(Laughter) In both my vocation at Robin Hood and my avocation as a volunteer firefighter, I am witness to acts of generosity and kindness on a monumental scale, but I'm also witness to acts of grace and courage on an individual basis.
The explanation of that paradox is that, within our societies, we're looking at relative income or social position, social status -- where we are in relation to each other and the size of the gaps between us.
It matters to me because I think we're setting ourselves up for trouble -- trouble certainly in how we relate to each other, but also trouble in how we relate to ourselves and our capacity for self-reflection.
Now, in January, 2011, the revolution started, and life stopped for 18 days, and on the 12th of February, we naively celebrated on the streets of Cairo, believing that the revolution had succeeded.
But, you know, the thing that always gets me about these letters is that most of them have been written by people that have never known themselves loved on a piece of paper.
The disease leaves eight million people permanently blind each and every year. The shocking part about it is that to avoid being infected with trachoma, all you have to do is wash your face: no medicine, no pills, no injections.
Recently, on one trip, we were walking, and she stops dead in her tracks, and she points to a red awning of the doll store that she loved when she was little on our earlier trips.
Now, one of the things that I have issues with is that, as the days and weeks and months go by, time just seems to start blurring and blending into each other and, you know, I hated that, and visualization is the way to trigger memory.
In addition to potentially socially isolating yourself when you're out and about looking at your phone, it's kind of, is this what you're meant to do with your body?
ハードウェアは気にするな プログラムを持てる位 ― 豊かで 安定していれば どんなものでもいい」
Yeah, forget about the hardware. Any hardware will do provided it's rich enough and stable enough to carry the program."
Now, I know many people have not had the opportunity to see how this can happen, so let me give you a quick example with my favorite collection of numbers, the Fibonacci numbers. (Applause) Yeah! I already have Fibonacci fans here.
And one of my all-time favorites begins: "I am not a big fan of your political leanings or your sometimes tortured logic, (Laughter) but I'm a big fan of you as a person."
I'm talking about mindful eating: learning to understand your body's signals so that you eat when you're hungry and stop when you're full, because a lot of weight gain boils down to eating when you're not hungry.
I spoke with Jason's parents that evening, and I suppose that, when I was speaking with them, that I didn't sound as if I was doing very well, because that very next day, their family rabbi called to check on me.
So governments care desperately about the image of their country, because it makes a direct difference to how much money they can make, and that's what they've promised their populations they're going to deliver.
I will tell that woman that my students can talk about transcendentalism like their last name was Thoreau, and just because you watched one episode of "The Wire" doesn't mean you know anything about my kids.
But my particular favorite is that it turns out that on an online dating website, how attractive you are does not dictate how popular you are, and actually, having people think that you're ugly can work to your advantage.
(Laughter) Now, I like this definition of an affair -- it brings together the three key elements: a secretive relationship, which is the core structure of an affair; an emotional connection to one degree or another; and a sexual alchemy.
Now, I would no more recommend you have an affair than I would recommend you have cancer, and yet we know that people who have been ill often talk about how their illness has yielded them a new perspective.
Flash forward: now I work at an amazing place in San Francisco called the Zen Hospice Project, where we have a little ritual that helps with this shift in perspective.
So citizen scientists, makers, dreamers -- we must prepare the next generation that cares about the environment and people, and that can actually do something about it.
これは 少し古風ですが もし あなたが自分の誓いを破り 時間になる前に去っても 私は気にしません
It's something so old-fashioned, but if you don't respect your own word of honor and you leave before -- that's not my problem.
I explained who I was, how narrow my reading had been, and I asked anyone who cared to to leave a message suggesting what I might read from other parts of the planet.
I really liked the idea that I wouldn't have to go to the market and pick fabrics that someone else chose to sell -- I could just design them and print them directly from home.
(Laughter) (Applause) But in the middle of all this excitement, the Rational Decision-Maker seemed to have something else on his mind.
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.
And there was something in this tweets -- I could not tell exactly what because nothing was said explicitly -- but I got this strong hunch, this strong intuition, that something was going wrong.
(Laughter) And my favorite way to catch these people in the interview process is to ask the question, "Can you give me the names of four people whose careers you have fundamentally improved?"
Again, like I said, my life has been about being fascinated by objects and the stories that they tell, and also making them for myself, obtaining them, appreciating them and diving into them.
It's made to feel, by magazines and other media outlets, that if you've got energy, a few bright ideas about technology, a garage -- you, too, could start a major thing.
(Laughter) And then my favorite -- they really do have a kind of genius of their own, these guys -- my favorite is Sophocles' Oedipus the King: "Sex With Mum Was Blinding."
So it's this here, this little gap that you have to close, as Jeffrey Moore calls it, "Crossing the Chasm" -- because, you see, the early majority will not try something until someone else has tried it first.
And on the other end, excessive angiogenesis -- too many blood vessels -- drives disease, and we see this in cancer, blindness, arthritis, obesity, Alzheimer's disease.
In total, there are more than 70 major diseases affecting more than a billion people worldwide, that all look on the surface to be different from one another, but all actually share abnormal angiogenesis as their common denominator.
(Laughter) In both my vocation at Robin Hood and my avocation as a volunteer firefighter, I am witness to acts of generosity and kindness on a monumental scale, but I'm also witness to acts of grace and courage on an individual basis. 