|
c960c3d
|
At some point in an unimaginably distant past some little bag of chemicals fidgeted to life. It absorbed some nutrients, gently pulsed, had a brief existence.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
3c148df
|
Dadaab is a vivid reminder that refugee problems don't end simply because journalistic interest moves elsewhere. The inhabitants themselves are irremediably stuck. They can't go back to Somalia because it isn't safe and they can't go elsewhere in Kenya because Kenya has problems enough of its own without having 134,000 Somalis pitching up in Nairobi or Mombasa, looking for food and work. And so way out in the desert there exists this strang..
|
|
refugees
|
Bill Bryson |
|
c2d84e9
|
the beaver and bear nearly
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
7717666
|
the average asteroid actually will be about one and a half million kilometres from its nearest neighbour.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
c923b6f
|
if you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn't choose human beings for the job. But
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
6375e3a
|
we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously. Because
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
2fc0e55
|
One planet, one experiment." If"
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
af8e240
|
Although the creation of a universe might be very unlikely, Tryon emphasized that no one had counted the failed attempts." Martin" --
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
689ee9c
|
In the summer of 1876 in Montana while George Armstrong Custer and his troops were being cut down at Little Big Horn, Cope was out hunting for bones nearby. When it was pointed out to him that this was probably not the most prudent time to be taking treasures from Indian lands, Cope thought for a minute and decided to press on anyway.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
9ee614c
|
I can tell you at once that nothing you touch today will have more bloodshed, suffering, and woe attached to it than the innocuous twin pillars of your salt and pepper set.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
5aa38ce
|
Jane Jacobs cites it in her landmark work of 1969, The Economy of Cities),
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
06731e7
|
In the summer of 1876 in Montana while George Armstrong Custer and his troops were being cut down at Little Big Horn, Cope was out hunting for bones nearby. When it was pointed out to him that this was probably not the most prudent time to be taking treasures from Indian lands, Cope thought for a minute and decided to press on anyway. He was having too good a season.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
02a9162
|
Para que estes ahora aqui, tuvieron que agruparse de algun modo, de una forma compleja y extranamente servicial, trillones de atomos errantes. Es una disposicion tan especializada y tan particular que nunca se ha intentado antes y que solo existira esta vez. Durante los proximos muchos anos -tenemos esa esperanza-, estas pequenas particulas participaran sin queja en todos los miles de millones de habilidosas tareas cooperativas necesarias p..
|
|
science
|
Bill Bryson |
|
e408ea7
|
A hundred years after his death, a statue of Lavoisier was erected in Paris and much admired until someone pointed out that it looked nothing like him. Under questioning the sculptor admitted that he had used the head of the mathematician and philosopher the Marquis de Condorcet--apparently he had a spare--in the hope that no one would notice or, having noticed, would care. In the second regard he was correct. The statue of Lavoisier-cum- C..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
9a0e804
|
Among the words first found in Shakespeare are abstemious, antipathy, critical, frugal, dwindle, extract, horrid, vast, hereditary, critical, excellent, eventful, barefaced, assassination, lonely, leapfrog, indistinguishable, well-read, zany, and countless others (including countless). Where would we be without them? He was particularly prolific, as David Crystal points out, when it came to attaching un prefixes to existing words to make ne..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
7a30c48
|
It isn't easy being an organism. In the whole universe, as far as we yet know, there is only one place, an inconspicuous outpost of the Milky Way called the Earth, that will sustain you, and even it can be pretty grudging.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
4c58668
|
the basement. Katz
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
3680f9a
|
And then you might learn, as we did from a local, that the reason hundreds of starlings in flight will twist and turn in unison is because the ones on the outside are constantly trying to get to the inside where they feel safer. Some
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
f1f74e1
|
The Dunning-Kruger Effect is basically being too stupid to know how stupid you are. That
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
779af6d
|
It is beyond us to divine how any people could have bred cobs of corn from such a thin and unpropitious plant--or even thought to try. Hoping to settle the matter once and for all, food scientists from around the world convened in 1969 at a conference on the origin of corn at the University of Illinois, but the debates grew so vituperative and bitter, and at times so personal, that the conference broke up in confusion and no papers from it ..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
5a916d3
|
If the global temperature rises by 4degC over the next fifty years, as is evidently possible, the whole of the Appalachian wilderness below New England could become savanna. Already trees are dying in frightening numbers. The elms and chestnuts are long gone, the stately hemlocks and flowery dogwoods are going, and the red spruces, Fraser firs, mountain ashes, and sugar maples may be about to follow. Clearly, if ever there was a time to exp..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
9df77b0
|
WHEN I was brand new to Britain and everything was still a mystery to me, I went with an English friend to Brighton for the day, and there I saw my first seaside pier. The idea of constructing a runway to nowhere was one that would never have occurred to me.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
2b1642f
|
Silbury Hill in Wiltshire
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
e53379d
|
The best ones go in for a kind of gloriously silly redundancy toward the end, as with Sir Humphrey Dodington Benedict Sherston Sherston-Baker and the truly unbeatable Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraduati Tollemache-Tollemache-de Orellana-Plantagenet-Tollemache-Tollemache, a British army major who died in World War I. The
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
b7e9dc8
|
We know amazingly little about what happens beneath our feet. It is fairly remarkable to think that Ford has been building cars and baseball has been playing World Series for longer than we have known that the Earth has a core. And of course the idea that the continents move about on the surface like lily pads has been common wisdom for much less than a generation. "Strange as it may seem," wrote Richard Feynman, "we understand the distribu..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
d9d86b0
|
Modern Londoners live in a great Victorian city; the Victorians lived through it, so to speak.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
a2b9247
|
Rees maintains that six numbers in particular govern our universe, and that if any of these values were changed even very slightly things could not be as they are. For example, for the universe to exist as it does requires that hydrogen be converted to helium in a precise but comparatively stately manner--specifically, in a way that converts seven one-thousandths of its mass to energy. Lower that value very slightly--from 0.007 percent to 0..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
dea36ad
|
There are some things in life that just have to be faced up to, whether you want to or not.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
c1afb73
|
It is natural but wrong to visualize the singularity as a kind of pregnant dot hanging in a dark, boundless void. But there is no space, no darkness. The singularity has no "around" around it. There is no space for it to occupy, no place for it to be. We can't even ask how long it has been there--whether it has just lately popped into being, like a good idea, or whether it has been there forever, quietly awaiting the right moment. Time does..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
f179658
|
I suppose all our lives must be at the end of a long chain of improbable coincidences,
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
025e518
|
Holmes laid out a continental drift theory that was in its fundamentals the theory that prevails today. It was still a radical proposition for the time and widely criticized, particularly in the United States, where resistance to drift lasted longer than elsewhere. One reviewer there fretted, without any evident sense of irony, that Holmes presented his arguments so clearly and compellingly that students might actually come to believe them...
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
12ae7fd
|
What would it be like if we had four years and four months to watch an inescapable doom advancing toward us, knowing that when it finally arrived it would blow the skin right off our bones?
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
1990eac
|
Don't make the extremely foolish mistake of thinking that winning is everything. If there is one person that I would really like to smack, it is the person who said, "Winning is not the main thing. It's the only thing." That's awful. Taking part is the main thing. Doing your best is the main thing. There is no shame in not winning. The shame is in not trying to win, which is of course another matter altogether. Above all, be gracious in def..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
fb67531
|
The most elusive element of all, however, appears to be francium, which is so rare that it is thought that our entire planet may contain, at any given moment, fewer than twenty francium atoms.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
9c4654f
|
The universe was vaster--vastly vaster--than anyone had ever supposed.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
a872fee
|
Between December 1606 and February 1625, Virginia received 7,289 immigrants and buried 6,040 of them. Most barely had time to settle in. All but 500 of the 3,500 immigrants who arrived in the three years 1619-1621 were dead by the end of the period. To go to Virginia was effectively to commit suicide.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
c8fe938
|
Rat bites are almost certainly underreported because only the most serious cases attract attention, but even using the most conservative figures, at least fourteen thousand people in the United States are attacked by rats each year.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
7ec571c
|
A sign by the highway said DON'T LITTER, KEEP ALABAMA THE BEAUTIFUL. 'OK, I the will,' I replied cheerfully
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
d4dbf5a
|
1. Take a moment from time to time to remember that you are alive. I know this sounds a trifle obvious, but it is amazing how little time we take to remark upon this singular and gratifying fact. By the most astounding stroke of luck an infinitesimal portion of all the matter in the universe came together to create you and for the tiniest moment in the great span of eternity you have the incomparable privilege to exist. For endless eons the..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
2374ba7
|
The most notable feature about anecdotes involving toilet practices is that they always--really, always--involve people from one country being appalled by the habits of those from another.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
1bdab51
|
Yucatan in Mexico means "What?" or "What are you saying?"--the reply given by the natives to the first Spanish conquistadors to fetch up on their shores. The"
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
cfbaa22
|
Bayes's theorem and that looks like this: People who understand Bayes's theorem can use it to work out complex problems involving probability distributions--or inverse probabilities, as they are sometimes called.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
76ddde1
|
It cannot be said too often: all life is one. That is, and I suspect will forever prove to be, the most profound true statement there is.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
3a3bdbf
|
All that is gone. Nowadays we have nothing but meaningless names. Look at Starbucks and their cup sizes--Venti, Trenta, and Wanko Grande or whatever.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |