http://www.ted.com Like your uncle at a family party, the rumpled Swedish doctor Lennart Green says, “Pick a card, any card.” But what he does with those cards is pure magic — flabbergasting, lightning-fast, how-does-he-do-it? magic.

http://www.ted.com The photo director for National Geographic, David Griffin knows the power of photography to connect us to our world. In a talk filled with glorious images, he talks about how we all use photos to tell our stories.

http://www.ted.com After Robert Lang’s talk on origami at TED2008, Bruno Bowden stepped onstage with a challenge — he would fold one of Lang’s astonishingly complicated origami figures, blindfolded, in under 2 minutes. He’s accompanied by the cellist Rufus Cappadocia.

http://www.ted.com Robert Lang is a pioneer of the newest kind of origami — using math and engineering principles to fold mind-blowingly intricate designs that are beautiful and, sometimes, very useful.

http://www.ted.com Researcher Kwabena Boahen is looking for ways to mimic the brain’s supercomputing powers in silicon — because the messy, redundant processes inside our heads actually make for a small, light, superfast computer.

http://www.ted.com At the 2007 EG conference, Kevin Kelly shares a fun stat: The World Wide Web, as we know it, is only 5,000 days old. Now, Kelly asks, how can we predict what’s coming in the next 5,000 days?

http://www.ted.com Reed Kroloff gives us a new lens for judging new architecture: is it modern, or is it romantic? Look for glorious images from two leading practices — and a blistering critique of the 9/11 planning process.

http://www.ted.com In this short, image-packed talk, Marisa Fick-Jordan talks about how a village of traditional Zulu wire weavers built a worldwide market for their dazzling work.

At the EG conference in December 2007, artist Jonathan Harris discusses his latest projects, which involve collecting stories: his own, strangers’, and stories collected from the Internet, including his amazing “We Feel Fine.”