[utsmokingaces]

Entertaining...but another example of how most TED talkers spend their time on trivial stuff. Then they go on TED and congratulate each other on how smart they are.

I would like to see more talks such as Bill G's on solving the world's biggest problem such as education and malaria.

[jpeterson]

I'm sure Ms. Roach would not agree with your dismissal of her work as "trivial". This is a bright example of stating your own value judgment as an absolute fact.

[dkarl]

Maybe the subject itself is not trivial, but her approach was. I think she underestimated how much the average person knows about sex research. This stuff is not taboo: it's a popular topic in mass-circulation magazines, and "Kinsey" was a mainstream, surprisingly bland movie full of big-name actors. She needed to present new information or a unique perspective, and instead she presented a handful of factoids. The pig video was funny, but not particularly thought-provoking.

It also annoyed me that she kept cracking herself up with lines that weren't all that funny.

[seiji]

This is one of my favorite "people doing amazingly trivial stuff" examples: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s31tLFhnpa4

But, who am I to judge what makes someone who isn't me tick?

[dxjones]

re: the link to the youtube video of a Google talk about TODO lists ...

On the one hand, people's "TO DO" lists may seem trivial, but some of the key lasting archaeological artifacts have been lists of cattle and grain being brought to market.

Also, since the talk was given at Google, it is not really the TODO list of any one person that is up for consideration, but rather the collective of ALL TODO lists around the world and what information they contain and what they might reveal about the people who make them.

I am not saying the author who gave the presentation (and wrote the book) has it all figured out, but looking carefully at something simple on a massive scale is, in fact, what many startups connected to ycombinators are all about.

Rather than "people doing amazingly trivial stuff", we might say YC startups are "people doing amazing stuff with trivial things".