there's nothing more annoying than incompetent government officials. is all they can say.

A boxtroll cannot choose a new life because a boxtroll does not aspire to be anything more than a weak, lowly pest!

It was decided the country needed a domestic UAV program that could not only surveil targets, but also, in extreme circumstances... take action.

And so you have to be careful about leaving your front lawn open, which is basically your Facebook wall, so that people don't write on it in the middle of the night -- because it's very much the equivalent.

(Laughter) Now if you don't like these rules, and many of us don't -- I know I didn't, and I still don't, even though I follow them half the time, not quite aware that I'm following them -- what better way than to change them [than] with humor?

There is an effective evolution lobby coordinating the fight on behalf of science, and I try to do all I can to help them, but they get quite upset when people like me dare to mention that we happen to be atheists as well as evolutionists.

(Laughter) So, as I say before the last piece, feel not as though it is a sphere we live on, rather an infinite plane which has the illusion of leading yourself back to the point of origin.

He surrounded himself with an entourage of young, unknown scholars like Martin Buber and Shai Agnon and Franz Kafka, and he paid each one of them a monthly salary so that they could write in peace.

The biggest lesson I learned was many years later when I went to Beverly Hills and I ran into a talent agent who looked at me up and down and said I don't look like I have any experience to be working in this business.

Jordan Bunker, who had had no experience with chemistry until then, read this paper and reproduced the experiment at his maker space using only off-the-shelf substances and tools.

If you had asked me 10 years ago whether or not we would ever be able to sequence the genome of extinct animals, I would have told you, it's unlikely.

You could view what he did as fundamentally a reckless act that has endangered America or you could view it as fundamentally a heroic act that will work towards America and the world's long-term good?

But what I wanted to say is that dating, for me, you know, as far as I'm concerned, however you reproduce, as long as you're enjoying yourself and it's with another consenting asexual -- I don't know.

They have no smell at all, and it's only the wonderful bacteria growing on the rainforest of hair that actually produces the smells that we know and love.

Now, society's reach has expanded all the way to the top of the world, and it's made even these, the most remote, the most powerful bears on the planet, seem like adorable and blameless victims.

In 1931, a young, unknown mathematician named Kurt Gödel presented a proof that a logically complete system of mathematics was impossible.

Nebraska this week just passed a law abolishing the death penalty, because it costs so much. (Applause) So the resort to violence and abuse of poor people and helpless people is another cause of the increase in abuse of women.

But then I would become interested in something else, something totally unrelated, and I would dive into that, and become all-consumed, and I'd be like, "Yes! I found my thing, " and then I would hit this point again where I'd start to get bored.

But just a couple years later, I witnessed and experienced a lot of incivility in my first job out of college.

Not only do we shame, blame and reject them for atrocities that they had absolutely nothing to do with, we re-traumatize them, when we're supposed to be welcoming them into our countries.

It's about the 60 percent of black girls like me who will be experiencing sexual violence before they turn 18, and the thousands and thousands of low-wage workers who are being sexually harassed right now on jobs that they can't afford to quit.

And yes, we have developed more selective drugs, but it's still a challenge to get them into the tumor, and they end up accumulating in the other organs as well or passing through your urine, which is a total waste.

But remember, this is taking place in our strange, weird world, and so inevitably the ability to download these video clips to, you know, your iPod or your Zune gives you the ability to turn it into entertainment.

What you're looking at on this slide is just a person from my lab holding a flask of a liquid culture of a bacterium, a harmless, beautiful bacterium that comes from the ocean, named Vibrio fischeri.

At the same time, all of our firepower was impotent when it came to halting or even stemming the slaughter in Rwanda, Darfur, Myanmar.

[Everything was better back when everything was worse.] The reason that everything was better back when everything was worse is that when everything was worse, it was actually possible for people to have experiences that were a pleasant surprise.

Because the truth of the matter is, if you shatter the fishbowl so that everything is possible, you don't have freedom.