I guess the more you matter the more space you take up, which explains the whole SUV phenomenon.

The grain required to fill the tank of an SUV with ethanol is enough to feed one African for a year. Thirty percent of this year s corn production in the United States will be burned up on America s highways.

Keith Bellows gleefully outlines the engineering marvels of the camel, a vital creature he calls the SUV of the desert. Though he couldn't bring a live camel to TED, he gets his camera crew as close as humanly possible to a one ton beast in full rut.

Whenever you fill up your European compact car s gas tank, or that of your American SUV, you pay as much as a Russian schoolteacher earns in a month. And every time you pay, you subsidize a regime that relies on energy, not information, as its main product.

But before I do, I just want to mention that this animal truly is a sort of the SUV of the sand, the ship of the desert. It's so vital to the inhabitants of the areas in which the camel is found largely Mongolia and Sahara that there are 160 words in Arabic to describe the camel.

These children have joined the ranks of 25 million displaced boys and girls worldwide a number equivalent to the population of a midsize European country and the largest in the 70 years since the end of World War II. Images of vulnerable, desolate refugee children likely to be displaced for a decade or more have become so common that the world seems unable to comprehend what it is seeing.