What don't you know? TEDx Houston asks that question and many more in its frenetic debut

A mobile lab in a backpack designed by students, a car for under $2,000, Houston as home of the largest urban garden in the country, a mosaic floor crafted from bottle caps — try sleeping on those ideas, and about 75 more like them.

TEDx Houston went off without a hitch at University of Houston's 566-seat Lyndall Finley Wortham Theatre in the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Building Saturday. Gathering a near-capacity crowd of friendly, curious and downright willing to engage folks, TEDx Houston is off to a great beginning and sure to make big TED: Ideas Worth Spreading proud.

KUHF's Chris Johnson did a terrific job introducing each speaker and keeping the whole thing running ahead of schedule. Thinking caps off to Culture Pilot and their team of curators and volunteers who contributed to one polished, proud to be a Houstonian day.

Here are some of those ideas that kept me up most of the night.

Sustainability proved to be a strong thread throughout, starting with Brene Brown's revelatory blast through her research on wholeheartedness. Embrace vulnerability and your imperfections, suggested Brown.

We are worthy. We are enough. Amen.

College students in the crowd are probably switching their majors to social work right now. Dan Phillips of The Phoenix Commotion wants us to love broken and castoff stuff. If you have enough of it, you have a pattern and one amazing looking dwelling. Phillips showed images of his artful homes behind him as he rallied against our disposable perfection-centered culture.

Mark Johnson of Hometta also asks us to consider what makes your house a home. Apparently, our children don't give a hoot about those granite counter tops. The oak tree in the back yard, you bet. David Crossley of Houston Tomorrow brought our minds around the growing population and its impact on the loss of Houston's green spaces.

Cristal Montanez Baylor (a former Miss Venezuela winner) of the Hashoo Foundation preaches a different kind of sustainability. Her foundation teaches women in Pakistan the bee keeping biz as long as they keep their children in school, creating a new generation of learners.

Rick Pal of AirGenerate urged us to consider the concept of Jugaad, which means to do with what you have.

The bio-engineering students — Dr. Rebecca Richards-Kortum   Rice 360: Institute for Global Health Technologies and Marie Oden of Rice's Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen — get Jugaad completely. Their innovations in low-cost incubators, a centrifuge made from a salad spinner, and mobile backpack labs had the crowd cheering with pride for what's possible given a problem, some materials and a room full of hungry-to-save-the-world students.

Innovation and a need for big change in our actions and thinking, often a core tenant of any TED experience, were present big time. Gracie Cavnar of Recipe for Success shared some heartbreaking statistics of childhood obesity. We could be looking at the first generation of children who will not outlive their parents.

Chef Monica Pope reminded us that food is about stories. And if you didn't learn anything from your grandmother (I didn't), it's never too late to start making some family food history.

Also, how about eating at the table for a big idea? Rice University sociologist Stephen Klineberg sees Houston's rapidly changing demographics as a chance to succeed or fail, depending on what we do with the information. All the oldsters are Anglo and the youngsters are non-Anglo. Let's figure this out people before we get left in the dust.

 Cary Wolfe, also from Rice, wants to reconsider our place in the natural world in his investigations chronicled in the book What is Posthumanism?

The right sides of our brain got a workout too with Two Star Symphony's collective songwriting and a snippet of their score from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Mat Johnson of University of Houston enlisted his personal narrative as a bi-racial child to become a graphic novelist, giving him a chance to reach a much greater audience than the literary genre. His graphic novel Incognegro investigates lynching in America, a crime and scar on American history too often forgotten.

In The Dying Swan, the elegant  Rachel Meyer revealed Dominic Walsh's cunning way of using gesture and nuance to create performances that exist between theater and dance. Walsh described his process, sharing a glimpse of a rehearsal of his delicate ballet, For the Two of You. Walsh invited us to consider the wonder of abstraction. "My job is just to ask the questions," he stated.

No TED event  seems complete without an idea that actually hurts to think about, like dark matter, the limits of science, and what's happening in our three-pound brain, which has more connections than stars in the Milky Way.

That's where neuroscientist rock star David Eagleman comes in. Religion and politics are too polarizing, leaving a rich place in the middle empty of serious discourse. Perhaps we need to quit cowboying up to things we don't have the tools to understand and start "geeking out," seeking evidence and better questions. Embrace uncertainty, be a Possibilian (Eagelman's sort of fake religion). He doesn't even care how you spell it.

"We know for sure what we don't know," Eagleman said. "Let us not forget the three most important words in the gospel of science, 'I don't know.'"

Earlier in the day, I turned to the woman next to me to find out what brought her to TEDx. She offered, "I just want to learn everything I don't know."