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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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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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4918f65
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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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Our word "salary" comes literally from the vulgar Latin salarium, "salt money"--the Roman soldier's ironic term for what it would buy."
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Bill Bryson |
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There is no question that a Neanderthal could easily beat us up. So, too, presumably could their women, which may be why we are only 2 percent Neanderthal instead of 50 percent. Those bitches were too scary for us. Nearby
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Bill Bryson |
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Others did not fare so well. A German man in St. Louis who was believed to have spoken ill of his adopted country was set upon by a mob, dragged through the streets tied up in an American flag, and hanged. A jury subsequently found the mob leaders not guilty on the grounds that it had been a "patriotic murder."
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Bill Bryson |
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untimely death is a common but really quite inane expression. When ever was a death timely?
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Bill Bryson |
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14e54a7
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The early colonists were among the first to use the new word goodbye, contracted from God be with you and still at that time often spelled Godbwye,
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Bill Bryson |
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when a person says to you, "How do you do?" he will be taken aback if you reply, with impeccable logic, "How do I do what?" The complexities of the English language are"
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Bill Bryson |
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a7d338b
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Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which states that the electron is a particle but a particle that can be described in terms of waves.
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Bill Bryson |
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no small achievement when you consider the British climate, the fact that Blackpool is ugly, dirty and a long way from anywhere, that its sea is an open toilet, and its attractions nearly all cheap, provincial and dire.
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Bill Bryson |
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2902a74
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The upward flow of ancient heat to the Earth's surface is measured in tens of milliwatts per square metre; the flow from the Sun above is measured in hundreds of watts per square metre.
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Bill Bryson |
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Among the tiny atomic structures the plankton take to the grave with them are two very stable isotopes--oxygen-16 and oxygen-18.
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Bill Bryson |
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The amount of energy actually liberated in the burning of these fossil fuels is tiny by planetary scales - ten terawatts or so a year, not that much more than the nuga-tory contribution made by the tides. But the side effects are huge.
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Bill Bryson |
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Of course, if we all spoke a common language things might work more smoothly, but there would be far less scope for amusement. In an article in Gentleman's Quarterly in 1987, Kenneth Turan described some of the misunderstandings that have occurred during the dubbing or subtitling of American movies in Europe. In one movie where a policeman tells a motorist to pull over, the Italian translator has him asking for a sweater (i.e., a pullover)...
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Bill Bryson |
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Comets develop their distinctive tails when their surface material begins to evaporate as they approach the Sun.
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Bill Bryson |
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If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here - and by 'we' I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life at all in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course. We enjoy not only the privilege of existence, but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a trick we have only just begun to grasp.
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Bill Bryson |
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the mightiest and most extensive mountain range on Earth was--mostly--under water.
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Bill Bryson |
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It is a natural human impulse to think of evolution as a long chain of improvements, of a never-ending advance towards largeness and complexity - in a word, towards us. We flatter ourselves. Most of the real diversity in evolution has been small-scale. We large things are just flukes - an interesting side branch.
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Bill Bryson |
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Sheepskin is a marvelously durable medium, though it has to be treated with some care. Whereas ink soaks into the fibers on paper, on sheepskin it stays on the surface, rather like chalk on a blackboard, and so can be rubbed away comparatively easily. "Sixteenth-century paper was of good quality, too," he went on. "It was made of rags and was virtually acid free, so it has lasted very well."
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Bill Bryson |
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Somehow, from this Gilbert concluded that the Moon's craters were indeed formed by impacts--in itself quite a radical notion for the time--but
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Bill Bryson |
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ocean floors everywhere were so comparatively youthful. None had ever been found to be older than about 175 million years, which was a puzzle because continental rocks were often billions of years old.
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Bill Bryson |
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It is a fortunate fluke for us that HIV, the AIDS agent, isn't among them - at least not yet. Any HIV the mosquito sucks up on its travels is dissolved by the mosquito's own metabolism. When the day comes that the virus mutates its way around this, we may be in real trouble.
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Bill Bryson |
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there are particles of matter and antimatter popping into existence and popping out again--and that these are pushing the universe outwards at an accelerating rate.
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Bill Bryson |
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Iowa, to be on the safe side, outlawed conversations in any language other than English in schools, at church, or even over the telephone. When people protested that they would have to give up church services in their own languages, Governor William L. Harding responded: "There is no use in anyone wasting his time praying in other languages than English. God is listening only to the English tongue."
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Bill Bryson |
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As we sit here, continents are adrift, like leaves on a pond. GPS tracking shows North America & Europe currently moving apart at the same rate your fingernail grows, or about two yards in a human lifetime.
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continents
gps
tectonic-plates
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Bill Bryson |
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Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, at least thirty-eight theories have been put forward to explain why people took to living in communities: that they were driven to it by climatic change, or by a wish to stay near their dead, or by a powerful desire to brew and drink beer, which could only be indulged by staying in one place.
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Bill Bryson |
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Almost all the energy that now comes from within the Earth was put there, in one form or another, at the time of its creation (a tiny amount is now added by the flexing of the planet under the tides of Moon and Sun, but it is the merest smidgen).
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Bill Bryson |
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A native of the southern United States, the warbler was famous for its unusually lovely song, but its population numbers, never robust, gradually dwindled until by the 1930s the warbler vanished altogether and went unseen for many years. Then, in 1939, by happy coincidence two separate birding enthusiasts, in widely separated locations, came across lone survivors just two days apart. They both shot the birds.
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Bill Bryson |
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Fired by the oxygen of irrationality, America entered a period of grave intolerance, not just toward immigrants but toward any kind of antiestablishment behavior. The Sedition Act of 1918 made it illegal, among much else, to make critical remarks about government expenditure or even the YMCA.44 So low did standards of civil liberty fall that police routinely arrested not only almost anyone remotely suspected of sedition, but even those who ..
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Bill Bryson |
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The Earth thus started off with vast supplies of heat inside it, and a rocky planet, like any other rock, takes a long time to cool down. Stones in a campfire may still be hot the morning after; a stone the size of the Earth can hold heat for billions of years.
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Bill Bryson |
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For us, the universe goes only as far as light has travelled in the billions of years since the universe was formed.
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Bill Bryson |
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future. As an adjective, the word is often used unnecessarily: 'He refused to say what his future plans were' (Daily Telegraph); 'The parties are prepared to say little about how they see their future prospects' (The Times). In both sentences, and nearly all others like them, future adds nothing and should be deleted.
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Bill Bryson |
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For most of its history until fairly recent times the general pattern for Earth was to be hot with no permanent ice anywhere. The current ice age--ice epoch really--started about forty million years ago, and has ranged from murderously bad to not bad at all.
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Bill Bryson |
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The bad news is that atoms are fickle and their time of devotion is fleeting--fleeting indeed. Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000 hours. And when that modest milestone flashes past, or at some other point thereabouts, for reasons unknown your atoms will shut you down, silently disassemble, and go off to be other things. And that's it for you.
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Bill Bryson |
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Less than a decade after the Great Exhibition, iron as a structural material was finished--which makes it slightly odd that the most iconic structure of the entire century, about to rise over Paris, was made of that doomed material. I refer of course to the soaring wonder of the age known as the Eiffel Tower. Never in history has a structure been more technologically advanced, materially obsolescent, and gloriously pointless all at the same..
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Bill Bryson |
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Hutton noticed that if he used a pencil to connect points of equal height, it all became much more orderly. Indeed, one could instantly get a sense of the overall shape and slope of the mountain. He had invented contour lines.
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Bill Bryson |