|
dac01a7
|
If your pillow is six years old (apparently average age for a pillow) it has been estimated that one tenth of its weight will be made up of sloughed skin, living mites, dead mites and mite dung.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
3524a70
|
My room had a balcony where I could watch the setting sun flood the desert floor and burnish the golden slopes of the MacDonnell Ranges beyond - or at least I could if I looked past the more immediate sprawl of a K-Mart plaza across the road. In the two million or more square miles that is the Australian outback, I don't suppose there is a more unfortunate juxtaposition. Allan was evidently held by a similar thought, for a half hour later w..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
b850b3b
|
I quite like Torquay and might one day come back, but I can tell you this now: where watch batteries are concerned, they can go fuck themselves.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
049bfc4
|
Worse still, it isn't actually necessary to look to space for petrifying danger. As we are about to see, Earth can provide plenty of danger of its own.
|
|
earth
space
|
Bill Bryson |
|
9e53379
|
About 4.6 billion years ago, a great swirl of gas and dust some 24 billion kilometres across accumulated in space where we are now and began to aggregate. Virtually all of it - 99.9 per cent of the mass of the solar system21 - went to make the Sun. Out of the floating material that was left over, two microscopic grains floated close enough together to be joined by electrostatic forces. This was the moment of conception for our planet. All o..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
9a82b54
|
At first, the letters were arrayed in alphabetical order, an arrangement hinted at on modern keyboards by the sequences F-G-H, J-K-L and O-P, but the fact that no two other letters are alphabetical, that the most popular letters are not only banished to the periphery but given mostly to the left hand while the right is left with a sprinkling of secondary letters, punctuation marks and little-used symbols, are vivid reminders of the extent t..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
84f814c
|
Although Penzias and Wilson had not been looking for cosmic background radiation, didn't know what it was when they had found it, and hadn't described or interpreted its character in any paper, they received the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics. The Princeton researchers got only sympathy. According to Dennis Overbye in Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, neither Penzias nor Wilson altogether understood the significance of what they had found until the..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
3ca544c
|
Coming back to your native land after an absence of many years is a surprisingly unsettling business, a little like waking from a long coma. Time, you discover, has wrought changes that leave you feeling mildly foolish and out of touch.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
ce98a59
|
So woods are spooky. Quite apart from the thought that they may harbor wild beasts and armed, genetically challenged fellows named Zeke and Festus, there is something innately sinister about them, some ineffable thing that makes you sense an atmosphere of pregnant doom with every step and leaves you profoundly aware that you are out of your element and ought to keep your ears pricked. Though you tell yourself it's preposterous, you can't qu..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
e45593e
|
When I say "most people" I mean, of course, me after my first cocktail."
|
|
conventional-wisdom
nuances
|
Bill Bryson |
|
e6ae0e7
|
Let us pause for a moment and consider the structure of the atom as we know it now. Every atom is made from three kinds of elementary particles: protons, which have a positive electrical charge; electrons, which have a negative electrical charge; and neutrons, which have no charge. Protons and neutrons are packed into the nucleus, while electrons spin around outside. The number of protons is what gives an atom its chemical identity. An atom..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
2b508d9
|
Houses are really quite odd things. They have almost no universally defining qualities: they can be of practically any shape, incorporate virtually any material, be of almost any size. Yet wherever we go in the world we recognize domesticity the moment we see it.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
07ce43c
|
It occurred to me, not for the first time, that if Britain is ever to sort itself out, it is going to require a lot of euthanasia.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
05b225c
|
He left to do whatever editors do.
|
|
leadership
submission
supervision
unity
|
Bill Bryson |
|
17a4092
|
The patients on Tuke Ward were a pleasant and tractable bunch and practised insanity with a certain elan.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
39fbe95
|
In Iowa, we were not used to seeing the houses of well-known people on account of there were no well-known people in Iowa.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
e261098
|
She was torn between her customer service training and her youthful certitude.
|
|
education
graciousness
humility
maturation
|
Bill Bryson |
|
ca530a3
|
Of the total surface area of Earth, Britain occupies just 0.0174069 per cent.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
5b659c7
|
The Greater London Development Plan would have cost a then-colossal PS2 billion, making it the biggest public investment ever made in Britain. That was its salvation. Britain couldn't afford it. In the end, the visionaries were undone by the unmanageable scale of their own ambitions. It
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
ac50cce
|
The telephone," he wrote, "may be briefly described as an electrical contrivance for reproducing in different places the tones and articulations of a speaker's voice so that Conversations can be carried on by word of mouth between persons in different rooms, in different streets or in different Towns.... The great advantage it possesses over every other form of electrical apparatus is that it requires no skill to operate the instrument."
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
0e4fd38
|
Out of all the incursions, the only permanent one so far is the present one, and that dates from just twelve thousand years ago, which means that Britain is actually one of the more recent places in the world to become inhabited by modern people. In this sense it is much younger than the Americas or Australia. The
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
605a6c1
|
In 1684 Dr Halley came to visit at Cambridge [and] after they had some time together the Dr asked him what he thought the curve would be that would be described by the Planets supposing the force of attraction towards the Sun to be reciprocal to the square of their distance from it. This was a reference to a piece of mathematics known as the inverse square law, which Halley was convinced lay at the heart of the explanation, though he wasn't..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
ee1b450
|
We have been spoiled by artists' renderings into imagining a clarity of resolution that doesn't exist in actual astronomy. Pluto in Christy's photograph is faint and fuzzy--a piece of cosmic lint--and its moon is not the romantically backlit, crisply delineated companion orb you would get in a National Geographic painting, but rather just a tiny and extremely indistinct hint of additional fuzziness. Such was the fuzziness, in fact, that it ..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
be4eedd
|
Finally, in 1926, Heisenberg came up with a celebrated compromise, producing a new discipline that came to be known as quantum mechanics. At the heart of it was Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which states that the electron is a particle but a particle that can be described in terms of waves. The uncertainty around which the theory is built is that we can know the path an electron takes as it moves through a space or we can know where i..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
fabf76c
|
Good lord, look at you!" he cried, delighted at my grubbiness. "What have you been doing? You're filthy!" He looked me up and down admiringly, then said in a more solemn tone: "You haven't been screwing hogs again, have you, Bryson?" "Ha ha ha." "They're not clean animals, you know, no matter how attractive they may look after a month on the trail. And don't forget we're not in Tennessee anymore. It's probably not even legal here - at least..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
5fccdff
|
Alexander von Humboldt, yet another friend, may have had Agassiz at least partly in mind when he observed that there are three stages in scientific discovery7: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
c36865a
|
Fears have been raised that in their enthusiasm scientists might inadvertently create a black hole or even something called "strange quarks," which could, theoretically, interact with other subatomic particles and propagate uncontrollably. If you are reading this, that hasn't happened. Finding"
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
2b4570f
|
Sometimes the world just isn't ready for a good idea.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
11cdadf
|
A supernova occurs when a giant star, one much bigger than our own Sun, collapses and then spectacularly explodes, releasing in an instant the energy of a hundred billion suns, burning for a time more brightly than all the stars in its galaxy. "It's like a trillion hydrogen bombs going off at once, supernovae are extremely rare. A star can burn for billions of years, but it dies just once and quickly, and only a few dying stars explode. Mo..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
d850dcb
|
That is the problem with Scotland, I find. You never know whether the next person you meet is going to offer you his bone marrow or nut you with his forehead. Afterward
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
f2448a4
|
The story of Kelly is easily told. He was a murderous thug who deserved to be hanged and was. He came from a family of rough Irish settlers, who made their living by stealing livestock and waylaying innocent passers-by. Like most bushrangers he was at pains to present himself as a champion of the oppressed, though in fact there wasn't a shred of nobility in his character or his deeds. He killed several people, often in cold blood, sometimes..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
f5c3e42
|
In breve, e come sempre, in Shakespeare un lettore attento puo trovare sostegno per quasi qualsiasi posizione voglia prendere. (O come lo stesso Shakespeare ha scritto in una battuta citata spesso a sproposito: <>.)
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
ba9bde1
|
Intrebarea care se naste in mod firesc este urmatoarea: ce s-ar intampla daca ar exploda o stea prin apropiere? Cel mai apropiat vecin stelar al nostru, dupa cum am vazut, este Alpha Centauri, la 4,3 ani-lumina departare. Imi imaginasem ca, daca s-ar produce o explozie acolo, atunci am avea 4,3 ani in care sa privim lumina acestui eveniment magnific traversand cerul, ca si cum ar curge dintr-o uriasa cutie rasturnata. Cum ar fi daca am avea..
|
|
science
|
Bill Bryson |
|
b3514fb
|
Percy Bysshe (the only poet named for the sound of a match hitting water),
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
f477e1a
|
For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless, and then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match.
|
|
humor
|
Bill Bryson |
|
01b1024
|
Life, in short, just wants to be.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
9da3312
|
It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
47aeaa7
|
As far as we can tell, we are the best there is. We may be all there is. It's an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
dbf1004
|
Stephen Hawking has observed with a touch of understandable excitement, that one cannot "predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely!"
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
5f8f34d
|
Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
8f132ee
|
Space, let me repeat, is enormous. The average distance between stars out there is 20 million million miles. Even at speeds approaching those of light, these are fantastically challenging distances for any traveling individual. Of course, it is possible that alien beings travel billions of miles to amuse themselves by planting crop circles in Wiltshire or frightening the daylights out of some poor guy in a pickup truck on a lonely road in A..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
4bd7059
|
An is indisputably correct before just four words beginning with 'h': hour, honest, honour and heir.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
61f2ab4
|
Unluckier still was Guillaume Le Gentil, whose experiences are wonderfully summarized by Timothy Ferris in Coming of Age in the Milky Way. Le Gentil set off from France a year ahead of time to observe the transit from India, but various setbacks left him still at sea on the day of the transit--just about the worst place to be since steady measurements were impossible on a pitching ship. Undaunted, Le Gentil continued on to India to await th..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
779c25e
|
amoral, immoral. Amoral describes matters in which questions of morality do not arise or are disregarded; immoral applies to things that are evil.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |