colding and minicozzi have shown that if an embedded minimal disk in $b_r\subset\mathbb{r}^3$ has large curvature then in a smaller ball, on a scale still proportional to $r$, the disk looks roughly like a piece of a helicoid. in this talk, we will see that near points whose curvature is relatively large the description can be made more precise. that is, in a neighborhood of such a point (on a scale $s$ proportional to the inverse of the curvature of the point) the surface is bi-lipschitz to a piece of a helicoid. moreover, the lipschitz constant goes to 1 as $rs$ goes to $\infty$ . this follows from meeks and rosenberg's result on the uniqueness of the helicoid of which, time permitting, we will discuss a new proof. joint work with c. breiner.