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The AT is no longer the longest hiking trail--the Pacific Crest and Continental Divide trails, both out West, are slightly longer--but it will always be the first and greatest. It has a lot of friends. It deserves them.
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Bill Bryson |
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49d6084
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Electric jugs for all.
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Bill Bryson |
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6b95427
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All over the inchoate solar system, the same was happening. Colliding dust grains formed larger and larger clumps. Eventually the clumps grew large enough to be called planetesimals.
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Bill Bryson |
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07fe686
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tiny bag of chemicals twitched and became animate. We were on our way. Four
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Bill Bryson |
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90ee071
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On 1 July 1858, Darwin's and Wallace's theory was unveiled to the world. Darwin himself was not present. On the day of the meeting, he and his wife were burying their son.
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Bill Bryson |
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All the light switches in the hallways were timed to go off after ten or fifteen seconds, presumably as an economy measure. This wasn't so bad if your room was next to the elevator, but if it was very far down the hall, and hotel hallways in Paris tend to wander around like an old man with Alzheimer's, you would generally proceed the last furlong in total blackness, feeling your way along the walls with flattened palms, and invariably colli..
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Bill Bryson |
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Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden, provides us with a history that is rather more straightforward, if not tremendously vivid or enlightening.
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Bill Bryson |
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She was the mother of eight children: four daughters, of whom only one lived to adulthood, and four sons, all of whom reached their majority but only one of whom, Will, married.
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Bill Bryson |
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516ce40
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Even so, as was his custom, he writes the name in an abbreviated form: "Wllm Shaksp." It also has a large blot on the end of the surname, probably because of the comparatively low quality of the paper. Though it is only a deposition, it is also the only document in existence containing a transcript of Shakespeare speaking in his own voice."
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Bill Bryson |
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623b006
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I ordered a pint of Cooper's Draught and retired with it to a table overlooking the square. And there I sat for a good few minutes doing nothing at all, not even touching my glass, just savoring the pleasure of sitting down and finding myself in a far country with a glass of beer and cricket on the TV and a roomful of people enjoying the fruits of a prosperous age. I could not have been happier. After
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Bill Bryson |
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64fd963
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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. So
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Bill Bryson |
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e94068b
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I really do think Britain had attained something approaching perfection just around the time of my arrival. It's a funny thing because Britain was in a terrible state in those days. It limped from crisis to crisis. It was known as the Sick Man of Europe. It was in every way poorer than now. Yet there were flowerbeds on roundabouts, libraries and post offices in every village, cottage hospitals in abundance, council housing for all who neede..
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Bill Bryson |
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9ab40a3
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When a prominent Puritan named (all too appropriately, it would seem) John Stubbs criticized the queen's mooted marriage to a French Catholic, the Duke of Alencon, his right hand was cut off.*
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Bill Bryson |
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39d4ef6
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for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you. It's an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once. For the next many years (we hope) these tiny particles will uncomplainingly engage in all the billions of deft, cooperative efforts necessary to keep you intact and let you experience the ..
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Bill Bryson |
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Carleton Coon of the University of Pennsylvania suggested that some modern races have different sources of origin, implying that some of us come from superior stock to others.
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Bill Bryson |
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Data from any single gene cannot really tell you anything so definitive. If
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Bill Bryson |
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c2583a7
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In this sense, according to Harding, every gene is a different highway, and we have only barely begun to map the routes. "No single gene is ever going to tell you the whole story,"
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Bill Bryson |
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26de537
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I think both sides have done a bit of a disservice to science by insisting that it must be one thing or the other. Things are likely to turn out to be not so straightforward as either camp would have you believe.
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Bill Bryson |
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At Wauchope there's a Big Bull," he added. I raised my eyebrows in a way that said, "Oh, yes?" He nodded fondly. "Its testicles swing in the breeze." "It has testicles?" I said, impressed. "I'll say. If they fell on you, you wouldn't get up in a hurry." We took an extended moment to savor this image. "It would make an interesting insurance claim, I suppose," I observed at last. "Yeah!" He liked this idea, too. "Or a newspaper headline: 'Man..
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Bill Bryson |
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2c9d0b7
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The ill-fated dodo. Slow, flightless and dangerously trusting, the dodo was driven to extinction just seventy years after first being spotted by European sailors on its island home of Mauritius.
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Bill Bryson |
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52b1050
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You would be hard pressed, I would submit, to find a better pairing of occurrences to illustrate the divine and felonious nature of the human being--a species of organism that is capable of unravelling the deepest secrets of the heavens while at the same time pounding into extinction, for no purpose at all, a creature that never did us any harm and wasn't even remotely capable of understanding what we were doing to it as
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Bill Bryson |
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fe6e9e0
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Nobody knows quite how destructive human beings are, but it is a fact that over the last fifty thousand years or so, wherever we have gone animals have tended to vanish, often in astonishingly large numbers. In
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Bill Bryson |
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Steller's sea cow, named after the German naturalist Georg Steller, who discovered a small community of them living on Bering Island, off the coat of Siberia, in 1741. Hunted mercilessly by humans, within thirty years of its discovery by Steller this remarkable species was extinct.
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Bill Bryson |
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pair of Stephens Island wrens, which were found only on a small, isolated island in New Zealand's Cook Strait. All were killed by a lighthouse keeper's cat.
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Bill Bryson |
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Peale was a lover of birds, and yet did not hesitate to kill them in large numbers for no better reason than that it interested him to do so.
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Bill Bryson |
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the people who were most intensely interested in the world's living things were the ones most likely to extinguish them. No-one
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Bill Bryson |
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The greater koa finch, an innocuous member of the honeycreeper family, lurked shyly in the canopies of koa trees, but if someone imitated its song it would abandon its cover at once and fly down in a show of welcome.
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Bill Bryson |
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His point, of course, is that it is easy to make any banal situation seem extraordinary if you treat it as fateful. So
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Bill Bryson |
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And now here I was in McDonald's again for the first time since my earlier fracas. I vowed to behave myself, but McDonald's is just too much for me. I ordered a chicken sandwich and a Diet Coke. 'Do you want fries with that?' the young man serving me asked. I hesitated for a moment, and in a pained but patient tone said: 'No. That's why I didn't ask for fries, you see.' 'We're just told to ask like,' he said. 'When I want fries, generally I..
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mcdonald-s
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Bill Bryson |
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e2d1e9e
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Einstein couldn't bear the notion that God could create a universe in which some things were for ever unknowable.
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Bill Bryson |
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You shall be led from hence to the place whence you came...and your body shall be opened, your heart and bowels plucked out, and your privy members cut off and thrown into the fire before your eyes.
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Bill Bryson |
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Food was similarly regulated, with restrictions placed on how many courses one might eat, depending on status.
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Bill Bryson |
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In 1586 Elizabeth ordered that Anthony Babington, a wealthy young Catholic who had plotted her assassination, should be made an example of. Babington was hauled down from the scaffold while still conscious and made to watch as his abdomen was sliced open and the contents allowed to spill out. It was by this time an act of such horrifying cruelty that it disgusted even the bloodthirsty crowd.
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Bill Bryson |
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Among skilled craftsmen--a category that included John Shakespeare--some 60 percent could read, a clearly respectable proportion.
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Bill Bryson |
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A single kilogram of CFCs can capture and annihilate 70,000 kilograms of atmospheric ozone.
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Bill Bryson |
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Though banned in most of the developed world, millions of pounds of destructive CFCs, often made by Western companies, are still legally sold in the third world each year.
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Bill Bryson |
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What it really takes to find particles these days is money and lots of it. There is a curious inverse relationship in modern physics between the tininess of the thing being sought and the scale of the facilities required to do the searching.
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Bill Bryson |
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aef0723
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The World Wide Web is a CERN offshoot. It was invented by a CERN scientist, Tim Berners-Lee, in 1989. 2
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Bill Bryson |
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hadrons"--a collective term used by physicists for protons, neutrons and other particles governed by the strong nuclear force."
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Bill Bryson |
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2a88a23
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quarks," a collective term that encompasses all particles that are governed by the strong nuclear force."
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Bill Bryson |
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So we are stuck with a theory, and we do not know whether it is right or wrong, but we do know that it is a little wrong, or at least incomplete." In"
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Bill Bryson |
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8862b0d
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Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, painted here by his friend Jan Vermeer, was a self-taught instrument maker.
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Bill Bryson |
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ff3b2b8
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It wasn't until the 1860s, and some landmark work by Louis Pasteur in France, that it was shown conclusively that life cannot arise spontaneously but must come from pre-existing cells.
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Bill Bryson |
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6d0eb55
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The wonder of cells is not that things occasionally go wrong, but that they manage everything so smoothly for decades at a stretch.
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Bill Bryson |