Listen, I appreciate your calling ahead, but we don't need to be so formal about this.

You know, I appreciate your concern with my safety, I really do, but I think we need to have a conversation about boundaries.

She has a beauty mark here, she has size 6 feet, she bites her nails and thankfully nothing else.

If you could include our brand name in the press kit, along with shots of our shoes, we'd appreciate it.

You, your sister and Nacchan have all come to talk to me, and I feel really grateful.

Probably the least-appreciated aspect of this is the notion that the very first time that you're trying to get your brain around a new concept, the very last thing you need is another human being saying, "Do you understand this?"

"An Australian study in 2001 found that olive oil, in combination with fruits, vegetables and pulses, offers measurable protection against skin wrinklings, " and give the advice: "If you eat olive oil and vegetables, you'll have fewer wrinkles."

And aren't we grateful for our brains, that can take this electrical impulse that comes from light energy to create images in order for us to explore our world?

Now thankfully, some of the world's best material scientists are looking to replace coal with sustainable resources like these, and this is both fantastic and essential.

And so we had to then, fortunately, get the funds to repeat this experience, and this is one of the next four neighborhoods that had a 45-percent drop in shootings and killings.

What you are really grateful for is the opportunity, not the thing that is given to you, because if that thing were somewhere else and you didn't have the opportunity to enjoy it, to do something with it, you wouldn't be grateful for it.

Now, I really appreciate that sentiment from them, but the reality, when you look at this slide is, not only do they have the capability, the capability already exists.

I do, however, collect new words much the way dictionary editors do, and the great thing about being a historian of the English language is that I get to call this "research."

I google desperately, and thankfully that day I find out that Maria was not the victim, though sadly, another Afghan prosecutor was gunned down on his way to work.

And what they said was, look, fine to protect the city against future tsunamis, we really appreciate, but the next one is going to come in, what, 20 years?

In a thankfully voluntary section of OkCupid, you are allowed to rate how attractive you think people are on a scale between one and five.

And more, even when we had thousands of people, 5, 000 people, we had two people in the H.R. department, and thankfully one of them has retired.

So, if you want it, the short version of the story of my relationship is this: a year ago, an acquaintance and I did a study designed to create romantic love, and we fell in love, and we are still together, and I am so glad.

Now, admittedly, and blessedly, the number of girls involved is still quite small, but you could see them as canaries in a coal mine, telling us something important about the way girls see their bodies.

Thank God, no system can nullify our desire to open up to the good, to compassion and to our capacity to react against evil, all of which stem from deep within our hearts.

Not small things -- many of us in this audience write books, are writing books; we always make mistakes, that's why we're glad to have second editions: correct the mistakes.

When this is said and done, we're going to remember everything we've ever said and seen, you'll remember every person, which is good for me in my early stages of Alzheimer's.

But your phone, your sneakers, these chairs, modern manufacturing, penicillin -- the things we cherish.

And the fact that the TED community has supported our audacious dream is just deeply, deeply meaningful, to me and to everybody on our team.

And thankfully, the answer is yes, because what I discovered, when I began looking around, that there is a global backlash against this culture that tells us that faster is always better, and that busier is best.

This is a terrific kind of test in a binary world, and the nice thing about pregnancy is either you are pregnant or you're not pregnant; you're not partially pregnant or thinking about being pregnant or something of that sort.

(Laughter) In the same letter, mind you, she said, "I did call, and I got the man in charge, and he said he appreciated someone calling him.