Hasta La Ideas

“As a kid, I was quite disappointed to learn that there actually wasn’t a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow,” a prism-wielding Chris Anderson (pictured) told the freshly-seated crowd of 1,500 yesterday in Long Beach, California. Moments before, he had angled his chunk of glass just so and bathed the stage in a temporary radiant rainbow. “But now, we’re going to follow that ray of light to something possibility more valuable: wonder, insight, and those dangerous little sparks with a life of their own that we call ideas. It’s time for TED.” The theme of the 2012 confab, which runs through Friday morning, is “full-spectrum,” a nod to the expanded ambition and scope of the dozen sessions that tackle topics ranging from quantum physics (from kickoff TED talker Brian Greene) and the future of healthcare (surgeon-journalist Atul Gawande) to secrets (PostSecret’s Frank Warren) and the industrious, intimate constructions of bird nests (photographer Sharon Beals). Stay tuned to UnBeige—and our Twitter feed—for TED highlights as we count down the minutes to tomorrow’s peek inside “The Design Studio.” Guest curators Chee Pearlman and David Rockwell have lined up an all-star session that includes the perpetually crowd-pleasing Chip Kidd, IDEO’s David Kelley, Metropolitan Museum of Art director Tom Campbell, and (swoon!) the one and only John Hodgman.

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