Category: TED

We have to face more competition from the east and should start being less arrogant and ignorant. And we should prepare that the dominance of the western civilization will end sooner than we think.

I regularily check the videos feed of TED, a platform for interesting, yet sometimes remarkable talks. A good friend once told me about this site and I’m always astonished how many mind-boggling individuals share their ideas and thinkings there. When I wrote about Saul Griffith and his website WattzOn! a while ago, this was one of these remarkable talks which influenced my thinkings and view of several aspects of my life.

Now, I want to share another video with you, about a woman named Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist, who calls herself the “Singin’ Scientist”, and who talks about the experiences she had when she suffered a massive brain stroke. This stroke was caused by an exploding blood vessel in the left side of her brain, and it took her 8 years to recover from it.

“How many brain scientists have been able to study the brain from the inside out? I’ve gotten as much out of this experience of losing my left mind as I have in my entire academic career.” — Jill Bolte Taylor

Here is the video:

The average American uses 11400 Watts of power continuously. This is the equivalent of burning 114 x100 Watt light bulbs, all the time. The average person globally uses 2255 Watts of power, or a little less than 23 x100 Watt light bulbs.

These sentences are taken out of the introduction from the website of the talk “Energy Literacy and climate change” by Saul Griffith, which took place at this year’s ETech in early March. Griffith, inventor, genius and general mastermind, continues, where Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” stops: on each of us personally. And it is not less inconvenient to know how big the energy consumption of our first-world-lives actually is.

What follows is a small example from his talk, where he explains the energy and power basics to all the Mac addicts out there:

Energy is measured in Joules (J)
Power is measued in Watts (W)
1 Watt = 1 Joule / second

Lifting an apple from the ground to a table: ~ 1 Joule

Lifting 40 apples from the ground to a table: ~ 40 Watt

Running your Apple laptop takes 40 Watt.

(Source)

But I don’t like to condense this great work to just this one example. If you have a little spare time, take a look at Griffith’s work yourself – it will surely be an eye-opener for you if you have not understood or simply not cared about such things yet.

He licensed his materials under CC Attribution 3.0 US, so you can freely distribute and remix his work.