If you follow the news at all you start noticing a trend... war, death, famine, disease, recession, depression, homeless, racism, climate change, etc, etc. It seems to me that more and more the tone of major news outlets is a very pessimistic one. It's the style of our time to be frightened of tomorrow and the horrors it might bring. In which case I'm totally unhip because I am an optimist.

Perhaps it was my diet of science fiction novels as a child reader. I fell in love with the future, the idea that we are working towards a better tomorrow. The News would tell you that we are working towards the total exploitation and destruction of our world. That we should stop now, just stop everything, before its too late. Of course there's truth in what they preach, you can't ignore problems, but you can work to solve them.

That's what people are doing, working to fix things, make things better, understand the wprld we live in. I like listening to these people more then the News, and this is what this whole rant has been building too, a presentation of an alternative to pessimism and a shameless plug of something I happen to love. TED, Technology Entertainment Design, a massive conference for the presentation of one thing, ideas. They're up there on the net right now, right here [link]

I recommend it.

Because in the end, the people making the most noise about a problem are those doing the least to fix it. The people who go to TED and the thousands like them that are at work around the world, they are the people who will fix it.