|
9bf8484
|
Vitamin B proved to be not one vitamin but several, which is why we have B1, B2, and so on. To add to the confusion, Vitamin K has nothing to do with an alphabetical sequence. It was called K because its Danish discoverer, Henrik Dam, dubbed it "koagulations viatmin" for its role in blood clotting."
|
|
vitamins
trivia
|
Bill Bryson |
|
0f46af0
|
From that original colony sprang seven names that still feature on the landscape: Roanoke (which has the distinction of being the first Indian word borrowed by English settlers), Cape Fear, Cape Hatteras, the Chowan and Neuse Rivers, Chesapeake, and Virginia. (Previously, Virginia had been called Windgancon, meaning "what gay clothes you wear" - apparently what the locals had replied when an early reconnoitering party had asked the place's ..
|
|
humor
language
|
Bill Bryson |
|
c8088bd
|
Considerable thought was given in early Congresses to the possibility of renaming the country. From the start, many people recognized that United States of America was unsatisfactory. For one thing, it allowed of no convenient adjectival form. A citizen would have to be either a United Statesian or some other such clumsy locution, or an American, thereby arrogating to ourselves a title that belonged equally to the inhabitants of some three ..
|
|
humor
language
|
Bill Bryson |
|
ae435a5
|
In countless small ways the world around us grows gradually shittier. Well, I don't like it at all.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
05c3e4c
|
Still, statistically the probability that there are other thinking beings out there is good. Nobody knows how many stars there are in the Milky Way - estimates range from a hundred billion or so to perhaps four hundred billion - and the Milky Way is just one of a hundred and forty billion or so other galaxies, many of them even larger than ours. In the 1960s, a professor at Cornell named Frank Drake, excited by such whopping numbers, worked..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
9f1a72b
|
Nothing, however, bemused the Indians more than the European habit of blowing their noses into a fine handkerchief, folding it carefully, and placing it back in their pockets as if it were a treasured memento.
|
|
handkerchief
native-americans
|
Bill Bryson |
|
fe001b8
|
At one time he [Cornelius Vanderbilt] personally controlled some 10 percent of all the money in circulation in the United States.
|
|
history
the-1
vanderbilt
wealthy-americans
|
Bill Bryson |
|
e807c0b
|
A plumped feather bed may have looked divine, but occupants quickly found themselves sinking into a hard, airless fissure between billowy hills. Support was on a lattice of ropes, which could be tightened with a key when they began to sag (hence the expression "sleep tight")."
|
|
trivia
|
Bill Bryson |
|
4512dbf
|
I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
0fabfb1
|
It is often said that what most immediately sets English apart from other languages is the richness of its vocabulary. Webster's Third New International Dictionary lists 450,000 words, and the revised Oxford English Dictionary has 615,000, but that is only part of the total. Technical and scientific terms would add millions more. Altogether, about 200,000 English words are in common use, more than in German (184,000) and far more than in Fr..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
d75d8e9
|
It would be useful (I wasn't quite sure in what way, but I was sure nonetheless) to learn to fend for myself in the wilderness. When guys in camouflage pants and hunting hats sat around in the Four Aces Diner talking about fearsome things done out-of-doors, I would no longer have to feel like such a cupcake. I wanted a little of that swagger that comes with being able to gaze at a far horizon through eyes of chipped granite and say with a s..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
900aadb
|
If we should be worrying about anything to do with the future of English, it should not be that the various strands will drift apart but that they will grow indistinguishable. And what a sad, sad loss that would be.
|
|
lingodiversity
linguistics
|
Bill Bryson |
|
ddee3e7
|
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. Many people--people who make posters for leading publishers, write captions for the BBC, compose letters and advertisements for important institutions--seem to think that capitalization and marks of punctuation are condiments that you sprinkle through any collection of wo..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
5deeb02
|
Whatever else it may be, at the level of chemistry life is curiously mundane: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, a little calcium, a dash of sulfur, a light dusting of other very ordinary elements--nothing you wouldn't find in any ordinary drugstore--and that's all you need. The only thing special about the atoms that make you is that they make you. That is of course the miracle of life.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
505bc71
|
This is one reason that some experts believe there may have been many other big bangs, perhaps trillions and trillions of them, spread through the mighty span of eternity, and that the reason we exist in this particular one is that this is one we could exist in. As Edward P. Tryon of Columbia University once put it: "In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things whi..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
7aeabb9
|
Ah," he said in a tone of genial wisdom, "a chancellor is rather like a bidet. Everyone is pleased to have one, but no one knows quite what they are for." A chancellor is nominally the head of a university, but in practice has no role, no power, no purpose."
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
b36a630
|
Rarely has a man been more comfortable with his own greatness. He spent much of his leisure time penning long and flattering portraits of himself, declaring that there had never 'been a greater botanist or zoologist', and that his system of classification was 'the greatest achievement in the realm of science'. Modestly, he suggested that his gravestone should bear the inscription Princeps Botanicorum, 'Prince of Botanists'. It was never wis..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
f8c0f35
|
What an interesting and exciting thought. We may be only one of millions of advanced civilizations. Unfortunately, space being spacious, the average distance between any two of these civilizations is reckoned to be at least two hundred light-years, which is a great deal more than merely saying it makes it sound. It means for a start that even if these beings know we are here and are somehow able to see us in their telescopes, they're watchi..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
1935eac
|
We were idiots really, but awfully happy, too.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
9c3e05d
|
Originally, the cellar served primarily as a coal store. Today it holds the boiler, idle suitcases, out-of-season sporting equipment, and many sealed cardboard boxes that are almost never opened but are always carefully transferred from house to house with every move in the belief that one day someone might want some baby clothes that have been kept in a box for twenty-five years.
|
|
cellar
storage
hoarding
moving
|
Bill Bryson |
|
0c0651a
|
It fascinated me that Europeans could at once be so alike - that they could be so universally bookish and cerebral, and drive small cars, and live in little houses in ancient towns, and love soccer, and be relatively unmaterialistic and law-abiding, and have chilly hotel rooms and cosy and inviting places to eat and drink - and yet be so endlessly, unpredictably different from each other as well. I loved the idea that you could never be sur..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
5bc7960
|
the books tell you that if the grizzly comes for you, on no account should you run. This is the sort of advice you get from someone who is sitting at a keyboard when he gives it. Take it from me, if you are in an open space with no weapons and a grizzly comes for you, run. You may as well. If nothing else, it will give you something to do with the last seven seconds of your life. However, when the grizzly overtakes
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
ea1e3e5
|
mass and energy have an equivalence. They are two forms of the same thing: energy is liberated matter; matter is energy waiting to happen. Since c2 (the speed of light times itself) is a truly enormous number, what the equation is saying is that there is a huge amount--a really huge amount--of energy bound up in every material thing.4 You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your m..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
28559bc
|
More than nine million people a year come to the Smokies, many of them to picnic. So bears have learned to associate people with food. Indeed, to them people are overweight creatures in baseball caps who spread lots and lots of food out on picnic tables and then shriek a little and waddle off to get their video cameras when old Mr. Bear comes along and climbs onto the table and starts devouring their potato salad and chocolate cake. Since t..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
e2b9496
|
I soon learned that everyone in Paris was like that. You would go into a bakery and be greeted by some vast sluglike creature with a look that told you you would never be friends. In halting French you would ask for a small loaf of bread. The woman would give you a long, cold stare and then put a dead beaver on the counter. "No, no," you would say, hands aflutter, "not a dead beaver. A loaf of bread." The sluglike creature would stare at yo..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
6015237
|
In fact, mostly what the Forest Service does is build roads.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
6e18b98
|
The Moon is slipping from our grasp at a rate of about 1.5 inches a year. In another two billion years it will have receded so far that it won't keep us steady and we will have to come up with some other solution, but in the meantime you should think of it as much more than just a pleasant feature in the night sky.
|
|
science
moon
sky
|
Bill Bryson |
|
c0509d0
|
It is still a fairly astounding notion to consider that atoms are mostly empty space, and that the solidity we experience all around us is an illusion. When two objects come together in the real world - billiard balls are most often used for illustration - they don't actually strike each other. 'Rather,' as Timothy Ferris explains, 'the negatively charged fields of the two balls repel each other ... [W]ere it not for their electrical charge..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
21ba62b
|
Sometimes it rained, but mostly it was just dull, a land without shadows. It was like living inside Tupperware.
|
|
tupperware
weather
|
Bill Bryson |
|
c77da6f
|
In the early 1800s there arose in England a fashion for inhaling nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, after it was discovered that its use 'was attended by a highly pleasurable thrilling11'. For the next half-century it would be the drug of choice for young people. One learned body, the Askesian Society, was for a time devoted to little else. Theatres put on 'laughing gas evenings'12 where volunteers could refresh themselves with a robust inhala..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
6c787c4
|
They were Republicans, Nixon Republicans, and so didn't subscribe to the notion that laws are supposed to apply to all people equally.
|
|
humorous
political
politics
|
Bill Bryson |
|
6ed1d42
|
Because they are so long-lived, atoms really get around. Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms--up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested--probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and G..
|
|
science
omnipresent
universal
|
Bill Bryson |
|
5e27bc6
|
A physicist is the atoms' way of thinking about atoms. --Anonymous
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
26e8a15
|
I could be dead in a minute," he said grimly, then clutched my forearm. "Look, if I get shot, do me a favor. Call my brother and tell him there's $10,000 buried in a coffee can under his front lawn." "You buried $10,000 under your brother's front lawn?" "No, of course not, but he's a little prick and it would serve him right. Let's go."
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
a36750b
|
I ended up with enough equipment to bring full employment to a vale of sherpas--
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
8ad96df
|
loony hillbillies destabilized by gross quantities of impure corn liquor and generations of profoundly unbiblical sex;
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
82f5a3c
|
Life, in short, just wants to be. But--and here's an interesting point--for the most part it doesn't want to be much. This is perhaps a little odd because life has had plenty of time to develop ambitions. If you imagine the 4.5 billion odd years of Earth's history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the n..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
460b589
|
In the mystifying world that was Victorian parenthood, obedience took precedence over all considerations of affection and happiness, and that odd, painful conviction remained the case in most well-heeled homes up until at least the time of the First World War.
|
|
victorian-era
parenthood
|
Bill Bryson |
|
9ae2b77
|
We are not only what we do, we are also what we imagine.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
587f668
|
we're going to be in the wilderness in three days. There won't be doughnut stores.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
11a2e97
|
The complexities of the English language are such that even native speakers cannot always communicate effectively, as almost every American learns on his first day in Britain.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
e71af4f
|
It is a natural human impulse to think of evolution as a long chain of improvements, of a never-ending advance towards largeness and complexity - in a word, towards us. We flatter ourselves. Most of the real diversity in evolution has been small-scale. We large things are just flukes - an interesting side branch. Of the twenty-three main divisions of life, only three - plants, animals and fungi - are large enough to be seen by the human eye..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
03bb5b5
|
IN 1953, STANLEY Miller, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, took two flasks--one containing a little water to represent a primeval ocean, the other holding a mixture of methane, ammonia, and hydrogen sulphide gases to represent Earth's early atmosphere--connected them with rubber tubes, and introduced some electrical sparks as a stand-in for lightning. After a few days, the water in the flasks had turned green and yellow in a ..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
deaf54b
|
That is the most extraordinary fact about Britain. It wants to be a garden. Flowers bloom in the unlikeliest places - on railway sidings and waste grounds where there is nothing beneath them but rubble and grit.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |