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a0de7d4
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Each mobile phone today - indeed, each washing machine - has more computing power than NASA could deploy on the Apollo programme.
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Bill Bryson |
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And it is all the more extraordinary when you reflect that despite perpetually modest funding Britain still has three of the world's top ten universities and eleven of the top one hundred. Put another way, Britain has 1 percent of the world's population, but 11 percent of its best universities, and accounts for nearly 12 percent of total academic citations and 16 percent of the most highly cited studies. I
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Bill Bryson |
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8aefa9f
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revert back is commonly seen and always redundant: 'If no other claimant can be found, the right to the money will revert back to her' (Daily Telegraph). Delete back.
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Bill Bryson |
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4d31bea
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It met its target, a remarkable accomplishment, but here's the thing. According to the 2014 Times Higher Education world rankings (which are generally held to be the most exacting of their type), the University of Virginia ranks 130th among the world's universities. Eighteen much more modestly funded British universities rank higher. On the world stage, according to the Times Higher, Virginia is about level with Britain's Lancaster Universi..
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Bill Bryson |
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e46ba3a
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At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as "the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance."
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Bill Bryson |
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ba890e2
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Mr. Schlubb, the pear-shaped PE teacher, sent us all out to run half a dozen laps around a preposterously enormous cinder track. For the Greenwood kids--all of us white, marshmallowy, innately unphysical, squinting unfamiliarly in the bright sunshine--it was a shock to the system of an unprecedented order.
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exercise
humor
gym
running
memoir
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Bill Bryson |
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beec380
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Charles Lindbergh's achievement in finding his way alone from Long Island to an airfield outside Paris deserves a moment's consideration. Maintaining your bearings by means of dead reckoning means taking close note of compass headings, speed of travel, time elapsed since the last calculation, and any deviations from the prescribed route induced by drifting. Some measure of the difficulty is shown by the fact that the Byrd expedition the fol..
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Bill Bryson |
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54f4cc9
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Whatever the actual total, 99.99 per cent of all species that have ever lived are no longer with us.
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Bill Bryson |
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c910e71
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In Russia there are no native words for efficiency, challenge, engagement ring, have fun, or take care
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Bill Bryson |
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008b39e
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Experimentation without mathematical explanation is blind; mathematical explanation without experimentation is empty.
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Bill Bryson |
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d784338
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Instead, we were given the period of unusual tranquillity known as the Holocene, the time in which we live now.
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Bill Bryson |
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8c0c499
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We are the only creature that can harm at a distance.
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Bill Bryson |
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Baron Rothschild, whose obsessive quest for rare species led to the annihilation of several.
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Bill Bryson |
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da915ae
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wanted to be puzzled and charmed, to experience the endless, beguiling variety of a continent where you can board a train and an hour later be somewhere where the inhabitants speak a different language, eat different foods, work different hours, live lives that are at once so different and yet so oddly similar. I wanted to be a tourist. But
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Bill Bryson |
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7fa8fb0
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That's the thing about Australia, you see. It teems with interesting stuff, but at the same time it's so vast and empty and forbidding that it generally takes a remarkable stroke of luck to find it. Unfortunately,
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Bill Bryson |
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2600f66
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I remember once reading that the tenth Duke of Marlborough, on a visit to one of his daughter's homes, announced in consternation from the top of the stairs that his toothbrush wasn't foaming properly. It turned out that his valet had always put toothpaste on his brush for him, and as a consequence the duke was unaware that dental implements didn't foam up spontaneously. I rest my case.
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Bill Bryson |
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cc83150
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Cook was a brilliant navigator and a conscientious observer, but he made one critical mistake on his first voyage: he took Australia's wet season for its dry one, and concluded that the country was more hospitable than it was.
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Bill Bryson |
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9bf400b
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I am quite certain that if the rest of the world vanished overnight and the development of cricket was left in Australian hands, within a generation the players would be wearing shorts and using the bats to hit each other.
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Bill Bryson |
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4402818
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There is almost no area of British life that isn't touched with a kind of genius for names.
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Bill Bryson |
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Elizabethans were as free with their handwriting as they were with their spelling. Handbooks of handwriting suggested up to twenty different--often very different--ways of shaping particular letters.
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Bill Bryson |
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One day in 1987 Fallows was standing at a window in a London bank waiting to be served when a would-be robber named Douglas Bath stepped in front of him, brandished a handgun and demanded money from the cashier. Outraged, Fallows told Bath to 'bugger off' to the back of the line and wait his turn, to the presumed approving nods of others in the queue. Unprepared for this turn of events, Bath meekly departed from the bank empty-handed and wa..
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Bill Bryson |
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They were all women's magazines, but they weren't like the magazines my mother and sister read. The articles in my mother's and sister's magazines were always about sex and personal gratification. They had titles like "Eat Your Way to Multiple Orgasms," "Office Sex--How to Get It," "Tahiti: The Hot New Place for Sex," and "Those Shrinking Rain Forests--Are They Any Good for Sex?" The British magazines addressed more modest aspirations. They..
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Bill Bryson |
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c5c2da4
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In 1935, not far from where we stood now, some fishermen captured a fourteen-foot beige shark and took it to a public aquarium at Coogee, where it was put on display. The shark swam around for a day or two in its new home, then abruptly, and to the certain surprise of the viewing public, regurgitated a human arm.
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Bill Bryson |
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942f7fe
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I have often been struck in Britain by this sort of thing - by how mysteriously well educated people from unprivileged background so often are, how the most unlikely people will tell you plant names in Latin or turn out to be experts on the politics of ancient Thrace or irrigation techniques at Glanum. This is a country, after all, where the grand final of a programme like Mastermind is frequently won by cab drivers and footplatemen. I have..
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Bill Bryson |
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It took 500 men just to pull each sarsen, plus 100 more to dash around positioning the rollers. Just think about it for a minute. Can you imagine trying to talk 600 people into helping you drag a 50-ton stone 18 miles across the countryside, muscle it into an upright position and then saying, 'Right, lads! Another twenty like that, plus some lintels and maybe a couple of dozen nice bluestones from Wales, and we can party!' Whoever was the p..
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Bill Bryson |
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The friendliness of Australians - all of it quite sincere and spontaneous, as far as I could ever tell - never ceases to amaze or gratify.
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Bill Bryson |
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If there is one thing the AT teaches, it is low-level ecstasy--something we could all do with more of in our lives.
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Bill Bryson |
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In late 1998, the inhabitants were invited to become Australia's seventh state and roundly rejected the notion in a referendum. It appears they quite like being outsiders. In consequence, an area of 523,000 square miles, or about one-fifth of the country, is in Australia but not entirely of it. This throws up some interesting anomalies. All Australians are required by law to vote in federal elections, including residents of the Northern Ter..
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Bill Bryson |
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Shenandoah National Park is lovely. It is possibly the most wonderful national park I have ever been in, and, considering the impossible and conflicting demands put on it, it is extremely well run. Almost at once it became my favorite part of the Appalachian Trail.
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shenandoah
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Bill Bryson |
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3dacadc
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One thing you won't find much in Australian second-hand bookshops are 1950s or earlier editions of lots of books - The Catcher in the Rye, A Farewell to Arms, Animal Farm, Peyton Place, Another Country, Brave New World and hundreds and hundreds of others. The reason for this is simple: they were banned. Altogether, at its peak, 5,000 titles were forbidden to be imported into the country. By the 1950s this had fallen to a couple of hundred, ..
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Bill Bryson |
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It was full of lazy late-afternoon shadows and an impossible green lushness such as could only be appreciated by someone freshly arrived
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Bill Bryson |
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It is an interesting experience to become acquainted with a country through the eyes of the insane, and, if I may say so, a particularly useful grounding for life in Britain.
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Bill Bryson |
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e98e946
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For reasons I couldn't begin to guess at, a balustrade along the roofline had been adorned with life-sized statues of ordinary men, women and children. Goodness knows what this is meant to suggest - I suppose that this is some sort of Hall of the People - but the effect is that it looks as if two dozen citizens of various ages are about to commit mass suicide.
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Bill Bryson |
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3849bde
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We don't know if he ever left England. We don't know who his principal companions were or how he amused himself. His sexuality is an irreconcilable mystery. On only a handful of days in his life can we say with absolute certainty where he was.
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Bill Bryson |
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101f29b
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Nearly everyone I talked to had some gruesome story involving a guileless acquaintance who had gone off hiking the trail with high hopes and new boots and come stumbling back two days later with a bobcat attached to his head or dripping blood from an armless sleeve and whispering in a hoarse voice, "Bear!" before sinking into a troubled unconsciousness."
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Bill Bryson |
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9c90c61
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All 2,100 miles of the trail, as well as side trails, footbridges, signs, blazes, and shelters, are maintained by volunteers--indeed, the AT is said to be the largest volunteer-run undertaking on the planet.
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Bill Bryson |
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36e4ba6
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I have long known that it is part of God's plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth,
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Bill Bryson |
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I found my wife at the kitchen sink and told her the good news. She was more reserved in her enthusiasm than I had hoped. "You're going into the woods for weeks and weeks with a person you have barely seen for twenty-five years. Have you really thought this through?" (As if I have ever thought anything through.) "I thought you two ended up getting on each other's nerves in Europe." "No." This was not quite correct. "We started off on each o..
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Bill Bryson |
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It seemed such an extraordinary notion--that I could set off from home and walk 1,800 miles through woods to Georgia, or turn the other way and clamber over the rough and stony White Mountains to the fabled prow of Mount Katahdin, floating in forest 450 miles to the north in a wilderness few have seen. A little voice in my head said: "Sounds neat! Let's do it!"
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Bill Bryson |
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628beb0
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You have your whole life ahead of you. But here's the thing to remember. You will always have your whole life ahead of you. That never stops and you shouldn't forget it.
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Bill Bryson |
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72bad2a
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People are so addicted to convenience that they have become trapped in a vicious circle: The more labor-saving appliances they acquire, the harder they need to work; the harder they work, the more labor-saving appliances they feel they need to acquire.
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Bill Bryson |
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1c8a6e8
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I was beginning to appreciate that the central feature of life on the Appalachian Trail is deprivation, that the whole point of the experience is to remove yourself so thoroughly from the conveniences of everyday life that the most ordinary things--processed cheese, a can of pop gorgeously beaded with condensation--fill you with wonder and gratitude.
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Bill Bryson |
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So it needs to be said that nearly all of the anti-Shakespeare sentiment--actually all of it, every bit--involves manipulative scholarship or sweeping misstatements of fact. Shakespeare "never owned a book," a writer for the New York Times gravely informed readers in one doubting article in 2002. The statement cannot actually be refuted, for we know nothing about his incidental possessions. But the writer might just as well have suggested t..
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Bill Bryson |
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Then there were all the diseases one is vulnerable to in the woods -- giardiasis, eastern equine encephalitis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Lyme disease, ehrlichiosis, schistosomiasis, brucellosis, and shigellosis, to offer but a sampling. Eastern equine encephalitis, caused by the prick of a mosquito, attacks the brain and central nervous system. If you're lucky you can hope to spend the rest of your life propped in a chair with a bib aro..
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Bill Bryson |