TedxHongKongED 2014

20140531 2230

Wow! had a really rewarding day - up fresh at 0730 despite only having a terrible 4 hours of zzz time in desperate fear of a mosquito buzzing around my room leeching off my O+ blood CRYCRY!!! :'(

anyway... then had a nice breakfast with plastic B, then set off for TedxHongKongED - the first TED event I've been to. (thanks wlcp for the invite!!!)

http://tedxed.hk/

though sitting for 6-7 hours really made my butt and back all sore ... it was pretty worth it (Y)

ofc, you might say that these independent TED events are nothing like the real thing ... but hey, we're all just simple human beings, and we can all learn something cool from other human beings :)

obviously some speakers were better than others, some messages hit home much more powerfully than others did. But that aint matter, cos at the end of the day, I was pretty blown away by some of the stuff that went on in those other human beings' lives. Not that they had the greatest opportunities in life, but HOW they dealt with the adversities in their lives and transformed themselves and changed their perspectives, and smashed apart those obstacles using an alternative method.

It was incredible, one speaker talked of her daughter born without a heartbeat or breath, almost brain dead, and pronounced by doctors likely to be both physically and mentally incapacitated for the whole of her life ... only to survive with severe cerebral palsy but at the same time now is one of the most inspiring people I have ever heard of! And she's still a high schooler in KGV! that makes me feel like, she could've been in my class, and how would I have treasured such an opportunity to interact with her! She really reminds me of Nick Vujicic (my hero)

http://tedxed.hk/speaker/kim-anderson/

"It's not what life throws at you. It's how you react to what life throws at you."

"You can be who you want to be. The biggest opponent in life is always going to be yourself."
(a close friend has said this to me before and I truly embrace it, though incredibly difficult in practice)

"You must fail in life, in order to find ways to overcome the obstacle and achieve more. If you're afraid of failing you'll never succeed."

Again, Nick Vujicic. "You need courage to fail."
"Courage is the strength that overrides all the fear to give you strength to just try anyway."

I'm pretty damn sure it's not the first time I've heard such messages before, but in that particular time and place and context ... everything just naturally fell into place perfectly and punched a provocative message out to me. It's not something I will forget in a while.

And then, there was something entirely unbeknownst to me, in my little happy bubble of ignorance - robotics. Evidently I'd heard the term before, broken concepts here and there, and even studied AI (artificial intelligence) during IB philosophy - but it just seemed like an entirely different universe! I came to realise how revolutionary robotics research and design had become over the past decade, how wrong my initial perspective had been, and how immensely useful they could actually prove to be o_o

My second favourite one (my favourite was the beautiful KGV girl with cerebral palsy who can work wonders despite having mega mega mega motor deficits and 24/7 physical dependence.

oh oops anyway, my second favourite one was about robotics replicating neurobehaviour and human facial expressions, in relation to the human brain and neural connections and everything above and beyond it. It was a pretty good summary of the neuroanatomy I've been learning this year, and I just obsessed over it. And a more primitive robot was built a little while ago to aid medical technology for complex neural conditions such as autism (autism, being one of my life obsessions) ... and I suddenly felt totally absorbed. The speaker was using all sorts of fancy neurology terms and I understood every single word haha (i even turned to wlcp and asked her if it was quite sad, she looked at me dead in the eye and said definitively ... yeah @@)

and for their latest robot, they created one that imitated a baby - with its ability for classical conditioning, complete with the inherent mother-baby bond (e.g. baby cries when mother leaves his/her line of sight), and they showed the different layers they replicated to mimic the intricate components of the brain that control individual elements like facial expression (muscle control) and stuff. E.g. basal ganglia as a networking system linking cortices with the brainstem, superior colliculus that picks up loud sounds, etc.

The baby was so cute! :3

And it really made me think hard - how much this is going to influence my practice in the future, if I am privileged enough to be working with kids and using such mindblowing technology. That would just be way cool. Wicked.

All in all, very excited for what the future has in store for us all! Embrace challenges, embrace failures, embrace every single life lesson :') and treasure all the people around you, who will only make you stronger. not because they can educate you and teach you and impart knowledge to you - but because they will inspire you to seek knowledge on your own, at your own pace, driven and motivated by your own soul.

Time to set the world on fire~!