1.) People are willing to put up with a building that's difficult to use as long as it looks beautiful.
2.) Our rivers are burning because we have as much red tape for fixing our waterways as we do for damaging them.
3.) When a woman is well educated, her entire family - her entire homeland - benefits.
4.) Children like to play outside, but it rains a lot in Oregon and city planners don't seem to think covered play areas/skate parks are important.
5.) The mayor of Portland is not as entertaining as an 11-year-old skater boy.
6.) We are all cubists and if we can see everything from every perspective at once, we'll end up with something extraordinary.
7.) People love unexpected happiness.
8.) The World Wide Web isn't flat. When you take away 404 pages and allow people to fill in the cracks, what you get is Wiki-magic.
9.) Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words and a thousand pictures can be better than a video.
10.) I'm not the only one who struggles with being vulnerable. Unfortunately, vulnerability seems to be the dividing quality between secure and insecure people.
11.) We're killing good and bad microbes indiscriminately, which is making us sick.
12.) Many places on Earth still don't teach their girls/women to read or swim. This can be lethal for an entire gender.
13.) A group of trombones is called a chorus.
14.) You have to continue to respect fear or you'll break yourself.
15.) No matter how clueless you are, you can achieve your dreams long as you have talent and Thomas Jefferson.
16.) It's not always necessary to think outside the box. Sometimes, you can just change size or contents of the box to solve a problem.
17.) It can be helpful to embrace a sucky situation as your own.
18.) TEDxPortland knows how to put on a conference!
