Josh Wurman, a meteorologist who heads the Center for Severe Weather Research in Boulder, Colo.
WSJ: Extreme Weather Storm Chasers Create Chaos for Emergency Crews
Wurman's real talent is in forging serendipitous connections and themes between unrelated people and their stories.
Wurman somehow talked Chris Blackwell into coming and talking about his life in music.
Richard Saul Wurman held his first--and what he says will be his last--Entertainment Gathering, or EG, in Los Angeles this week.
Even though most of the chasers must have recognized Mr. Wurman's "Doppler on Wheels, " no one would get out of the way, he said.
WSJ: Extreme Weather Storm Chasers Create Chaos for Emergency Crews
Wurman relishes the role of onstage impresario, tossing free hats to the audience, needling latecomers and rambling about his past successes in between desultory interviews.
Wurman sold TED in 2002 to U.K. publishing entrepreneur Chris Anderson (no relation to the editor of Wired magazine--though Anderson the editor was at EG--just to confuse those playing from home).
Rumor had it that Wurman waited until the day after his noncompete agreement to begin planning EG, which came across very much as a thumb in the eye of the other Anderson's TED.
Wurman is a seventysomething graphic designer and author of 81 books, who garnered fame and adulation among the elite in technology, art and entertainment with his foresightful, insightful TED conferences of the 1990s.
There was much talk about that "other" conference, as well as periodic reminders from Wurman that TED was not to be invoked--even when he and his returning guests were reminiscing about their glory days.
"It created a rolling roadblock, " Mr. Wurman said.
WSJ: Extreme Weather Storm Chasers Create Chaos for Emergency Crews
The program generated huge excitement, but it was a commercial failure, Five years later, Wurman tried again, and since then it's been held annually in California, with a growing number of spin-off events in other locations.
CNN: With TED, amazing ideas spread at speed of sound -- and light
Other conference goers, many of whom are Gadgetoff regulars, also shone: including Amazon's Jeff Bezos, TED conference founder Richard Saul Wurman, computer engineer Danny Hillis, polymathic inventor Dean Kamen, sly literary agent John Brockman and Creative Good's Mark Hurst.
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