TED Community » Anca Chereches

Comments

• TEDCred score: +4.00 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• +2

  A reply on Talk: Tim Ferriss: Smash fear, learn anything

  Feb 20 2010: RE: "A male in a milonga would be sought after."
  
  I'd like to disagree on that. At a milonga, a good dancer would rather spend the night sitting at the bar than dance with a beginner. Beginners have bad technique, which leads to very uncomfortable (and thus not enjoyable) and potentially dangerous dances. There's a lot of traffic on the milonga dance floor. If your technique is not good enough to navigate, you will get pushed around and kicked a lot.
  
  Good dancers will dance with beginners at practicas, to help improve their technique, but milongas are for enjoyment and moving up the tango food chain, not practice.
• +1

  A reply on Talk: Tim Ferriss: Smash fear, learn anything

  Feb 20 2010: Fernando, I'm just wondering how many classes is "several" classes. Very many Argentines have nothing to do with the tango scene.
  
  I've been dancing Argentine Tango for almost 4 years now. Not that this would automatically make anyone's opinion authoritative in any way, it just puts it into perspective a bit.
  
  I feel somewhat doubtful of Mr. Ferriss' dancing abilities. I've seen some videos of him dancing on youtube and it looks okay enough. But some things don't add up.
  
  For one, he calls it "ballroom dancing," when Argentine Tango dancers are always quick to spot and complain about ballroom dancers because ballroom tango is so different from AT. Mr. Ferriss also talks about "breaking" the follower and "pushing" her (on his blog). Now I've never taken classes with Gabriel Misse, but I doubt it's what he does/teaches. AT is about comfort and natural, fluid motion. If you break and push followers around, no one will dance with you (unless paid). A lead is an invitation, not a command.

• A reply on Talk: Derek Sivers: Weird, or just different?

  Feb 20 2010: The idea that the Japanese writing system is ideographic is a common misconception. The Japanese have 3 writing systems: 2 syllabaries (kana) + 1 logographic (kanji), where one grapheme maps onto a word or a morpheme.
  
  As to which part of the brain is involved in processing kanji vs kana, see this pretty recent fMRI study: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2782536/?tool=pubmed (Buschweitz, Mason, Hasegawa, and Just, 2009). Buschweitz et al. find more right hemisphere activity for kanji processing, but put the difference down to the visual complexity of kanji compared to kana. The right hemisphere is more specialized in visuospatial processing.
  
  PS - If you wanna use scientific arguments, I'd stay away from pseudoscientific generalizations and non sequiturs such as "the left brain is more analytic and the right more artistic," and since the Japanese read kanji, they must be more creative and artistic than analytic.
• +4

  A reply on Talk: Kevin Kelly: The next 5,000 days of the web

  Aug 15 2009: Actually, I would agree with the initial comment on this one. Glass is reusable. You can fill up a pitcher again and again. PET bottles are not, they're disposable and they're usually not passed from one person to the next. So glass may be more difficult to produce, but it scores more points for "reduce" and "reuse".
  
  As for recycling, correct me if I'm wrong, but glass is inifinitely recyclable. Plastic is not. Also, plastic bottle caps generally don't get recycled. Watch the TED talk "Seas of plastic", it's short and poignant.
  
  I agree with the OP. This is a problem that DOES matter. The amount of plastic (bottles and otherwise) used and discarded is terrifying. TED is in the position to set an example and I think they should.