So when I found a cheap camera on the subway, I started documenting those adventures with my friends and gave them back as photocopies -- really small photos just that size.
As Wael Ghonim, the Google-Egyptian-executive by day, secret-Facebook-activist by night, famously said to CNN after Mubarak stepped down, "If you want to liberate a society, just give them the Internet."
After all, companies didn't stop polluting groundwater as a matter of course, or employing 10-year-olds as a matter of course, just because executives woke up one day and decided it was the right thing to do.
[Small thing. Big idea.] [Michael Bierut on the London Tube Map] The London Underground came together in 1908, when eight different independent railways merged to create a single system.
This January, we did the 10th annual No Pants Subway Ride where a diverse group of 3, 500 people rode the train in their underwear in New York -- almost every single train line in the city.
In the 19th century, if you had a basement lab, you could make major scientific discoveries in your own home. Right? Because there was all this science just lying around waiting for somebody to pick it up.
So in these two capacities, I've been scavenger, in the sense of taking, like, the subway map, right, or thief maybe, and I've also been designer, in the case of making the wristwatches.
They had put in underground sewer pipes, and as a result, one of the great scourges of the late 19th century, waterborne diseases like cholera, began to disappear.
All the branches of the trees, the leaves that come down create a humid area, and they take months and months under the water, go to the rivers, and maintain our source, maintain our rivers.
I made the tough decision of going home after graduation and not going up to Capitol Hill, but going down to my parents' basement and making it my job to learn how to paint.
And if I wanted to paint on people, well, I was a little bit embarrassed to bring people down into my studio and show them that I spent my days in a basement putting paint on toast.
In these villages, you see an entirely altered landscape, and hidden behind these mounds of dirt are these square, rectangular houses which sit seven meters below the ground.
For example, this system in Guangzhou is moving more passengers our direction than all subway lines in China, except for one line in Beijing, at a fraction of the cost.
The image that comes to your mind is probably more likely of a pasty kid sitting in a basement doing something mischievous, or of a shady criminal who is trying to steal your identity, or of an international rogue with a political agenda.
Over the course of 12 years, we were able to rezone 124 neighborhoods, 40 percent of the city, 12, 500 blocks, so that now, 90 percent of all new development of New York is within a 10-minute walk of a subway.
And we had a sense that, as we operated within our organizations, it was important to keep information in the silos within the organizations, particularly only give information to people had a demonstrated need to know.
One day soon after that -- it was a Friday -- at the end of the day, I went down -- I was going down to the subway. It was rush hour and thousands of people were streaming down the stairs.
Those men would eventually be convicted of placing a van filled with 1, 500 pounds of explosives into the sub-level parking lot of the World Trade Center's North Tower, causing an explosion that killed six people and injured over 1, 000 others.
Within two years of having this forest in our backyard, I could observe that the groundwater didn't dry during summers, the number of bird species I spotted in this area doubled.
We were all scientists, so we used our scientific creativity and came up with a very creative name for our project: ProtonMail. (Laughter) Many startups these days actually begin in people's garages or people's basements.
Think of it as conditions in the subsurface of a planet where you are very far away from a sun, but you still have water, energy, nutrients, which for some of them means food, and a protection.
The atmosphere was stripped away by solar winds, Mars lost its magnetosphere, and then cosmic rays and U.V. bombarded the surface and water escaped to space and went underground.
In 2008, I picked up a scientific study looking at how many years we have of valuable materials to extract from the ground: copper, 61; tin, zinc, 40; silver, 29.
In this video clip, that was shot half a kilometer, or about a third of a mile, underground, in the cave of Cudon in Spain, we found a series of red paintings on a ceiling in a previously unexplored section of the cave.
Over the course of two years, my faithful husband Dylan and I each spent over 300 hours underground, hiking, crawling and wriggling around 52 sites in France, Spain, Portugal and Sicily.
There's actually almost no regulation in the UK around burial, and the little bit that there is, is about not polluting water courses, like not polluting rivers or groundwater.
The Real Number Infinite Hotel has negative number rooms in the basement, fractional rooms, so the guy in room 1/2 always suspects he has less room than the guy in room 1.
We were just a bunch of commuters who, minutes earlier, had followed the Tube etiquette: no direct eye contact, no talking and absolutely no conversation.
I figured it would take this long for the trees to suck up the CO2 through photosynthesis, turn it into sugars, send it down into their roots, and maybe, I hypothesized, shuttle that carbon belowground to their neighbors.
My dad was outside mowing the lawn, my mom was upstairs folding laundry, my sister was in her room doing homework and I was in the basement playing video games.
And looking at tunneling technology, it turns out that in order to make a tunnel, you have to -- In order to seal against the water table, you've got to typically design a tunnel wall to be good to about five or six atmospheres.
I think if you were to do something like a DC-to-New York Hyperloop, I think you'd probably want to go underground the entire way because it's a high-density area.
But even here, well hidden underground, we found a number of different microorganisms, which suggested to me that similarly dry places, like Mars, may be inhabited.
And at that time two years ago I mentioned that we were speculating that these jets might in fact be geysers, and erupting from pockets or chambers of liquid water underneath the surface, but we weren't really sure.
So, for example, I was giving this talk recently in New York City, and I said, "You know when you're on the subway and the other person across the subway car smiles at you, and you just instinctively smile back?"
ですから私たちは データをデザインに結び付ける 非営利のベンチャーを始めました Gapminderです ロンドン地下鉄の“MIND THE GAP” （隙間にご注意ください）から名前を取りました
So we started a nonprofit venture linking data to design, we called "Gapminder, " from the London Underground, where they warn you, "Mind the gap."
The clanging of shackles brings to our minds the dungeons of the czars, not the flag-bedecked liberty of an American courtroom. 