A post on Josh Holmes‘ blog mentioned that he watches videos on the TED site regularly to gain insight into topics he may not have heard about before. This is a brilliant way to take advantage of some seriously good content at that site. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design and is the world’s foremost conference for bringing together the world’s thought leaders. To attend this conference is cost prohibitive and also unattainable for many due to the fact that you must join the association ($6000!) and apply for attendance for the events. A pretty high bar of entry. However, over 200 of the conferences sessions are available on the site and able to be viewed by us mere mortals. There is some mind blowing content on that site, and I previously blogged about that Hans Rosling video on emerging nations stats on health and related topics. Great great stuff.

One such video that I would like to share with you is this presentation by the artist/statistician Chris Jordan. From the site:

Artist Chris Jordan shows us an arresting view of what Western culture looks like. His supersized images picture some almost unimaginable statistics — like the astonishing number of paper cups we use every single day.

The mix of art and science here is pretty delicious for a geek like me. I saw an appearance by Chris Jordan on The Colbert Report some time ago and it was entertaining, that clip is available here. I recommend you take 10 minutes and watch this video.