TED meet BIL, BIL meet TED
I love TED lectures. I have an ambition to actually go one day. Maybe even pull the wool over someone’s eyes for long enough that they let me up on stage to speak. But it’s $6000 just to attend. And that doesn’t include my flights, stay in a posh hotel and massive bar tab.
However, there is now an alternative to TED. And it’s called BIL. It stands for the Bilateral, Intelligence, Life (I think they just cobbled some random words together so that they could have a name just like TED). It seems to be a bit like Speaker’s Corner for geeks. Anyone who’s got something to say can just turn up and start talking. This is their reason for starting it:
At some point we realized we are all interesting people with worthwhile things to say, and it didn’t make sense to rely always on centrally organized ways for spreading ideas. There is a time and place for traditional conferences, TED is a great conference, but perhaps a little emergence and anarchy is needed.
I fear that it’s just going to be a bunch of self-interested bores doing bad presentations. But I hope I’m wrong. We need to spread more intelligence around this little planet of ours.
So it’s cheaper than TED and there’s no barrier to me getting up and speaking. But unfortunately it still won’t help me cut down on those expensive bar bills.
The Dictionary of Specific Generalities 
Seems the like your right about the randomness of the abbreviation, I went to the site and it said, “Booze. Inspiration. Learning.” and next time “Boisterous. Ingenious. Logic.”..
I’d be interested in a Dave B lecture. Maybe you could do one on the finer points of exotic bread baking or techniques for painting foreign bottles of beer?
Cheers Ben,
I think my experimental yoghurt bread would make an interesting lecture but my beer bottle paintings leave something to be desired. I had drunk the beer before I painted them, after all.