So very quickly -- really about six weeks into this research -- I ran into this unnamed thing that absolutely unraveled connection in a way that I didn't understand or had never seen.
If they have to review something that they should have learned a couple of weeks ago, or maybe a couple of years ago, they don't have to be embarrassed and ask their cousin.
And I'm going to paint solar systems on the backs of her hands so she has to learn the entire universe before she can say, "Oh, I know that like the back of my hand."
In the original story, God told Sarah she could do something impossible, and -- she laughed, because the first Sarah, she didn't know what to do with impossible.
I don't know if I can change the world yet, because I don't know that much about it -- and I don't know that much about reincarnation either, but if you make me laugh hard enough, sometimes I forget what century I'm in.
(Laughter) Complexity is the problem that any theory of biology has to solve, and you can't solve it by postulating an agent that is even more complex, thereby simply compounding the problem.
A lot of kids these days like to play games, but now they want to make them, and it's difficult, because not many kids know where to go to find out how to make a program.
It's not as though, as I try to suggest, it's not as though either you have religion and then you have to accept all sorts of things, or you don't have religion and then you're cut off from all these very good things.
So at the end of my first year at Harvard, a student who had not talked in class the entire semester, who I had said, "Look, you've gotta participate or else you're going to fail, " came into my office. I really didn't know her at all.
Well, tonight he sleeps safely with a stack of letters just like this one tucked beneath his pillow, scripted by strangers who were there for him when.
I would have told you myself that I was the last person on Earth who would stay with a man who beats me, but in fact I was a very typical victim because of my age.
To me, this is the saddest and most painful question that people ask, because we victims know something you usually don't: It's incredibly dangerous to leave an abuser.
I got an educational impossibility, zero to 30 percent in two months in the tropical heat with a computer under the tree in a language they didn't know doing something that's a decade ahead of their time.
Because they weren't with us on the sidewalk, and they couldn't see the exchange that was happening between me and my crowd, an exchange that was very fair to us but alien to them.
And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push the same rock up a hill, and when he almost got to the end, the rock would roll over, and he would have to start again.
But before that, what actually happened was, I used to think about it as, you could take care of your health, or you could take care of obligations, and one always came at the cost of the other.
In my continued exploration of subjects in nature that have the ability to illustrate the interconnection of all life, I started storm chasing in 2008 after my daughter said, "Mom, you should do that."
But we want to share what was the key learning, the key learning that Mario drove to us, and it is to consider what you have as a gift and not only what you miss, and to consider what you miss just as an opportunity.
In biology, we look for rules that apply to all animals and to life in general, so why should the rules of evolution apply to everybody else but not to us?
Last question, then: how did we come by this remarkable number of neurons, and in particular, if great apes are larger than we are, why don't they have a larger brain than we do, with more neurons?
And I realized that if I was going to ask my students to speak up, I was going to have to tell my truth and be honest with them about the times where I failed to do so.
And you know, what shocked me -- although it shouldn't have -- was other research last year that determined humiliation was a more intensely felt emotion than either happiness or even anger.
It might sound like a funny question, but we have to ask ourselves: Is there any 21st-century skill more important than being able to sustain coherent, confident conversation?"
この検証結果が気に入らない人も いるでしょう （笑） FirefoxとChromeの利用者は Internet ExplorerとSafariの利用者より はるかに優秀であると証明されました
Now, some of you are not going to like the results of this study -- (Laughter) But there is good evidence that Firefox and Chrome users significantly outperform Internet Explorer and Safari users.
This may seem like doom and gloom, like there's nothing we can do about it, like nothing has ever changed, like there will always be rich and powerful individuals.
なぜ空が青いのかということから なぜ原子核がばらばらにならないのかということ -- 原理的には 十分大きなコンピュータがあれば -- DNA の形がなぜそうなっているのかということまで
So, you want to know why the sky is blue, why atomic nuclei stick together -- in principle, you've got a big enough computer -- why DNA is the shape it is.
And this is why that’s not entirely a good thing: because over the age of 65, your risk of getting Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease will increase exponentially.
It was like time would stop, and the dancer would sort of step through some kind of portal and he wasn't doing anything different than he had ever done, 1, 000 nights before, but everything would align.
Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify.
But if there is someone here who has an autistic child, or knows an autistic child and feels kind of cut off from them, what advice would you give them?
This suggests that whatever is beautiful and moving, whatever gives us a new way to see, cannot be communicated to those who speak a different language.
So what this means, this incredible freedom of choice we have with respect to work, is that we have to make a decision, again and again and again, about whether we should or shouldn't be working.
And what happens is, this imagined alternative induces you to regret the decision you made, and this regret subtracts from the satisfaction you get out of the decision you made, even if it was a good decision.
Well, when there are lots of alternatives to consider, it's easy to imagine the attractive features of alternatives that you reject that make you less satisfied with the alternative that you've chosen.
Now, as a policy matter -- I'm almost done -- as a policy matter, the thing to think about is this: what enables all of this choice in industrial societies is material affluence.
So very quickly -- really about six weeks into this research -- I ran into this unnamed thing that absolutely unraveled connection in a way that I didn't understand or had never seen. 