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It is only the brevity of lifetimes that keeps us from appreciating the changes.
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Bill Bryson |
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When the Earth was only about a third of its eventual size, it was probably already beginning to form an atmosphere, mostly of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, methane and sulphur. Hardly the sort of stuff that we would associate with life, and yet from this noxious stew life formed. Carbon dioxide is a powerful greenhouse gas. This was a good thing, because the Sun was significantly dimmer back then. Had we not had the benefit of a greenhouse eff..
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Bill Bryson |
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Depending on where it falls, the prognosis for a water molecule varies widely. If it lands in fertile soil it will be soaked up by plants or reevaporated directly within hours or days. If it finds its way down to the groundwater, however, it may not see sunlight again for many years--thousands if it gets really deep. When you look at a lake, you are looking at a collection of molecules that have been there on average for about a decade. In ..
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Bill Bryson |
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Proteins can't exist without DNA and DNA has no purpose without proteins. Are we to assume, then, that they arose simultaneously with the purpose of supporting each other? If so: wow. And
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Bill Bryson |
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51738a4
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When they are not eating, rats are likely to be having sex. Rats have a lot of sex--up to twenty times a day. If a male rat can't find a female, he will happily--or at least willingly--find relief in a male.
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Bill Bryson |
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A man arriving for the Grand Final in Melbourne is surprised to find the seat beside his empty. Tickets for the Grand Final are sold out weeks in advance and empty seats unknown. So he says to the man on the other side of the seat: 'Excuse me, do you know why there is no one in this seat?' 'It was my wife's,' answers the second man, a touch wistfully, 'but I'm afraid she died.' 'Oh, that's terrible. I'm so sorry.' 'Yes, she never missed a m..
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Bill Bryson |
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1f7af5b
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The sciences are sometimes likened to different levels of a tall building: logic in the basement, mathematics on the ground floor, then particle physics, then the rest of physics and chemistry, and so forth, all the way up to psychology, sociology - and the economists in the penthouse.
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Bill Bryson |
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Sumptuary laws, as they were known, laid down precisely, if preposterously, who could wear what.
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Bill Bryson |
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6ac9e2c
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significance), 600,000 known archaeological sites (and more being found every day; more being lost, too), 3,500 historic cemeteries, 70,000 war memorials, 4,000 sites of special scientific interest, 18,500 medieval churches, and 2,500 museums containing 170 million objects. Having such a fund of richness means that it can sometimes be taken for granted to a shocking degree, but
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Bill Bryson |
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He was defiantly narrow-minded, barely educated, and at least close to functionally illiterate. His beliefs were powerful but consistently dubious, and made him seem, in the words of The New Yorker, "mildly unbalanced." He did not like bankers, doctors, liquor, tobacco, idleness of any sort, pasteurized milk, Wall Street, overweight people, war, books or reading, J. P. Morgan and Co., capital punishment, tall buildings, college graduates, R..
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Bill Bryson |
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An upright hominid could see better, but could also be seen better. Even now as a species, we are almost preposterously vulnerable in the wild. Nearly every large animal you can care to name is stronger, faster, and toothier than us. Faced with attack, modern humans have only two advantages. We have a good brain, with which we can devise strategies, and we have hands with with we can fling or brandish hurtful objects. We are the only creatu..
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Bill Bryson |
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58710af
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Since the dawn of time, several billion human (or humanlike) beings have lived, each contributing a little genetic variability to the total human stock.
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Bill Bryson |
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The household was so crowded that the secretary--a man named Pieper--had to share a bed with Marx. (Somehow, even so, Marx managed to put together enough private moments to seduce and impregnate the housekeeper, who bore him a son in the year of the Great Exhibition.)
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Bill Bryson |
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e3bd8c6
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Noise is everywhere in America. Waitresses shout orders to the cook. Bus drivers shout at passengers. Checkin-in clerks bark: "Next in line!" Baristas at Starbucks shout: "Conchita, your order's ready!" (I prefer not to give them my real name.)"
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Bill Bryson |
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Jules Feiffer once drew a strip cartoon in which the down-at-heel character observed that first he was called poor, then needy, then deprived, then underprivileged, and then disadvantaged, and concluded that although he still didn't have a dime he sure had acquired a fine vocabulary. There is something in that. A rich vocabulary carries with it a concomitant danger of verbosity,
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Bill Bryson |
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Karl Schimper, was actually the first to coin the term "ice age"
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Bill Bryson |
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The prize item of the house is Jane's small round writing table, where all her books were scratched out. A group of Japanese visitors were gathered around it now, discussing it in low, reverential whispers, which is something I find the Japanese do exceptionally well. Nobody gets more out of a few low grunts and a couple of rounded vowel sounds stretched out and spoken as if in surprise or consternation. They can carry on the most complex c..
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Bill Bryson |
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Where the weather is concerned, the Midwest has the worst of both worlds. In the winter the wind is razor sharp. It skims down from the Arctic and slices through you. It howls and swirls and buffets the house. It brings piles of snow and bonecracking cold. From November to March you walk leaning forward at a twenty-degree angle, even indoors, and spend your life waiting for your car to warm up, or digging it out of drifts or scraping futile..
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Bill Bryson |
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there are three stages in scientific discovery: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person. At
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Bill Bryson |
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Everything on offer was robustly Scottish and not in the least appealing to someone from Iowa. (I believe I can speak for my entire state on this.) The dinner options featured a plate of haggis, neeps and tatties, and the snacks included Tunnock's teacake, haggis-flavored potato chips, and Mrs. Tilly's Scottish Tablet, which sounded to me not at all like a food but more like something you would put in a tub of warm water and immerse sore fe..
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Bill Bryson |
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Louis Agassiz, the Swiss naturalist who became the most outspoken advocate of the idea that much of Earth had once been covered in ice, but alienated many in the process.
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Bill Bryson |
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Without his books, Thomas Jefferson could not have been Thomas Jefferson. For someone like him living on a frontier, remote from actual experience, books were vital guides to how life might be lived, and none gave him greater inspiration, satisfaction,
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Bill Bryson |
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2c4f109
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I also said no to a first-aid kit, sewing kit, anti-snake-bite kit, $12 emergency whistle, and small orange plastic shovel for burying one's poop, on the grounds that these were unnecessary, too expensive, or invited ridicule.
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Bill Bryson |
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radiocarbon dating works only for objects up to forty thousand or so years old. Curiously,
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Bill Bryson |
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James Croll, the Scottish janitor and self-taught polymath whose theories concerning Earth's orbit provided the first plausible explanation for how ice ages might have started.
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Bill Bryson |
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Indeed, if not told to live -- if not given some kind of active instruction from another cell -- cells automatically kill themselves. Cells need a lot of reassurance.
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Bill Bryson |
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It is often noted, for instance, that Shakespeare's plays are full of ocean metaphors ("take arms against a sea of troubles," "an ocean of salt tears," "wild sea of my conscience") and that every one of his plays has at least one reference to the sea in it somewhere."
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Bill Bryson |
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The 1905 draft of a treaty between Russia and Japan, written in both French and English, treated the English control and French controler as synonyms when in fact the English form means "to dominate or hold power" while the French means simply "to inspect." The treaty nearly fell apart as a result. The"
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Bill Bryson |
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931b7f5
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In nearly every year for at least 250 years, deaths outnumbered births in London.
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Bill Bryson |
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I somberly reflected that the history of the Highlands is five hundred years of cruelty and bloodshed followed by two hundred years of way too much bagpipe music.
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Bill Bryson |
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They are taking away all the nice things there because they are impractical, as if that were reason enough - the red phone-boxes, the pound note, those open London buses that you can leap on and off. There is almost no experience in life that makes you look and feel more suave than jumping on or off a moving London bus. But they aren't practical. They require two men (one to drive and one to stop thugs from kicking the crap out of the Pakis..
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Bill Bryson |
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These are all just informed guesses.
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Bill Bryson |
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4560e35
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Put in the crudest terms, Australia was slightly more important to us in 1997 than bananas, but not nearly as important as ice cream.
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Bill Bryson |
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336bbac
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Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead. I
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Bill Bryson |
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If you want to say that a word has a circumflex on its penultimate syllable, without saying flat out that it has a circumflex there, there is a word for it: properispomenon.
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Bill Bryson |
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c2f60f6
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By the time the first Europeans arrived in the New World, farmers there were harvesting more than a hundred kinds of edible plants--potatoes, tomatoes, sunflowers, eggplants, avocados, sweet potatoes, peanuts, cashews, pineapples, papaya, guava, yams, manioc (or cassava), pumpkins, vanilla, a whole slew of beans and squashes, four types of chili peppers, and chocolate, among rather a lot else--not a bad haul. It has been estimated that 60 p..
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Bill Bryson |
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3ec9f1f
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Never has anyone milked a single thought more vigorously and successfully than he did. The line for which he is remembered was "Work expands to fill the time available for its completion," still known as Parkinson's Law. It was first elucidated in a comic essay he wrote for The Economist in 1955 while he was a professor at the University of Malaya in Singapore." --
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Bill Bryson |
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0bd35f9
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It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards either. A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much vitamin C as the average person today. Even in the bitterest depths of the ice ages, we now know, nomadic people ate surprisingly well--and surprisingly healthily. Settled people, by contrast, became reliant on a much sm..
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Bill Bryson |
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By the late eighteenth century Britain's statute books were plump with capital offences; you could be hanged for any of 200 acts, including, notably, 'impersonating an Egyptian'.
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Bill Bryson |
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From Ukraine, it wasn't uncommon for hang gliders to take off near the border and float their way into Hungary or Romania. Once they hovered in the general vicinity of the drop spot, they'd release their cargo--hundreds, even thousands of cartons of cigarettes--make a hasty turn, and head back.
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Bill Bryson |
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Jennings quotes the response of a contestant in the Miss Teen USA competition when asked to explain why so many Americans couldn't even find their own country on a map. With solemnity and conviction she responded: I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our nation don't have maps, and I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as, an..
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Bill Bryson |
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Part of the power of travel is that you stand a good chance of being hollowed out by it. The lucky come back home complaining about crooked rug merchants and dishonest taxi drivers; the unlucky never come home at all.
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Bill Bryson |
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When they aren't being incompetent, city officials like to relax with a little corruption.
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Bill Bryson |
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Yugoslavian hotel: "The flattening of underwear with pleasure is the job of the chambermaid. Turn to her straightaway."
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Bill Bryson |