|
15a8d0e
|
Data from any single gene cannot really tell you anything so definitive. If you follow the mitochondrial DNA backwards, it will take you to a certain place - to an Ursula or Tara or whatever. But if you take any other bit of DNA, any gene at all, and trace it back, it will take you someplace else altogether.' It was a little, I gathered, like following a road randomly out of London and finding that eventually it ends at John O'Groats, and c..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
d3dd476
|
One of Milton's poems contains the well-known line "Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth."
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
3d3fae0
|
The camp consists of three compounds, each a mile or two apart, and when travelling between any two you must be escorted by a truckload of Kenyan soldiers, just in case. The camp has become essentially a city in the desert, with schools and markets and permanent habitations. It has been there so long now that a generation of children has grown to adulthood without knowing any life other than being behind razor wire and heavy iron gates, and..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
07cd39d
|
One of the undoubted virtues of English is that it is a fluid and democratic language in which meanings shift and change in response to the pressures of common usage rather than the dictates of committees. It is a natural process that has been going on for centuries. To interfere with that process is arguably both arrogant and futile, since clearly the weight of usage will push new meanings into currency no matter how many authorities hurl ..
|
|
usage
|
Bill Bryson |
|
531cb18
|
Franklin Delano Roosevelt's grandfather Warren Delano made much of the family's fortune by trading opium, a fact that the Roosevelt family has never exactly crowed about.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
d0fce17
|
Eating forks were thought comically dainty and unmanly--and dangerous, too, come to that. Since they had only two sharp tines, the scope for spearing one's lip or tongue was great, particularly if one's aim was impaired by wine and jollity. Manufacturers experimented with additional numbers of tines--sometimes as many as six--before settling, late in the nineteenth century, on four as the number that people seemed to be most comfortable wit..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
d75fae2
|
To build the most basic yeast cell, for example, you would have to miniaturize about the same number of components as are found in a Boeing 777 jetliner and fit them into a sphere just five microns across; then somehow you would have to persuade that sphere to reproduce.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
89abcc6
|
home,
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
356d38e
|
After four years, he stumbled from the steamy jungles exhausted, his clothes in tatters, trembling and half delirious from a recurrent fever, but with a rare collection of specimens. In the Brazilian port city of Para, he secured passage home on a barque called the Helen. Midway across the Atlantic, however, the Helen caught fire and Wallace had to scramble into a lifeboat, leaving his precious cargo behind. He watched as the ship, consumed..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
1d4484f
|
centre round or around. 'Their argument centres around the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act' (The Times). Centre indicates a point, and a point cannot encircle anything. Make it 'centre on' or 'revolve around'.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
705a24f
|
tropical hurricane can release in twenty-four hours as much energy as a rich, medium-sized nation like Britain or France uses in a year.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
a643da0
|
In 1755, some seventy years after the last dodo's death, the director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford decided that the institution's stuffed dodo was becoming unpleasantly musty and ordered it tossed on a bonfire. This was a surprising decision as it was by this time the only dodo in existence, stuffed or otherwise. A passing employee, aghast, tried to rescue the bird but could save only its head and part of one limb.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
3922a35
|
very should be made to pay its way in sentences. Too often it is used where it adds nothing to sense ('It was a very tragic death'), or is inserted in a futile effort to prop up a weak word that would be better replaced by something with more punch ('The play was very good').
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
217244a
|
I mention all this to make the point that if you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn't choose human beings for the job.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
b55237d
|
It was Broom's habit, for instance, to do his fieldwork naked when the weather was warm, which was often. He was also known for conducting dubious anatomical experiments on his poorer and more tractable patients. When the patients died, which was also often, he would sometimes bury their bodies in his back garden to dig up for study later.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
b6a3f5c
|
activity. Often a sign of prolixity, as here: 'The warnings followed a week of earthquake activity throughout the region' (Independent). Just make it 'a week of earthquakes'.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
a1c05a8
|
contagious, infectious. Diseases spread by contact are contagious. Those spread by air and water are infectious. Used figuratively ('contagious laughter', 'infectious enthusiasm'), either is all right.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
65a3aaa
|
As a rough rule, I would suggest that a company's orthographic eccentricities should be noted, possibly even observed, but never overindulged. Just because a company chooses to put a backward letter into its title or to spell its name in small capitals does not entitle it to become a distraction in print.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
42476b2
|
if. Problems often arise in deciding whether if is introducing a subjunctive clause ('If I were ...') or an indicative one ('If I was ...'). The distinction is straightforward. When if introduces a notion that is hypothetical or improbable or clearly untrue, the verb should be in the subjunctive: 'If I were king ...'; 'If he were in your shoes ...'. But when the if is introducing a thought that is true or could well be true, the mood should..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
7454342
|
A physicist is the atoms' way of thinking about atoms. Anonymous
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
2118337
|
Estrada calls the desire to visit an unchanged Cuba patronizing, as if the island is a museum, not a nation entitled to a future.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
57e7e6b
|
We were looking for the "real" outback where the men are men and the sheep are nervous."
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
18eab48
|
We started this chapter with three points: life wants to be; life doesn't always want to be much; life from time to time goes extinct. To this we may add a fourth: life goes on. And often, as we shall see, it goes on in ways that are decidedly amazing.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
76b2279
|
When you feel the sun warm on your back on a summer's day, it's really excited atoms you feel. The higher you climb, the fewer molecules there are, and so the fewer collisions between them.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
0512302
|
Things reached such a pitch that at one conference Bohr remarked of a new theory that the question was not whether it was crazy, but whether it was crazy enough. To illustrate the non-intuitive nature of the quantum world, Schrodinger offered a famous thought experiment in which a hypothetical cat was placed in a box with one atom of a radioactive substance attached to a vial of hydrocyanic acid. If the particle degraded within an hour, it ..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
c33a449
|
If it was his goal in life to make as little impression as possible upon history, he achieved it gloriously.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
ed23363
|
Leeuwenhoek himself occasionally got carried away with his enthusiasms. In one of his least successful experiments13 he tried to study the explosive properties of gunpowder by observing a small blast at close range; he nearly blinded himself in the process.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
98389e3
|
since for forty years every study of lead's effects had been funded exclusively by manufacturers of lead additives. In one such study, a doctor who had no specialized training in chemical pathology17 undertook a five-year programme in which volunteers were asked to breathe in or swallow lead in elevated quantities. Then their urine and faeces were tested. Unfortunately, as the doctor appears not to have known, lead is not excreted as a wast..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
935eef3
|
It was one of those buildings that you don't so much as look at as bathe in.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
fd81400
|
a Croatian seismologist named Andrija Mohorovicic was studying graphs from an earthquake in Zagreb when he noticed a similar odd deflection, but at a shallower level. He had discovered the boundary between the crust and the layer immediately below, the mantle; this zone has been known ever since as the Mohorovicic discontinuity, or Moho for short.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
b21fcec
|
replica. Properly, a replica is an exact copy, built to the same scale as the original and using the same materials. To use the word when you might better use 'model', 'miniature', 'copy' or 'reproduction' devalues it, as here: 'Using nothing but plastic Lego toy bricks, they have painstakingly reconstructed replicas of some of the world's most famous landmarks' (Sunday Times).
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
7ec7817
|
More recently, during a debate in the House of Lords in 1978 one of the members said: "If there is a more hideous language on the face of the earth than the American form of English, I should like to know what it is."
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
c4a76af
|
second largest and other similar comparisons often lead writers astray: 'Japan is the second largest drugs market in the world after the United States' (The Times). Not quite. It is the largest drugs market in the world after the United States or it is the second largest drugs market in the world. The sentence above could be fixed by placing a comma after 'world'.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
0b0dddb
|
Before the shift house was pronounced "hoose" (it still is in Scotland), mode was pronounced "mood," and home rhymed with "gloom," which is why Domesday Book is pronounced and sometimes called Doomsday. (The word has nothing to do with the modern word doom, incidentally. It is related to the domes- in domestic.)"
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
e733d0c
|
Bell treated his friend and colleague Watson generously. Though he had no legal obligations to do so, he awarded Watson 10 percent of the company, allowing Watson to retire rich at the age of just twenty-seven. Able to do anything he wanted, Watson devoted the rest of his life to just that. He traveled the world, read widely, and took a degree in geology at MIT for the simple satisfaction of improving his brain. He then started a shipyard, ..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
02e166c
|
Life in Australia would go on and I would hear nothing, because once you leave Australia, Australia ceases to be. What a strange, sad thought that is.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
4b74b15
|
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 ..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
92160e2
|
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.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
e2ed682
|
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
91aa137
|
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.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
0b3cd47
|
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 ..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
5275478
|
hostile
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
e221eed
|
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
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
4385dc0
|
At one time he personally controlled some 10 percent of all the money in circulation in the United States.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |