There Are Four Lights

Attending TEDActive was an amazing experience. Just seeing the TED2010 simulcast alone is great—-12 sessions of TED talks in four days. Then there’s the swag; the TED gift bags and the surprise giveaway of Google Nexus One phones for the 1500 Long Beach attendees, 500 TEDActive attendees, and all the TED Associate members. One of the experiences I’m most grateful for in my TEDActive ’10 attendance was the opportunity to give a 3min TEDYou talk, Friday morning, to an audience of a few hundred of my fellow TEDActive members.

I was second to speak, which meant following Sebastian Wernicke‘s amazing talk on how to make an amazing TED talk. My 3mins was dedicated to speaking about why I think the world needs more skepticism and how I’d like to promote that idea through manga storytelling.

What I believe is an idea worth spreading can be summed up in one of my favourite Sagan quotes “For me, it is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring”. The theme of this year’s TED conference was “What the World Needs Now”. My pick for what the world needs is more skepticism, critical thinking, and science literacy.

If we want to distinguish what is true from what we simply want to be true, we will learn to be good skeptics.

TED is a conference of the world’s leading thinkers and doers. What speaks to me the most about the TED speakers is not only that they are at the leading edge of their field, but that their work is driven by a passion to somehow make the world a better place. In my own work, I’m motivated to improve my writing and art from a technical perspective, but my major focus is often to establish what my own idea worth spreading is.

Manga is a hugely popular form of sequential art. Some of the things most appealing to me about it is the diverse readership (people of all ages read manga, including a high percentage of female readers) and the unconstrained storytelling—-you can tell all kinds of stories using manga. My goal in my work as a mangaka is to create stories that show the value in critical thinking and the dangers of mixing power and ignorance. I want to create characters that are good role models as skeptics—-overcoming problems using knowledge and evidence-based thinking.

Legend of the Ztarr is the story I’m writing with these ideas in mind. Currently, the first chapter is available online. My goal for 2010 is to get the series picked up my one of the major US manga publishers.

I had a great time getting my 3mins in front of the amazing TEDActive crowd. It isn’t often I get to talk to others about my work and my passion behind it. My fellow TED 2009 Fellowship member, Tino Chow, posted about my TEDYou talk on his blog, where he covered the TED simulcast.

©tinochow

Last February, I was chosen to be a TED’09 Fellow and attended the TED conference in Long Beach, CA. It was a life-changing experience. This year, I’m headed to TEDActive, in Palm Springs, which is the simulcast of TED. For those of you who live in a cyber-cave, head over to TED.com already!

I did a talk, last year, on the TED Fellows stage, and this year I’ll be doing another little talk—-this time, during TEDActive‘s TEDYou session. I’ve recently put the finishing touches on my slides (example above). My talk will be about skepticism and manga!

Obviously, I didn’t have the time or energy to blog about my TED experience while I was actually there. TED is a brain-melting experience that leaves you feeling amazed and overwhelmed at the end of each day. I’m going to have to refresh my memory when the DVD set arrives of all the great talks that were given within just a few days. As a fellowship member, I did a short talk on a mini TED stage to an audience of fellow Fellows. I took advantage of the chance to give a talk to talk about one of the things I love to talk about most—-Legend of the Ztarr, my new manga series!

As a Canadian in the middle of winter, just being in California was nice (though, apparently 12c is “cold”, lol). I was really thrilled to meet all kinds of amazing people; Of course, all of the fellowship members were extraordinary and simply the greatest group of people I’ve been fortunate enough to become friends with. Everyone is doing something amazing to change the world for the better from all corners of the planet.

Though my family was interested in hearing about whether I got to meet Al Gore or Robin Williams, instead, I was excited about getting to meet Dan Dennett, philosopher and one of the ‘Four Horsemen’ of atheism, Brian Cox, physicist at CERN working on the LHC, and Carolyn Porco, head of imaging for the Cassini mission to Saturn (links point to Flickr photos of them and myself). I’m extremely shy, so I probably freaked them all out a bit by being so quiet!

My Twitter followers count has quadrupled since the first day at TED and my inbox has exploded with emails. There are several invites in the works for various talks/workshops that organizations are interested in having me attend. Hopefully, this TED momentum will aid in my current goal of getting Legend of the Ztarr picked up by a publisher. If there’s one feeling that a TED conference leaves you with, it’s that nothing is out of reach, and any idea is possible. TED is truly an inspiring gathering of the worlds leading thinkers and doers, that leaves a lasting impression on the rest of your life.

If you’ve come across this little blog of mine, I invite you to read Legend of the Ztarr and spread the word about it. You can find my collection of TED photos on my Flickr account, follow me on twitter here, and look me up on Facebook/Myspace as well.

So this little blog of mine will serve as a place to write about my trip to Long Beach and my adventures at TED 2009 this week. As I believe I mentioned before, I was selected as one of the Fellowship members invited to attend TED this year. Lucky~!

I left North Bay for California on Sunday, but missed my connection in Toronto because of too much snow on the runway in North Bay which delayed my flight. Sunday afternoon was spent in the airport waiting for my flight to LAX at 5:30pm. So I didn’t end up at my hotel in Long Beach until around 9pm.

But the first day in Long Beach, here at the Hilton, was lovely! My Fellow roomate and I spent the afternoon by the pool. It’s so nice here, I don’t think I’ll be wanting to go back to the -40c weather up in northern Ontario. We registered and got our TED badges around 4pm and then got ready for the TED Fellows welcome party by the pool.

The welcome party was beautiful and everyone is so friendly and interesting. And wow, the amazing swag they had for all of us at the end–it was like being on Oprah, lol! “YOU get a car and YOU get a car!”, ok, no cars…but we all got gift bags with this neat little HD video cameras, and Nokia smart phones! Hadn’t I just been complaining that day that my phone was horribly annoying to send txts with? THANK YOU!

I live in a small northern Ontario town and this was the view from our balcony the other day. Snow is nice, as long as you stay indoors looking out at it. We have much more snow now than what is in this picture. November is just the first month of snow, which will continue right on until March/April. Fortunately, in the middle of this northern Ontario winter I will be escaping all the snow for Long Beach, CA; I’ve been invited as a fellowship member to the TED 2009 conference. Lucky!

TED (Technology Entertainment Design) is an annual idea conference in California. Its moto is Ideas worth spreading. They chose 20 individuals to attend as fellowship members and I’m so excited to be one of them. I’ll be heading to LA for the first week in February, which surprisingly seems just around the corner. More info about TED can be found on their website here.

I have a member profile you can check out which includes some of my favourite TED talks. Each week day, a new video of a TED talk is posted and I’m pretty much addicted to it; I can’t wait to see who will be speaking at TED 2009. Here is one of my favourite talks, which is by Michael Shermer from TED 2006.