Website / Ted

Ideas Worth Spreading

TED is, in effect, a convention of speakers from various walks of life, generally predisposed towards science, arts, and humanities. Run by a small non-profit group, it attracts many of the biggest names in three industries: Technology, Entertainment, and Design. Biyearly conferences occur in various locales, including Oxford, Tanzania, and Mysore, attracting presenters from all over the world —though the central, annual convention is still held in Long Beach, California. Each 'talk' runs a variable amount of time, from five minutes to almost an hour, and the most well-received presentations are provided for free viewing online, under the Creative Commons license.

Talks generally range from the arts to the social sciences, from new methods of interactive design to discourse on education systems. The tone of the presentations oftentimes ranges towards the irreverent, humor and jokes interspersed throughout.

The organization also hosts a charity, the "TED Prize", a $100,000 USD grant and assistance provided yearly to three individuals who wish 'to change the world' in a tangible, worthwhile manner. Every year, after months of preparation, these three individuals release their idea publicly, at the central talks in Long Beach.

TED's website can be found here, but be warned: while worth watching, the videos contained can quickly lead to an Archive Binge.

Not to be confused with the 2012 film.

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This website provides examples of:

• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: In the Killer Robo-Ants riddle, the titular robo-ants were made with deadly lasers, but not the ability to turn them off, and the inventor has to round them up before they escape their farm and start indiscriminately shooting everything in the city.
• Aliens Steal Cattle: The ending to the Prisoner Hat riddle. After the aliens let the human prisoners go (they refrain from eating logical thinkers, and the humans solved the hat puzzle correctly), they decide to find a less logical organism to abduct for food, which happens to be a cow.
• Alphabetical Theme Naming:
  • Three of the green-eyed people on the prison island are named Adria, Bill and Carl.
  • The 5 pirates in the pirate riddle are named Amaro, Bart, Charlotte, Daniel and Eliza.
  • The 4 siblings in the Cheating Royal Riddle are Alexa, Bertram, Cassandra and Draco.
• Atlantis: Mentioned in the Sea Monster riddle as a floating city that failed to pay proper tithe to the sea monsters that are now threatening Atlantartica, the floating city the protagonist rules.
• Bizarre Alien Reproduction: In the Cuddly Duddly Fuddly Wuddly riddle, the Wuddly genus consists of the Ridiculously Cute Critter Cuddly, the terrifying Duddly, and the hideous Fuddly. A new member of the Wuddly genus is created via mixing 100 eggs together, two at a time, with red + blue giving a purple egg, purple + blue giving a red, and red + purple giving a blue. The last remaining egg then hatches into a Cuddly, Duddly, or Fuddly if it's blue, purple, or red respectively.
• Blatant Burglar: The Phantom Thief in the egg drop riddle enters the museum she plans to rob clad in a balaclava.
• Bungling Inventor:
  • Slate Kanoli, the protagonist's uncle in the Death Race riddle (and a Distressed Dude), is an inventor whose inventions include a snow speedo, a portable cloud, and the Coil Runner, a vehicle where messing with the emergency turbo thrusters can cause any of three catastrophic failures. Subverted in the Human Cannonball riddle, where the cannon he made fails due to being sabotaged.
  • The protagonist of the Killer Robo-Ants riddle somehow accidentally gave her creations the ability to shoot powerful laser beams, and has to deactivate all the ants before they break free and start shooting things. The end implies that she's going to make a robo-anteater that can fly and shoot fire.
• Butt-Monkey: The protagonist of the Dragon Jousting, Fantasy Election, and Ice and Fire Dragons riddles keeps getting into situations where it's either solve riddles, or be executed. In the Magical Maze riddle, he finally gets one where losing won't kill him... because losing will start a war instead.
• Call-Back: At the end of the "Cursed Dice" riddle, Demeter punishes Loki for playing a prank on her by siccing a giant snake on him - implying that she caused the problem the Norse gods faced in the "Ragnarok" riddle.
• Captain Colorbeard: The Buried Treasure riddle has you trying to find where the pirate Captain Greenbeard buried his treasure.
• Captain Ersatz: Occasionally worked into the settings of the riddles.
  • The protagonist of the World's Most Evil Wizard riddle is a female Harry Potter who has to survive against the evil wizard Moldevort.
  • Harry Potter is again referenced in the Sorting Hat Riddle, where the protagonist is in the Sorting Ceremony at Magnificent Marigold's Magical Macademy.
  • The Monster Duel riddle takes place at a Diskymon tournament.
  • The protagonist of Dongle's Difficult Dilemma is a young man in a blue tunic and floppy hat, with pointed ears, armed with a sword and shield, going through dungeons and up against an evil wizard known as "Gordon" to collect a trio of powerful artifacts. Any similarities to The Legend of Zelda are purely coincidental.
  • The protagonists of "The Time Travelling Car" get themselves caught up in some time travel shenanigans similar to Doc Brown and Marty from Back to the Future.
  • Demeter does her divine duty of bringing spring by playing Settlers of Catan. Which raises a bit of a problem when Loki curses the dice she uses so that all the dots fall off, and one die in particular so it cannot have more than four dots on a given face, so she has to re-arrange the dots so she can get the same odds as if both dice had their normal set of dots.
• Chess with Death:
  • In the Cheating Death riddle, Death permits the 2 protagonists to leave the afterlife if they can win a game of Snakes and Ladders in less than 6 moves. Fortunately, the protagonists have access to a set of trick dice that let them choose where they land.
  • The protagonist of the Tarot Card riddle has to play cards with Fate. If he loses, he dies, but if he can win with a specific card, he can either end the curse on his family that forces the card games, gain great wealth, or find true love.
• Crash-Into Hello: On their TED Ed youtube channel, the How to Speed Up Chemical Reactions (And Get a Date) video invokes this trope to illustrate chemical collisions (with parallels between particular orientation and amount of energy in the collisions).
• Crossover: The Magic Maze riddle serves as this for the Dragon Jousting series and the Moldevort series of riddles, with the return of Magnificent Marigold's Magical Macademy from the Sorting Hat riddle and both Newt-Niz and Leib-Ton schools from Wizard Standoff added in the mix.
• Cryptic Conversation: Whenever a riddle protagonist needs to eavesdrop on a conversation to get their info, people will always speak in these.
  • The Secret Sauce riddle has a variant, since neither the protagonist nor the interrogator she's listening in on know the full story- she knows whether or not a given answer is true or false but doesn't know what the answers are, and the interrogator knows what's being said but doesn't realize that the chef he kidnapped sometimes lies to him. He then proceeds to complicate the situation further by not asking for the number he needs directly, and instead asking for information about it.
  • The two minions in the Rogue Submarine riddle, when told that one knows a number that is the sum of two whole numbers less than seven while the other knows the product of the same numbers, have the following conversation, which is all the protagonist has to go on to find out what said numbers are:
  Minion A: I don't know whether you know my number.
  Minion B: I do now, and now you know my number too.
• Cutting the Knot: In the Drumbledrore vs Moldevort video, the protagonist (the genderbent Harry Potter who once trapped Moldevort with a chessboard in a previous riddle) solves a riddle to learn that Moldevort's meddling has given them a 50/50 chance of getting the Macguffin vs. being killed by a cave-in, and there's no way they can logic their way to better odds... at which point Drumbledrore reveals that he brought a good luck potion along, almost completely bypassing the element of chance.
• Disproportionate Retribution: The manager in the prisoner boxes riddle is angry that the band members keep misplacing their instruments... so he kidnaps them and forces them to solve a riddle under threat to drop the contract if they fail.
• Eat the Evidence: In the Crystal riddle, the apprentices, having tripped the alarm while stealing the elemental crystals, decide to swallow the crystals. Unfortunately, the crystals could turn them into elemental spirits if they are not decontaminated immediately.
• Enigmatic Minion:
  • The protagonist's surveillance team in the Control Room riddle are a downplayed version. They're ordinary humans, but they seem to only give him information that requires him to solve riddles in order to get anything done.
  • The two minions in the Rogue Submarine riddle know the code numbers needed to abort the missile launch, but they only talk about it in a Cryptic Conversation.
• Edutainment Show: The talks themselves are definitely meant to educate the audience on whatever topic they cover. That doesn't stop some speakers from injecting humor into their talks.
• The Emperor: The counterfeit coin riddle features an emperor who jails the protagonist just for speaking out against his taxation policies.
• Empty Quiver: The Rogue Submarine riddle features the protagonist trying to resolve an Empty Quiver scenario by hacking into the titular sub's computers and inputting the correct code to abort the missile launch.
• Evil All Along: In the Assassin Society riddle, the protagonist's agent sent to spy on the assassins turns out to be one of the assassins themselves, and was in fact the one who swatted and sabotaged his surveillance fly drone.
• Explosive Breeder: The Multiplying Rabbits riddle has "nano-rabbits" that breed quickly with those in its adjacent habitat, producing offspring equal to the product of both habitats in the habitat below. These mature in minutes and continue the process. The protagonist's job is to find out whether the bottom habitat can contain 10⁸⁰ nano-rabbits and decide to continue or abort the experiment, with the risk of the rabbits breaking out and causing a Grey Goo apocalypse. To make matters worse, a rival company has sabotaged the protagonist's nano-rabbit company and removed the trailing zeroes from all his calculations.
• Fair Play Whodunit: The Human Cannonball riddle video challenges the viewer to solve not only the riddle (how to compensate for your cannon's sabotage), but who sabotaged the protagonist's cannon to begin with, out of three suspects: the clown (who has a crush on the trapeze artist who's the protagonist's partner in the act), the lion tamer (who wants to be the circus's star attraction), and the Ringmaster (who always wants more publicity). The culprit is the lion tamer, whose shoulder tassel has been torn off and can be found in the cannon. The ringmaster wasn't involved, because he isn't going to sabotage his star attractions just for some temporary shock value. The clown knew about the sabotage and tried to stop it (he isn't going to risk his loved one's life to sabotage the protagonist), as indicated by a splash of the yellow liquid in his squirting flower near the lion tamer- which is also presumably how the lion tamer lost his tassel.
• Fire, Ice, Lightning:
  • The Fire and Ice Dragons riddle involves solving the territorial issues of Fire and Ice dragons in the protagonist's home kingdom. After that, the protagonist is sent across the Western Sea to a land with even worse territory issues, now including Lightning dragons too.
  • In the Alien Probe riddle, the probe is given three different coatings to protect it from the extreme conditions it will encounter on its journey - extreme cold from the vacuum of space, extreme heat when it enters a planet's atmosphere, and electrical storms on the planet's surface.
• Five-Aces Cheater: In the Cheating Royal riddle, the king makes his 4 children play a game of dice to determine which of them will become his heir, has them each record their own scores and tasks the protagonist with analysing them. On closer inspection, it turns out that this trope (or at least some really bad math) is in play for 3 of the 4 scores submitted: 2 of the children logged scores that were impossible - Bertram declares a score of 840 when the maximum possible score for the game is 700, and Draco claims to have rolled 423 on dice where every combined score should be a multiple of 5. A third player, Cassandra, declares 700, which would have required her to roll the highest score on her dice 40 times in a row, at odds of 1 in 13 nonillion - improbable enough that it's reasonable to assume she either cheated or miscounted, and disqualify her under the conditions set out by the king.
• Fling a Light into the Future: The protagonist's father in the Tarot Card riddle lost his game with Fate, but he also hid a video camera that allowed his child to watch his attempt and thus learn the rules of Fate's riddle in advance, unlike everyone else who attempted the riddle and died. This allows the protagonist to avoid the trap that killed all of his ancestors; Fate offered them to take the Tower card before they knew the rules of the game and that taking it would make said game impossible to win.
• Forced Transformation: In the crystal riddle, the apprentices are in danger of transforming into uncontrollable elemental spirits because they swallowed the elemental crystals.
• Growing Muscles Sequence: Done with a chicken in "History through the eyes of a chicken", who then subsequently rapidly fires eggs out of a cannon in its backside.
• Hereditary Curse: The Vorozheykin family in the Tarot Card Riddle is cursed by Fate after an anscestor stole her tarot deck. Once every 23 years, one member of the family must solve Fate's puzzle or lose their soul. The protagonist is the most recent challenger, who has the leg up of knowing what the rules are in advance due to a video camera their father hid in the room when it was his turn. The curse will be broken if someone wins while having the High Priestess card, while having the Lovers will guarantee they find true love, and the Wheel of Fortune will grant the winner great wealth. Winning with any one of these cards is possible, but it means giving up on the other two.
• The Hero Dies: The protagonist of the Risky Disk riddle is an anti-virus program given one chance to pass information about how to defeat a virus to his team before he gets derezzed. If he finds the correct code to indicate where the Virus is holed up, he'll still die, but his team will be able to stop the Virus.
• Historical Domain Character: The protagonist of the Hades riddle is Sisyphus, who has another chance to escape Hades for good... if he can solve the riddle.
• "How I Wrote This Article" Article: Tim Urban opens his TED Talk "Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator" with a description of his own last-minute writing of the TED Talk as an example of his process.
• Lampshade Hanging: Some of the riddles end with lampshading the contrived circumstances that led to the protagonists needing to solve the riddle.
  Control Room Riddle (which requires the protagonist to use graph theory to get his answer from the information he has at the start): Now, time to solve the mystery of why your surveillance team always gives you cryptic information.
  Pirate Riddle: So it looks like Amaro gets to keep most of the gold. And the other pirates might need to find better ways to use those impressive logic skills. Like revising this absurd pirate code.
• La Résistance: The protagonists of the passcode riddle are a trio of resistance fighters in a dystopian future.
• Living Lie Detector: One of the many spy skills the protagonist of the Secret Sauce riddle has. It allows her a leg up over the interrogator she's spying on, since she knows which of his prisoner's answers are lies while he believes everything he hears.
• Logical Fallacies: The Demon of Reason series focuses on teaching these, using the Demon of Reason popping in on real-life demonstrations of said fallacies to lecture about them.
• Loony Laws: The city of Duonia from the Penniless Pilgrim riddle taxes people based on what direction they walk through the city. Walking right adds 2 pieces of silver to the tax, walking downward multiplies it by 2, walking left subtracts 2, and walking up divides it by 2. Which is a problem for the titular Pilgrim, who has no money and must get from the top left to bottom right of the city without ending up in debt. These laws even allow negative tax to be incurred and multiplied by moving counter-clockwise, which is needed to solve the riddle.
• Masked Luchador: For anachronistic humor, one of the opposing physicians competing in a mock battle in "A day in the life of an Aztec midwife" wears a luchador's mask and cape.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Each of the four apprentices in the crystal riddle have a name corresponding to the elemental crystal they ate, which serves as an alternate way to solve the riddle:
    • Rikku = Riku(陸), Japanese for 'Land' or 'Continent' ('Earth')
    • Sumi = Sum(숨), Korean for 'Breath' ('Air')
    • Bella = Latin for war ('Fire')
    • Jonah = From Jonah and the Whale. Jonah was swallowed by a whale, a fish of the sea. ('Water')
  • In "The Cheating Royal Riddle", Cassandra is disqualified from the game because the protagonist can be more than 90% certain that she either cheated or miscounted to get her ridiculously improbable score. However, given that the name Cassandra is associated with a trope about telling the truth but never being believed, maybe she really was very lucky and honest about her score...
• Million to One Chance:
  • In the Cheating Royal Riddle, Cassandra gets a ridiculously improbable score equal to rolling the highest score on her dice 40 times in a row, at odds of 1 in 13 nonillion. It's highly likely that she was cheating, unless she somehow managed to get this lucky.
  • Implied in the Assassin Society Riddle, where each assassin somehow manages to have their calling card (which they replace one of their dealt cards to signal the attack) match one of the three shared cards drawn from the pile, and the fourth one so happens to have their calling card match that of one of the victims, causing all four to give their intentions away.
• Near-Villain Victory: Several riddles are depicted as being solved just before the crisis that would've happened if they were failed, such as in the Rogue Submarine riddle in which the nuclear missile launch is overridden just seconds before they were meant to be launched.
• Never the Selves Shall Meet: The premise of the "Time Travelling Car" riddle is that two time-travellers meet future versions of themselves who time-travelled to the same point, and must now travel back in a specific way in order to merge the time streams and prevent a Temporal Paradox.
• No Honor Among Thieves: In the pirate riddle, while all the pirates will follow the pirate code to the letter, their goal is always to get the most gold possible for themselves, and if they think that following a certain plan won't give them more profit than the other alternative, they will vote for the planner to walk the plank.
• Oddly Small Organization: The rebel group in the Passcode Riddle consists of three people- the protagonist, Zara, and one other person.
• Phantom Thief: The protagonist of the egg drop riddle is “the world’s most notorious jewel thief” who spends the riddle using a logical deduction to decide which of the eggs featured in a 100-story egg museum she should steal.
• Pooled Funds: At one point in "The Infinite Hotel Paradox", the night manager is shown swimming in the infinite hotel's infinite profits.
• Prophecy Twist: In the Trojan War riddle, the Fates prophecize to the protagonist, Athena, that the Trojan War will end soon if the current ten-day truce doesn't collapse. You'll notice they never said anything about the war ending peacefully, as Odysseus takes the opportunity to pull off the Trojan Horse trick- presumably passing the thing off as being made to commemorate Athena keeping the peace by solving the riddle. Oops!
• Ridiculously Cute Critter:
  • The Cuddly in the Cuddly Duddly Fuddly Wuddly riddle is said to be the cutest creature in all of creation, and the protagonist's child wants one for a pet as a birthday present.
  • The nano-rabbits in the Multiplying Rabbits riddle are adorable and extremely tiny. They're also Explosive Breeders and having too much for an enclosure to handle will cause them to break out and cause a Grey Goo apocalypse scenario.
• Rite of Passage: "A day in the life of a teenage samurai" describes its subject Mori Banshirô being given two swords upon reaching the age of 15 — a long sword for training and combat, and a short sword for seppuku.
• Samus Is a Girl: The protagonist's partner in the Jail Break riddle spends most of the video covered up by motorcycle gear, but at the end after the protagonist gets out she takes off her helmet, revealing long red hair.
• Schizo Tech: In the Secret Werewolf Riddle, the protagonist (who looks like Sherlock Holmes) inexplicably has access to a laser cutter.
• Sequel Episode:
  • Fantasy Election is a sequel to the Dragon Jousting riddle, featuring the same protagonist who has to complete a poll after his world transitions to democracy from rulers chosen by dragon jousting tournaments.
  • Ice and Fire Dragons is another sequel to Dragon Jousting, with that same unlucky protagonist needing to divide up territories to satisfy some approaching Elder Dragons.
  • Magical Maze is another sequel to Dragon Jousting, this time tying it in with the Moldevort riddles, Wizard Standoff, and Sorting Hat.
  • Human Cannonball is a sequel to the Death Race riddle, featuring Slate Kanoli (the racer's uncle) as the protagonist's mentor who designed the cannon he uses.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: In the intro to the "Time Travelling Car" riddle, the time traveller's shenanigans cause the school bully to become a world dictator, and the journey that causes the main part of the riddle is them preventing that from happening.
• Sherlock Can Read: In the Infinite Gold riddle, the fairy creature asks the protagonist to guess his name, when she points out that he's wearing a nametag that says "Banach-Tarski". When he turns to leave after the actual riddle is solved, he also has the answer to the riddle sewn into the back of his shirt.
• Stock Puzzle: The Ted-Ed riddles series uses several of these as the basis of its riddles.
  • Fox-Chicken-Grain Puzzle: The 4 persons crossing a bridge variant is used in one riddle, where you and your three coworkers must escape a remote lab before zombies get you. The Cannibals and Missionaries variant is used in another riddle, where three lions and three wildebeest must escape a brushfire while making sure the lions never outnumber the wildebeest at any time.
  • Game of Nim: The "Rogue AI Riddle" pits the player against an AI in a variant of the game. You start on top of 25 meters of electrified water while Nim starts at the bottom. Both players must lower the water level to exactly 0 on their turn, and can only lower the water levels by 1, 3, or 4 levels.
  • Knights and Knaves:
    • The Three Gods puzzle appears, with the player a crashed astronaut who must figure out the identities of three alien overlords, one of whom is always truthful, another is always false, and a third whose answers are random, using three yes-or-no questions. And to make matters worse, they don't know which of the words Ozo or Ulu means yes, and which means no.
    • In the Secret Werewolf Bonus Riddle, the Detective (a Sherlock Holmes lookalike) travels to a werewolf village, with the stipulation given that werewolves always lie while humans always tell the truth. Since all 100 village inhabitants say that there is at least 1 human among them, the only solution is that all 100 inhabitants are werewolves since at least 1 werewolf must exist in the village, and regardless of what the others said, that one werewolf must have lied about there being at least one human.
  • 12 Coins Puzzle: In the Counterfeit Coin Riddle, you are an imprisoned mathematician who must earn freedom by determining which of twelve coins is counterfeit, using only a marker and three weighings on a scale.
• Simple Country Lawyer: The Defending Lawyer in the "History Vs" usually has a Southern accent, but sometimes he's replaced with a different defense lawyer (the one in History vs. Andrew Jackson has the same accent but is much younger, the one in History vs. Vladimir Lenin has a Russian accent).
• Stock Lateral Thinking Puzzle:
  • Wizard Standoff is the Truel puzzle, with the twist that the protagonist can choose between having a 60% chance of hitting, an 80% chance, and a 100% chance (his opponents have a 70% chance and a 90% chance respectively). The original situation of the truel is the best one, because if you don't miss the opponent you aim at then the other will probably kill you, and if you do miss, you'll be a target since you would be the more dangerous opponent. Taking the 60% chance and missing on purpose gives you better-than-average odds of success because the other two will take each other out, following which you have a 60% chance of winning on your next turn.
  • The Time-Travelling Car riddle is actually a variant of the 'What color is the bear?' riddle, with the twist that you need to find two separate places at least 100 miles apart where you can travel a mile south, then a mile east, and a mile north and end up back at your starting point.In any case, the answer is still the poles. One time-traveller pulls the classic trick at the north pole, while the second starts a mile north of a 1 mile circumference circle around the South Pole.
• Straight Gay: A blink-and-you'll miss it moment, but the trapezist in the Human Cannonball riddle is referred to as 'him', meaning that the clown who has a crush on him (and potentially the protagonist, whose act with the trapezist has a romantic rescue element, but whose personal feelings on the matter- and gender, for that matter- are never clarified) fits the trope.
• Take That!: A rather brutal one in "Why can parrots talk?" - the narrator questioning whether parrots can understand what they're saying is juxtaposed with one such parrot advising their owner to "INVEST IN CRYPTO!", with her looking noticeably worried afterwards.
• Tarot Troubles: In the Tarot Card riddle, the Vorozheykin family curse began when an ancestor stole a magical tarot deck from fate, and the game that Fate plays with them involves a tarot deck. She also offers each family member she plays against the Tower, the card usually seen as an ominous Portent of Doom, to begin. The Tower is indeed portent of bad news, since taking it on the first turn makes the game unwinnable and offering it before explaining the rules was Fate's gambit to make sure that nobody escaped the curse.
• Threatening Shark: The sharks in the fish riddle are not threatening to the human characters, but they do threaten the endangered species of rare fish that fell from the cargo.
• To Serve Man: The aliens in the prisoner hat riddle kidnap the humans specifically to eat them (though for some reason they avoid eating logical thinkers).
• Unobtainium: The incredibly rare metal the prospectors are searching for in the False Positive Riddle.
• Villain Protagonist:
  • The Pirate riddle stars five bloodthirsty pirates who have to divide up their ill-gotten gains.
  • The egg drop riddle stars a Phantom Thief who wants to steal a valuable egg from the egg museum.
  • The Jail Break riddle stars a bank robber trying to escape prison with his partner's help.
• Worthless Treasure Twist: The Buried Treasure riddle concerns the titular treasure of Captain Greenbeard. It turns out to be a chest of tree seeds.
• You Can't Make an Omelette...: The egg drop riddle ends with the narrator saying “Like the old saying goes, you can’t pull off a heist without breaking a few eggs.”

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