Eish

In case you ever thought of surfers as people who wander around in a daze... check this talk by Garrett Lisi out.

I was horribly lost. But so was half (optimistically) of the rest of the TED audience and the organiser.

Paul Krugman just won the Nobel Prize for economics. He happens to be a blogger journalist as well, and rates amongst his strengths his ability to put complex economic theories in understandable terms. I think that is great. I don't know much about Krugman's work, but the thought that with a little effort I will be able to understand some of it is appealing.

In terms of Lisi, I am less confident. Perhaps you can only go so far in terms of explaining things in simple ways. Perhaps sometimes you have to learn a whole new language.

The risk is... do you at some point not realise your language is becoming inaccessible? If you delve deeper and deeper (as is now possible with the Internet) into a whole range of different fields of thinking, does the number of people with whom you can actually discuss these things become more and more limited?

Or... is it just a challenge? A challenge to take things and fight with them to you can explain them in a way people can understand.

If you can't explain something so that someone else can understand it... do you understand it?