I probably ought to wait and post thee videos next week, since so many of you will be involved in Thanksgiving festivities, but then that wouldn’t be fair to the goodly number of you who live overseas. Can’t have that, so I’ll trust that the rest of you will catch up next week.

TED.com has become a very popular site in the last year, though it’s been around for a lot longer. For those of you who haven’t visited, it’s a site consisting of free videos of experts in a wide range of different fields giving incredible talks on cutting edge research and ideas. I watch a lot of them, but there are three that I am particularly fond of, and they are distantly related to the Brian Greene books I was discussing last week. Or at least they are damn fascinating in their own right.

The first one I’ll share with you is about femto-photography, a process that allows the ‘camera’ to film at a trillion frames per second. That’s right, a trillion. Regular movie film moves at 24 frames per second. Femto photography is fast enough and sensitive enough to capture the movement of light! You have to watch this, to see a small packet of photons shoot through and shatter within a Coke bottle. The uses of the photography are myriad, but I’m still processing the Coke bottle.

Next up is a man looking for new architectural shapes. Sounds dull as dirt, I know, but he’s talking about alien shapes that could fit nicely in a Lovecraft story. But even more to the point is the way he achieves theses shapes. Using algorithims he designs himself, he essentially folds boxes 10,000 or more times. A lot of them don’t pan out, but you have to see the ones that do.

Finally, a demonstration of how we see….and how it relates to the REAL world. Much of this is old stuff to anyone who has painted or worked with color, but the explanation behind why these effects occur is the meat of the video.

Enjoy. Have a good holiday or a good weekend.