Where'd You Go, Bernadette(44)

My point is, it would have been wholly unprofessional for us to launch into Bernadette’s transgressions with everyone straining to listen in.



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From: Audrey Griffin To: Soo-Lin Lee-Segal





I don’t give a fig about Ted. I don’t know who he is and I don’t care what he says during this talk you refuse to shut up about.



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From: Soo-Lin Lee-Segal To: Audrey Griffin





TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design. The TED conference is an exclusive meeting of the most brilliant minds in the world. It’s held once a year, in Long Beach, and it’s an enormous privilege to be chosen to give a talk. Here’s a link to Elgie’s TEDTalk.



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Dad’s TEDTalk was a really big deal. All the kids at school knew about it. Ms. Goodyear had Dad come to give the whole school a live demonstration. It’s hard to believe Audrey Griffin had never heard of it.

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Live-blog transcript of Dad’s TEDTalk posted by the blogger Masked Enzyme



4:30 PM AFTERNOON BREAK

Half hour to go until Session 10: “Code and Mind,” the last one of the day. The gals at the Vosges chocolate booth really outdid themselves for this break, passing out truffles with bacon. Hot buzz: at the end of Session 9, while Mark Zuckerberg droned on about some education initiative that nobody gave a shit about, the Vosges girls started frying their bacon, and the smell wafted into the auditorium. This got everyone murmuring excitedly, “Do you smell bacon? I smell bacon.” Chris bolted out and must have torn into the Vosges girls, who now have mascara dripping down their cheeks. Chris has always had his detractors and this sure didn’t help.


4:45 PM PEOPLE FILING INTO AUDITORIUM FOR SESSION 10

? Ben Affleck having his picture taken with Murray Gell-Mann. Dr. Gell-Mann arrived this morning, driving up to the valet in his Lexus with New Mexico plates reading QUARK. Nice touch, nice man.

? While we were on break, the stage was transformed into a living room, or maybe a college dorm. La-Z-Boy recliner, TV set, microwave, vacuum. A robot, too!

? Jesus Christ, there’s a robot onstage. It’s a cute one—four feet high, anthropomorphic. Hourglass shape. Dare I say, a sexy robot? Hmmm, program says next speaker is a dancer from Madagascar discussing her creative process. What’s the robot for, then? Will there be some kind of African-lesbian-robot-living-room dance? Stay tuned, this might get good.

? Guy with eye patch and Nehru jacket who gave deranged talk last year about floating cities just sat down where Al Gore usually sits. No reserved seats at TED, natch, but Al Gore has sat in the third row, right aisle, dating back to Monterey, and everyone knows it. You don’t just go plop down in Al Gore’s spot.

? Jane doing housekeeping announcements. Gift bag pickup closes tonight. Last chance to test-drive Tesla. Luncheon tomorrow with (the awesome) E. O. Wilson for an update on his TED wish, the Encyclopedia of Life.

? Al Gore just entered, talking with Sergey Brin’s parents. They’re so cute and tiny and don’t speak great English.

? All eyes on the veep, waiting to see how he reacts to the fact that his seat is taken. Nehru jacket offers to move, but Al Gore declines. Nehru hands Al Gore a business card! What a dirty trick. He’s practically booed by the audience, but nobody will admit to being that interested. Al Gore takes business card with a smile. I heart Al Gore.


5 PM CHRIS TAKES THE STAGE

Announces that before the African lady, there will be a surprise talk, a mind-bender, he promises, on brain-computer interface. People snap out of their truffle-and-bacon haze. Chris introduces Elgin Branch from… wait for it… Microsoft Research. Research is the only half-decent group at MS, but really? Microsoft? Audience deflating. Energy dissipating.


5:45 PM HOLY CRAP

Disregard snarkiness of 5 PM post. Give me a second… I’m going to need some time…


7 PM SAMANTHA 2

Thanks for your patience. This talk won’t post on the TED website for a month. In the meantime, let me try to do it justice. Big shout-out to my blogging pal TEDGRRRL for letting me transcribe her phone video.

5 PM Branch puts on headset. On the big screen:

ELGIN BRANCH

(You’ve gotta feel for these guys who have only five minutes. They’re all rushing and nervous.)

5:01 PM Branch: “Twenty-five years ago, my first job was testing code for a research team at Duke. They were attempting to merge mind and computer.”

5:02 PM Clicker doesn’t work. Branch hits it again. And again. Branch looking around. “This isn’t working,” he says to everyone and no one.

5:03 PM Branch bravely soldiering on without video. “They sat two rhesus monkeys in front of a video screen with joysticks, which controlled a little animated ball. Every time the monkeys used the joysticks to move the ball in a basket, they were rewarded with a treat.” He clicks again and again and looks around. Nobody is coming to help. This is ridiculous! The guy’s a good sport. David Byrne stormed offstage this morning when his audio blew.

5:05 PM Branch: “That was supposed to be a video of the pioneering Duke study. In it, you’d see a pair of monkeys with two hundred electrodes implanted into their brains’ motor cortex. They look like those grow-her-hair Barbies with the crown of their heads cut open and a bunch of wires cascading down. It’s pretty grisly. It’s probably best that I can’t show you. Anyway, it was an early instance of brain-computer interface, or BCI.” He clicks the clicker again. “I had a really good slide explaining how it worked.”