Thirty years have passed, and I still feel guilty about that prayer, for the next day, I learned that that missile landed on my brother's friend's home and killed him and his father, but did not kill his mother or his sister.
My late, lamented friend Bob Nozick, a fine philosopher, in one of his books, "Philosophical Explanations, " is commenting on the ethos of philosophy -- the way philosophers go about their business.
So I teamed up with my good friend Ricardo Cabello, also known as Mr. doob, who's a much better programmer than I am, and he made this amazing Flash drawing tool.
My good friend Ray Kurzweil showed that any tool that becomes an information technology jumps on this curve, on Moore's Law, and experiences price performance doubling every 12 to 24 months.
I wrote this after a friend's funeral, but not so much about the friend as something the eulogist kept saying, as all eulogists tend to do, which is how happy the deceased would be to look down and see all of us assembled.
The educator Parker Palmer calls it "the tragic gap, " tragic not because it's sad but because it's inevitable, and my friend Dick Nodel likes to say, "You can hold that tension like a violin string and make something beautiful."
I made a booking, and weeks later, my friend Chris and my mom drove me out to the airport, all 80 pounds of me covered in a plaster body cast in a baggy pair of overalls.
Best friends are great for giving rides to the airport, but twentysomethings who huddle together with like-minded peers limit who they know, what they know, how they think, how they speak, and where they work.
And when I woke up the next morning, I was sleeping on a friend's floor, the only thing I had in the world was a toothbrush I had just bought from an all-night supermarket.
So my 15-year-old niece, she's amazing, and she's called Charlotte, and I asked her to record something, and I worked with a friend called Elliot to put some beats together.
It's the stigma inside of others, it's the shame, it's the embarrassment, it's the disapproving look on a friend's face, it's the whispers in the hallway that you're weak, it's the comments that you're crazy.
What originally brought me to Makoko was this project from a friend of mine, Kunlé Adeyemi, who recently finished building this three-story floating school for the kids in Makoko.
I was asked by a good friend, Fred Bernstein, to do an interview for the October issue of Architect magazine, and he and I kind of had a good chuckle when we saw the magazine released with the title, "Can This Planner Save Detroit?"
["Children have to sit by and watch. What's your excuse?"] Esta Soler: As we were in the process of releasing this campaign, O.J. Simpson was arrested for the murder of his wife and her friend.
Now, I first learned about this way of life through David Attenborough's "Trials of Life" about 20 years ago, and then later through a wonderful book called "Parasite Rex" by my friend Carl Zimmer.
At the outset, AT&T had wanted to set the phone books in Helvetica, but as my friend Erik Spiekermann said in the Helvetica movie, if you've seen that, the letters in Helvetica were designed to be as similar to one another as possible.
My friend Andy Cavatorta was building a robotic harp for Bjork's Biophilia tour and I wound up building the electronics and motion control software to make the harps move and play music.
My friends, many in their 50s and 60s, were looking at a downward mobility, a work-for-life proposition, just a job loss, medical diagnosis or divorce away from insolvency.
I invited him, and he started talking with a woman, one of my friends, and she knew how bad it had been out there, and she said, "Brendan, is there anything at all that you miss about being out in Afghanistan, about the war?"
And my friend Martin Amis — sorry that I'll be doing a lot of name-dropping in this talk, so get used to it — my dear friend Martin Amis once said that we're about five Einsteins away from answering the mystery of where the universe came from.
This exoskeleton was covered with an artificial skin invented by Gordon Cheng, one of my greatest friends, in Munich, to allow sensation from the joints moving and the foot touching the ground to be delivered back to the patient through a vest, a shirt.
It was a reference from a friend of mine to call Taber MacCallum from Paragon Space Development Corporation, and I asked him the question: is it possible to build a system to go into the stratosphere?
Nevertheless, many cult members eventually find a way out, whether through their own realizations, the help of family and friends, or when the cult falls apart due to external pressure or scandals.
A friend of mine, Art, he recently needed to be hospitalized for just a minor surgery, and he had to stay in the hospital for over two weeks, just because he needed a specific kind of IV antibiotics.
In this project we made with the New York Times, Zach Richter and our friend, JR, we take you up in a helicopter, and even though you're flying 2, 000 feet above Manhattan, you don't feel afraid.
As a lapsed biologist, I decided to immediately call a real biologist, my friend Simon Levin, Professor of Biology and Mathematics at Princeton University.
Now, the answer began to come when a friend of mine lamented to me that her young daughter was a big scaredy-cat, and so I began to notice, and yes, the daughter was anxious, but more than that, the parents were anxious.
I travelled for a month in Nepal with our good friend, Matthieu Ricard, and you'll remember Matthieu famously said to all of us here once at TED, "Western science is a major response to minor needs."
A wonderful woman named Natalie got eight beehives at her home in Truro, and she introduced us to her friend Valerie, who let us set up 60 beehives at an abandoned tennis court on her property.
Filmmakers, friends of mine, they look at Nollywood and they say, "Wow, they are doing what we really want to do, and make a buck and live with this job."
But you give me something like this -- my friend Mike Murnane sculpted this; it's a maquette for "Star Wars, Episode Two" -- this is not my thing -- this is something other people do -- dragons, soft things.
But again, I am not a sculptor, and so I don't know a lot of the tricks, like, I don't know how my friend Mike gets beautiful, shiny surfaces with his Sculpey; I certainly wasn't able to get it.
In 1871, in a letter to his friend Joseph Hooker, Charles Darwin suggested: "What if life started in some warm little pond with all sort of chemicals still ready to undergo more complex changes?"
In 2007 I went to Liberia, where a group of my friends and I did an independent, self-funded film, still in progress, on a very legendary and brutal war-lord named General Butt Naked.
About five years in, one of the few friends that I had was concerned about my well-being, and she came to me and she said, "You need to do something, because I don't want to see you die."
We took 1, 300 randomly selected undergraduates, we had them nominate their friends, and we followed both the random students and their friends daily in time to see whether or not they had the flu epidemic.
You're obviously angry that I went to your friend Alistair and that he told me you knew someone named Irene. 