TEDYouth 2012!

Today was TEDYouth!!!

For those of you that don't know what TED is, I'll give you a little summary, but you can read more about it here. TED is a nonprofit dedicated to Ideas Worth Spreading. They have two annual conferences in Long Beach/Palm Springs, California, and in Edinburgh, Scotland, where famous scientists, philosophers, artists, and doers meet to give presentations, or "TED Talks", in an effort to spread their ideas. TEDYouth began last year, and it is a TED Conference focused on high school kids, with talks geared specifically towards them.

I got a quick haircut this morning before going to help for a little at the church clean-up with the Boy Scouts. I could only stay for a little bit because I had to catch a train to the city with some Rube Goldberg kids to attend TEDYouth 2012! We had an entertaining train ride in that included a reading of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, taking a lot of selfies with my camera, and bothering the people around us. Once we arrived at Penn Station, we walked briskly through the streets of Manhattan towards The Times Center. We walked in, got our name tags, and caught up with some people we met last year at TEDYouth. When the doors to the hall opened, we were lucky enough to snag our seats from last year. The first half of the program was jam-packed with awesome speakers, like Rick Smolan, Constance Hale, and Carl Zimmer. During our lunch break we ate a ton of small sandwiches and socialized with the speakers. The second half of the program was great too, with Gaurav Tekriwal, Maurice Ashley, and Bobak Ferdowsi, who served as the Flight Director of the Mars Curiosity Rover mission (the guy with the mohawk). On our way out we grabbed some free goodies to soften the sadness that overcame us when we realized that TEDYouth 2012 was over. We had a great time and I'm so lucky that I was able to hear all of these amazing people talk about what they love doing.

I grabbed some McDonalds in Penn before the long and loud ride home. We spent nearly the whole ride looking through a photo book that Rick Smolan gave to us and trying to name McG's unborn child. As soon as I got home I headed over to Perri's house for her surprise 18th birthday party. We basically just ate food and yelled a lot for a few hours...I had a great time.

Word of the Day: Dog-ear - To fold down the corner of a page in a book