Yesterday, I promised to tell you about a few of the 150 moving, inspiring and depressing talks I saw at the TED conference last week. Today, a few notes.

Mary — my comrade in gin-soaked sex science nerdery — just emailed letting me know they finally got her TED talk online, 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Orgasm. Awesomeness! May Mary Roach and the rest of us continue to twist TED’s knickers.

New Zealander Nadya Vessey — who lost both of her legs to the knee when she was a child — has just received a prosthesis that’s pretty much unlike anything we’ve ever seen (outside of Splash). About two years ago, she approached Weta Workshop, who specialize in design and manufacturing of costumes and special effects (and have worked on projects such as The Lord of the Rings trilogy) to see if the company might be interested in making her a working, prostethic mermaid tail. Turns out they were, and they’ve just completed the final product. The tail, which is composed of wetsuit fabric and plastic molds, with a custom paint job and digitally-imaged effects, enables Nadya to swim quite effectively, apparently, and is an all around sexy piece of machinery. No word on what one of these slick dudes would cost in real life, but we have a feeling we couldn’t justify the expense just to tool around in the kiddie pool.

However, it’s one of the few conferences I would never consider attending unless it was without travel – I think that the presentations transfer so well to the video format that there is no need to attend in person. The reason why it is better to be at a conference rather than simply watch it on the internet is the ability to ask questions and to interact with others at the conference, but since there is no real coherence to the attendees, I don’t see the point. Conferences are about networking with other experts in your own field. In some ways, TED seems more like a weekend long all day elaborate cocktail party than a conference.

It seems to be one of the few conferences that would justify the associated travel emissions.

Porn as education, robots at war, and retired Microsoft boss Bill Gates’ mosquito release were just some of the highlights at the TED conference.

Hacker and writer Joshua Klein is fascinated by crows. (Notice the gleam of intelligence in their little black eyes?) After a long amateur study of corvid behavior, he’s come up with an elegant machine that may form a new bond between animal and human.

Joshua Klein will hack anything that moves — his list includes “social systems, computer networks, institutions, consumer hardware and animal behavior.” His latest project, though charmingly low-tech, has amazing implications for the human-animal interface.

Right now, Klein is working at Frog Design as a Principle Technologist, while developing mobile/social applications, health care-related systems and other tools that improve people’s lives. He’s the author of the novel Roo’d, which was the first modern book (after Tarzan) to be ported to the iPhone.

“Klein envisions a new symbiotic relationship between these intelligent birds and the humans that encroach on their habitat. … Why not turn a longstanding rivalry between man and crow into something that profits both species?”