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30256b1
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The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back. The brain has shut down. The flesh begins to soften. Nothing much new happens, and nothing is expected of you.
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Mary Roach |
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2f1ed05
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It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more then half of the people in the position H's family was in will say no, will choose to burn those organs or let them rot. We abide the surgeon's scalpel to save our own lives, out loved ones' lives, but not to save a stranger's life. H has no heart, bu..
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life
medicine
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Mary Roach |
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2cc03d4
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We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget.
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death
science
life
mary-roach
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Mary Roach |
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87d6020
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The human head is of the same approximate size and weight as a roaster chicken. I have never before had occasion to make the comparison, for never before today have I seen a head in a roasting pan.
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Mary Roach |
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480aa0c
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It is the mind that speaks a woman's heart, not the vaginal walls.
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sexuality
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Mary Roach |
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e52897c
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You are a person and then you cease to be a person, and a cadaver takes your place.
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Mary Roach |
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3769aa0
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Death. It doesn't have to be boring.
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Mary Roach |
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c2c18ab
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Here is the secret to surviving one of these [airplane] crashes: Be male. In a 1970 Civil Aeromedical institute study of three crashes involving emergency evacuations, the most prominent factor influencing survival was gender (followed closely by proximity to exit). Adult males were by far the most likely to get out alive. Why? Presumably because they pushed everyone else out of the way.
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survival
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Mary Roach |
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d5f0631
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Hormones are nature's three bottles of beer.
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Mary Roach |
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9af50cc
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Yes, the money could be better spent on Earth. But would it? Since when has money saved by government redlining been spent on education and cancer research? It is always squandered. Let's squander some on Mars. Let's go out and play.
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Mary Roach |
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51b21db
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In my experience, the most staunchly held views are based on ignorance or accepted dogma, not carefully considered accumulations of facts. The more you expose the intricacies and realtities of the situation, the less clear-cut things become.
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science
spook
facts
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Mary Roach |
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0fd7e76
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Many people will find this book disrespectful. There is nothing amusing about being dead, they will say. Ah, but there is.
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Mary Roach |
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b245703
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Sharing a room with a cadaver is only mildly different from being in a room alone. They are the same sort of company as people across from you on subways or in airport lounges, there but not there. Your eyes keep going back to them, for lack of anything more interesting to look at, and then you feel bad for staring.
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Mary Roach |
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a079049
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The paper does not provide the exact number of penises eaten by ducks, but the author says there have been enough over the years to prompt the coining of a popular saying: 'I better get home or the ducks will have something to eat.
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sex
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Mary Roach |
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12ecb33
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To the rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will ever have to deal with. You and your fluctuating metabolism, your puny memory, your frame that comes in a million different configurations. You are unpredictable. You're inconstant. You take weeks to fix. The engineer must worry about the water and oxygen and food you'll need in space, about how much extra fuel it will take to launch yo..
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space-travel
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Mary Roach |
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5444f84
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One young woman's tribute describes unwrapping her cadaver's hands and being brought up short by the realization that the nails were painted pink. "The pictures in the anatomy atlas did not show nail polish", she wrote. "Did you choose the color? Did you think that I would see it? I wanted to tell you about the inside of your hands. I want you to know you are always there when I see patients. When I palpate an abdomen, yours are the organs ..
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Mary Roach |
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c314fad
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You do not question an author who appears on the title page as "T.V.N. Persaud, M.D., Ph.D., D.Sc., F.R.C.Path. (Lond.), F.F.Path. (R.C.P.I.), F.A.C.O.G." --
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Mary Roach |
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a5143f8
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The point is that no matter what you choose to do with your body when you die, it won't, ultimately, be very appealing. If you are inclined to donate yourself to science, you should not let images of dissection or dismemberment put you off. They are no more or less gruesome, in my opinion, than ordinary decay or the sewing shut of your jaws via your nostrils for a funeral viewing.
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science
dissection
funeral
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Mary Roach |
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9c1d80c
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Sexual desire is a state not unlike hunger.
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Mary Roach |
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b0ab300
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Space doesn't just encompass the sublime and the ridiculous. It erases the line between.
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Mary Roach |
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75e8bcc
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Every mode of travel has its signature mental aberration.
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travel
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Mary Roach |
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3975755
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I am very much out of my element here. There are moments, listening to the conversations going on around me, when I feel I am going to lose my mind. Earlier today, I heard someone say the words, "I felt at one with the divine source of creation." Mary Roach on a conducted tour of Hades. I had to fight the urge to push back my chair and start screaming: STAND BACK! ALL OF YOU! I'VE GOT AN ARTHUR FINDLAY BOX CUTTER! Instead, I quietly excused..
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science
humor
psychic
medium
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Mary Roach |
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ee143de
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I walk up and down the rows. The heads look like rubber halloween masks. They also look like human heads, but my brain has no precedent for human heads on tables or in roasting pans or anywhere other than on top of a human bodies, and so I think it has chosen to interpret the sight in a more comforting manner. - Here we are at the rubber mask factory. Look at the nice men and woman working on the masks.
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science
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Mary Roach |
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5b5f5bf
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It's the reason we say "pork" and "beef" instead of "pig" and "cow." Dissection and surgical instruction, like meat-eating, require a carefully maintained set of illusions and denial."
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Mary Roach |
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3788cb5
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In the words of the late Francis Crick...You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. (13)
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Mary Roach |
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cb7b3b1
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He has a minor in explosives and the slightly bitter, misanthropic personality of someone who shouldn't.
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space-exploration
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Mary Roach |
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01b063d
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Here's the other thing I think about. It makes little sense to try to control what happens to your remains when you are no longer around to reap the joys or benefits of that control. People who make elaborate requests concerning disposition of their bodies are probably people who have trouble with the concept of not existing. [...] I imagine it is a symptom of the fear, the dread, of being gone, of the refusal to accept that you no longer c..
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funeral
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Mary Roach |
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9b6b969
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Heroism doesn't always happen in a burst of glory. Sometimes small triumphs and large hearts change the course of history. Sometimes a chicken can save a man's life.
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heroism
science
military
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Mary Roach |
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8b84db4
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People can't anticipate how much they'll miss the natural world until they are deprived of it. I have read about submarine crewmen who haunt the sonar room, listening to whale songs and colonies of snapping shrimp. Submarine captains dispense 'periscope liberty'- a chance to gaze at clouds and birds and coastlines and remind themselves that the natural world still exists. I once met a man who told me that after landing in Christchurch, New ..
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Mary Roach |
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b0dbe67
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Footnote: In 1998, a woman in Saline, Michigan received a patent for a Decorative Penile Wrap...The patent included three pages of drawings, including a penis wearing a ghost outfit, another in the robes of the Grim Reaper, and one dressed up to look like a snowman.
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sex
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Mary Roach |
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6b767ad
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There wasn't an anhydrous lacrimal gland in the house, writes the author in all seriousness describing a memorial service for a medical school's cadavers.
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Mary Roach |
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3f9caad
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Instead, I quietly excused myself and went to the bar, to commune with spirits I know how to relate to.
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Mary Roach |
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1d61efc
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People are messy, unpredictable things.
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Mary Roach |
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a4270f0
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the act of vomiting deserves your respect. It's an orchestral event of the gut.
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Mary Roach |
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aafe95b
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I challenge you to find a more innocuous sentence containing the words sperm, suction, swallow, and any homophone of seaman. And then call me up on the homophone and read it to me.
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science
humor
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Mary Roach |
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95337fb
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Meaning 'by way of the anus'. 'Per Annum', with two n's, means 'yearly'. The correct answer to the question, 'What is the birthrate per anum?' is zero (one hopes).
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humorous
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Mary Roach |
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19ac45c
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The suffix 'naut' comes from the Greek and Latin words for ships and sailing. suggests 'a sailor in space.' suggests 'a chimpanzee in sailor pants'.
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Mary Roach |
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b8e1b84
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Where do you find a stomach on a Thursday afternoon in Reno? "Chinatown?" suggests someone. "Costco?" "Butcher Boys." Tracy pulls his phone from a pocket. "Hello, I'm from the university" - the catchall preamble for unorthodox inquiries."
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stomach
university
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Mary Roach |
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2465e0e
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There, just beyond his open palm, was our mother's face. I wasn't expecting it. We hadn't requested a viewing, and the memorial service was closed-coffin. We got it anyway. They'd shampooed and waved her hair and made up her face. They'd done a great job, but I felt taken, as if we'd asked for the basic carwash and they'd gone ahead and detailed her. Hey, I wanted to say, we didn't order this. But of course I said nothing. Death makes us he..
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science
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Mary Roach |
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d6b29bc
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think of it.' said Robert Rosenbluth, a doctor whose acquaintance i made at the start of this book. 'no engineer could design something as multifunctional and fine tuned as an anus. to call someone an asshole is really bragging him up.
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science
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Mary Roach |
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f8068f1
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The early anatomists were dealing with a chronic shortage of bodies for dissection, and consequently were motivated to come up with ways to preserve the ones they managed to obtain. Blanchard's textbook was the first to cover arterial embalming. He describes opening up an artery, flushing the blood out with water, and pumping in alcohol. I've been to frat parties like that.
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Mary Roach |
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aed5341
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Upon the occasion of history's first manned flight - in the 1780's aboard the Montgolfier brothers' hot-air balloons - someone asked Franklin what use he saw in such frivolity. "What use," he replied, "is a newborn baby?"
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Mary Roach |
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edd4ce1
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Homo sapiens is one of the few species on earth that care if they're seen having sex. The impala is unconcerned. The dingo roundly flaunts it. A masturbating chimpanzee will stare straight at you. To any creature other than you and I and 6 billion other privacy-needing H. sapiens, sex is like peeling a mango or scratching your ear. It's just something you do sometimes.
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sex
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Mary Roach |
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30bd304
|
The slang for the rectum is "prison wallet"."
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science
prison
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Mary Roach |