As a first-time attendee of TED, or a TED "virgin" as they say, I found the day an almost overwheming multi-sensory infusion of knowledge. My brain hurts so good. There's too much to thumbtype and precious little open time in the very full schedule to get on the Internet, so here are some fragments from yesterday:

One startling observation I have as an asian american interested in diversity is that TED IS WHITE. Looking out across the main hall theater yesterday and this morning in the simulcast lounge, there were very few minorities. Just a handful of asians, asian indians, and african americans out of 1000 attendees. Interesting.

I learned that our Timbuk2 messenger bag is a specially designed, not-yet-for-sale icon designed to completely embody "cradle-to-cradle" design principles. And it's a great bag too.

Nicholas Negroponte passed around a non-working mock-up of the $100 Laptop during his passionate talk. He's determined to scale his effort through force of will to drop these laptops around the world in developing countries by the tens of millions units. He's also long made the case on the bloat and complexity in today's laptops. He says 60% of the cost of a laptop is sales and marketing. 25% of the cost is the screen.

Hans Rosling gave a rousing talk on his new approaches to visualizing data on global trends to produce more powerful educational experiences. All of his interactives are linked above.

The performance by the Children of Uganda traveling troupe was an envigorating way to ease out the afternoon of highly technical talks on multi-dimensional space, and DNA.

The program ran long and then the Al Gore talk was moved up from 9pm to 7pm, so no dinner. But that was OK since Al's talk and slideshow on global warming was captivating. Much of his message can be found this speech and elsewhere in the Google index. There's a documentary on Al's work that was shown at Sundance this year.

There's more from the day in a Flickr photo set.

Now diving back in...

- mike lee - ted