And one day I'm sitting with a friend, and I had a vision of a woman a crystal-clear vision.

Do you know me well enough that if I did something that looked a little strange and was maybe even a little bit dangerous, but I told you to trust me anyway, that you could do that?

The pilot looks confident, but I detect a slight tremor in his hands.

A few nights ago, we were in our spot, and we saw somebody spying on us from far away.

I know she's seen as some kind of beloved sister, but wasn't she also kind of a good-time girl with a beer or two inside her?

I weighed the good I see in you versus the horrible things I know you've done, and I realized if I hurt you,

But then, so did infamous zoophile Ebenezer Cornell when he claimed he had not attempted to violate two ostriches at London Zoo.

I'm actually quite fond of a pipe, but to smoke it, especially in public, after it became so well known a prop, seemed vulgar.

It's not that strove for mediocrity, it's just that the S used to be written differently, kind of like an F.

Of course, I understood that what made him stand tall -- yeah they were the legs, thank you very much -- but as a first step, it was the dignity.

If you watch closely — (Applause) If you watch closely, you may have seen some of the eigenmodes, but also you may have seen that jazz music is better with fire.

The pituitary tumor, as it grows, often starts to compress the visual nerves in your brain, with the result that people with acromegaly have either double vision or they are profoundly nearsighted.

They didn't bring much back: 841 pounds of old rocks, and something all 24 later emphasized -- a new sense of the smallness and the fragility of our common home.

We still don’t fully understand what causes them to come and go, or why certain patients develop them when others don’t.

I happened to look out the window, and hand on my heart, on the night of this conference -- it was the summertime -- and that's what I saw, a double rainbow.

These objects, it seemed to me, were quintessentially the kind that I and my liberal left friends in London had always seen as summing up something deplorable about the French aristocracy in the 18th century.

And I want you to notice how the same mechanical structure can, at one point, just by the way it moves, seem gentle and caring and in the other case, seem violent and confrontational.

So all this would count as religion for Rattray, but my point is that when you look into the lives of those people, you also find that every time they do anything, they're conscious of the ancestors.

How can we account for the fact that until World War I, wealth inequality was so high and, if anything, was rising to even higher levels, and how can we think about the future?

Something that five years ago would have seemed impossible we can now do efficiently and free of corruption.

Sure. People are always present in my photos, no matter whether they appear to portray tortoises or cougars or lions.

And top all of that off with the frustration that I'm wearing an out-of-character tight-fitting purple t-shirt, so this whole store can see my boobs, to make sure this exact same thing doesn't happen.

These are the early studies, but they have to sell furniture to normal people, so if I did the building and it was too fancy, then people might say, "Well, the furniture looks OK in his thing, but no, it ain't going to look good in my normal building."

Imagine a world in which you see numbers and letters as colored even though they're printed in black, in which music or voices trigger a swirl of moving, colored shapes, in which words and names fill your mouth with unusual flavors.

And I see janitor man mumble something in drunk language and turn pale, and from 87 stories up, I can hear his stomach trying to hurl its way out his Dickies.

But I see in the dark, I see his arms go limp and his head turns back, like, towards me.

I did notice at the Lancaster, Pennsylvania Wal-Mart, that far too many people in their 20s and 30s looked a decade or two from death, with patchy, flared-up skin and thinning, stringy hair and browning, ground-down teeth and a lostness in their eyes.

I've noticed that movements which welcome women into leadership positions, such as the one I documented in a village called Budrus, were much more likely to achieve their goals.

And those two things together, right, one or the two, may not have been that important, but the two together meant that we had to develop safer drugs, and that serotonin seemed like a pretty good place to start.

But these localized rituals become pan-Andean, and these fantastic festivals, like that of the Qoyllur Rit'i, which occurs when the Pleiades reappear in the winter sky.

Like you notice, nobody could make any sense of what was happening except me, and I didn't give a damn, really, because the whole world, and whole humanity, seemed as confused and lost as I was.

So, no; you see the path, and then you don't and then you see it again.

It was the decision to continue down that narrow path through nights, but for the first time, I caught a glimpse of light.

So if we want to become better at what we do, maybe we should spend some time doing something else, even if the two fields appear to be as completely distinct as ophthalmology and the history of art.

And she was usually just sort of keeping an eye on, and if there was any puffs of smoke out there, she'd lean out and admonish us all not to blow our eyes out. That was her -- You know, that was kind of the worst thing that could happen to us.

When we first found it, we weren't even sure what family it belonged to, so we just called it the Dr. Seuss fish, since it looked like something from one of those books.

(Laughter) I looked like a moron. However, my logic was good, because -- I don't know if you realize this, but -- until the iPhone came along, the carriers -- Verizon, AT&T, Cingular -- held veto power over every aspect of every design of every phone.

Wouldn't it be nice if intestinal gas came embodied in visible clouds, so she could see that her really quite inoffensive pop had only barely grazed my face before it drifted away.

So, it sounded easy: let's collect data from all the metabolites in our body, develop mathematical models to describe how they are changed in a disease and intervene in those changes to treat them.

There were weeds and piles of garbage and other stuff that I won't mention here, but she kept dragging me, and lo and behold, at the end of that lot was the river.

But where I saw the gift of her calm, attentive presence, an occupational therapist who came over to our house to work with Fiona saw a child who was neurologically dull.

I'm a cancer doctor, and I walked out of my office and walked by the pharmacy in the hospital three or four years ago, and this was the cover of Fortune magazine sitting in the window of the pharmacy.

Some of these things are 10 stories deep or more, and one of my climbing friends says that the reason we actually climb at night is because if we ever saw the bottom of what we're climbing over, we would never do it.

And if I were even higher, I would see that even more clearly, higher than that, more clearly still, higher enough, and it would close, and you would get the circle of Earth from space.