Wow.

When I said before my geek was overwhelmed, I was not kidding. We just wrapped up the first session and my brain is trying to do a ho-jillion things all at once. On top of that, I had a Cafe Mocha this morning - which is only remarkable because I have largely given up coffee and mostly drink tea - so I've got a little buzz.

Sitting in the balcony of the opera house, it's kind of hard not to be overwhelmed a bit. There's free Wi-Fi, all sorts of cool conversations going on, and did I mention free Wi-Fi?

The drawback - I don't think the seating at the opera house was designed for guys over 5'8." Not that I am complaining, just pointing it out.

This year's conference is on "The Human Impact," which, as Andrew Zolli, the curator of Pop!Tech, says, is all about the systems around us that we impact, and impact us. That means how we impact the world, not just the environmental impact, but also psychological and cultural impacts.

Just follow me for a second here.

This is typically the stuff of stuffy conference rooms with guys in bad suits and boring PowerPoint presentations.

To give you an idea of how Pop!Tech works, the first session this morning was led by Chris Jordan, an artist and photographer, and Christian Nold, who is behind a new type of geographic mapping/cartography/social gauging called Biomapping.

But to give you an idea on how all this whole science/technology/art/opera house thing works, let's look at Jordan.

Jordan's most recent work is called Running the Numbers, which gives a visual representation to all the waste we create in our lives. Now that's not exactly trash or the stuff going through the pipes, it's everything we discard and may not even think about.

Things like how much paper we use in five minutes, one hour and one day at the office. Or, how much we waste in plastic bottles and alumninum cans.

Now, this may sound a little bit like your typical science class/earth day talk, but Jordan's take is that statistics can only say so much, and really, who can wrap their brain around statistics? Things like 15 million sheets of paper (what we use in five minutes) or 106,000 cans (only 30 seconds).

What Jordan does is try and make it make sense, and get your attention. Take a look at the link to his work. Fifteen million sheets of paper seems like a lot, but you can't wrap your brain around that. But if you magnify it, blow it up, and show how this looks in relation to say, you or me, or the Space Needle in Seattle, then you get an idea.

How Jordan and Nold explain it is that their work shows things that may sometimes be beyond what we can see or feel with our senses. There are things that are so big that they kind of dwarf what we can relate to.

Along those same lines, his work makes a simple statement. When you look at these things individually -- a single sheet of paper, a single beer can or plastic soda bottle -- it does not seem like much every day. In the same way, you think, "hey, I am one person, what can I really do that will make a difference."
But Jordan said when you look at the whole, what you see is a collective - a whole bunch of bottles, cans, and people, can add up, and that's when you see the big picture, and can make change.

Make sure to check out the earlier post to get up to speed. And remember, you can check out a live steam of what's going on at Pop!Tech

Check back in later!

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