Day three, Day 2 of TED2010 proper.

Wow, brain hurts, too many clever people in this world. Where to start?

Day started with AKQA founder, Kirk Citron, laying out a brilliant new concept – www.longnews.org– which looks to highlight what news stories will be truly relevant in 50, 100 or 10,000 years time. What news will last? I bet real money it won’t be Michael Jacksons doctor.

Then author of the brilliant book “Denialism” – Michael Specter – gave us all an amazing and very entertaining talk on why human beings are increasingly rejecting scientific fact in favour of the blanket of lies and belief. Stunning stuff – “we leap into the arms of big pacebo”. Echinacea is tosh was the basic message.

Sam Harris then gave us a brilliant talk on the role that science could and should play in morality and belief, and why facts have a massive role to play in moral decisions and faith. He was very compelling; particularly his strong beliefs in why certain folk on this planet have no right whatsoever to have their views heard!

Elizabeth Pisani gave the second best talk of the day on her work looking at how we can combat HIV/AIDS and why people do stupid things, and why this contributes to the spread of disease from addicts, sex workers and politicians. Too complex to go into here but you should read her book “The Wisdom of Whores” (surely for the just the title alone).

Nicholas Kristakis was pretty cool. He has done some incredible work on the role of our social networks and how the people we know and know us can actually influence the spread of obesity, smoking and happiness. Well worth looking into.  In short if you hang about with fat people then you start to change your views about what constitutes normal body shape, and therefore more readily accept your own obesity leading to the spread of it. More complex than that but get him to explain it.

Valerie Plame Wilson (ex-CIA covert opps) then scared the living shit out of everyone by talking about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and how everyone should not have stopped worrying about this issue in 1990. The new film “Countdown to Zero” premiered at Sundance, and there is a special screening tonight in an hour that I’m going to (looking forward to not sleeping tonight for panicking). Worth heading to the URL : www.takepart.com/countdowntozero

Christopher “Moot” Poole was then very funny and very cool taking us through his site – 4chan. If you don’t know it then you should look it up. Massively influential meme spreader, and he still lived with his mum until last month.

Kevin Bales made sure there weren’t many dry eyes in the house in his exploration of the lives (or lack of them) of the 27 million (really, yes) slaves on planet earth today. The truly worrying bit was the shift from slaves being a valuable commodity to a disposable resource that has taken place. Historically a slave was worth the equivalent of $4000, but in 2010 a slave is worth only $90 (and this falls to only $5-10 dollars, PER HUMAN BEING, in some developing countries). But the great news was the stuff he was doing to eradicate it, and the stats that show that the % of the world in slavery is lower now than any point in human history. Definitely getting involved in www.freetheslaves.net

Then lunch, phew. I managed to get myself into a situation at lunch where I was with the founder of Twitter & the founder of Flickr at the same time (how to feel like an underachieving twonk). Then I escaped to eat my lunch with a lovely girl who it turned out had sold her website for $23million two years ago (felt even worse, although for some odd reason she wanted my email and phone number – perhaps she wants a cleaner).

LXD (League of Extraordinary Dancers) showed us all that breakdancing has come a long way since the Rock Steady Crew. All of our rubypseudo crew should look them up, they’d love them.

Jane McConigal then gave, in my opinion, the stand out talk of the day on online gaming and how if we harness the power of the gamers we can change the world. Brilliant, charming, entertaining, though-provoking with some truly amazing stats. Did you know that the members of World of Warcraft have spent a total of 5.93 million years playing the game???? (for context, it has been 5.93 million years since our Neolithic ancestors first stood on two feet). She was ace – and she wants to work with W+K as well in India, so watch this space. Her central thesis was that gamers have all the criteria and skills to change the real world for the better in the way they readily embrace ‘epic wins’ in the online space.

Further highlights of the day were:

–   Ex-Microsoft CTO Nathan Mythrold showing his supercool new machine that (get this) can identify, target and shoot mosquitos out of the sky with lasers (!!!!!) and thus could be a frontline tool for eradicating malaria. This was sci-fi on crack. Totally and utterly brilliant.

– Stephen Wulfram showing us the next generation search engine that makes google look like index cards. You have to see this to believe this: wolframalpha

– Seth Berkley showing us a potential super vaccine to eradicate flu that is not only effective but can be manufactured at a fraction of the cost of existing ones, and also can be created & deployed in weeks not months

– Mark Roth ended the day by wowing us with his clinical trials (now in human testing) showing us how he thinks he can put humans into suspended animation using hydrogen sulphide injections (er….)

Loads more happened but I’m tired of typing and you are probably more tired of reading.

The day ended with a piece of amazing corporate generosity when Larry Page from Google gave every TED attendee a brand new Nexus One smart phone.

Oh, and I got to catch up with the very lovely Sue Hoffman from Portland.

See you tomorrow.

Same place, same time.

Kev