TED talks

[wakela]

If you are not listening or watching TED talks you need to start immediately.  Each one is about 20 minutes, and of the half-dozen I've listened to, I learned something new and inspiring from almost each one. 

TED stands for Technology Entertainment Design.  So you get talks from artists, nutritionists, lawyers, psychologists, computer scientists, etc.  Big cheeses like Bill Gates and Al Gore have done them.  You can subscribe to their podcast and/or their Youtube channel.

I don't work of them or anything, I've just been blown away by the high quality of the talks I've heard, and I think you guys would be too. 

[Boggled Coriander]

What wakela said. 

Don't have much to add, really, except that some are considerably shorter than 20 minutes - some are 5-6 minutes long, the average is probably 15 min or so, and 22 min is the longest they ever stretch to.  (The TED site links to some outside talks that occasionally run much longer than that, but they're the exception, not the rule.)

And they cover all sorts of topics.

[Scattercat]

TED talks are pretty much uniformly awesome.

[Planish]

Yes, awesome.

The last one I watched was with Dutch artist Theo Jansen and his kinetic sculptures that have a weird sort of mechanical intelligence. - http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/theo_jansen_creates_new_creatures.html - Kind of a Gilligan's Island-tech robot?

Before that was Pattie Maes demos the Sixth Sense

[Bdoomed]

oh  man, http://www.ted.com/talks/lennart_green_does_close_up_card_magic.html
I was cracking up.

oh and by the way I saw the Sixth Sense demo vid a while ago, so awesome.

[lowky]

Not TED talks but free online courses through cosmolearning http://www.cosmolearning.com/