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Presumably, a confused person would be too addled to recognize that he was confused. Ergo, if you know that you are not confused then you are not confused. Unless, it suddenly occurred to me--and here was an arresting notion--unless persuading yourself that you are not confused is merely a cruel, early symptom of confusion. Or even an advanced symptom. Who could tell? For all I knew I could be stumbling into some kind of helpless preconfusi..
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Bill Bryson |
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In some sense, gravity does not exist28; what moves the planets and stars is the distortion of space and time.
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Bill Bryson |
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When at last Lindbergh reached the speaking platform, he nodded to those present and accepted the cheers of the crowd. President Coolidge made a short speech of welcome, pinned the Distinguished Flying Cross on his lapel, and with a gesture invited Lindbergh to speak. Lindbergh leaned into the microphone, for it was set a little low for him, expressed pleasure at being present, said a very few words of thanks, and stepped back. A moment of ..
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Bill Bryson |
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As the economist Herman Daly once put it: "The current national accounting system treats the earth as a business in liquidation."
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Bill Bryson |
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slubberdegullion,
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Bill Bryson |
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The state of New York had just one important advantage--an opening to the west through the Appalachian Mountains, the chain that runs in rough parallel to the Atlantic Ocean. It is hard to believe that those soft and rolling mountains, often little more than big hills, could ever have constituted a formidable barrier to movement, but in fact they afforded almost no usable passes along the whole of their twenty-five-hundred-mile length and w..
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Bill Bryson |
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With the canal, the cost of shipping a ton of flour from Buffalo to New York City fell from $120 a ton to $6 a ton, and the carrying time was reduced from three weeks to just over one. The effect on New York's fortunes was breathtaking. Its share of national exports leaped from less than 10 percent in 1800 to over 60 percent by the middle of the century; in the same period, even more dazzlingly, its population went from ten thousand to well..
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Bill Bryson |
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Farther west, Michigan's seemingly inexhaustible stock of white pine--170 billion board feet of it when the first colonists arrived--shrank by 95 percent in just a century.
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Bill Bryson |
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English bond is a style in which one row is made up entirely of stretchers (the long side of bricks) and the next is made only of headers (the end side).
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Bill Bryson |
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In Flemish bond, headers alternate with stretchers from brick to brick. Flemish bond is much more popular than English, not because it is stronger, but because it is more economical since every facade has more long faces than short ones, and thus requires fewer bricks. But there were many other patterns--Chinese bond, Dearne's bond, English garden-wall bond, cross bond, rat-trap bond, monk bond, flying bond, and so on--each signifying a dif..
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Bill Bryson |
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He invested heavily in an automated general store in which customers would put a coin in a slot and a moment later a bag of coal, potatoes, onions, nails, hairpins, or other desired commodity would come sliding down a chute to them. The system never worked. It never came close to working.
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Bill Bryson |
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When the company was finally broken up in the 1980s to satisfy antitrust regulators, it was worth more than the combined worth of General Electric, General Motors, Ford, IBM, Xerox, and Coca-Cola, and employed a million people.) Bell moved to Washington, D.C., became
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Bill Bryson |
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Chicago in the twenties may have been corrupt, but it was not really as violent as reputation has it. With an annual rate of 13.3 murders per every 100,000 people, it was indubitably more homicidal than New York, with 6.1, Los Angeles, with 4.7, or Boston, with just 3.9--but it was less dangerous than Detroit, at 16.8, or almost any city in the South. New Orleans had a murder rate of 25.9 per 100,000, while Little Rock had a rate of 37.9, M..
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Bill Bryson |
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when authorities learned that Eugene O'Neill's play All God's Chillun proposed to show black and white children playing together as if that were normal, the district attorney for Manhattan sent the police to stop it.
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Bill Bryson |
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Albert Snyder's mortal fall was outlined. The story had begun ten years earlier when Snyder, the lonely, balding art editor of Motor Boating magazine, had developed an infatuation with an office secretary of high spirits and light intellect named Ruth Brown.
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Bill Bryson |
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Pepys recorded in his diary a rather more prosaic milestone in his life. On September 25, 1660, he tried a new hot beverage for the first time, recording in his diary: "And afterwards I did send for a cup of tee (a China drink), of which I never had drank before." Whether he liked it or not Pepys didn't say, which is a shame, as it is the first mention we have in English of anyone's drinking a cup of tea." --
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Bill Bryson |
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On another occasion, he stared at the Sun for as long as he could bear, to determine what effect it would have upon his vision.
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Bill Bryson |
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Stoically, Le Gentil packed up his instruments and set off for the nearest port, but en route he contracted dysentery and was laid up for nearly a year.
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Bill Bryson |
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Although scientists were in an internationally co-operative mood, nations weren't.)
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Bill Bryson |
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The Earth at last had a position in space.
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Bill Bryson |
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Most star systems in the cosmos are binary (double-starred), which makes our solitary sun a slight oddity.
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Bill Bryson |
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he was the most gifted English scientist of his age, but also the strangest. He suffered, in the words of one of his few biographers, from shyness to a 'degree bordering on disease'19. Any human contact was for him a source of the deepest discomfort.
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Bill Bryson |
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Even his housekeeper communicated with him by letter.
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Bill Bryson |
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In America, Benjamin Franklin famously risked his life by flying a kite in an electrical storm.
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Bill Bryson |
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In his secretiveness he didn't merely resemble Newton, but actively exceeded him.
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Bill Bryson |
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By the eighteenth century the most reliable way to get a bath was to be insane. Then they could hardly soak you enough. In 1701, Sir John Floyer began to make a case for cold bathing as a cure for any number of maladies. His theory was that plunging a body into chilly water produced a sensation of "Terror and Surprize" which invigorated dulled and jaded senses."
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Bill Bryson |
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At all events, thanks to the work of Clair Patterson, by 1953 the Earth at last had an age everyone could agree on.
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Bill Bryson |
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In 1897, still in his early twenties, Hoover was hired by a large and venerable British mining company, Bewick, Moreing and Co., and for the next decade travelled the world ceaselessly as its chief engineer and troubleshooter - to Burma, China, Australia, India, Egypt and wherever else its mineralogical interests demanded. In six years, Hoover circled the globe five times. He lived through the Boxer Rebellion in China, hacked through the ju..
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Bill Bryson |
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On this scale, according to John McPhee in Basin and Range, the distance from the fingertips of one hand to the wrist of the other is Precambrian. All of complex life is in one hand, "and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history."
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Bill Bryson |
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And as you are about to see, it not only produces the best science, but also some of the very best science writing.
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Bill Bryson |
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Gibbs is perhaps the most brilliant person most people have never heard of. Modest to the point of near-invisibility, he passed virtually the whole of his life, apart from three years spent studying in Europe, within a three-block area bounded by his house and the Yale campus in New Haven, Connecticut. For his first ten years at Yale he didn't even bother to draw a salary.
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Bill Bryson |
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Altogether at least sixty thousand people were sterilized because of Laughlin's efforts. At the peak of the movement in the 1930s, some thirty states had sterilization laws, though only Virginia and California made wide use of them. It is perhaps worth noting that sterilization laws remain on the books in twenty states today.
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Bill Bryson |
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They determined, for instance, that a rusting object doesn't lose weight, as everyone had long assumed, but gains weight - an extraordinary discovery.
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Bill Bryson |
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American airmen, when they got to the front, mostly flew in borrowed, patched-up planes provided by the Allies, leaving them in the position of being sent into the most dangerous form of combat in modern times with next to no training in generally second-rate surplus planes against vastly more experienced enemies.
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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.
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Bill Bryson |
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The hard and unexpected part is the realization not just that my son is not here but that the boy he was is gone forever. I would give anything to have them both back. But of course that cannot be. Life moves on. Kids grow up and move away, and if you don't know this already, believe me, it happens faster than you can imagine.
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Bill Bryson |
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Thankfully for us, water seems unaware of the rules of chemistry or laws of physics. Everyone
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Bill Bryson |
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If you sell out to outsiders, you must accept that it will be people from other lands who decide what snacks you eat and where your sauces are concocted. And
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Bill Bryson |
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He was disorganized, forgetful, perpetually dissolute, and famous for his tremendous benders. One year he missed fifty straight weekly meetings at the Office of Works. His supervision of the office was so poor that one man was discovered to have been on holiday for three years. When sober, however, he was much liked and widely praised for his charm, good nature, and architectural vision. A bust of him in the National Portrait Gallery in Lon..
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Bill Bryson |
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A critic named John Carter was so exercised by Wyatt's predilection for ripping out ancient interiors that he dubbed him "the Destroyer" and devoted 212 essays in the Gentleman's Magazine--essentially his whole career--to attacking Wyatt's style and character. At"
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Bill Bryson |
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ancient light in
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Bill Bryson |
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unstable plane for a day and a half through storm and cloud and darkness while intricately balancing the flow of fuel through five tanks governed by fourteen valves, and navigating his way across a void without landmarks. When he needed to check his position or log a note, he would have to spread his work out on his lap and hold the stick between his knees; if it was nighttime he would have to grip a small flashlight between his teeth.
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Bill Bryson |
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In 1872, Lubbock learned from a rector in rural Wiltshire that a big chunk of Avebury, an ancient circle of stones considerably larger than Stonehenge (though not so picturesquely composed), was about to be cleared away for new housing. Lubbock bought the threatened land, along with two other ancient monuments nearby, West Kennett Long Barrow and Silbury Hill (an enormous manmade mound--the largest in Europe), but clearly he couldn't protec..
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Bill Bryson |
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We have now reached a level in which many people are not merely unacquainted with the fundamentals of punctuation, but don't evidently realize that there are fundamentals.
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Bill Bryson |