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Stairs incorporate three pieces of geometry: rise, going, and pitch. The rise is the height between steps, the going is the step itself (technically, the distance between the leading edges, or nosings, of two successive steps measured horizontally), and the pitch is the overall steepness of the stairway.
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Bill Bryson |
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As many as one-third of all stair accidents occur on the first or last step, and two-thirds occur on the first or last three steps.
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Bill Bryson |
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2046b7b
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From the outset wallpaper was often colored with pigments that used large doses of arsenic, lead, and antimony, but after 1775 it was frequently soaked in an especially insidious compound called copper arsenite, which was invented by the great but wonderfully hapless Swedish chemist Karl Scheele.* The color was so popular that it became known as Scheele's green. Later, with the addition of copper acetate, it was refined into an even richer ..
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Bill Bryson |
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The people of Cody like you to think that Buffalo Bill was a native son. In fact, I'm awfully proud to tell you, he was an Iowa native, born in the little town of Le Claire in 1846. The people of Cody, in one of the more desperate commercial acts of this century, bought Buffalo Bill's birthplace and re-erected it in their town, but they are lying through their teeth when they hint that he was a local. And the thing is, they have a talented ..
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Bill Bryson |
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If one's husband had been married before and widowed--a fairly common condition--and a close relative of his first wife's died, the second wife was expected to engage in "complementary mourning"--a kind of proxy mourning on behalf of the deceased earlier partner."
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Bill Bryson |
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canvas tarpaulin, and a piece of old carpet. I'm not sure that they didn't lay an old wardrobe on top of that, just to
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Bill Bryson |
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The 1920s was a great time for reading altogether--very possibly the peak decade for reading in American life.
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Bill Bryson |
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In the early Tertiary, if you were the size of a bobcat you could be king.
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Bill Bryson |
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And thus I was to be found, in the first week of June, standing on the banks of the Shenandoah again, in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, blinking at a grey sky and trying to pretend that with all my heart this was where I wanted to be.
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Bill Bryson |
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b1a2f79
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Bashfully I dropped my shirt onto the sand and stood naked but for my sagging trunks. Glenn, never having seen anything quite this grotesque and singular on an Australian beach, certainly nothing still alive, snatched up his camera and began excitedly taking close-up shots of my stomach. Bizeet, bizeet, bizeet, bizeet, his camera sang happily as he followed me into the surf.
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Bill Bryson |
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Wings
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Bill Bryson |
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A filmmaker named Robert Goldstein was imprisoned for showing the British in a bad light in a movie about the American War of Independence.
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Bill Bryson |
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Of all the minerals the most vital in dietary terms is sodium, which we mostly consume in the form of sodium chloride - table salt.* Here the problem is not that we are getting too little, but possibly way too much. We don't need all that much - 200 milligrams a day, about what you would get with six or eight vigorous shakes of a salt cellar - but we take in about sixty times that amount on average. In a normal diet it is almost impossible ..
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Bill Bryson |
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In addition to the ax, knife, quiver, and arrows, Otzi had shoes, clothing, two birchbark canisters, a sheath, a bowstave, miscellaneous small tools, some berries, a piece of ibex meat, and two spherical lumps of birch fungus, each about the size of a large walnut and carefully threaded with sinew. One of the canisters had contained glowing embers wrapped in maple leaves, for starting fires. Such an assemblage of personal effects was unique..
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Bill Bryson |
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849a918
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It's the place you would go if you wanted to buy a stereo system for under thirty-five dollars and didn't care if it sounded like the band was playing in a mailbox under water in a distant lake.
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Bill Bryson |
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These actions have arcane names like braking, retting, swingling (or scutching), and hackling or heckling, but essentially they involve pounding, stripping, soaking, and otherwise separating the pliant inner fiber, or bast, from its woodier stem. It is striking to think that when we heckle a speaker today we use a term that recalls the preparation of flax from the early Middle Ages.
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Bill Bryson |
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Henry Ford had the additional distinction of being the only American mentioned favorably in Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler's memoir of 1925.
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Bill Bryson |
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paradise for people who look as if they have just stepped out of a Barbour catalogue.
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Bill Bryson |
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one third of all the money America spent on furniture was spent on radios.
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Bill Bryson |
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The most celebrated germ expert in the world is almost certainly Dr. Charles P. Gerba of the University of Arizona, who is so devoted to the field that he gave one of his children the middle name Escherichia, after the bacterium Escherichia coli.
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Bill Bryson |
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ugsome,
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Bill Bryson |
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One less happy practice Vanbrugh introduced with Carlisle at Castle Howard was that of razing estate villages and moving the occupants elsewhere if they were deemed to be insufficiently picturesque or intrusive. At Castle Howard, Vanbrugh cleared away not only an existing village but also a church and the ruined castle from which the new house took its name. Soon villages up and down the country were being leveled to make way for more exten..
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Bill Bryson |
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Wind back the tape of life21 to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.
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Bill Bryson |
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Forty-two percent of all that was produced in the world was produced in the United States. America made 80 percent of the world's movies and 85 percent of its cars.
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Bill Bryson |
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How fast a man's beard grows, for instance, is partly a function of how much he thinks about sex (because thinking about sex produces a testosterone surge).
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Bill Bryson |
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polysemy, and it is very common. Sound is another polysemic word.
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Bill Bryson |
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catachresis,
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Bill Bryson |
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Until as late as the early 1950s a round-trip aeroplane ticket from Australia to England cost as much as a three-bedroom suburban home in Melbourne or Sydney.
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Bill Bryson |
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On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn't be able to see it anyway).
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Bill Bryson |
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The greatest possible irony would be if in our endless quest to fill our lives with comfort and happiness we created a world that had neither. But that of course would be another book.
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Bill Bryson |
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Brian Aldiss,
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Bill Bryson |
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arachibutyrophobia.
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Bill Bryson |
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When we reflect upon the works of William Shakespeare it is of course an amazement to consider that one man could have produced such a sumptuous, wise, varied, thrilling, ever-delighting body of work, but that is of course the hallmark of genius. Only one man had the circumstances and gifts to give us such incomparable works, and William Shakespeare of Stratford was unquestionably that man--whoever he was.
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Bill Bryson |
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It would be hard to imagine two more improbable founders for a movement as ascetic as communism. While earnestly desiring the downfall of capitalism, Engels made himself rich and comfortable from all its benefits. He kept a stable of fine horses, rode to hounds at weekends, enjoyed the best wines, maintained a mistress, hobnobbed with the elite of Manchester at the fashionable Albert Club--in short, did everything one would expect of a succ..
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Bill Bryson |
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In 1907, or so it has sometimes been written, Albert Einstein saw a workman fall off a roof and began to think about gravity. Alas, like many good stories this one appears to be apocryphal. According to Einstein himself, he was simply sitting in a chair when the problem of gravity occurred to him.
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Bill Bryson |
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It was interesting, I thought, that the memorial to Tip was grander than the memorial to the men who took part in the dam-busters raids, but then I remembered that this was England and Tip was a dog.
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Bill Bryson |
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55de627
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There isn't a landscape in the world that is more artfully worked, more lovely to behold, more comfortable to be in, than the countryside of Great Britain. It is the world's largest park, its most perfect accidental garden.
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Bill Bryson |
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Boxing Day. Country pubs. Saying 'you're the dog's bollocks' as an expression of endearment or admiration. Jam roly-poly with custard Ordnance Survey maps I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue Cream teas The shipping forecast The 20p piece June evenings, about 8pm Smelling the sea before you see it Villages with ridiculous names like Shellow Bowells and Nether Wallop
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Bill Bryson |
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aposiopesis.
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Bill Bryson |
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velleity, which describes a mild desire, a wish or urge too slight to lead to action.
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Bill Bryson |
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In those days, Alice had a population of 4,000 and hardly any visitors. Today it's a thriving little city with a population of 25,000 and it is full of visitors - 350,000 of them a year - which is of course the whole problem. These days you can jet in from Adelaide in two hours, from Melbourne and Sydney in less than three. You can have a latte and buy some opals and then climb on a tour bus and travel down the highway to Ayers Rock. The to..
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Bill Bryson |
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Looked at from above, west London isn't so much a city as a forest with buildings.
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Bill Bryson |
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In the years that followed there erupted a dispute that would run and run, between Allan Sandage, heir to Hubble at Mount Wilson, and Gerard de Vaucouleurs, a French-born astronomer based at the University of Texas.
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Bill Bryson |
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one cannot "predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely!"
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Bill Bryson |