divert attention and to diffuse tension.

Second, bonobo sex often occurs in aggressive contexts totally unrelated to food. A jealous male might chase another away from a female, after which the two males reunite and engage in scrotal rubbing. Or after a female hits a juvenile, the latter's mother may lunge at the aggressor, an action that is immediately followed by genital rubbing between the two adults.

2BonoboPlayful

Apart from maintaining harmony, sex is also involved in creating the singular social structure of the bonobo. This use of sex becomes clear when studying bonobos in the wild. Bonobos are unique in that the migratory sex, females, strongly bond with same-sex strangers later in life. In setting up an artificial sisterhood, bonobos can be said to be secondarily bonded. (Kinship bonds are said to be primary.) Although we now know HOW this happens--through the use of sexual contact and grooming--we do not yet know WHY bonobos and chimpanzees differ in this respect. The answer may lie in the different ecological environments of bonobos and chimpanzees--such as the abundance and quality of food in the forest. But it is uncertain if such explanations will suffice.

Human family life implies paternal investment, which is unlikely to develop unless males can be reasonably certain that they are caring for their own, not someone else's, offspring. Bonobo society lacks any such guarantee, but humans protect the integrity of their family units through all kinds of moral restrictions and taboos. Thus, although our species is characterized by an extraordinary interest in sex, there are no societies in which people engage in it at the drop of a hat (or a cardboard box, as the case may be). A sense of shame and a desire for domestic privacy are typical human concepts related to the evolution and cultural bolstering of the family.

Yet no degree of moralizing can make sex disappear from every realm of human life that does not relate to the nuclear family. The bonobo's behavioral peculiarities may help us understand the role of sex and may have serious implications for models of human society.

Just imagine that we had never heard of chimpanzees or baboons and had known bonobos first. We would at present most likely believe that early hominids lived in female- centered societies, in which sex served important social functions and in which warfare was rare or absent. In the end, perhaps the most successful reconstruction of our past will be based not on chimpanzees or even on bonobos but on a three-way comparison of chimpanzees, bonobos and humans.

ApesComparison

Social Organization among Various Primates

BONOBO

Bonobo communities are peace-loving and generally egalitarian. The strongest social bonds are those among females, although females also bond with males. The status of a male depends on the position of his mother, to whom he remains closely bonded for her entire life.

 

CHIMPANZEE

In chimpanzee groups the strongest bonds are established between the males in order to hunt and to protect their shared territory. The females live in overlapping home ranges within this territory but are not strongly bonded to other females or to any one male.

 

GIBBON

Gibbons establish monogamous, egalitarian relations, and one couple will maintain a territory to the exclusion of other pairs.

 

HUMAN

Human society is the most diverse among the primates. Males unite for cooperative ventures, whereas females also bond with those of their own sex. Monogamy, polygamy and polyandry are all in evidence.

 

GORILLA

The social organization of gorillas provides a clear example of polygamy. Usually a single male maintains a range for his family unit, which contains several females. The strongest bonds are those between the male and his females.

 

ORANGUTAN

Orangutans live solitary lives with little bonding in evidence. Male orangutans are intolerant of one another. In his prime, a single male establishes a large territory, within which live several females. Each female has her own, separate home range.

To read the original article "Bonobo, Sex & Society" by Frans B. M. de Waal in its entirety

And something quite disturbing about the fate of Bonobos that I found at the end of this article... 

Now a self-esteem coach who specializes in mind/body issues, Redmond has made a career of helping women and teenage girls get over what she calls their body demons. Her goal for them is summed up in the title of her 2001 book: "Feel Good Naked."

It's not about naked for naked's sake, she says it's about the amazing confidence that comes with being at ease in your own skin.

She Feels Good Naked

DEBORAH WAY: Let's be clear here: You're not advocating some kind of nudist revolution, correct?

LAURE REDMOND: (Laughs) No, streaking is not going to make a comeback as a result of my message. I just want women to feel good about their bodies so they can feel good about themselves -- because when a woman feels good naked, it shows. She has an allure that comes through in the way she moves or talks or laughs. Her confidence isn't rooted in her clothing size or facial features but in her attitude -- fun, delightful, free.

WAY: That sounds fabulous.

REDMOND: Yes, but it's not easy. For lots of women, even the word "naked" brings huge discomfort. I was volunteering at my child's school once when another mother, who had heard I was an author, asked me the title of my book. When I told her, she set down the envelopes she'd been stuffing, grabbed her purse, and left the building without saying another word.

WAY: Did that surprise you?

REDMOND: Unfortunately, no. I'm no longer shocked by negative reactions to the idea of nakedness. I call it naked fear. We button up. We shut ourselves down. We have an overwhelming paranoia about fat. We can't be free with our forms. 

WAY: Getting over our horror of our bodies must make things better in the bedroom.

REDMOND: Oh, yes. What's sexy in the bedroom is when you love your stuff, when you want to share it with your partner. But that's really just a bonus -- it's much broader than that. Being comfortable naked is the ultimate expression of self-confidence. If you're okay with being nude, you can take yourself anywhere in the world.

NoNakedSquirrelpants

WAY: Where do you start?

REDMOND: Often, at the beginning. I don't mean that facetiously. I mean that it can be really helpful to reconnect to a time when you weren't always blaming yourself -- when you believed in and loved yourself. And for many women, that time will turn out to be back in childhood.

WAY: What about someone who had an abusive or otherwise truly horrible childhood?

REDMOND: Even if your childhood was a total nightmare, the fact is you were a creature with enough gusto to get where you are today. Many women accept the opinions and judgments of others too quickly, which undermines self-esteem and personal power. But women who feel good naked have the ability to tap into their own source of self-love, without depending on the affirmations of others. A woman who feels good naked is a woman who's discovered her own definition of beauty. She knows that it's ultimately about personal attitude.

WAY: No doubt a lot of women would agree with that -- so long as you weren't talking about them. We can see beauty in others who aren't gorgeous in the conventional sense, but we're resolutely blind to it in ourselves.

REDMOND: That's because of our punishing culture. Men are rewarded for their bottom line; women, for their visuals. Our society is driven by an unrealistic ideal of physical beauty: More than 60 percent of American women are a size 12 or larger, yet we're bombarded by images of size 0s, which can fuel a barrage of insecurity and self-doubt.

Naked Lying On Street Spencer Tunick

Women from other countries have far healthier attitudes about the female form. I was in Puerto Rico recently with my husband, who rarely comments on other women's looks, and he was marveling at the number of beautiful Puerto Rican women on the beach -- women who by American standards would have been considered fat. I agreed with him.

WAY: How do you get away from those standards?

REDMOND: For one thing, turn off the TV -- especially if you find yourself biting your nails or eating a pint of ice cream while watching. Why spend the evening with actresses who remind you of what you visually aren't? Better to take a yoga class, sit down with a good book, or -- and this is my personal favorite -- watch a video of Tina Turner.

WAY: Why Tina Turner?

REDMOND: She was the source of my greatest body epiphany. I saw her perform in New York City in the late 1980s. She wore a black leather minidress and four-inch platform shoes, and watching her dance, I was transfixed. And then she stopped her electric gyrations, and I realized how substantial her legs were. They are bold and glorious, and she's turned them into art.

WAY: We can't all move like Tina, though...

REDMOND: No, but women who feel good naked approach life with that same spirit of boldness, that same use-it-or-lose-it zest. And by the way, that spirit is very sexy.

I know a professor in his 50s who's been single much of his adult life and who's had relationships -- or at least relations -- with many women, some in their early 20s. At a dinner party recently, he told me that sex with a woman over 40 is way more pleasurable and satisfying than sex with a younger woman -- because a woman with the joie de vivre that comes from having a bank of life experiences is a much bigger turn-on than a youthful body.

WAY: That's good to know.

REDMOND: I was delighted -- especially because part of my message is that the feel-good-naked lifestyle involves living with a sense of adventure. Eleanor Roosevelt was onto something when she said, "Do one thing every day that scares you." It doesn't have to be anything earth-shattering. I can't tell you how many of my former beets- or Brussels sprouts--hating friends have become converts in their 40s.

WAY: And what has that done for them beyond broadening their options in the produce section?

REDMOND: Eating is the most primal thing we do, and the way we do it inevitably carries over into other parts of our lives. It's the great metaphor. If you're going to try Brussels sprouts, you might be more likely to climb a mountain the next time you're on vacation. It's about breaking out of the fear zone. You're training yourself to move away from the world of "can't," "don't," "won't."

WAY: So women who feel good naked are adventurous eaters?

REDMOND: Adventurous, purposeful, and aware. I often hear women say they eat with blind abandon in an effort to avoid unpleasant feelings. Yet mindless eating will not eliminate these feelings. In fact, it compounds them, since in addition to carrying your mental pain, you won't be able to manage your weight effectively. Changing this destructive pattern means finding a balanced, sensible approach to eating that can become permanent because it's satisfying and sustainable.

Naked Food Sushi

WAY: The holy grail.

REDMOND: Yes. I'm still amazed by how many women let themselves be ruled by eating disorders -- not anorexia or bulimia, but things like cutting out whole food groups or routinely skipping entire meals.

Women try to avoid accountability with eating; they tend to believe in the magical thinking of random restriction. But this means their lives are directed by deprivation. No wonder we're obsessive and compulsive about food.

On the other hand, when you eat with purpose and awareness, it's such a relief. You're happier, calmer, not constantly bitchy or tense. Suddenly you can enjoy social outings more, you can be more conscious of your interactions with other people.

WAY: When it comes to food, then, we need to back off the crazy rules we make for ourselves. Be a little kinder to ourselves.

REDMOND: Absolutely. And "kindness" is a good word, because it brings up another characteristic of women who feel good naked: They're kind to other women.

WAY: In what way?

REDMOND: They can genuinely take pleasure in other women's success, happiness -- and beauty. Just the other night I was eating dinner with a group of women who were speaking about another woman in our community, an attractive woman, in such a mean-spirited way that I had to excuse myself from the table. The source of that mean-spiritedness was clearly the woman's physical appearance.

Guys Enjoying Running Naked

WAY: Because when you're miserable with your own body, you've doomed yourself to "compare and despair."

REDMOND: It's the distorted sense that looks are everything. And women who view each other this way do a disservice to us all. When my sister and her husband were in the process of separating, at least two acquaintances reacted by telling her, in disbelief, "But you're skinny!" -- as if her physique should have cushioned her from heartache. If you have friends who base everything on their own and other people's appearances, ask yourself what you're getting out of the relationship. If it's mostly stress, it's time to find different friends.

WAY: Have you found that women are judged more harshly by each other than they are by men?

Laure: Yes. And there's this, as well: I grew up in a houseful of women and now I'm growing older in a houseful of men, and I'm here to tell you that teenage boys might just be the vainest creatures on earth. They're every bit as freaked out by their pimples, bad hair, and extra weight as girls are.

It doesn't stop when they leave adolescence, either. We all know what bald men go through, and new research from Harvard University's McLean Hospital reports that up to 25 percent of adults with eating disorders are male. So the next time you start worrying that the man in your life is going to judge you, remember that he has insecurities of his own. And he'd probably love to feel good naked too.

By Deborah Way from "O, The Oprah Magazine," 2009.

Oh why oh why have I been bingeing on TED talks again? I promised myself I would quit watching the ecstatic series of head-rush disquisitions, available online, from violinists, political prisoners, brain scientists, novelists and Bill Clinton. But I can’t. Each hortatory TED talk starts with a bang and keeps banging till it explodes in fireworks. How can I shut it off? The speakers seem fevered, possessed, Pentecostal. No wonder I am, too, now.

A TED talk begins as an auditorium speech given at the multidisciplinary, invitation-only annual TED conference. (This year’s 25th-anniversary conference takes place next week in Long Beach, Calif.) TED then creates videos of the speeches and puts them online so they can find a broader audience — and usurp my life. There are around 370 speeches and counting on TED.com. A new one is added every weekday.

TED (which stands for “Technology, Entertainment, Design”) was founded in 1984 by the architect Richard Saul Wurman and his partners. Their first conference included one of the first demonstrations of the Macintosh computer. In 2001, TED was acquired and is now run by Chris Anderson, the new-media entrepreneur who started Business 2.0, among other magazines and Web sites. Giving a TED talk has become an opportunity for name-in-lights speakers to throw down, set forth “ideas worth spreading” and prove their intellectual heroism.

According to June Cohen, the executive producer of TED Media, the speeches were once filmed and cut for a TV pilot. (“The idea of a ‘lecture series’ wasn’t exactly greeted with enthusiasm by the networks,” she says.) But she had another idea when she brought on Jason Wishnow, an online-video virtuoso. Together, they made the TED talks streamable on the Web in 2006. In less than three years, the talks have become a huge hit, attracting sponsorship from BMW and others. Karen Armstrong, Jeff Bezos, Jared Diamond, Helen Fisher, Peter Gabriel, Jane Goodall, Stephen Hawking, Maira Kalman, Nellie McKay, Isaac Mizrahi, Jimmy Wales and Rick Warren have all given TED talks. As of this month, the talks have been viewed more than 90 million times.

SerenityPrayerParody

I have seen about 40. Let me say straight up that one of my favorites is “Simplicity Patterns,” by the designer John Maeda. His talk made clear to me the uncanny resemblance between a block of tofu (the kind Maeda grew up making in his family’s business in Seattle) and the I. M. Pei building that houses the M.I.T. Media Lab (where Maeda, who is now the president of the Rhode Island School of Design, used to work). Almost haphazardly associative, Maeda’s talk expresses respect for the mandate of the talks — to change the world — without becoming sententious. You get rapid, straight-to-the-bloodstream access to his mental life.

The other talk that does this poetically is Jill Bolte Taylor’s “My Stroke of Insight.” A brain scientist who studied the way she lost her own faculties during and after she suffered a stroke, Taylor urges the audience to pay attention to the sybaritic, present-tense right brain. Repeatedly, she recalls the pleasurable aspects of her stroke with such sensory precision that she seems to enter a rapturous trance. Not only do I buy her case for unfettered right-brain experience, but I began scheming to unfetter my right brain then and there.

While looking for your perfect TED talk, don’t make the mistake I first did. I started with the 10 most popular. If you do that, you could form the impression that TED talkers are nutcase bullies like the self-help entrepreneur Tony Robbins, who gave a menacing, abrasive performance in “Why We Do What We Do, and How We Can Do It Better.” Boasting about his renegade ways, he gunned through a series of piggish sophistries, only to fault fellow TEDster Al Gore — who was sitting in the front row, no less — for not making an emotional connection with the American electorate. (This was 2006.)

HeadInTheClouds

Once you start watching TED talks, ordinary life falls away. The corridor from Silicon Alley to Valley seems to crackle, and a new in-crowd emerges: the one that loves Linux, organic produce, behavioral economics, transhistorical theories and “An Inconvenient Truth.” Even though there are certain TED poses that I don’t warm to — the dour atheist, the environmental scold — the crowd as a whole glows with charisma. I love their greed for hope, their confidence in ingenuity, their organized but goofy ways of talking and thinking.

TED supplies its speakers with strict guidelines. “Start strong” is the most obvious one, and there is virtually no throat clearing or contrived thanking. Instead, speakers blaze onto the stage like stand-up comics, hellbent on room domination. Some consult notes and stay close by their audiovisual equipment — PowerPoint is used for emphasis, but it never directs the talks — while others pace, spread their arms wide and take up space. No one apologizes for himself. No one fails to make jokes. The appreciative room roars at humor, when they’re not literally oohing and aahing at insight.

It’s not easy to admit, then, that no single idea put forth in the TED talks seized me with its specifics. The necessary fiction at TED is that matters of substance — policy, practice, code — will emerge from the talks. But it’s unlikely that a plan to disarm Iran or treat autism will surface; there’s too much razzle-dazzle for brass tacks. What’s really on display is much more right brain, and that’s what I’ve come to be addicted to: the exposure to vigorous minds whirring as they work hard.

Right now I’m holed up on TED.com, sampling the talks. The TEDsters bellow their ideas at me, and I try to brook more stimulation. These are the people of the brain, after all, the understanders. They have only to chant some nostrums and cast rhetorical spells and I’m suddenly thinking some combination of It’s all going to be all right and The heck it is — but only I can stop it! Thanks, TED. I’m clearly inspired out of my mind.

__________

TEDISSIMO: At a TED conference, 80 speeches are given over four days. On your own, you can savor a choice few — or binge on way, way more. To get started, consider four sleeper favorites of the TED staff, all available at TED.com or on iTunes: Wade Davis(2003), Majora Carter (2006), Sir Ken Robinson (2006) and Hans Rosling (2006). The site is set up to let you run into other talks you’ll like.

SUPERFANS: Bloggers like to discuss which TED talks are the best, and their idiosyncratic lists are often more interesting than the “most popular” on the site. Nam-ho Park has a good list on strangesystems.com as does Tara Hunt at horsepigcow.com. The TED group on Facebook is another place to discuss the talks.

Probably the best way to start is to become a TEDster yourself & join me/we in shedding our addiction :)

According to their web site, the most recent PETA's ad—which features a 'bevy of beauties who are powerless to resist the temptation of veggie love'—was deemed too hot for the Super Bowl. NBC rejected the video because of concerns over "rubbing pelvic region with pumpkin," a woman "screwing herself with broccoli," and more! Read NBC's complete list of concerns and you can enter to win your own edible veggie love!

You be the Witness yourself of how many of those concerns & reasons are valid & what is a different way to bring attention & awareness to such important issues...