It was never going to work. I went to a Blue Brain presentation at a conference in Geneva in 2009. It didn't feel like a scientific presentation.
I didn't know about HBP prior to this article, but that anecdote at the end just killed me.
The 'gullible TED listener' is almost a trope at this point - TED cultivates an environment of pseudo-intellectualism, where listeners feel intelligent for listening and assume that the presenters are intelligent for presenting. They don't think, because they're too busy praising themselves for thinking. The article's secondary message of, "Maybe don't believe things just because you heard them from someone standing on a red dot," is great.