Friday Morning TED Talk: David Merrill and "Siftables"

TED stands for "Technology, Entertainment, Design"---all presented in a short, attention-grabbing time span. Today's talk, from the TED 2009 Conference at Long Beach, epitomizes the very best of all those aspects. Computer scientist David Merrill, who works at MIT's Media Lab, demonstrates a new product (design) and technology that entertains enormously, and he shows it off in just over seven minutes. He calls the ingenious little devices "Siftables", for reasons that will be apparent as you view the talk:

You can watch a high-resolution mp4 video of the demonstration here, if you have a suitable media player (QuickTime or Windows Media Player), and for this particular demonstration, I encourage you to do so.

[UPDATE 04/03/2009: This is not exactly connected to David Merrill's talk, but it is another example of cool technology and design that provides fascinating entertainment, plus it is going on right now: watch "100 Hours of Astronomy" live on line. Part of the project is an online event that started in Hawaii at 0900 GMT this morning, moved eastward to Australia and Japan, and is now in Spain; it's called "Around the World in 80 Telescopes." For more details, see this post at the TED blog, to whom I give a tip of the Rumpolean bowler for the information.]