data/en-de/dev2010/IWSLT.TED.dev2010.en-de.en.xml

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<doc docid="535" genre="lectures">
<url>http://www.ted.com/talks/al_gore_warns_on_latest_climate_trends</url> 
<description>TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: At TED2009, Al Gore presents updated slides from around the globe to make the case that worrying climate trends are even worse than scientists predicted, and to make clear his stance on "clean coal."</description> 
<keywords>talks, Natural resources, alternative energy, climate change, ecology, energy, environment, presentation, science, sustainability, technology</keywords> 
<talkid>535</talkid> 
<title>Al Gore: What comes after An Inconvenient Truth?</title> 
<reviewer></reviewer> 
<translator></translator> 
<seg id="1"> Last year I showed these two slides so that  demonstrate that the arctic ice cap,  which for most of the last three million years  has been the size of the lower 48 states,  has shrunk by 40 percent.    </seg>
<seg id="2"> But this understates the seriousness of this particular problem  because it doesn't show the thickness of the ice.    </seg>
<seg id="3"> The arctic ice cap is, in a sense,  the beating heart of the global climate system.    </seg>
<seg id="4"> It expands in winter and contracts in summer.    </seg>
<seg id="5"> The next slide I show you will be  a rapid fast-forward of what's happened over the last 25 years.    </seg>
<seg id="6"> The permanent ice is marked in red.    </seg>
<seg id="7"> As you see, it expands to the dark blue --  that's the annual ice in winter,  and it contracts in summer.    </seg>
<seg id="8"> The so-called permanent ice, five years old or older,  you can see is almost like blood,  spilling out of the body here.    </seg>
<seg id="9"> In 25 years it's gone from this, to this.    </seg>
<seg id="10"> This is a problem because the warming  heats up the frozen ground around the Arctic Ocean,  where there is a massive amount of frozen carbon  which, when it thaws, is turned into methane by microbes.    </seg>
<seg id="11"> Compared to the total amount of global warming pollution in the atmosphere,  that amount could double if we cross this tipping point.    </seg>
<seg id="12"> Already in some shallow lakes in Alaska,  methane is actively bubbling up out of the water.    </seg>
<seg id="13"> Professor Katey Walter from the University of Alaska  went out with another team to another shallow lake last winter.    </seg>
<seg id="14"> Video: Whoa!   Al Gore: She's okay. The question is whether we will be.    </seg>
<seg id="15"> And one reason is, this enormous heat sink  heats up Greenland from the north.    </seg>
<seg id="16"> This is an annual melting river.    </seg>
<seg id="17"> But the volumes are much larger than ever.    </seg>
<seg id="18"> This is the Kangerlussuaq River in southwest Greenland.    </seg>
<seg id="19"> If you want to know how sea level rises  from land-base ice melting  this is where it reaches the sea.    </seg>
<seg id="20"> These flows are increasing very rapidly.    </seg>
<seg id="21"> At the other end of the planet, Antarctica  the largest mass of ice on the planet.    </seg>
<seg id="22"> Last month scientists reported the entire continent  is now in negative ice balance.    </seg>
<seg id="23"> And west Antarctica cropped up on top some under-sea islands,  is particularly rapid in its melting.    </seg>
<seg id="24"> That's equal to 20 feet of sea level, as is Greenland.    </seg>
<seg id="25"> In the Himalayas, the third largest mass of ice:  at the top you see new lakes, which a few years ago were glaciers.    </seg>
<seg id="26"> 40 percent of all the people in the world  get half of their drinking water from that melting flow.    </seg>
<seg id="27"> In the Andes, this glacier is the  source of drinking water for this city.    </seg>
<seg id="28"> The flows have increased.    </seg>
<seg id="29"> But when they go away, so does much of the drinking water.    </seg>
<seg id="30"> In California there has been a 40 percent  decline in the Sierra snowpack.    </seg>
<seg id="31"> This is hitting the reservoirs.    </seg>
<seg id="32"> And the predictions, as you've read, are serious.    </seg>
<seg id="33"> This drying around the world has lead to  a dramatic increase in fires.    </seg>
<seg id="34"> And the disasters around the world  have been increasing at an absolutely extraordinary  and unprecedented rate.    </seg>
<seg id="35"> Four times as many in the last 30 years  as in the previous 75.    </seg>
<seg id="36"> This is a completely unsustainable pattern.    </seg>
<seg id="37"> If you look at in the context of history  you can see what this is doing.    </seg>
<seg id="38"> In the last five years  we've added 70 million tons of CO2  every 24 hours --  25 million tons every day to the oceans.    </seg>
<seg id="39"> Look carefully at the area of the eastern Pacific,  from the Americas, extending westward,  and on either side of the Indian subcontinent,  where there is a radical depletion of oxygen in the oceans.    </seg>
<seg id="40"> The biggest single cause of global warming,  along with deforestation, which is 20 percent of it, is the burning of fossil fuels.    </seg>
<seg id="41"> Oil is a problem, and coal is the most serious problem.    </seg>
<seg id="42"> The United States is one of the two  largest emitters, along with China.    </seg>
<seg id="43"> And the proposal has been to build a lot more coal plants.    </seg>
<seg id="44"> But we're beginning to see a sea change.    </seg>
<seg id="45"> Here are the ones that have been cancelled in the last few years  with some green alternatives proposed.    </seg>
<seg id="46">   However there is a political battle  in our country.    </seg>
<seg id="47"> And the coal industries and the oil industries  spent a quarter of a billion dollars in the last calendar year  promoting clean coal,  which is an oxymoron.    </seg>
<seg id="48"> That image reminded me of something.    </seg>
<seg id="49">   Around Christmas, in my home in Tennessee,  a billion gallons of coal sludge was spilled.    </seg>
<seg id="50"> You probably saw it on the news.    </seg>
<seg id="51"> This, all over the country, is the second largest waste stream in America.    </seg>
<seg id="52"> This happened around Christmas.    </seg>
<seg id="53"> One of the coal industry's ads around Christmas was this one.    </seg>
<seg id="54"> Video: ♪♫ Frosty the coal man is a jolly, happy soul.    </seg>
<seg id="55"> He's abundant here in America,  and he helps our economy grow.    </seg>
<seg id="56"> Frosty the coal man is getting cleaner everyday.    </seg>
<seg id="57"> He's affordable and adorable, and workers keep their pay.    </seg>
<seg id="58"> Al Gore: This is the source of much of the coal in West Virginia.    </seg>
<seg id="59"> The largest mountaintop miner is the head of Massey Coal.    </seg>
<seg id="60"> Video: Don Blankenship: Let me be clear about it. Al Gore,  Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, they don't know what they're talking about.    </seg>
<seg id="61"> Al Gore: So the Alliance for Climate Protection  has launched two campaigns.    </seg>
<seg id="62"> This is one of them, part of one of them.    </seg>
<seg id="63"> Video: Actor: At COALergy we view climate change as a very serious  threat to our business.    </seg>
<seg id="64"> That's why we've made it our primary goal  to spend a large sum of money  on an advertising effort to help bring out and complicate  the truth about coal.    </seg>
<seg id="65"> The fact is, coal isn't dirty.    </seg>
<seg id="66"> We think it's clean --  smells good, too.    </seg>
<seg id="67"> So don't worry about climate change.    </seg>
<seg id="68"> Leave that up to us.    </seg>
<seg id="69">   Video: Actor: Clean coal -- you've heard a lot about it.    </seg>
<seg id="70"> So let's take a tour of this state-of-the-art clean coal facility.    </seg>
<seg id="71"> Amazing! The machinery is kind of loud.    </seg>
<seg id="72"> But that's the sound of clean coal technology.    </seg>
<seg id="73"> And while burning coal is one of the leading causes of global warming,  the remarkable clean coal technology you see here  changes everything.    </seg>
<seg id="74"> Take a good long look: this is today's clean coal technology.    </seg>
<seg id="75"> Al Gore: Finally, the positive alternative  meshes with our economic challenge  and our national security challenge.    </seg>
<seg id="76"> Video: Narrator: America is in crisis -- the economy,  national security, the climate crisis.    </seg>
<seg id="77"> The thread that links them all:  our addiction to carbon based fuels,  like dirty coal and foreign oil.    </seg>
<seg id="78"> But now there is a bold new solution to get us out of this mess.    </seg>
<seg id="79"> Repower America with 100 percent clean electricity  within 10 years.    </seg>
<seg id="80"> A plan to put America back to work,  make us more secure, and help stop global warming.    </seg>
<seg id="81"> Finally, a solution that's big enough to solve our problems.    </seg>
<seg id="82"> Repower America. Find out more.    </seg>
<seg id="83"> Al Gore: This is the last one.    </seg>
<seg id="84"> Video: Narrator: It's about repowering America.    </seg>
<seg id="85"> One of the fastest ways to cut our dependence  on old dirty fuels that are killing our planet.    </seg>
<seg id="86"> Man: Future's over here. Wind, sun, a new energy grid.    </seg>
<seg id="87"> Man #2: New investments to create high-paying jobs.    </seg>
<seg id="88"> Narrator: Repower America. It's time to get real.    </seg>
<seg id="89"> Al Gore: There is an old African proverb that says,  "If you want to go quickly, go alone.    </seg>
<seg id="90"> If you want to go far, go together."    </seg>
<seg id="91"> We need to go far, quickly.    </seg>
<seg id="92"> Thank you very much.    </seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="531" genre="lectures">
<url>http://www.ted.com/talks/brian_cox_what_went_wrong_at_the_lhc</url> 
<description>TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: In this short talk from TED U 2009, Brian Cox shares what's new with the CERN supercollider. He covers the repairs now underway and what the future holds for the largest science experiment ever attempted.</description> 
<keywords>talks, astronomy, energy, exploration, physics, science, technology</keywords> 
<talkid>531</talkid> 
<title>Brian Cox: What went wrong at the LHC</title> 
<reviewer></reviewer> 
<translator></translator> 
<seg id="1"> Last year at TED I gave an introduction to the LHC.    </seg>
<seg id="2"> And I promised to come back and give you an update  on how that machine worked.    </seg>
<seg id="3"> So this is it. And for those of you that weren't there,  the LHC is the largest scientific experiment ever attempted --  27 kilometers in circumference.    </seg>
<seg id="4"> Its job is to recreate the conditions  that were present less than a billionth of a second after the universe began,  up to 600 million times a second.    </seg>
<seg id="5"> It's nothing if not ambitious.    </seg>
<seg id="6"> This is the machine below Geneva.    </seg>
<seg id="7"> We take the pictures of those mini-Big Bangs inside detectors.    </seg>
<seg id="8"> This is the one I work on. It's called the ATLAS detector --  44 meters wide, 22 meters in diameter.    </seg>
<seg id="9"> Spectacular picture here of ATLAS under construction  so you can see the scale.    </seg>
<seg id="10"> On the 10th of September last year we turned the machine on for the first time.    </seg>
<seg id="11"> And this picture was taken by ATLAS.    </seg>
<seg id="12"> It caused immense celebration in the control room.    </seg>
<seg id="13"> It's a picture of the first beam particle  going all the way around the LHC,  colliding with a piece of the LHC deliberately,  and showering particles into the detector.    </seg>
<seg id="14"> In other words, when we saw that picture on September 10th  we knew the machine worked,  which is a great triumph.    </seg>
<seg id="15"> I don't know whether this got the biggest cheer,  or this, when someone went onto Google  and saw the front page was like that.    </seg>
<seg id="16"> It means we made cultural impact  as well as scientific impact.    </seg>
<seg id="17"> About a week later we had a problem with the machine,  related actually to these bits of wire here -- these gold wires.    </seg>
<seg id="18"> Those wires carry 13 thousand amps  when the machine is working in full power.    </seg>
<seg id="19"> Now the engineers amongst you will look at them and say,  "No they don't. They're small wires."    </seg>
<seg id="20"> They can do that because  when they are very cold they are what's called superconducting wire.    </seg>
<seg id="21"> So at minus 271 degrees,  colder than the space between the stars,  those wires can take that current.    </seg>
<seg id="22"> In one of the joints between over 9,000 magnets in LHC,  there was a manufacturing defect.    </seg>
<seg id="23"> So the wire heated up slightly,  and its 13,000 amps suddenly encountered electrical resistance.    </seg>
<seg id="24"> This was the result.    </seg>
<seg id="25"> Now that's more impressive  when you consider those magnets weigh over 20 tons,  and they moved about a foot.    </seg>
<seg id="26"> So we damaged about 50 of the magnets.    </seg>
<seg id="27"> We had to take them out, which we did.    </seg>
<seg id="28"> We reconditioned them all, fixed them.    </seg>
<seg id="29"> They're all on their way back underground now.    </seg>
<seg id="30"> By the end of March the LHC will be intact again.    </seg>
<seg id="31"> We will switch it on,  and we expect to take data in June or July,  and continue with our quest to find out  what the building blocks of the universe are.    </seg>
<seg id="32"> Now of course, in a way  those accidents reignite the debate  about the value of science and engineering at the edge. It's easy to refute.    </seg>
<seg id="33"> I think that the fact that it's so difficult,  the fact that we're overreaching, is the value of things like the LHC.    </seg>
<seg id="34"> I will leave the final word to an English scientist, Humphrey Davy,  who, I suspect,  when defending his protege's useless experiments --  his protege was Michael Faraday --  said this, "Nothing is so dangerous  to the progress of the human mind  than to assume that our views of science are ultimate,  that there are no mysteries in nature,  that our triumphs are complete, and that  there are no new worlds to conquer."    </seg>
<seg id="35"> Thank you.    </seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="457" genre="lectures">
<url>http://www.ted.com/talks/david_merrill_demos_siftables_the_smart_blocks</url> 
<description>TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: MIT grad student David Merrill demos Siftables -- cookie-sized, computerized tiles you can stack and shuffle in your hands. These future-toys can do math, play music, and talk to their friends, too. Is this the next thing in hands-on learning?</description> 
<keywords>talks, art, business, children, computers, design, education, invention, music, technology, toy</keywords> 
<talkid>457</talkid> 
<title>David Merrill: Toy tiles that talk to each other</title> 
<reviewer></reviewer> 
<translator></translator> 
<seg id="1"> I want to start out by asking you to think back to when you were a kid,  playing with blocks.    </seg>
<seg id="2"> As you figured out how to reach out and grasp,  pick them up and move them around,  you were actually learning how to think and solve problems  by understanding and manipulating spatial relationships.    </seg>
<seg id="3"> Spatial reasoning is deeply connected  to how we understand a lot of the world around us.    </seg>
<seg id="4"> So, as a computer scientist  inspired by this utility of our interactions with physical objects --  along with my adviser Pattie, and my collaborator Jeevan Kalanithi --  I started to wonder -- what if when we used a computer,  instead of having this one mouse cursor that was a like a digital fingertip  moving around a flat desktop,  what if we could reach in with both hands and grasp information physically,    </seg>
<seg id="5"> arranging it the way we wanted?    </seg>
<seg id="6"> This question was so compelling that we decided to explore the answer,  by building Siftables.    </seg>
<seg id="7"> In a nutshell, a Siftable is an interactive computer  the size of a cookie.    </seg>
<seg id="8"> They're able to be moved around by hand,  they can sense each other, they can sense their motion,  and they have a screen and a wireless radio.    </seg>
<seg id="9"> Most importantly, they're physical,  so like the blocks, you can move them just by reaching out and grasping.    </seg>
<seg id="10"> And Siftables are an example of a new ecosystem  of tools for manipulating digital information.    </seg>
<seg id="11"> And as these tools become more physical,  more aware of their motion, aware of each other,  and aware of the nuance of how we move them,  we can start to explore some new and fun interaction styles.    </seg>
<seg id="12"> So, I'm going to start with some simple examples.    </seg>
<seg id="13"> This Siftable is configured to show video,  and if I tilt it in one direction, it'll roll the video this way;  if I tilt it the other way it rolls it backwards.    </seg>
<seg id="14"> And these interactive portraits are aware of each other.    </seg>
<seg id="15"> So if I put them next to each other, they get interested.    </seg>
<seg id="16"> If they get surrounded, they notice that too,  they might get a little flustered.    </seg>
<seg id="17"> And they can also sense their motion and tilt.    </seg>
<seg id="18"> One of the interesting implications on interaction, we started to realize,  was that we could use everyday gestures on data,  like pouring a color the way we might pour a liquid.    </seg>
<seg id="19"> So in this case, we've got three Siftables configured to be paint buckets  and I can use them to pour color into that central one,  where they get mixed.    </seg>
<seg id="20"> If we overshoot, we can pour a little bit back.    </seg>
<seg id="21"> There are also some neat possibilities for education,  like language, math and logic games  where we want to give people the ability to try things quickly,  and view the results immediately.    </seg>
<seg id="22"> So here I'm --    This is a Fibonacci sequence that I'm making with a simple equation program.    </seg>
<seg id="23"> Here we have a word game that's kind of like a mash-up between Scrabble and Boggle.    </seg>
<seg id="24"> Basically, in every round  you get a randomly assigned letter on each Siftable,  and as you try to make words it checks against a dictionary.    </seg>
<seg id="25"> Then, after about 30 seconds, it reshuffles,  and you have a new set of letters and new possibilities to try.    </seg>
<seg id="26">   Thank you.    </seg>
<seg id="27">   So these are some kids that came on a field trip to the Media Lab,  and I managed to get them to try it out, and shoot a video.    </seg>
<seg id="28"> They really loved it.    </seg>
<seg id="29"> And, one of the interesting things about this kind of application  is that you don't have to give people many instructions.    </seg>
<seg id="30"> All you have to say is, "Make words,"  and they know exactly what to do.    </seg>
<seg id="31"> So here's another few people trying it out.    </seg>
<seg id="32"> That's our youngest beta tester, down there on the right.    </seg>
<seg id="33"> Turns out, all he wanted to do was to stack the Siftables up.    </seg>
<seg id="34"> So to him, they were just blocks.    </seg>
<seg id="35"> Now, this is an interactive cartoon application.    </seg>
<seg id="36"> And we wanted to build a learning tool for language learners.    </seg>
<seg id="37"> And this is Felix, actually.    </seg>
<seg id="38"> And he can bring new characters into the scene,  just by lifting the Siftables off the table that have that character shown on them.    </seg>
<seg id="39"> Here, he's bringing the sun out.    </seg>
<seg id="40"> David Merrill: Now he's brought a tractor into the scene.    </seg>
<seg id="41"> Good job! Yeah!    </seg>
<seg id="42"> DM: So by shaking the Siftables and putting them next to each other  he can make the characters interact --  Video: Woof!    </seg>
<seg id="43"> DM: inventing his own narrative.    </seg>
<seg id="44"> DM: It's an open-ended story,  and he gets to decide how it unfolds.    </seg>
<seg id="45"> DM: So, the last example I have time to show you today  is a music sequencing and live performance tool  that we've built recently,  in which Siftables act as sounds  like lead, bass and drums.    </seg>
<seg id="46"> Each of these has four different variations,  you get to choose which one you want to use.    </seg>
<seg id="47"> And you can inject these sounds into a sequence  that you can assemble into the pattern that you want.    </seg>
<seg id="48"> And you inject it by just bumping up the sound Siftable against a sequence Siftable.    </seg>
<seg id="49"> There are effects that you can control live, like reverb and filter.    </seg>
<seg id="50"> You attach it to a particular sound and then tilt to adjust it.    </seg>
<seg id="51"> And then, overall effects like tempo and volume  that apply to the entire sequence.    </seg>
<seg id="52"> So let's have a look.    </seg>
<seg id="53"> Video:   DM: We'll start by putting a lead  into two sequence Siftables, arrange them into a series,  extend it, add a little more lead.    </seg>
<seg id="54"> Now I put a bass line in.    </seg>
<seg id="55"> Video:   DM: Now I'll put some percussion in.    </seg>
<seg id="56"> Video:   DM: And now I'll attach the filter to the drums, so I can control the effect live.    </seg>
<seg id="57"> Video:   DM: I can speed up the whole sequence  by tilting the tempo one way or the other.    </seg>
<seg id="58"> Video:   DM: And now I'll attach the filter to the bass for some more expression.    </seg>
<seg id="59"> Video:   DM: I can rearrange the sequence while it plays.    </seg>
<seg id="60"> So I don't have to plan it out in advance, but I can improvise,  making it longer or shorter as I go.    </seg>
<seg id="61"> And now, finally, I can fade the whole sequence out  using the volume Siftable, tilted to the left.    </seg>
<seg id="62">   Thank you.    </seg>
<seg id="63"> So, as you can see,  my passion is for making new human-computer interfaces  that are a better match to the ways our brains and bodies work.    </seg>
<seg id="64"> And today, I had time to show you one point in this new design space,  and a few of the possibilities that we're working to bring out of the laboratory.    </seg>
<seg id="65"> So the thought I want to leave you with  is that we're on the cusp of this new generation of tools  for interacting with digital media  that are going to bring information into our world  on our terms.    </seg>
<seg id="66"> Thank you very much.    </seg>
<seg id="67"> I look forward to talking with all of you.    </seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="453" genre="lectures">
<url>http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius</url> 
<description>TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses -- and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius. It's a funny, personal and surprisingly moving talk.</description> 
<keywords>talks, creativity, culture, entertainment, personality, poetry, work, writing</keywords> 
<talkid>453</talkid> 
<title>Elizabeth Gilbert: Your elusive creative genius</title> 
<reviewer></reviewer> 
<translator></translator> 
<seg id="1"> I am a writer.    </seg>
<seg id="2"> Writing books is my profession but it's more than that, of course.    </seg>
<seg id="3"> It is also my great lifelong love and fascination.    </seg>
<seg id="4"> And I don't expect that that's ever going to change.    </seg>
<seg id="5"> But, that said, something kind of peculiar has happened recently  in my life and in my career,  which has caused me to have to recalibrate my whole relationship with this work.    </seg>
<seg id="6"> And the peculiar thing is that I recently wrote this book,  this memoir called "Eat, Pray, Love"  which, decidedly unlike any of my previous books,  went out in the world for some reason, and became this big,  mega-sensation, international bestseller thing.    </seg>
<seg id="7"> The result of which is that everywhere I go now,  people treat me like I'm doomed.    </seg>
<seg id="8"> Seriously -- doomed, doomed!    </seg>
<seg id="9"> Like, they come up to me now, all worried, and they say,  "Aren't you afraid you're never going to be able to top that?    </seg>
<seg id="10"> Aren't you afraid you're going to keep writing for your whole life  and you're never again going to create a book  that anybody in the world cares about at all,  ever again?"    </seg>
<seg id="11"> So that's reassuring, you know.    </seg>
<seg id="12"> But it would be worse, except for that I happen to remember  that over 20 years ago, when I was a teenager,  when I first started telling people that I wanted to be a writer,  I was met with this same sort of fear-based reaction.    </seg>
<seg id="13"> And people would say, "Aren't you afraid you're never going to have any success?    </seg>
<seg id="14"> Aren't you afraid the humiliation of rejection will kill you?    </seg>
<seg id="15"> Aren't you afraid that you're going to work your whole life at this craft  and nothing's ever going to come of it  and you're going to die on a scrap heap of broken dreams  with your mouth filled with bitter ash of failure?"    </seg>
<seg id="16">   Like that, you know.    </seg>
<seg id="17"> The answer -- the short answer to all those questions is, "Yes."    </seg>
<seg id="18"> Yes, I'm afraid of all those things.    </seg>
<seg id="19"> And I always have been.    </seg>
<seg id="20"> And I'm afraid of many, many more things besides  that people can't even guess at,  like seaweed and other things that are scary.    </seg>
<seg id="21"> But, when it comes to writing,  the thing that I've been sort of thinking about lately, and wondering about lately, is why?    </seg>
<seg id="22"> You know, is it rational?    </seg>
<seg id="23"> Is it logical that anybody should be expected  to be afraid of the work that they feel they were put on this Earth to do.    </seg>
<seg id="24"> And what is it specifically about creative ventures  that seems to make us really nervous about each other's mental health  in a way that other careers kind of don't do, you know?    </seg>
<seg id="25"> Like my dad, for example, was a chemical engineer  and I don't recall once in his 40 years of chemical engineering  anybody asking him if he was afraid to be a chemical engineer, you know?    </seg>
<seg id="26"> "That chemical-engineering block, John, how's it going?"    </seg>
<seg id="27"> It just didn't come up like that, you know?    </seg>
<seg id="28"> But to be fair, chemical engineers as a group  haven't really earned a reputation over the centuries  for being alcoholic manic-depressives.    </seg>
<seg id="29">   We writers, we kind of do have that reputation,  and not just writers, but creative people across all genres,  it seems, have this reputation for being enormously mentally unstable.    </seg>
<seg id="30"> And all you have to do is look at the very grim death count  in the 20th century alone, of really magnificent creative minds  who died young and often at their own hands, you know?    </seg>
<seg id="31"> And even the ones who didn't literally commit suicide  seem to be really undone by their gifts, you know.    </seg>
<seg id="32"> Norman Mailer, just before he died, last interview, he said,  "Every one of my books has killed me a little more."    </seg>
<seg id="33"> An extraordinary statement to make about your life's work.    </seg>
<seg id="34"> But we don't even blink when we hear somebody say this,  because we've heard that kind of stuff for so long  and somehow we've completely internalized and accepted collectively  this notion that creativity and suffering are somehow inherently linked  and that artistry, in the end, will always ultimately lead to anguish.    </seg>
<seg id="35"> And the question that I want to ask everybody here today  is are you guys all cool with that idea?    </seg>
<seg id="36"> Are you comfortable with that?    </seg>
<seg id="37"> Because you look at it even from an inch away and, you know --  I'm not at all comfortable with that assumption.    </seg>
<seg id="38"> I think it's odious.    </seg>
<seg id="39"> And I also think it's dangerous,  and I don't want to see it perpetuated into the next century.    </seg>
<seg id="40"> I think it's better if we encourage our great creative minds to live.    </seg>
<seg id="41"> And I definitely know that, in my case -- in my situation --  it would be very dangerous for me to start sort of leaking down that dark path  of assumption,  particularly given the circumstance that I'm in right now in my career.    </seg>
<seg id="42"> Which is -- you know, like check it out,  I'm pretty young, I'm only about 40 years old.    </seg>
<seg id="43"> I still have maybe another four decades of work left in me.    </seg>
<seg id="44"> And it's exceedingly likely that anything I write from this point forward  is going to be judged by the world as the work that came after  the freakish success of my last book, right?    </seg>
<seg id="45"> I should just put it bluntly, because we're all sort of friends here now --  it's exceedingly likely that my greatest success is behind me.    </seg>
<seg id="46"> So Jesus, what a thought!    </seg>
<seg id="47"> That's the kind of thought that could lead a person  to start drinking gin at nine o'clock in the morning,  and I don't want to go there.    </seg>
<seg id="48">   I would prefer to keep doing this work that I love.    </seg>
<seg id="49"> And so, the question becomes, how?    </seg>
<seg id="50"> And so, it seems to me, upon a lot of reflection,  that the way that I have to work now, in order to continue writing,  is that I have to create some sort of protective psychological construct, right?    </seg>
<seg id="51"> I have to sort of find some way to have a safe distance  between me, as I am writing, and my very natural anxiety  about what the reaction to that writing is going to be, from now on.    </seg>
<seg id="52"> And, as I've been looking, over the last year, for models for how to do that,  I've been sort of looking across time,  and I've been trying to find other societies  to see if they might have had better and saner ideas than we have  about how to help creative people  sort of manage the inherent emotional risks of creativity.    </seg>
<seg id="53"> And that search has led me to ancient Greece and ancient Rome.    </seg>
<seg id="54"> So stay with me, because it does circle around and back.    </seg>
<seg id="55"> But, ancient Greece and ancient Rome --  people did not happen to believe that creativity  came from human beings back then, OK?    </seg>
<seg id="56"> People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit  that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source,  for distant and unknowable reasons.    </seg>
<seg id="57"> The Greeks famously called these divine attendant spirits of creativity "daemons."    </seg>
<seg id="58"> Socrates, famously, believed that he had a daemon  who spoke wisdom to him from afar.    </seg>
<seg id="59"> The Romans had the same idea,  but they called that sort of disembodied creative spirit a genius.    </seg>
<seg id="60"> Which is great, because the Romans did not actually think  that a genius was a particularly clever individual.    </seg>
<seg id="61"> They believed that a genius was this, sort of magical divine entity,  who was believed to literally live in the walls of an artist's studio,  kind of like Dobby the house elf,  and sort of invisibly assist the artist with their work  and would shape the outcome of that work.    </seg>
<seg id="62"> So brilliant -- there it is, right there, that distance that I'm talking about --  that psychological construct to protect you from the results of your work.    </seg>
<seg id="63"> And everyone knew that this is how it functioned, right?    </seg>
<seg id="64"> So the ancient artist was protected from certain things,  like, for example, too much narcissism, right?    </seg>
<seg id="65"> If your work was brilliant, you couldn't take all the credit for it,  everybody knew that you had this disembodied genius who had helped you.    </seg>
<seg id="66"> If your work bombed, not entirely your fault, you know?    </seg>
<seg id="67"> Everyone knew your genius was kind of lame.    </seg>
<seg id="68"> And this is how people thought about creativity in the West for a really long time.    </seg>
<seg id="69"> And then the Renaissance came and everything changed,  and we had this big idea, and the big idea was,  let's put the individual human being at the center of the universe  above all gods and mysteries, and there's no more room for mystical creatures  who take dictation from the divine.    </seg>
<seg id="70"> And it's the beginning of rational humanism,  and people started to believe that creativity  came completely from the self of the individual.    </seg>
<seg id="71"> And for the first time in history,  you start to hear people referring to this or that artist as being a genius,  rather than having a genius.    </seg>
<seg id="72"> And I got to tell you, I think that was a huge error.    </seg>
<seg id="73"> You know, I think that allowing somebody, one mere person  to believe that he or she is like, the vessel,  you know, like the font and the essence and the source  of all divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery  is just a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile, human psyche.    </seg>
<seg id="74"> It's like asking somebody to swallow the sun.    </seg>
<seg id="75"> It just completely warps and distorts egos,  and it creates all these unmanageable expectations about performance.    </seg>
<seg id="76"> And I think the pressure of that  has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years.    </seg>
<seg id="77"> And, if this is true,  and I think it is true,  the question becomes, what now?    </seg>
<seg id="78"> Can we do this differently?    </seg>
<seg id="79"> Maybe go back to some more ancient understanding  about the relationship between humans and the creative mystery.    </seg>
<seg id="80"> Maybe not.    </seg>
<seg id="81"> Maybe we can't just erase 500 years of rational humanistic thought  in one 18 minute speech.    </seg>
<seg id="82"> And there's probably people in this audience  who would raise really legitimate scientific suspicions  about the notion of, basically, fairies  who follow people around rubbing fairy juice on their projects and stuff.    </seg>
<seg id="83"> I'm not, probably, going to bring you all along with me on this.    </seg>
<seg id="84"> But the question that I kind of want to pose is --  you know, why not?    </seg>
<seg id="85"> Why not think about it this way?    </seg>
<seg id="86"> Because it makes as much sense as anything else I have ever heard  in terms of explaining the utter maddening capriciousness  of the creative process.    </seg>
<seg id="87"> A process which, as anybody who has ever tried to make something --  which is to say basically everyone here ---  knows does not always behave rationally.    </seg>
<seg id="88"> And, in fact, can sometimes feel downright paranormal.    </seg>
<seg id="89"> I had this encounter recently where I met the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone,  who's now in her 90s, but she's been a poet her entire life  and she told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia,  she would be out working in the fields,  and she said she would feel and hear a poem  coming at her from over the landscape.    </seg>
<seg id="90"> And she said it was like a thunderous train of air.    </seg>
<seg id="91"> And it would come barreling down at her over the landscape.    </seg>
<seg id="92"> And she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet.    </seg>
<seg id="93"> She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point,  and that was to, in her words, "run like hell."    </seg>
<seg id="94"> And she would run like hell to the house  and she would be getting chased by this poem,  and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil  fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it  and grab it on the page.    </seg>
<seg id="95"> And other times she wouldn't be fast enough,  so she'd be running and running, and she wouldn't get to the house  and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it  and she said it would continue on across the landscape,  looking, as she put it "for another poet."    </seg>
<seg id="96"> And then there were these times --  this is the piece I never forgot --  she said that there were moments where she would almost miss it, right?    </seg>
<seg id="97"> So, she's running to the house and she's looking for the paper  and the poem passes through her,  and she grabs a pencil just as it's going through her,  and then she said, it was like she would reach out with her other hand  and she would catch it.    </seg>
<seg id="98"> She would catch the poem by its tail,  and she would pull it backwards into her body  as she was transcribing on the page.    </seg>
<seg id="99"> And in these instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact  but backwards, from the last word to the first.    </seg>
<seg id="100">   So when I heard that I was like -- that's uncanny,  that's exactly what my creative process is like.    </seg>
<seg id="101">   That's not at all what my creative process is -- I'm not the pipeline!    </seg>
<seg id="102"> I'm a mule, and the way that I have to work  is I have to get up at the same time every day,  and sweat and labor and barrel through it really awkwardly.    </seg>
<seg id="103"> But even I, in my mulishness,  even I have brushed up against that thing, at times.    </seg>
<seg id="104"> And I would imagine that a lot of you have too.    </seg>
<seg id="105"> You know, even I have had work or ideas come through me from a source  that I honestly cannot identify.    </seg>
<seg id="106"> And what is that thing?    </seg>
<seg id="107"> And how are we to relate to it in a way that will not make us lose our minds,  but, in fact, might actually keep us sane?    </seg>
<seg id="108"> And for me, the best contemporary example that I have of how to do that  is the musician Tom Waits,  who I got to interview several years ago on a magazine assignment.    </seg>
<seg id="109"> And we were talking about this,  and you know, Tom, for most of his life, he was pretty much the embodiment  of the tormented contemporary modern artist,  trying to control and manage and dominate  these sort of uncontrollable creative impulses  that were totally internalized.    </seg>
<seg id="110"> But then he got older, he got calmer,  and one day he was driving down the freeway in Los Angeles,  and this is when it all changed for him.    </seg>
<seg id="111"> And he's speeding along, and all of a sudden  he hears this little fragment of melody,  that comes into his head as inspiration often comes, elusive and tantalizing,  and he wants it, it's gorgeous,  and he longs for it, but he has no way to get it.    </seg>
<seg id="112"> He doesn't have a piece of paper, or a pencil, or a tape recorder.    </seg>
<seg id="113"> So he starts to feel all of that old anxiety start to rise in him  like, "I'm going to lose this thing,  and I'll be be haunted by this song forever.    </seg>
<seg id="114"> I'm not good enough, and I can't do it."    </seg>
<seg id="115"> And instead of panicking, he just stopped.    </seg>
<seg id="116"> He just stopped that whole mental process and he did something completely novel.    </seg>
<seg id="117"> He just looked up at the sky, and he said,  "Excuse me, can you not see that I'm driving?"    </seg>
<seg id="118">   "Do I look like I can write down a song right now?    </seg>
<seg id="119"> If you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment  when I can take care of you.    </seg>
<seg id="120"> Otherwise, go bother somebody else today.    </seg>
<seg id="121"> Go bother Leonard Cohen."    </seg>
<seg id="122"> And his whole work process changed after that.    </seg>
<seg id="123"> Not the work, the work was still oftentimes as dark as ever.    </seg>
<seg id="124"> But the process, and the heavy anxiety around it  was released when he took the genie, the genius out of him  where it was causing nothing but trouble, and released it back where it came from,  and realized that this didn't have to be this internalized, tormented thing.    </seg>
<seg id="125"> It could be this peculiar, wondrous, bizarre collaboration,  kind of conversation between Tom and the strange, external thing  that was not quite Tom.    </seg>
<seg id="126"> When I heard that story, it started to shift a little bit  the way that I worked too, and this idea already saved me once.    </seg>
<seg id="127"> It saved me when I was in the middle of writing "Eat, Pray, Love,"  and I fell into one of those sort of pits of despair  that we all fall into when we're working on something and it's not coming  and you start to think this is going to be a disaster, the worst book ever written.    </seg>
<seg id="128"> Not just bad, but the worst book ever written.    </seg>
<seg id="129"> And I started to think I should just dump this project.    </seg>
<seg id="130"> But then I remembered Tom talking to the open air  and I tried it.    </seg>
<seg id="131"> So I just lifted my face up from the manuscript  and I directed my comments to an empty corner of the room.    </seg>
<seg id="132"> And I said aloud, "Listen you, thing,  you and I both know that if this book isn't brilliant  that is not entirely my fault, right?    </seg>
<seg id="133"> Because you can see that I am putting everything I have into this,  I don't have any more than this.    </seg>
<seg id="134"> If you want it to be better, you've got to show up and do your part of the deal.    </seg>
<seg id="135"> But if you don't do that, you know what, the hell with it.    </seg>
<seg id="136"> I'm going to keep writing anyway because that's my job.    </seg>
<seg id="137"> And I would please like the record to reflect today  that I showed up for my part of the job."    </seg>
<seg id="138">   Because --    Because in the end it's like this, OK --  centuries ago in the deserts of North Africa,  people used to gather for these moonlight dances of sacred dance and music  that would go on for hours and hours, until dawn.    </seg>
<seg id="139"> They were always magnificent, because the dancers were professionals  and they were terrific, right?    </seg>
<seg id="140"> But every once in a while, very rarely, something would happen,  and one of these performers would actually become transcendent.    </seg>
<seg id="141"> And I know you know what I'm talking about,  because I know you've all seen, at some point in your life, a performance like this.    </seg>
<seg id="142"> It was like time would stop,  and the dancer would sort of step through some kind of portal  and he wasn't doing anything different than he had ever done, 1,000 nights before,  but everything would align.    </seg>
<seg id="143"> And all of a sudden, he would no longer appear to be merely human.    </seg>
<seg id="144"> He would be lit from within, and lit from below  and all lit up on fire with divinity.    </seg>
<seg id="145"> And when this happened, back then,  people knew it for what it was, you know, they called it by its name.    </seg>
<seg id="146"> They would put their hands together and they would start to chant,  "Allah, Allah, Allah, God, God, God."    </seg>
<seg id="147"> That's God, you know.    </seg>
<seg id="148"> Curious historical footnote:  when the Moors invaded southern Spain, they took this custom with them  and the pronunciation changed over the centuries  from "Allah, Allah, Allah," to "Olé, olé, olé,"  which you still hear in bullfights and in flamenco dances.    </seg>
<seg id="149"> In Spain, when a performer has done something impossible and magic,  "Allah, olé, olé, Allah, magnificent, bravo,"  incomprehensible, there it is -- a glimpse of God.    </seg>
<seg id="150"> Which is great, because we need that.    </seg>
<seg id="151"> But, the tricky bit comes the next morning,  for the dancer himself, when he wakes up and discovers  that it's Tuesday at 11 a.m., and he's no longer a glimpse of God.    </seg>
<seg id="152"> He's just an aging mortal with really bad knees,  and maybe he's never going to ascend to that height again.    </seg>
<seg id="153"> And maybe nobody will ever chant God's name again as he spins,  and what is he then to do with the rest of his life?    </seg>
<seg id="154"> This is hard.    </seg>
<seg id="155"> This is one of the most painful reconciliations to make  in a creative life.    </seg>
<seg id="156"> But maybe it doesn't have to be quite so full of anguish  if you never happened to believe, in the first place,  that the most extraordinary aspects of your being came from you.    </seg>
<seg id="157"> But maybe if you just believed that they were on loan to you  from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life  to be passed along when you're finished, with somebody else.    </seg>
<seg id="158"> And, you know, if we think about it this way, it starts to change everything.    </seg>
<seg id="159"> This is how I've started to think,  and this is certainly how I've been thinking in the last few months  as I've been working on the book that will soon be published,  as the dangerously, frighteningly over-anticipated follow up  to my freakish success.    </seg>
<seg id="160"> And what I have to sort of keep telling myself  when I get really psyched out about that is don't be afraid.    </seg>
<seg id="161"> Don't be daunted. Just do your job.    </seg>
<seg id="162"> Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever that might be.    </seg>
<seg id="163"> If your job is to dance, do your dance.    </seg>
<seg id="164"> If the divine, cockeyed genius assigned to your case  decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed, for just one moment  through your efforts, then "Olé!"    </seg>
<seg id="165"> And if not, do your dance anyhow.    </seg>
<seg id="166"> And "Olé!" to you, nonetheless.    </seg>
<seg id="167"> I believe this and I feel that we must teach it.    </seg>
<seg id="168"> "Olé!" to you, nonetheless,  just for having the sheer human love and stubbornness  to keep showing up.    </seg>
<seg id="169"> Thank you.    </seg>
<seg id="170">   Thank you.    </seg>
<seg id="171">   June Cohen: Olé!    </seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="227" genre="lectures">
<url>http://www.ted.com/talks/craig_venter_is_on_the_verge_of_creating_synthetic_life</url> 
<description>TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: "Can we create new life out of our digital universe?" Craig Venter asks. His answer is "yes" -- and pretty soon. He walks through his latest research and promises that we'll soon be able to build and boot up a synthetic chromosome.</description> 
<keywords>talks, alternative energy, creativity, energy, genetics, global issues, invention, science, technology</keywords> 
<talkid>227</talkid> 
<title>Craig Venter: On the verge of creating synthetic life</title> 
<reviewer></reviewer> 
<translator></translator> 
<seg id="1"> You know, I've talked about some of these projects before --  about the human genome and what that might mean,  and discovering new sets of genes.    </seg>
<seg id="2"> We're actually starting at a new point:  we've been digitizing biology,  and now we're trying to go from that digital code  into a new phase of biology  with designing and synthesizing life.    </seg>
<seg id="3"> So, we've always been trying to ask big questions.    </seg>
<seg id="4"> "What is life?" is something that I think many biologists  have been trying to understand  at various levels.    </seg>
<seg id="5"> We've tried various approaches,  paring it down to minimal components.    </seg>
<seg id="6"> We've been digitizing it now for almost 20 years;  when we sequenced the human genome,  it was going from the analog world of biology  into the digital world of the computer.    </seg>
<seg id="7"> Now we're trying to ask, "Can we regenerate life  or can we create new life  out of this digital universe?"    </seg>
<seg id="8"> This is the map of a small organism,  Mycoplasma genitalium,  that has the smallest genome for a species  that can self-replicate in the laboratory,  and we've been trying to just see if  we can come up with an even smaller genome.    </seg>
<seg id="9"> We're able to knock out on the order of 100 genes  out of the 500 or so that are here.    </seg>
<seg id="10"> When we look at its metabolic map,  it's relatively simple  compared to ours --  trust me, this is simple --  but when we look at all the genes  that we can knock out one at a time,  it's very unlikely that this would yield  a living cell.    </seg>
<seg id="11"> So we decided the only way forward  was to actually synthesize this chromosome  so we could vary the components  to ask some of these most fundamental questions.    </seg>
<seg id="12"> And so we started down the road of:  can we synthesize a chromosome?    </seg>
<seg id="13"> Can chemistry permit making  these really large molecules  where we've never been before?    </seg>
<seg id="14"> And if we do, can we boot up a chromosome?    </seg>
<seg id="15"> A chromosome, by the way, is just a piece of inert chemical material.    </seg>
<seg id="16"> So, our pace of digitizing life has been increasing  at an exponential pace.    </seg>
<seg id="17"> Our ability to write the genetic code  has been moving pretty slowly  but has been increasing,  and our latest point would put it on, now, an exponential curve.    </seg>
<seg id="18"> We started this over 15 years ago.    </seg>
<seg id="19"> It took several stages, in fact,  starting with a bioethical review before we did the first experiments.    </seg>
<seg id="20"> But it turns out synthesizing DNA  is very difficult.    </seg>
<seg id="21"> There are tens of thousands of machines around the world  that make small pieces of DNA --  30 to 50 letters in length --  and it's a degenerate process, so the longer you make the piece,  the more errors there are.    </seg>
<seg id="22"> So we had to create a new method  for putting these little pieces together and correct all the errors.    </seg>
<seg id="23"> And this was our first attempt, starting with the digital information  of the genome of phi X174.    </seg>
<seg id="24"> It's a small virus that kills bacteria.    </seg>
<seg id="25"> We designed the pieces, went through our error correction  and had a DNA molecule  of about 5,000 letters.    </seg>
<seg id="26"> The exciting phase came when we took this piece of inert chemical  and put it in the bacteria,  and the bacteria started to read this genetic code,  made the viral particles.    </seg>
<seg id="27"> The viral particles then were released from the cells  and came back and killed the E. coli.    </seg>
<seg id="28"> I was talking to the oil industry recently  and I said they clearly understood that model.    </seg>
<seg id="29">   They laughed more than you guys are.   And so, we think this is a situation  where the software can actually build its own hardware  in a biological system.    </seg>
<seg id="30"> But we wanted to go much larger:  we wanted to build the entire bacterial chromosome --  it's over 580,000 letters of genetic code --  so we thought we'd build them in cassettes the size of the viruses  so we could actually vary the cassettes  to understand  what the actual components of a living cell are.    </seg>
<seg id="31"> Design is critical,  and if you're starting with digital information in the computer,  that digital information has to be really accurate.    </seg>
<seg id="32"> When we first sequenced this genome in 1995,  the standard of accuracy was one error per 10,000 base pairs.    </seg>
<seg id="33"> We actually found, on resequencing it,  30 errors; had we used that original sequence,  it never would have been able to be booted up.    </seg>
<seg id="34"> Part of the design is designing pieces  that are 50 letters long  that have to overlap with all the other 50-letter pieces  to build smaller subunits  we have to design so they can go together.    </seg>
<seg id="35"> We design unique elements into this.    </seg>
<seg id="36"> You may have read that we put watermarks in.    </seg>
<seg id="37"> Think of this:  we have a four-letter genetic code -- A, C, G and T.    </seg>
<seg id="38"> Triplets of those letters  code for roughly 20 amino acids,  such that there's a single letter designation  for each of the amino acids.    </seg>
<seg id="39"> So we can use the genetic code to write out words,  sentences, thoughts.    </seg>
<seg id="40"> Initially, all we did was autograph it.    </seg>
<seg id="41"> Some people were disappointed there was not poetry.    </seg>
<seg id="42"> We designed these pieces so  we can just chew back with enzymes;  there are enzymes that repair them and put them together.    </seg>
<seg id="43"> And we started making pieces,  starting with pieces that were 5,000 to 7,000 letters,  put those together to make 24,000-letter pieces,  then put sets of those going up to 72,000.    </seg>
<seg id="44"> At each stage, we grew up these pieces in abundance  so we could sequence them  because we're trying to create a process that's extremely robust  that you can see in a minute.    </seg>
<seg id="45"> We're trying to get to the point of automation.    </seg>
<seg id="46"> So, this looks like a basketball playoff.    </seg>
<seg id="47"> When we get into these really large pieces  over 100,000 base pairs,  they won't any longer grow readily in E. coli --  it exhausts all the modern tools of molecular biology --  and so we turned to other mechanisms.    </seg>
<seg id="48"> We knew there's a mechanism called homologous recombination  that biology uses to repair DNA  that can put pieces together.    </seg>
<seg id="49"> Here's an example of it:  there's an organism called  Deinococcus radiodurans  that can take three millions rads of radiation.    </seg>
<seg id="50"> You can see in the top panel, its chromosome just gets blown apart.    </seg>
<seg id="51"> Twelve to 24 hours later, it put it  back together exactly as it was before.    </seg>
<seg id="52"> We have thousands of organisms that can do this.    </seg>
<seg id="53"> These organisms can be totally desiccated;  they can live in a vacuum.    </seg>
<seg id="54"> I am absolutely certain that life can exist in outer space,  move around, find a new aqueous environment.    </seg>
<seg id="55"> In fact, NASA has shown a lot of this is out there.    </seg>
<seg id="56"> Here's an actual micrograph of the molecule we built  using these processes, actually just using yeast mechanisms  with the right design of the pieces we put them in;  yeast puts them together automatically.    </seg>
<seg id="57"> This is not an electron micrograph;  this is just a regular photomicrograph.    </seg>
<seg id="58"> It's such a large molecule  we can see it with a light microscope.    </seg>
<seg id="59"> These are pictures over about a six-second period.    </seg>
<seg id="60"> So, this is the publication we had just a short while ago.    </seg>
<seg id="61"> This is over 580,000 letters of genetic code;  it's the largest molecule ever made by humans of a defined structure.    </seg>
<seg id="62"> It's over 300 million molecular weight.    </seg>
<seg id="63"> If we printed it out at a 10 font with no spacing,  it takes 142 pages  just to print this genetic code.    </seg>
<seg id="64"> Well, how do we boot up a chromosome? How do we activate this?    </seg>
<seg id="65"> Obviously, with a virus it's pretty simple;  it's much more complicated dealing with bacteria.    </seg>
<seg id="66"> It's also simpler when you go  into eukaryotes like ourselves:  you can just pop out the nucleus  and pop in another one,  and that's what you've all heard about with cloning.    </seg>
<seg id="67"> With bacteria and Archaea, the chromosome is integrated into the cell,  but we recently showed that we can do a complete transplant  of a chromosome from one cell to another  and activate it.    </seg>
<seg id="68"> We purified a chromosome from one microbial species --  roughly, these two are as distant as human and mice --  we added a few extra genes  so we could select for this chromosome,  we digested it with enzymes  to kill all the proteins,  and it was pretty stunning when we put this in the cell --  and you'll appreciate  our very sophisticated graphics here.    </seg>
<seg id="69"> The new chromosome went into the cell.    </seg>
<seg id="70"> In fact, we thought this might be as far as it went,  but we tried to design the process a little bit further.    </seg>
<seg id="71"> This is a major mechanism of evolution right here.    </seg>
<seg id="72"> We find all kinds of species  that have taken up a second chromosome  or a third one from somewhere,  adding thousands of new traits  in a second to that species.    </seg>
<seg id="73"> So, people who think of evolution  as just one gene changing at a time  have missed much of biology.    </seg>
<seg id="74"> There are enzymes called restriction enzymes  that actually digest DNA.    </seg>
<seg id="75"> The chromosome that was in the cell  doesn't have one;  the chromosome we put in does.    </seg>
<seg id="76"> It got expressed and it recognized  the other chromosome as foreign material,  chewed it up, and so we ended up  just with a cell with the new chromosome.    </seg>
<seg id="77"> It turned blue because of the genes we put in it.    </seg>
<seg id="78"> And with a very short period of time,  all the characteristics of one species were lost  and it converted totally into the new species  based on the new software that we put in the cell.    </seg>
<seg id="79"> All the proteins changed,  the membranes changed;  when we read the genetic code, it's exactly what we had transferred in.    </seg>
<seg id="80"> So, this may sound like genomic alchemy,  but we can, by moving the software of DNA around,  change things quite dramatically.    </seg>
<seg id="81"> Now I've argued, this is not genesis;  this is building on three and a half billion years of evolution.    </seg>
<seg id="82"> And I've argued that we're about to perhaps  create a new version of the Cambrian explosion,  where there's massive new speciation  based on this digital design.    </seg>
<seg id="83"> Why do this?    </seg>
<seg id="84"> I think this is pretty obvious in terms of some of the needs.    </seg>
<seg id="85"> We're about to go from six and a half  to nine billion people over the next 40 years.    </seg>
<seg id="86"> To put it in context for myself:  I was born in 1946.    </seg>
<seg id="87"> There are now three people on the planet  for every one of us that existed in 1946;  within 40 years, there'll be four.    </seg>
<seg id="88"> We have trouble feeding, providing fresh, clean water,  medicines, fuel  for the six and a half billion.    </seg>
<seg id="89"> It's going to be a stretch to do it for nine.    </seg>
<seg id="90"> We use over five billion tons of coal,  30 billion-plus barrels of oil --  that's a hundred million barrels a day.    </seg>
<seg id="91"> When we try to think of biological processes  or any process to replace that,  it's going to be a huge challenge.    </seg>
<seg id="92"> Then of course, there's all that  CO2 from this material  that ends up in the atmosphere.    </seg>
<seg id="93"> We now, from our discovery around the world,  have a database with about 20 million genes,  and I like to think of these as the design components of the future.    </seg>
<seg id="94"> The electronics industry only had a dozen or so components,  and look at the diversity that came out of that.    </seg>
<seg id="95"> We're limited here primarily  by a biological reality  and our imagination.    </seg>
<seg id="96"> We now have techniques,  because of these rapid methods of synthesis,  to do what we're calling combinatorial genomics.    </seg>
<seg id="97"> We have the ability now to build a large robot  that can make a million chromosomes a day.    </seg>
<seg id="98"> When you think of processing these 20 million different genes  or trying to optimize processes  to produce octane or to produce pharmaceuticals,  new vaccines,  we can just with a small team,  do more molecular biology  than the last 20 years of all science.    </seg>
<seg id="99"> And it's just standard selection:  we can select for viability,  chemical or fuel production,  vaccine production, etc.    </seg>
<seg id="100"> This is a screen snapshot  of some true design software  that we're working on to actually be able to sit down  and design species in the computer.    </seg>
<seg id="101"> You know, we don't know necessarily what it'll look like:  we know exactly what their genetic code looks like.    </seg>
<seg id="102"> We're focusing on now fourth-generation fuels.    </seg>
<seg id="103"> You've seen recently, corn to ethanol  is just a bad experiment.    </seg>
<seg id="104"> We have second- and third-generation fuels  that will be coming out relatively soon  that are sugar, to much higher-value fuels  like octane or different types of butanol.    </seg>
<seg id="105"> But the only way we think that biology  can have a major impact without  further increasing the cost of food and limiting its availability  is if we start with CO2 as its feedstock,  and so we're working with designing cells to go down this road.    </seg>
<seg id="106"> And we think we'll have the first fourth-generation fuels  in about 18 months.    </seg>
<seg id="107"> Sunlight and CO2 is one method ...    </seg>
<seg id="108">   but in our discovery around the world,  we have all kinds of other methods.    </seg>
<seg id="109"> This is an organism we described in 1996.    </seg>
<seg id="110"> It lives in the deep ocean,  about a mile and a half deep,  almost at boiling-water temperatures.    </seg>
<seg id="111"> It takes CO2 to methane  using molecular hydrogen as its energy source.    </seg>
<seg id="112"> We're looking to see if we can take  captured CO2,  which can easily be piped to sites,  convert that CO2 back into fuel  to drive this process.    </seg>
<seg id="113"> So, in a short period of time,  we think that we might be able to increase  what the basic question is of "What is life?"    </seg>
<seg id="114"> We truly, you know,  have modest goals  of replacing the whole petrol-chemical industry --     Yeah. If you can't do that at TED, where can you? --    become a major source of energy ...    </seg>
<seg id="115"> But also, we're now working on using these same tools  to come up with instant sets of vaccines.    </seg>
<seg id="116"> You've seen this year with flu;  we're always a year behind and a dollar short  when it comes to the right vaccine.    </seg>
<seg id="117"> I think that can be changed  by building combinatorial vaccines in advance.    </seg>
<seg id="118"> Here's what the future may begin to look like  with changing, now, the evolutionary tree,  speeding up evolution  with synthetic bacteria, Archaea  and, eventually, eukaryotes.    </seg>
<seg id="119"> We're a ways away from improving people:  our goal is just to make sure that we have a chance  to survive long enough to maybe do that. Thank you very much.    </seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="129" genre="lectures">
<url>http://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_demos_photosynth</url> 
<description>TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Blaise Aguera y Arcas leads a dazzling demo of Photosynth, software that could transform the way we look at digital images. Using still photos culled from the Web, Photosynth builds breathtaking dreamscapes and lets us navigate them.</description> 
<keywords>talks, collaboration, demo, microsoft, photography, software, technology, virtual reality, visualizations</keywords> 
<talkid>129</talkid> 
<title>Blaise Agüera y Arcas: How PhotoSynth can connect the world's images</title> 
<reviewer></reviewer> 
<translator></translator> 
<seg id="1"> What I'm going to show you first, as quickly as I can,  is some foundational work, some new technology  that we brought to Microsoft as part of an acquisition  almost exactly a year ago.    </seg>
<seg id="2"> This is Seadragon, and it's an environment in which you can either locally or remotely interact  with vast amounts of visual data.    </seg>
<seg id="3"> We're looking at many, many gigabytes of digital photos here  and kind of seamlessly and continuously zooming in,  panning through it, rearranging it in any way we want.    </seg>
<seg id="4"> And it doesn't matter how much information we're looking at,  how big these collections are or how big the images are.    </seg>
<seg id="5"> Most of them are ordinary digital camera photos,  but this one, for example, is a scan from the Library of Congress,  and it's in the 300 megapixel range.    </seg>
<seg id="6"> It doesn't make any difference  because the only thing that ought to limit the performance of a system like this one  is the number of pixels on your screen at any given moment.    </seg>
<seg id="7"> It's also very flexible architecture.    </seg>
<seg id="8"> This is an entire book, so this is an example of non-image data.    </seg>
<seg id="9"> This is "Bleak House" by Dickens. Every column is a chapter.    </seg>
<seg id="10"> To prove to you that it's really text, and not an image,  we can do something like so, to really show  that this is a real representation of the text; it's not a picture.    </seg>
<seg id="11"> Maybe this is an artificial way to read an e-book.    </seg>
<seg id="12"> I wouldn't recommend it.    </seg>
<seg id="13"> This is a more realistic case, an issue of The Guardian.    </seg>
<seg id="14"> Every large image is the beginning of a section.    </seg>
<seg id="15"> And this really gives you the joy and the good experience  of reading the real paper version of a magazine or a newspaper,  which is an inherently multi-scale kind of medium.    </seg>
<seg id="16"> We've done something  with the corner of this particular issue of The Guardian.    </seg>
<seg id="17"> We've made up a fake ad that's very high resolution --  much higher than in an ordinary ad --  and we've embedded extra content.    </seg>
<seg id="18"> If you want to see the features of this car, you can see it here.    </seg>
<seg id="19"> Or other models, or even technical specifications.    </seg>
<seg id="20"> And this really gets at some of these ideas  about really doing away with those limits on screen real estate.    </seg>
<seg id="21"> We hope that this means no more pop-ups  and other rubbish like that -- shouldn't be necessary.    </seg>
<seg id="22"> Of course, mapping is one of those obvious applications  for a technology like this.    </seg>
<seg id="23"> And this one I really won't spend any time on,  except to say that we have things to contribute to this field as well.    </seg>
<seg id="24"> But those are all the roads in the U.S.    </seg>
<seg id="25"> superimposed on top of a NASA geospatial image.    </seg>
<seg id="26"> So let's pull up, now, something else.    </seg>
<seg id="27"> This is actually live on the Web now; you can go check it out.    </seg>
<seg id="28"> This is a project called Photosynth, which marries two different technologies.    </seg>
<seg id="29"> One of them is Seadragon  and the other is some very beautiful computer-vision research  done by Noah Snavely, a graduate student at the University of Washington,  co-advised by Steve Seitz at U.W.    </seg>
<seg id="30"> and Rick Szeliski at Microsoft Research. A very nice collaboration.    </seg>
<seg id="31"> And so this is live on the Web. It's powered by Seadragon.    </seg>
<seg id="32"> You can see that when we do these sorts of views,  where we can dive through images  and have this kind of multi-resolution experience.    </seg>
<seg id="33"> But the spatial arrangement of the images here is actually meaningful.    </seg>
<seg id="34"> The computer vision algorithms have registered these images together  so that they correspond to the real space in which these shots --  all taken near Grassi Lakes in the Canadian Rockies --  all these shots were taken. So you see elements here  of stabilized slide-show or panoramic imaging,  and these things have all been related spatially.    </seg>
<seg id="35"> I'm not sure if I have time to show you any other environments.    </seg>
<seg id="36"> Some are much more spatial.    </seg>
<seg id="37"> I would like to jump straight to one of Noah's original data-sets --  this is from an early prototype that we first got working this summer --  to show you what I think  is really the punch line behind the Photosynth technology,  It's not necessarily so apparent  from looking at the environments we've put up on the website.    </seg>
<seg id="38"> We had to worry about the lawyers and so on.    </seg>
<seg id="39"> This is a reconstruction of Notre Dame Cathedral  that was done entirely computationally from images scraped from Flickr.    </seg>
<seg id="40"> You just type Notre Dame into Flickr,  and you get some pictures of guys in T-shirts, and of the campus and so on.    </seg>
<seg id="41"> And each of these orange cones represents an image  that was discovered to belong to this model.    </seg>
<seg id="42"> And so these are all Flickr images,  and they've all been related spatially in this way.    </seg>
<seg id="43"> We can just navigate in this very simple way.    </seg>
<seg id="44">   You know, I never thought that I'd end up working at Microsoft.    </seg>
<seg id="45"> It's very gratifying to have this kind of reception here.    </seg>
<seg id="46">   I guess you can see this is lots of different types of cameras:  it's everything from cell-phone cameras to professional SLRs,  quite a large number of them, stitched together in this environment.    </seg>
<seg id="47"> If I can find some of the sort of weird ones --  So many of them are occluded by faces, and so on.    </seg>
<seg id="48"> Somewhere in here there is actually a series of photographs -- here we go.    </seg>
<seg id="49"> This is actually a poster of Notre Dame that registered correctly.    </seg>
<seg id="50"> We can dive in from the poster  to a physical view of this environment.    </seg>
<seg id="51"> What the point here really is  is that we can do things with the social environment.    </seg>
<seg id="52"> This is now taking data from everybody --  from the entire collective memory, visually, of what the Earth looks like --  and link all of that together.    </seg>
<seg id="53"> Those photos become linked, and they make something emergent  that's greater than the sum of the parts.    </seg>
<seg id="54"> You have a model that emerges of the entire Earth.    </seg>
<seg id="55"> Think of this as the long tail to Stephen Lawler's Virtual Earth work.    </seg>
<seg id="56"> And this is something that grows in complexity as people use it,  and whose benefits become greater to the users as they use it.    </seg>
<seg id="57"> Their own photos are getting tagged with meta-data that somebody else entered.    </seg>
<seg id="58"> If somebody bothered to tag all of these saints  and say who they all are, then my photo of Notre Dame Cathedral  suddenly gets enriched with all of that data,  and I can use it as an entry point to dive into that space,  into that meta-verse, using everybody else's photos,  and do a kind of a cross-modal  and cross-user social experience that way.    </seg>
<seg id="59"> And of course, a by-product of all of that is immensely rich virtual models  of every interesting part of the Earth,  collected not just from overhead flights and from satellite images  and so on, but from the collective memory.    </seg>
<seg id="60"> Thank you so much.    </seg>
<seg id="61">   Chris Anderson: Do I understand this right? What your software is going to allow,  is that at some point, really within the next few years,  all the pictures that are shared by anyone across the world  are going to link together?    </seg>
<seg id="62"> BAA: Yes. What this is really doing is discovering,  creating hyperlinks, if you will, between images.    </seg>
<seg id="63"> It's doing that based on the content inside the images.    </seg>
<seg id="64"> And that gets really exciting when you think about the richness  of the semantic information a lot of images have.    </seg>
<seg id="65"> Like when you do a web search for images,  you type in phrases, and the text on the web page is carrying a lot of information  about what that picture is of.    </seg>
<seg id="66"> What if that picture links to all of your pictures?    </seg>
<seg id="67"> The amount of semantic interconnection and richness  that comes out of that is really huge.    </seg>
<seg id="68"> It's a classic network effect.    </seg>
<seg id="69"> CA: Truly incredible. Congratulations.    </seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="69" genre="lectures">
<url>http://www.ted.com/talks/wade_davis_on_endangered_cultures</url> 
<description>TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: With stunning photos and stories, National Geographic Explorer Wade Davis celebrates the extraordinary diversity of the world's indigenous cultures, which are disappearing from the planet at an alarming rate.</description> 
<keywords>talks, anthropology, culture, environment, film, global issues, language, photography</keywords> 
<talkid>69</talkid> 
<title>Wade Davis: Dreams from endangered cultures</title> 
<reviewer></reviewer> 
<translator></translator> 
<seg id="1"> You know, one of the intense pleasures of travel  and one of the delights of ethnographic research  is the opportunity to live amongst those  who have not forgotten the old ways,  who still feel their past in the wind,  touch it in stones polished by rain,  taste it in the bitter leaves of plants.    </seg>
<seg id="2"> Just to know that Jaguar shamans still journey beyond the Milky Way,  or the myths of the Inuit elders still resonate with meaning,  or that in the Himalaya,  the Buddhists still pursue the breath of the Dharma,  is to really remember the central revelation of anthropology,  and that is the idea that the world in which we live  does not exist in some absolute sense,  but is just one model of reality,    </seg>
<seg id="3"> the consequence of one particular set of adaptive choices  that our lineage made, albeit successfully, many generations ago.    </seg>
<seg id="4"> And of course, we all share the same adaptive imperatives.    </seg>
<seg id="5"> We're all born. We all bring our children into the world.    </seg>
<seg id="6"> We go through initiation rites.    </seg>
<seg id="7"> We have to deal with the inexorable separation of death,  so it shouldn't surprise us that we all sing, we all dance,  we all have art.    </seg>
<seg id="8"> But what's interesting is the unique cadence of the song,  the rhythm of the dance in every culture.    </seg>
<seg id="9"> And whether it is the Penan in the forests of Borneo,  or the Voodoo acolytes in Haiti,  or the warriors in the Kaisut desert of Northern Kenya,  the Curandero in the mountains of the Andes,  or a caravanserai in the middle of the Sahara --  this is incidentally the fellow that I traveled into the desert with  a month ago --  or indeed a yak herder in the slopes of Qomolangma,    </seg>
<seg id="10"> Everest, the goddess mother of the world.    </seg>
<seg id="11"> All of these peoples teach us that there are other ways of being,  other ways of thinking,  other ways of orienting yourself in the Earth.    </seg>
<seg id="12"> And this is an idea, if you think about it,  can only fill you with hope.    </seg>
<seg id="13"> Now, together the myriad cultures of the world  make up a web of spiritual life and cultural life  that envelops the planet,  and is as important to the well-being of the planet  as indeed is the biological web of life that you know as a biosphere.    </seg>
<seg id="14"> And you might think of this cultural web of life  as being an ethnosphere,  and you might define the ethnosphere  as being the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths,  ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being  by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness.    </seg>
<seg id="15"> The ethnosphere is humanity's great legacy.    </seg>
<seg id="16"> It's the symbol of all that we are  and all that we can be as an astonishingly inquisitive species.    </seg>
<seg id="17"> And just as the biosphere has been severely eroded,  so too is the ethnosphere  -- and, if anything, at a far greater rate.    </seg>
<seg id="18"> No biologists, for example, would dare suggest  that 50 percent of all species or more have been or are  on the brink of extinction because it simply is not true,  and yet that -- the most apocalyptic scenario  in the realm of biological diversity --  scarcely approaches what we know to be the most optimistic scenario  in the realm of cultural diversity.    </seg>
<seg id="19"> And the great indicator of that, of course, is language loss.    </seg>
<seg id="20"> When each of you in this room were born,  there were 6,000 languages spoken on the planet.    </seg>
<seg id="21"> Now, a language is not just a body of vocabulary  or a set of grammatical rules.    </seg>
<seg id="22"> A language is a flash of the human spirit.    </seg>
<seg id="23"> It's a vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture  comes into the material world.    </seg>
<seg id="24"> Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind,  a watershed, a thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities.    </seg>
<seg id="25"> And of those 6,000 languages, as we sit here today in Monterey,  fully half are no longer being whispered into the ears of children.    </seg>
<seg id="26"> They're no longer being taught to babies,  which means, effectively, unless something changes,  they're already dead.    </seg>
<seg id="27"> What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence,  to be the last of your people to speak your language,  to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the ancestors  or anticipate the promise of the children?    </seg>
<seg id="28"> And yet, that dreadful fate is indeed the plight of somebody  somewhere on Earth roughly every two weeks,  because every two weeks, some elder dies  and carries with him into the grave the last syllables  of an ancient tongue.    </seg>
<seg id="29"> And I know there's some of you who say, "Well, wouldn't it be better,  wouldn't the world be a better place  if we all just spoke one language?" And I say, "Great,  let's make that language Yoruba. Let's make it Cantonese.    </seg>
<seg id="30"> Let's make it Kogi."    </seg>
<seg id="31"> And you'll suddenly discover what it would be like  to be unable to speak your own language.    </seg>
<seg id="32"> And so, what I'd like to do with you today  is sort of take you on a journey through the ethnosphere,  a brief journey through the ethnosphere,  to try to begin to give you a sense of what in fact is being lost.    </seg>
<seg id="33"> Now, there are many of us who sort of forget  that when I say "different ways of being,"  I really do mean different ways of being.    </seg>
<seg id="34"> Take, for example, this child of a Barasana in the Northwest Amazon,  the people of the anaconda  who believe that mythologically they came up the milk river  from the east in the belly of sacred snakes.    </seg>
<seg id="35"> Now, this is a people who cognitively  do not distinguish the color blue from the color green  because the canopy of the heavens  is equated to the canopy of the forest  upon which the people depend.    </seg>
<seg id="36"> They have a curious language and marriage rule  which is called "linguistic exogamy:"  you must marry someone who speaks a different language.    </seg>
<seg id="37"> And this is all rooted in the mythological past,  yet the curious thing is in these long houses,  where there are six or seven languages spoken  because of intermarriage,  you never hear anyone practicing a language.    </seg>
<seg id="38"> They simply listen and then begin to speak.    </seg>
<seg id="39"> Or, one of the most fascinating tribes I ever lived with,  the Waorani of northeastern Ecuador,  an astonishing people first contacted peacefully in 1958.    </seg>
<seg id="40"> In 1957, five missionaries attempted contact  and made a critical mistake.    </seg>
<seg id="41"> They dropped from the air  8 x 10 glossy photographs of themselves  in what we would say to be friendly gestures,  forgetting that these people of the rainforest  had never seen anything two-dimensional in their lives.    </seg>
<seg id="42"> They picked up these photographs from the forest floor,  tried to look behind the face to find the form or the figure,  found nothing, and concluded that these were calling cards  from the devil, so they speared the five missionaries to death.    </seg>
<seg id="43"> But the Waorani didn't just spear outsiders.    </seg>
<seg id="44"> They speared each other.    </seg>
<seg id="45"> 54 percent of their mortality was due to them spearing each other.    </seg>
<seg id="46"> We traced genealogies back eight generations,  and we found two instances of natural death  and when we pressured the people a little bit about it,  they admitted that one of the fellows had gotten so old  that he died getting old, so we speared him anyway.   But at the same time they had a perspicacious knowledge  of the forest that was astonishing.    </seg>
<seg id="47"> Their hunters could smell animal urine at 40 paces  and tell you what species left it behind.    </seg>
<seg id="48"> In the early '80s, I had a really astonishing assignment  when I was asked by my professor at Harvard  if I was interested in going down to Haiti,  infiltrating the secret societies  which were the foundation of Duvalier's strength  and Tonton Macoutes,  and securing the poison used to make zombies.    </seg>
<seg id="49"> In order to make sense out of sensation, of course,  I had to understand something about this remarkable faith  of Vodoun. And Voodoo is not a black magic cult.    </seg>
<seg id="50"> On the contrary, it's a complex metaphysical worldview.    </seg>
<seg id="51"> It's interesting.    </seg>
<seg id="52"> If I asked you to name the great religions of the world,  what would you say?    </seg>
<seg id="53"> Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, whatever.    </seg>
<seg id="54"> There's always one continent left out,  the assumption being that sub-Saharan Africa  had no religious beliefs. Well, of course, they did  and Voodoo is simply the distillation  of these very profound religious ideas  that came over during the tragic Diaspora of the slavery era.    </seg>
<seg id="55"> But, what makes Voodoo so interesting  is that it's this living relationship  between the living and the dead.    </seg>
<seg id="56"> So, the living give birth to the spirits.    </seg>
<seg id="57"> The spirits can be invoked from beneath the Great Water,  responding to the rhythm of the dance  to momentarily displace the soul of the living,  so that for that brief shining moment, the acolyte becomes the god.    </seg>
<seg id="58"> That's why the Voodooists like to say  that "You white people go to church and speak about God.    </seg>
<seg id="59"> We dance in the temple and become God."    </seg>
<seg id="60"> And because you are possessed, you are taken by the spirit --  how can you be harmed?    </seg>
<seg id="61"> So you see these astonishing demonstrations:  Voodoo acolytes in a state of trance  handling burning embers with impunity,  a rather astonishing demonstration of the ability of the mind  to affect the body that bears it  when catalyzed in the state of extreme excitation.    </seg>
<seg id="62"> Now, of all the peoples that I've ever been with,  the most extraordinary are the Kogi  of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in northern Colombia.    </seg>
<seg id="63"> Descendants of the ancient Tairona civilization  which once carpeted the Caribbean coastal plain of Colombia,  in the wake of the conquest,  these people retreated into an isolated volcanic massif  that soars above the Caribbean coastal plain.    </seg>
<seg id="64"> In a bloodstained continent,  these people alone were never conquered by the Spanish.    </seg>
<seg id="65"> To this day, they remain ruled by a ritual priesthood  but the training for the priesthood is rather extraordinary.    </seg>
<seg id="66"> The young acolytes are taken away from their families  at the age of three and four,  sequestered in a shadowy world of darkness  in stone huts at the base of glaciers for 18 years:  two nine-year periods  deliberately chosen to mimic the nine months of gestation  they spend in their natural mother's womb;  now they are metaphorically in the womb of the great mother.    </seg>
<seg id="67"> And for this entire time,  they are inculturated into the values of their society,  values that maintain the proposition that their prayers  and their prayers alone maintain the cosmic --  or we might say the ecological -- balance.    </seg>
<seg id="68"> And at the end of this amazing initiation,  one day they're suddenly taken out  and for the first time in their lives, at the age of 18,  they see a sunrise. And in that crystal moment of awareness  of first light as the Sun begins to bathe the slopes  of the stunningly beautiful landscape,  suddenly everything they have learned in the abstract  is affirmed in stunning glory. And the priest steps back    </seg>
<seg id="69"> and says, "You see? It's really as I've told you.    </seg>
<seg id="70"> It is that beautiful. It is yours to protect."    </seg>
<seg id="71"> They call themselves the "elder brothers"  and they say we, who are the younger brothers,  are the ones responsible for destroying the world.    </seg>
<seg id="72"> Now, this level of intuition becomes very important.    </seg>
<seg id="73"> Whenever we think of indigenous people and landscape,  we either invoke Rousseau  and the old canard of the "noble savage,"  which is an idea racist in its simplicity,  or alternatively, we invoke Thoreau  and say these people are closer to the Earth than we are.    </seg>
<seg id="74"> Well, indigenous people are neither sentimental  nor weakened by nostalgia.    </seg>
<seg id="75"> There's not a lot of room for either  in the malarial swamps of the Asmat  or in the chilling winds of Tibet, but they have, nevertheless,  through time and ritual, forged a traditional mystique of the Earth  that is based not on the idea of being self-consciously close to it,  but on a far subtler intuition:  the idea that the Earth itself can only exist  because it is breathed into being by human consciousness.    </seg>
<seg id="76"> Now, what does that mean?    </seg>
<seg id="77"> It means that a young kid from the Andes  who's raised to believe that that mountain is an Apu spirit  that will direct his or her destiny  will be a profoundly different human being  and have a different relationship to that resource  or that place than a young kid from Montana  raised to believe that a mountain is a pile of rock  ready to be mined.    </seg>
<seg id="78"> Whether it's the abode of a spirit or a pile of ore is irrelevant.    </seg>
<seg id="79"> What's interesting is the metaphor that defines the relationship  between the individual and the natural world.    </seg>
<seg id="80"> I was raised in the forests of British Columbia  to believe those forests existed to be cut.    </seg>
<seg id="81"> That made me a different human being  than my friends amongst the Kwagiulth  who believe that those forests were the abode of Huxwhukw  and the Crooked Beak of Heaven  and the cannibal spirits that dwelled at the north end of the world,  spirits they would have to engage during their Hamatsa initiation.    </seg>
<seg id="82"> Now, if you begin to look at the idea  that these cultures could create different realities,  you could begin to understand  some of their extraordinary discoveries. Take this plant here.    </seg>
<seg id="83"> It's a photograph I took in the Northwest Amazon just last April.    </seg>
<seg id="84"> This is ayahuasca, which many of you have heard about,  the most powerful psychoactive preparation  of the shaman's repertoire.    </seg>
<seg id="85"> What makes ayahuasca fascinating  is not the sheer pharmacological potential of this preparation,  but the elaboration of it. It's made really of two different sources:  on the one hand, this woody liana  which has in it a series of beta-carbolines,  harmine, harmaline, mildly hallucinogenic --  to take the vine alone  is rather to have sort of blue hazy smoke  drift across your consciousness --  but it's mixed with the leaves of a shrub in the coffee family    </seg>
<seg id="86"> called Psychotria viridis.    </seg>
<seg id="87"> This plant had in it some very powerful tryptamines,  very close to brain serotonin, dimethyltryptamine,  5-methoxydimethyltryptamine.    </seg>
<seg id="88"> If you've ever seen the Yanomami  blowing that snuff up their noses,  that substance they make from a different set of species  also contains methoxydimethyltryptamine.    </seg>
<seg id="89"> To have that powder blown up your nose  is rather like being shot out of a rifle barrel  lined with baroque paintings and landing on a sea of electricity.   It doesn't create the distortion of reality;  it creates the dissolution of reality.    </seg>
<seg id="90"> In fact, I used to argue with my professor, Richard Evan Shultes --  who is a man who sparked the psychedelic era  with his discovery of the magic mushrooms  in Mexico in the 1930s --  I used to argue that you couldn't classify these tryptamines  as hallucinogenic because by the time you're under the effects  there's no one home anymore to experience a hallucination.   But the thing about tryptamines is they cannot be taken orally    </seg>
<seg id="91"> because they're denatured by an enzyme  found naturally in the human gut called monoamine oxidase.    </seg>
<seg id="92"> They can only be taken orally if taken in conjunction  with some other chemical that denatures the MAO.    </seg>
<seg id="93"> Now, the fascinating things  are that the beta-carbolines found within that liana  are MAO inhibitors of the precise sort necessary  to potentiate the tryptamine. So you ask yourself a question.    </seg>
<seg id="94"> How, in a flora of 80,000 species of vascular plants,  do these people find these two morphologically unrelated plants  that when combined in this way,  created a kind of biochemical version  of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts?    </seg>
<seg id="95"> Well, we use that great euphemism, "trial and error,"  which is exposed to be meaningless.    </seg>
<seg id="96"> But you ask the Indians, and they say, "The plants talk to us."    </seg>
<seg id="97"> Well, what does that mean?    </seg>
<seg id="98"> This tribe, the Cofan, has 17 varieties of ayahuasca,  all of which they distinguish a great distance in the forest,  all of which are referable to our eye as one species.    </seg>
<seg id="99"> And then you ask them how they establish their taxonomy  and they say, "I thought you knew something about plants.    </seg>
<seg id="100"> I mean, don't you know anything?" And I said, "No."    </seg>
<seg id="101"> Well, it turns out you take each of the 17 varieties  in the night of a full moon, and it sings to you in a different key.    </seg>
<seg id="102"> Now, that's not going to get you a Ph.D. at Harvard,  but it's a lot more interesting than counting stamens.   Now --   --  the problem -- the problem is that even those of us  sympathetic with the plight of indigenous people  view them as quaint and colorful  but somehow reduced to the margins of history  as the real world, meaning our world, moves on.    </seg>
<seg id="103"> Well, the truth is the 20th century, 300 years from now,  is not going to be remembered for its wars  or its technological innovations,  but rather as the era in which we stood by  the massive destruction of both biological and cultural diversity  on the planet. Now, the problem isn't change.    </seg>
<seg id="104"> All cultures through all time  have constantly been engaged in a dance  with new possibilities of life.    </seg>
<seg id="105"> And the problem is not technology itself.    </seg>
<seg id="106"> The Sioux Indians did not stop being Sioux  when they gave up the bow and arrow  any more than an American stopped being an American  when he gave up the horse and buggy.    </seg>
<seg id="107"> It's not change or technology  that threatens the integrity of the ethnosphere. It is power,  the crude face of domination.    </seg>
<seg id="108"> Wherever you look around the world,  you discover that these are not cultures destined to fade away;  these are dynamic living peoples  being driven out of existence by identifiable forces  that are beyond their capacity to adapt to:  whether it's the egregious deforestation  in the homeland of the Penan --  a nomadic people from Southeast Asia, from Sarawak --  a people who lived free in the forest until a generation ago,    </seg>
<seg id="109"> and now have all been reduced to servitude and prostitution  on the banks of the rivers,  where you can see the river itself is soiled with the silt  that seems to be carrying half of Borneo away  to the South China Sea,  where the Japanese freighters hang light in the horizon  ready to fill their holds with raw logs ripped from the forest --  or, in the case of the Yanomami,    </seg>
<seg id="110"> it's the disease entities that have come in,  in the wake of the discovery of gold.    </seg>
<seg id="111"> Or if we go into the mountains of Tibet,  where I'm doing a lot of research recently,  you'll see it's a crude face of political domination.    </seg>
<seg id="112"> You know, genocide, the physical extinction of a people  is universally condemned, but ethnocide,  the destruction of people's way of life, is not only not condemned,  it's universally, in many quarters, celebrated  as part of a development strategy.    </seg>
<seg id="113"> And you cannot understand the pain of Tibet  until you move through it at the ground level.    </seg>
<seg id="114"> I once travelled 6,000 miles from Chengdu in Western China  overland through southeastern Tibet to Lhasa  with a young colleague, and it was only when I got to Lhasa  that I understood the face behind the statistics  you hear about:  6,000 sacred monuments torn apart to dust and ashes,  1.2 million people killed by the cadres  during the Cultural Revolution.    </seg>
<seg id="115"> This young man's father had been ascribed to the Panchen Lama.    </seg>
<seg id="116"> That meant he was instantly killed  at the time of the Chinese invasion.    </seg>
<seg id="117"> His uncle fled with His Holiness in the Diaspora  that took the people to Nepal.    </seg>
<seg id="118"> His mother was incarcerated  for the crime of being wealthy.    </seg>
<seg id="119"> He was smuggled into the jail at the age of two  to hide beneath her skirt tails  because she couldn't bear to be without him.    </seg>
<seg id="120"> The sister who had done that brave deed  was put into an education camp.    </seg>
<seg id="121"> One day she inadvertently stepped on an armband  of Mao, and for that transgression,  she was given seven years of hard labor.    </seg>
<seg id="122"> The pain of Tibet can be impossible to bear,  but the redemptive spirit of the people is something to behold.    </seg>
<seg id="123"> And in the end, then, it really comes down to a choice:  do we want to live in a monochromatic world of monotony  or do we want to embrace a polychromatic world of diversity?    </seg>
<seg id="124"> Margaret Mead, the great anthropologist, said, before she died,  that her greatest fear was that as we drifted towards  this blandly amorphous generic world view  not only would we see the entire range of the human imagination  reduced to a more narrow modality of thought,  but that we would wake from a dream one day  having forgotten there were even other possibilities.    </seg>
<seg id="125"> And it's humbling to remember that our species has, perhaps,  been around for [150,000] years.    </seg>
<seg id="126"> The Neolithic Revolution -- which gave us agriculture,  at which time we succumbed to the cult of the seed;  the poetry of the shaman was displaced  by the prose of the priesthood;  we created hierarchy specialization surplus --  is only 10,000 years ago.    </seg>
<seg id="127"> The modern industrial world as we know it  is barely 300 years old.    </seg>
<seg id="128"> Now, that shallow history doesn't suggest to me  that we have all the answers for all of the challenges  that will confront us in the ensuing millennia.    </seg>
<seg id="129"> When these myriad cultures of the world  are asked the meaning of being human,  they respond with 10,000 different voices.    </seg>
<seg id="130"> And it's within that song that we will all rediscover the possibility  of being what we are: a fully conscious species,  fully aware of ensuring that all peoples and all gardens  find a way to flourish. And there are great moments of optimism.    </seg>
<seg id="131"> This is a photograph I took at the northern tip of Baffin Island  when I went narwhal hunting with some Inuit people,  and this man, Olayuk, told me a marvelous story of his grandfather.    </seg>
<seg id="132"> The Canadian government has not always been kind  to the Inuit people, and during the 1950s,  to establish our sovereignty, we forced them into settlements.    </seg>
<seg id="133"> This old man's grandfather refused to go.    </seg>
<seg id="134"> The family, fearful for his life, took away all of his weapons,  all of his tools.    </seg>
<seg id="135"> Now, you must understand that the Inuit did not fear the cold;  they took advantage of it.    </seg>
<seg id="136"> The runners of their sleds were originally made of fish  wrapped in caribou hide.    </seg>
<seg id="137"> So, this man's grandfather was not intimidated by the Arctic night  or the blizzard that was blowing.    </seg>
<seg id="138"> He simply slipped outside, pulled down his sealskin trousers  and defecated into his hand. And as the feces began to freeze,  he shaped it into the form of a blade.    </seg>
<seg id="139"> He put a spray of saliva on the edge of the shit knife  and as it finally froze solid, he butchered a dog with it.    </seg>
<seg id="140"> He skinned the dog and improvised a harness,  took the ribcage of the dog and improvised a sled,  harnessed up an adjacent dog,  and disappeared over the ice floes, shit knife in belt.    </seg>
<seg id="141"> Talk about getting by with nothing.   And this, in many ways --   --  is a symbol of the resilience of the Inuit people  and of all indigenous people around the world.    </seg>
<seg id="142"> The Canadian government in April of 1999  gave back to total control of the Inuit  an area of land larger than California and Texas put together.    </seg>
<seg id="143"> It's our new homeland. It's called Nunavut.    </seg>
<seg id="144"> It's an independent territory. They control all mineral resources.    </seg>
<seg id="145"> An amazing example of how a nation-state  can seek restitution with its people.    </seg>
<seg id="146"> And finally, in the end, I think it's pretty obvious  at least to all of all us who've traveled  in these remote reaches of the planet,  to realize that they're not remote at all.    </seg>
<seg id="147"> They're homelands of somebody.    </seg>
<seg id="148"> They represent branches of the human imagination  that go back to the dawn of time. And for all of us,  the dreams of these children, like the dreams of our own children,  become part of the naked geography of hope.    </seg>
<seg id="149"> So, what we're trying to do at the National Geographic, finally,  is, we believe that politicians will never accomplish anything.    </seg>
<seg id="150"> We think that polemics --   --  we think that polemics are not persuasive,  but we think that storytelling can change the world,  and so we are probably the best storytelling institution  in the world. We get 35 million hits on our website every month.    </seg>
<seg id="151"> 156 nations carry our television channel.    </seg>
<seg id="152"> Our magazines are read by millions.    </seg>
<seg id="153"> And what we're doing is a series of journeys  to the ethnosphere where we're going to take our audience  to places of such cultural wonder  that they cannot help but come away dazzled  by what they have seen, and hopefully, therefore,  embrace gradually, one by one,  the central revelation of anthropology:  that this world deserves to exist in a diverse way,  that we can find a way to live  in a truly multicultural, pluralistic world    </seg>
<seg id="154"> where all of the wisdom of all peoples  can contribute to our collective well-being.    </seg>
<seg id="155"> Thank you very much.    </seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="93" genre="lectures">
<url>http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice</url> 
<description>TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central tenet of western societies: freedom of choice. In Schwartz's estimation, choice has made us not freer but more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied.</description> 
<keywords>talks, business, choice, culture, decision-making, economics, happiness, personal growth, potential, psychology</keywords> 
<talkid>93</talkid> 
<title>Barry Schwartz: The paradox of choice</title> 
<reviewer></reviewer> 
<translator></translator> 
<seg id="1"> I'm going to talk to you about some stuff that's in this book of mine  that I hope will resonate with other things you've already heard,  and I'll try to make some connections myself, in case you missed them.    </seg>
<seg id="2"> But I want to start with what I call the "official dogma."    </seg>
<seg id="3"> The official dogma of what?    </seg>
<seg id="4"> The official dogma of all Western industrial societies.    </seg>
<seg id="5"> And the official dogma runs like this:  if we are interested in maximizing the welfare of our citizens,  the way to do that is to maximize individual freedom.    </seg>
<seg id="6"> The reason for this is both that freedom is in and of itself good,  valuable, worthwhile, essential to being human.    </seg>
<seg id="7"> And because if people have freedom,  then each of us can act on our own  to do the things that will maximize our welfare,  and no one has to decide on our behalf.    </seg>
<seg id="8"> The way to maximize freedom is to maximize choice.    </seg>
<seg id="9"> The more choice people have, the more freedom they have,  and the more freedom they have,  the more welfare they have.    </seg>
<seg id="10"> This, I think, is so deeply embedded in the water supply  that it wouldn't occur to anyone to question it.    </seg>
<seg id="11"> And it's also deeply embedded in our lives.    </seg>
<seg id="12"> I'll give you some examples of what modern progress has made possible for us.    </seg>
<seg id="13"> This is my supermarket. Not such a big one.    </seg>
<seg id="14"> I want to say just a word about salad dressing.    </seg>
<seg id="15"> 175 salad dressings in my supermarket,  if you don't count the 10 extra-virgin olive oils  and 12 balsamic vinegars you could buy  to make a very large number of your own salad dressings,  in the off-chance that none of the 175 the store has on offer suit you.    </seg>
<seg id="16"> So this is what the supermarket is like.    </seg>
<seg id="17"> And then you go to the consumer electronics store to set up a stereo system --  speakers, CD player, tape player, tuner, amplifier --  and in this one single consumer electronics store,  there are that many stereo systems.    </seg>
<seg id="18"> We can construct six-and-a-half-million different stereo systems  out of the components that are on offer in one store.    </seg>
<seg id="19"> You've got to admit that's a lot of choice.    </seg>
<seg id="20"> In other domains -- the world of communications.    </seg>
<seg id="21"> There was a time, when I was a boy,  when you could get any kind of telephone service you wanted,  as long as it came from Ma Bell.    </seg>
<seg id="22"> You rented your phone. You didn't buy it.    </seg>
<seg id="23"> One consequence of that, by the way, is that the phone never broke.    </seg>
<seg id="24"> And those days are gone.    </seg>
<seg id="25"> We now have an almost unlimited variety of phones,  especially in the world of cell phones.    </seg>
<seg id="26"> These are cell phones of the future.    </seg>
<seg id="27"> My favorite is the middle one --  the MP3 player, nose hair trimmer, and crème brûlée torch.    </seg>
<seg id="28"> And if by some chance you haven't seen that in your store yet,  you can rest assured that one day soon, you will.    </seg>
<seg id="29"> And what this does is it leads people to walk into their stores asking this question.    </seg>
<seg id="30"> And do you know what the answer to this question now is?    </seg>
<seg id="31"> The answer is "no."    </seg>
<seg id="32"> It is not possible to buy a cell phone that doesn't do too much.    </seg>
<seg id="33"> So, in other aspects of life that are much more significant than buying things,  the same explosion of choice is true.    </seg>
<seg id="34"> Health care. It is no longer the case in the United States  that you go to the doctor, and the doctor tells you what to do.    </seg>
<seg id="35"> Instead, you go to the doctor,  and the doctor tells you, "Well, we could do A, or we could do B.    </seg>
<seg id="36"> A has these benefits, and these risks.    </seg>
<seg id="37"> B has these benefits, and these risks. What do you want to do?"    </seg>
<seg id="38"> And you say, "Doc, what should I do?"    </seg>
<seg id="39"> And the doc says, "A has these benefits and risks, and B has these benefits and risks.    </seg>
<seg id="40"> What do you want to do?"    </seg>
<seg id="41"> And you say, "If you were me, Doc, what would you do?"    </seg>
<seg id="42"> And the doc says, "But I'm not you."    </seg>
<seg id="43"> And the result is -- we call it "patient autonomy,"  which makes it sound like a good thing,  but it really is a shifting of the burden and the responsibility  for decision-making from somebody who knows something --  namely, the doctor --  to somebody who knows nothing and is almost certainly sick  and thus not in the best shape to be making decisions --  namely, the patient.    </seg>
<seg id="44"> There's enormous marketing of prescription drugs  to people like you and me,  which, if you think about it, makes no sense at all,  since we can't buy them.    </seg>
<seg id="45"> Why do they market to us if we can't buy them?    </seg>
<seg id="46"> The answer is that they expect us to call our doctors the next morning  and ask for our prescriptions to be changed.    </seg>
<seg id="47"> Something as dramatic as our identity  has now become a matter of choice,  as this slide is meant to indicate.    </seg>
<seg id="48"> We don't inherit an identity; we get to invent it.    </seg>
<seg id="49"> And we get to re-invent ourselves as often as we like.    </seg>
<seg id="50"> And that means that every day, when you wake up in the morning,  you have to decide what kind of person you want to be.    </seg>
<seg id="51"> With respect to marriage and family,  there was a time when the default assumption that almost everyone had is that you got married as soon as you could,  and then you started having kids as soon as you could.    </seg>
<seg id="52"> The only real choice was who,  not when, and not what you did after.    </seg>
<seg id="53"> Nowadays, everything is very much up for grabs.    </seg>
<seg id="54"> I teach wonderfully intelligent students,  and I assign 20 percent less work than I used to.    </seg>
<seg id="55"> And it's not because they're less smart,  and it's not because they're less diligent.    </seg>
<seg id="56"> It's because they are preoccupied, asking themselves,  "Should I get married or not? Should I get married now?    </seg>
<seg id="57"> Should I get married later? Should I have kids first, or a career first?"    </seg>
<seg id="58"> All of these are consuming questions.    </seg>
<seg id="59"> And they're going to answer these questions,  whether or not it means not doing all the work I assign  and not getting a good grade in my courses.    </seg>
<seg id="60"> And indeed they should. These are important questions to answer.    </seg>
<seg id="61"> Work -- we are blessed, as Carl was pointing out,  with the technology that enables us  to work every minute of every day from any place on the planet --  except the Randolph Hotel.    </seg>
<seg id="62">   There is one corner, by the way,  that I'm not going to tell anybody about, where the WiFi actually works.    </seg>
<seg id="63"> I'm not telling you about it because I want to use it.    </seg>
<seg id="64"> So what this means,  this incredible freedom of choice we have with respect to work,  is that we have to make a decision,  again and again and again,  about whether we should or shouldn't be working.    </seg>
<seg id="65"> We can go to watch our kid play soccer,  and we have our cell phone on one hip,  and our Blackberry on our other hip,  and our laptop, presumably, on our laps.    </seg>
<seg id="66"> And even if they're all shut off,  every minute that we're watching our kid mutilate a soccer game,  we are also asking ourselves,  "Should I answer this cell phone call?    </seg>
<seg id="67"> Should I respond to this email? Should I draft this letter?"    </seg>
<seg id="68"> And even if the answer to the question is "no,"  it's certainly going to make the experience of your kid's soccer game  very different than it would've been.    </seg>
<seg id="69"> So everywhere we look,  big things and small things, material things and lifestyle things,  life is a matter of choice.    </seg>
<seg id="70"> And the world we used to live in looked like this.    </seg>
<seg id="71"> That is to say, there were some choices,  but not everything was a matter of choice.    </seg>
<seg id="72"> And the world we now live in looks like this.    </seg>
<seg id="73"> And the question is, is this good news, or bad news?    </seg>
<seg id="74"> And the answer is, "yes."    </seg>
<seg id="75">   We all know what's good about it,  so I'm going to talk about what's bad about it.    </seg>
<seg id="76"> All of this choice has two effects,  two negative effects on people.    </seg>
<seg id="77"> One effect, paradoxically,  is that it produces paralysis, rather than liberation.    </seg>
<seg id="78"> With so many options to choose from,  people find it very difficult to choose at all.    </seg>
<seg id="79"> I'll give you one very dramatic example of this:  a study that was done of investments in voluntary retirement plans.    </seg>
<seg id="80"> A colleague of mine got access to investment records from Vanguard,  the gigantic mutual-fund company  of about a million employees and about 2,000 different workplaces.    </seg>
<seg id="81"> And what she found  is that for every 10 mutual funds the employer offered,  rate of participation went down two percent.    </seg>
<seg id="82"> You offer 50 funds -- 10 percent fewer employees participate  than if you only offer five. Why?    </seg>
<seg id="83"> Because with 50 funds to choose from,  it's so damn hard to decide which fund to choose,  that you'll just put it off until tomorrow.    </seg>
<seg id="84"> And then tomorrow,  and tomorrow, and tomorrow,  and of course tomorrow never comes.    </seg>
<seg id="85"> Understand that not only does this mean  that people are going to have to eat dog food when they retire  because they don't have enough money put away,  it also means that making the decision is so hard  that they pass up significant matching money from the employer.    </seg>
<seg id="86"> By not participating, they are passing up as much as 5,000 dollars a year  from the employer, who would happily match their contribution.    </seg>
<seg id="87"> So paralysis is a consequence of having too many choices.    </seg>
<seg id="88"> And I think it makes the world look like this. [And lastly, for all eternity, French, bleu cheese, or ranch?]    You really want to get the decision right if it's for all eternity, right?    </seg>
<seg id="89"> You don't want to pick the wrong mutual fund, or the wrong salad dressing.    </seg>
<seg id="90"> So that's one effect. The second effect  is that even if we manage to overcome the paralysis and make a choice,  we end up less satisfied with the result of the choice  than we would be if we had fewer options to choose from.    </seg>
<seg id="91"> And there are several reasons for this.    </seg>
<seg id="92"> is that with a lot of different salad dressings to choose from,  if you buy one, and it's not perfect -- and what salad dressing is? --  it's easy to imagine you could have made a different choice  that would have been better. And what happens  is this imagined alternative induces you to regret the decision you made,  and this regret subtracts from the satisfaction you get out of the decision you made,    </seg>
<seg id="93"> even if it was a good decision.    </seg>
<seg id="94"> The more options there are, the easier it is to regret anything at all  that is disappointing about the option that you chose.    </seg>
<seg id="95"> Second, what economists call "opportunity costs."    </seg>
<seg id="96"> Dan Gilbert made a big point this morning  of talking about how much the way in which we value things  depends on what we compare them to.    </seg>
<seg id="97"> Well, when there are lots of alternatives to consider,  it is easy to imagine the attractive features  of alternatives that you reject  that make you less satisfied with the alternative that you've chosen.    </seg>
<seg id="98"> Here's an example. [I can't stop thinking about those other available parking spaces on W 85th street] Sorry if you're not New Yorkers.    </seg>
<seg id="99"> Here's what you're supposed to be thinking.    </seg>
<seg id="100"> Here's this couple on the Hamptons.    </seg>
<seg id="101"> Very expensive real estate.    </seg>
<seg id="102"> Gorgeous beach. Beautiful day. They have it all to themselves.    </seg>
<seg id="103"> What could be better?    </seg>
<seg id="104"> "Well, damn it," this guy is thinking,  "It's August. Everybody in my Manhattan neighborhood is away.    </seg>
<seg id="105"> I could be parking right in front of my building."    </seg>
<seg id="106"> And he spends two weeks nagged by the idea  that he is missing the opportunity, day after day, to have a great parking space.    </seg>
<seg id="107"> subtract from the satisfaction we get out of what we choose,  even when what we choose is terrific.    </seg>
<seg id="108"> And the more options there are to consider,  the more attractive features of these options  are going to be reflected by us as opportunity costs.    </seg>
<seg id="109"> Here's another example.    </seg>
<seg id="110"> Now this cartoon makes a lot of points.    </seg>
<seg id="111"> It makes points about living in the moment as well,  and probably about doing things slowly.    </seg>
<seg id="112"> But one point it makes is that whenever you're choosing one thing,  you're choosing not to do other things  that may have lots of attractive features,  and it's going to make what you're doing less attractive.    </seg>
<seg id="113"> Third: escalation of expectations.    </seg>
<seg id="114"> This hit me when I went to replace my jeans.    </seg>
<seg id="115"> I wear jeans almost all the time.    </seg>
<seg id="116"> There was a time when jeans came in one flavor,  and you bought them, and they fit like crap,  they were incredibly uncomfortable,  if you wore them and washed them enough times,  they started to feel OK.    </seg>
<seg id="117"> I went to replace my jeans after years of wearing these old ones,  and I said, "I want a pair of jeans. Here's my size."    </seg>
<seg id="118"> And the shopkeeper said,  "Do you want slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit?    </seg>
<seg id="119"> You want button fly or zipper fly? You want stonewashed or acid-washed?    </seg>
<seg id="120"> Do you want them distressed?    </seg>
<seg id="121"> You want boot cut, tapered, blah blah." On and on he went.    </seg>
<seg id="122"> My jaw dropped. And after I recovered, I said,  "I want the kind that used to be the only kind."    </seg>
<seg id="123">   He had no idea what that was,  so I spent an hour trying on all these damn jeans,  and I walked out of the store -- truth! -- with the best-fitting jeans I had ever had.    </seg>
<seg id="124"> I did better. All this choice made it possible for me to do better.    </seg>
<seg id="125"> But -- I felt worse.    </seg>
<seg id="126"> Why? I wrote a whole book to try to explain this to myself.    </seg>
<seg id="127"> The reason I felt worse is that,  with all of these options available,  my expectations about how good a pair of jeans should be went up.    </seg>
<seg id="128"> I had very low, no particular expectations when they only came in one flavor.    </seg>
<seg id="129"> When they came in 100 flavors, damn it, one of them should've been perfect.    </seg>
<seg id="130"> And what I got was good, but it wasn't perfect.    </seg>
<seg id="131"> And so I compared what I got to what I expected,  and what I got was disappointing in comparison to what I expected.    </seg>
<seg id="132"> Adding options to people's lives  can't help but increase the expectations people have  about how good those options will be.    </seg>
<seg id="133"> And what that's going to produce is less satisfaction with results,  even when they're good results.    </seg>
<seg id="134"> Nobody in the world of marketing knows this.    </seg>
<seg id="135"> [It all looks so great. I can't wait to be disappointed.] Because if they did, you wouldn't all know what this was about.    </seg>
<seg id="136"> The truth is more like this.    </seg>
<seg id="137"> [Everything was better back when everything was worse]  The reason that everything was better back when everything was worse  is that when everything was worse,  it was actually possible for people to have experiences that were a pleasant surprise.    </seg>
<seg id="138"> Nowadays, the world we live in -- we affluent, industrialized citizens,  with perfection the expectation --  the best you can ever hope for is that stuff is as good as you expect it to be.    </seg>
<seg id="139"> You will never be pleasantly surprised  because your expectations, my expectations, have gone through the roof.    </seg>
<seg id="140"> The secret to happiness -- this is what you all came for --  the secret to happiness is low expectations.    </seg>
<seg id="141">     I want to say -- just a little autobiographical moment --  that I actually am married to a wife,  and she's really quite wonderful.    </seg>
<seg id="142"> I couldn't have done better. I didn't settle.    </seg>
<seg id="143"> But settling isn't always such a bad thing.    </seg>
<seg id="144"> Finally -- One consequence of buying a bad-fitting pair of jeans  when there is only one kind to buy  is that when you are dissatisfied, and you ask why,  who's responsible, the answer is clear: the world is responsible.    </seg>
<seg id="145"> What could you do?    </seg>
<seg id="146"> When there are hundreds of different styles of jeans available,  and you buy one that is disappointing,  and you ask why, who's responsible?    </seg>
<seg id="147"> It is equally clear that the answer to the question is "you."    </seg>
<seg id="148"> You could have done better.    </seg>
<seg id="149"> With a hundred different kinds of jeans on display,  there is no excuse for failure.    </seg>
<seg id="150"> And so when people make decisions,  and even though the results of the decisions are good,  they feel disappointed about them;  they blame themselves.    </seg>
<seg id="151"> Clinical depression has exploded in the industrial world in the last generation.    </seg>
<seg id="152"> I believe a significant -- not the only, but a significant -- contributor  to this explosion of depression, and also suicide,  is that people have experiences that are disappointing  because their standards are so high,  and then when they have to explain these experiences to themselves,  they think they're at fault.    </seg>
<seg id="153"> And so the net result is that we do better in general, objectively,  and we feel worse.    </seg>
<seg id="154"> So let me remind you.    </seg>
<seg id="155"> This is the official dogma, the one that we all take to be true,  and it's all false. It is not true.    </seg>
<seg id="156"> There's no question that some choice is better than none,  but it doesn't follow from that that more choice is better than some choice.    </seg>
<seg id="157"> There's some magical amount. I don't know what it is.    </seg>
<seg id="158"> I'm pretty confident that we have long since passed the point  where options improve our welfare.    </seg>
<seg id="159"> Now, as a policy matter -- I'm almost done --  as a policy matter, the thing to think about is this:  what enables all of this choice in industrial societies is material affluence.    </seg>
<seg id="160"> There are lots of places in the world,  and we have heard about several of them,  where their problem is not that they have too much choice.    </seg>
<seg id="161"> Their problem is that they have too little.    </seg>
<seg id="162"> So the stuff I'm talking about is the peculiar problem  of modern, affluent, Western societies.    </seg>
<seg id="163"> And what is so frustrating and infuriating is this:  Steve Levitt talked to you yesterday  about how these expensive and difficult-to-install child seats don't help.    </seg>
<seg id="164"> It's a waste of money.    </seg>
<seg id="165"> What I'm telling you is that these expensive, complicated choices --  it's not simply that they don't help.    </seg>
<seg id="166"> They actually hurt.    </seg>
<seg id="167"> They actually make us worse off.    </seg>
<seg id="168"> If some of what enables people in our societies to make all of the choices we make  were shifted to societies in which people have too few options,  not only would those people's lives be improved,  but ours would be improved also,  which is what economists call a "Pareto-improving move."    </seg>
<seg id="169"> Income redistribution will make everyone better off -- not just poor people --  because of how all this excess choice plagues us.    </seg>
<seg id="170"> So to conclude. [You can be anything you want to be -- no limits]  You're supposed to read this cartoon, and, being a sophisticated person, say,  "Ah! What does this fish know?    </seg>
<seg id="171"> You know, nothing is possible in this fishbowl."    </seg>
<seg id="172"> Impoverished imagination, a myopic view of the world --  and that's the way I read it at first.    </seg>
<seg id="173"> The more I thought about it, however,  the more I came to the view that this fish knows something.    </seg>
<seg id="174"> Because the truth of the matter  is that if you shatter the fishbowl so that everything is possible,  you don't have freedom. You have paralysis.    </seg>
<seg id="175"> If you shatter this fishbowl so that everything is possible,  you decrease satisfaction.    </seg>
<seg id="176"> You increase paralysis, and you decrease satisfaction.    </seg>
<seg id="177"> Everybody needs a fishbowl.    </seg>
<seg id="178"> This one is almost certainly too limited --  perhaps even for the fish, certainly for us.    </seg>
<seg id="179"> But the absence of some metaphorical fishbowl is a recipe for misery,  and, I suspect, disaster.    </seg>
<seg id="180"> Thank you very much.    </seg>
</doc>
</srcset>
</mteval>