Ignite Boulder 18

Ignite Boulder is a pretty awesome event. They hold it at the Boulder Theater a few times a year. Unfortunately, I took the photo after they had changed the sign!

The premise is simple: each speaker has 5 minutes to speak. Each presentation must have exactly 20 slides and each slide advances every 15 seconds. This piece is fixed. All presentations must comply to that specification. Other than that, you can pretty much talk about anything. The evening had 16 talks with one intermission at the halfway point. At the beginning they said you wouldn’t find everything interesting. That was true. However, most of the presentations were quite engaging.

The presentations included (that were interesting to me enough to remember):

Arranged Marriage
Mental Illness
RFID
Statins vs High Cholesterol
Regulatory Compliance
Opera
Digital Craftsmanship
Alcohol: Does it make you funnier?

The one that affected me the most was the one about statins. There seems to be a lot of controversy around these particular drugs and I too am not thoroughly convinced they’re the right therapy for a condition that may or may not need to be treated. Cholesterol is an important substance in the body in that it helps us heal from cuts and wounds. Inflammation is a major cause of heart attacks as noted by the speaker. However, while cholesterol may be correlated in some regards with heart attacks, in his opinion there was not a cause-and-effect relationship.