Such assertions, I would submit, are not only an excessive distraction from the main issues, but dangerously counterproductive. They invite ridicule – and, as we have seen, there is no shortage of people who ache to provide it.
Forty-two percent of all that was produced in the world was produced in the United States.
Yellowstone’s eruptions averaged one massive blow every 600,000 years. The last one was 630,000 years ago. Yellowstone, it appears, is due.
That,” he said, “is where all your skin color is. That’s all that race is – a sliver of epidermis.
In Hollywood, a young cartoonist named Walt Disney was inspired to create an animated short feature called “Plane Crazy” featuring a mouse who was also a pilot. The mouse was initially called Mortimer but soon assumed a more lasting place in the nation’s hearts as Mickey.
As with so much else, you experience the world that your brain allows you to experience.
Visitors to eighteenth-century London often noted that the shops were open till ten at night, and clearly there would be no shops without shoppers.
The very brightest gas streetlamps provided less light than a modern 25-watt bulb.
All the gases of flatus can make a pretty explosive combination, as was tragically demonstrated in Nancy, France, in 1978 when surgeons stuck an electrically heated wire up the rectum of a sixty-nine-year-old man to cauterize a polyp and caused an explosion that literally tore the patient apart.
It is a degree of slenderness way beyond the capacity of our imaginations, but you can get some idea of the proportions if you bear in mind that one atom is to the width of a millimetre line as the thickness of a sheet of paper is to the height of the Empire State Building.
Atwater’s most unsettling discovery – to himself as much as to the world at large – was that alcohol was an especially rich source of calories, and thus an efficient fuel. As the son of a clergyman and a teetotaler himself, he was appalled to report it, but as a diligent scientist he felt his first duty was to the truth, however awkward. In consequence, he was swiftly disowned by his own, devoutly Methodist university and its already scornful president.
What makes Halsted’s achievements all the more remarkable is that for much of his career he was a drug addict. While investigating methods for providing pain.
A heart attack, as one doctor has put it, is “50 percent genetic and 50 percent cheeseburger.
Put another way, the amount of electricity going on within your cells is a thousand times greater than the electricity within your house. You are, in a very small way, exceedingly energetic.
It is often written that a kind of medieval footstool was called a tuffet – a presumption based entirely on the venerable line “Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet.” In fact, the only place the word appears in historic English is in the nursery rhyme itself. If tuffets ever actually existed, they are not otherwise recorded.
They had much in common. Both were spoiled, driven, self-centred, quarrelsome, jealous, mistrustful and ever unhappy.
On the other hand, it you are outdoors in cold weather and your head is the only part of you that is exposed, then it will play a disproportionate part in any heat loss, so listen to your mother when she tells you to put a hat on.
Shellac is a hard resinous secretion from the Indian lac beetle. Lac beetles emerge in swarms in parts of India at certain times of the year, and their secretions make varnish that is odorless, nontoxic, brilliantly shiny, and highly resistant to scratches and fading. It doesn’t attract dust while wet, and it dries in minutes. Even now, in an age of chemistry, shellac has scores of applications against which synthetic products cannot compete.
The second thing that can be said with regard to life expectancy is that it is not a good idea to be an American.
Farming was independently invented at least seven times – in China, the Middle East, New Guinea, the Andes, the Amazon basin, Mexico, and West Africa.