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The physicist Richard Feynman used to make a joke36 about a posteriori conclusions - reasoning from known facts back to possible causes. 'You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight,' he would say. 'I saw a car with the licence plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of licence plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!' His point, of course, is that it is easy to ..
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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.
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Bill Bryson |
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On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life
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Bill Bryson |
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successfully. 'Japanese researchers have successfully developed a semiconductor chip made of gallium arsenide' (Associated Press). It was thoughtful of the writer to tell us that the researchers had not unsuccessfully developed a gallium arsenide chip, but also unnecessary. Delete successfully.
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Bill Bryson |
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Like many British towns, Eastleigh has closed its factories and workshops, and instead is directing all its economic energies into the making and drinking of coffee. There were essentially two types of shop in the town: empty shops and coffee shops. Some of the empty shops, according to signs in their windows, were in the process of being converted into coffee shops, and many of the coffee shops, judging by their level of custom, looked as ..
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Bill Bryson |
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hostile
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Bill Bryson |
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Just to ease you into a sense of perspective here, Australia is the least wooded continent (Antarctica excluded, of course) and yet it is also the world's largest exporter of woodchips
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Bill Bryson |
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At one time he personally controlled some 10 percent of all the money in circulation in the United States.
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Bill Bryson |
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I mentioned my observation that the world seems to be filling up with imbeciles. They explained to me that this is simply an affliction of age.
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Bill Bryson |
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In 1649 the laws were tightened even further--to the extent that swearing at a parent became punishable by death.
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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 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."
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Bill Bryson |
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To agree with Ingold is no to say that everything must be local first and last, nor to deny that there are environmental problems on a planetary scale. It is to say that they are not the planet's problems. They are ours.
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Bill Bryson |
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A quick Google search reveals there to be seven, ten, five, four or eight 'years to save the planet', depending on your headline writer and expert of choice ('Eleven years to save the planet' seems at the moment a rallying cry still up for grabs).
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Bill Bryson |
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And to see a plant grow armed with the knowledge that it does so out of thin air - that is, after all, where the carbon that makes up most of its mass comes from - is to realise that something else must be restoring that nutritive goodness to the atmosphere.
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Bill Bryson |
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Very little arrives (those asteroid impacts are few and far between), and only a whisper of gas escapes. Everything else must be endlessly recycled: and so it is. The rain becomes the ocean and the ocean becomes the rain, the mountains are ground down to cover the sea-floors with silt, ancient silts rise up to make new mountains.
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Bill Bryson |
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68aa058
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Several of the houses have been mildly disfigured by the careless addition of electrical wires to their facades (something that other less intellectually distracted nations would put inside) but never mind.
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Bill Bryson |
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To a British crossword enthusiast, the clue "An important city in Czechoslovakia" instantly suggests Oslo. Why? Look at Czech(OSLO)vakia again. "A seed you put in the garage" is caraway, while "HIJKLMNO" is water because it is H-to-O or H2O"
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Bill Bryson |
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Even Christ reputedly made a pun when He said: "Thou art Peter: upon this rock I shall build my Church." It doesn't make a lot of sense from the wordplay point of view until you realize that in ancient Greek the word for Peter and for rock was the same."
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Bill Bryson |
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As the Bhagavad Gita says, 'There never was a time when I was not . . . there will never be a time when I will cease to be.' Since time and space began together - as both St Augustine and the big bang attest - the Bhagavad Gita has a point. The chicken and the egg arrived at the same time.
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Bill Bryson |
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Bacon's dichotomy is still germane today: a former President of the Royal Society, George Porter, encapsulated it by the maxim 'there are two kinds of science, applied and not yet applied'.
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Bill Bryson |
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It may seem topsy-turvy that cosmologists can speak confidently about galaxies billions of light years away, whereas theories of diet and child rearing - issues that everyone cares about - are still tentative and controversial
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Bill Bryson |
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But astronomy is, quite genuinely, far simpler than the human sciences.
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Bill Bryson |
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I sat there for some time, a young man with more on his mind than in it.
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Bill Bryson |
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Perhaps for our last words on the subject of usage we should turn to the last words of the venerable French grammarian Dominique Bonhours, who proved on his deathbed that a grammarian's work is never done when he turned to those gathered loyally around him and whispered: "I am about to--or I am going to--die; either expression is used."
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Bill Bryson |
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Built in the hope of distracting workers from the peril of drink, it contained a gymnasium, a laboratory, a billiards room, a library, a reading room, and a lecture and concert hall. Never before had manual workers been given a more lavish opportunity to better themselves, an opportunity that many scores enthusiastically seized. One James Waddington, an untutored woolsorter, became a world authority on linguistics and a leading light of the..
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Bill Bryson |
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Consider the oft-quoted statement "the exception proves the rule." Most people take this to mean that the exception confirms the rule, though when you ask them to explain the logic in that statement, they usually cannot. After all, how can an exception prove a rule? It can't. The answer is that an earlier meaning of prove was to test (a meaning preserved in proving ground) and with that meaning the statement suddenly becomes sensible--the e..
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Bill Bryson |
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I was about to say it was an awful place, but in fact, like most things connected with one's adolescence, it was wonderful and awful at the same time.
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Bill Bryson |
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It was a haven, a little island of light in the darkness of the downtown, very like the diner in Edward Hopper's painting 'The Nighthawks'.
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Bill Bryson |
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An Association for Prevention of Premature Burial was established in Britain in 1899 and an American society was formed the following year.
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Bill Bryson |
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To avoid arousal more generally, women were instructed to get plenty of fresh air, avoid stimulating pastimes like reading and card games, and above all never to use their brains more than was strictly necessary.
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Bill Bryson |
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It's easy to make bricks, but making houses requires far more than throwing a pile of bricks in the air.
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Bill Bryson |
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It is entirely possible that some terrestrial microbes are the products of different biogenesis events, in effect 'alien organisms', constituting a type of shadow biosphere
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Bill Bryson |
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The universal tree of life on Earth might actually be a forest.
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Bill Bryson |
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Today's mathematics is intimately bound up with two key areas of human knowledge and activity: the natural world, and the society in which we live.
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Bill Bryson |
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But one must be careful when speaking of 'experimental science' before the Enlightenment, for it often meant demonstrating what one already knew to be the case - and if experiment seemed to contradict axiomatic reason, so much the worse for experiment.
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Bill Bryson |
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Almost all languages change. A rare exception is written Icelandic, which has changed so little that modern Icelanders can read sagas written a thousand years ago, and if Leif Ericson appeared on the streets of Reykjavik he could find his way around, allowing for certain difficulties over terms like airport and quarter-pound cheeseburger.
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Bill Bryson |
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The fact that 'pure' and 'applied' science are useful and meaningful terms seduces us sometimes into thinking that they are real, absolute and distinct categories.
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Bill Bryson |
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We need to understand why in a society so dependent on technology, a society that benefits so richly from the results of engineering, a society that rewards engineers so well, engineering isn't perceived as a desirable profession.
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Bill Bryson |
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People want everything. That's their problem.
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Bill Bryson |
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Science is about making stuff, just as much as it is about understanding stuff.
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Bill Bryson |
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Despite the ambiguities I have just confessed to, most of me wants very badly not to die just yet, and I am sure the majority of writers and scientists working in this area agree.
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Bill Bryson |
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Instead, we look for patterns in the facts, and some of these patterns we have come to call the laws of Nature, while others have achieved only the status of by-laws.
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Bill Bryson |
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To call human beings 'stewards' of this planet is like accepting that Jack the Ripper is the right man to start a Home for the Care and Protection of Fallen Women.
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Bill Bryson |
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Not only were the Anglo-Saxons relatively uncultured, they were also pagan, a fact rather quaintly preserved in the names of four of our weekdays, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, which respectively commemorate the gods Tiw, Woden, and Thor, and Woden's wife, Frig. (Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, to complete the picture, take their names from Saturn, the sun, and the moon.)
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Bill Bryson |