Best of: TED Talks worth watching on a rainy day
By 
TED.com (Technology, Entertainment and Design) has been offering hundreds of amazing videos for viewing and download since 2006. Since then TED has released over 700 talks, with more released daily, on a Creative Commons license. Here's a Technoholik best-of line-up of videos from recent times which makes interesting viewing:
Carter Emmart demos a 3D atlas of the universe About this talk: For the last 12 years, Carter Emmart has been coordinating the efforts of scientists, artists and programmers to build a complete 3D visualization of our known universe. He demos this stunning tour and explains how it's being shared with facilities around the world.
This is worth having on HD. This 6 minute video shows reveals the known map of the universe across all scales. This should be awesome in 1080p, sadly 480p is the highest downloadable resolution.
John Underkoffler points to the future of UI About this talk: Minority Report science adviser and inventor John Underkoffler demos g-speak -- the real-life version of the film's eye-popping, tai chi-meets-cyberspace computer interface. Is this how tomorrow's computers will be controlled?
John Underkoffler starts the talk with a very interesting point - a $100 GPU today buys you more graphics power than you could have gotten for a million bucks a decade ago. He then highlights his own past experiments in trying to improve human-machine interaction.. Using 3D space and gestures to interface with data sounds very compelling, especially when it is done like Tai-Chi and gives six degrees of navigational control.. In comparison, the demo of Microsoft's Kinect looks a lot more clumsy, hopefully we will see interesting leaps in the software, and not just games that provide the same level of fluidity to end-users. He ends the talk by saying: "I think in five years time, when you buy a computer, you will get this."
George Dyson at the birth of the computer
About this talk: Historian George Dyson tells stories from the birth of the modern computer -- from its 17th-century origins to the hilarious notebooks of some early computer engineers.
A very interesting look at the history and roots of modern computing. George Dyson is a computer historian, this talk is both funny and full of trivia with slides of logbooks of the first computer engineers trying to get binary behaviour out of vaccum tubes. These engineers were working on calculations for the Atomic bomb.
Nick Veasey: Exposing the invisible Nick Veasey shows outsized X-ray images that reveal the otherworldly inner workings of familiar objects -- from the geometry of a wildflower to the anatomy of a Boeing 747. Producing these photos is dangerous and painstaking, but the reward is a superpower: looking at what the human eye can't see.