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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 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 | ||
| 5755d2d | Better be wise by the misfortunes of others than by your own. | Aesop | ||
| e3eed27 | For one, there are so many things on the table, most of which are tricky to identify, especially when you've nobody to consult with. I'm pretty sure some of the gear from the bathroom - the little pots of cream and lotion - are put out with the breakfast things, to give the impression of abundance and luxury, a dozen things to spread on your toast. Another thing is that the other guests are always so fascinated by you. They're so bored of e.. | Ben Aitken | ||
| 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 | ||
| bce9781 | 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. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 5828680 | In 1649 the laws were tightened even further--to the extent that swearing at a parent became punishable by death. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 5e0c3db | 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." | Bill Bryson | ||
| f2cfee2 | 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. | Bill Bryson | ||
| b2cd061 | 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). | Bill Bryson | ||
| 3145918 | 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. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 4a1381f | 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. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 68aa058 | 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. | Bill Bryson | ||
| fb693d7 | 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" | Bill Bryson | ||
| e47f66f | 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." | Bill Bryson | ||
| 1662efb | 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. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 05e6abb | 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'. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 8317618 | 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 | Bill Bryson | ||
| 55b7c4b | But astronomy is, quite genuinely, far simpler than the human sciences. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 0f7c29d | I sat there for some time, a young man with more on his mind than in it. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 7145b98 | 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." | Bill Bryson | ||
| cd648e9 | Channels I Watch Often Darwin on the Trail (One of my two favorites) Flat Broke Outside Homemade Wanderlust (The other of my two favorites) Technomadia.com Books Read and Reread The Backpacker's Field Manual, Rick Curtis Step By Step: An Introduction to Walking the Appalachian Trail, Appalachian Trail Conservancy The Best About Backpacking, A Sierra Club Totebook, Edited by Densise Van Lear The Modern Backpackers Handbook, Glenn Randall Lip.. | Tory White | ||
| e3fdeb3 | 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.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 20a8ae6 | 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.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 6adcf7a | 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. | Bill Bryson |