Phones were originally seen as providing services – weather reports, stock market news, fire alarms, musical entertainment, even lullabies to soothe restless babies. Nobody saw them as being used primarily for gossip, social intercourse, or keeping in touch with friends and family. The idea that you would chat by phone to someone you saw regularly anyway would have struck most people as absurd.
Oh, you can trust the studies well enough, generally speaking. What you can’t trust are the sweeping conclusions that people often attach to them.
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.
Food was similarly regulated, with restrictions placed on how many courses one might eat, depending on status.
The brain takes a long time to form completely. A teenager’s brain is only about 80 percent finished.
The AT is no longer the longest hiking trail – the Pacific Crest and Continental Divide trails, both out West, are slightly longer – but it will always be the first and greatest. It has a lot of friends. It deserves them.
A study in Switzerland in 2008 found that flu virus can survive on paper money for two and a half weeks if it is accompanied by a microdot of snot.
Goodness knows what the world is coming to when park rangers carry service revolvers.
But astronomy is, quite genuinely, far simpler than the human sciences.
Electric jugs for all.
There are two problems with notions of panspermia, as extraterrestrial theories are known.
In 1586 Elizabeth ordered that Anthony Babington, a wealthy young Catholic who had plotted her assassination, should be made an example of. Babington was hauled down from the scaffold while still conscious and made to watch as his abdomen was sliced open and the contents allowed to spill out. It was by this time an act of such horrifying cruelty that it disgusted even the bloodthirsty crowd.
Sir Thomas More came up with absurdity, acceptance, exact, explain, and exaggerate.
It turned out that under the western United States there was a huge cauldron of magma, a colossal volcanic hot spot, which erupted cataclysmically every 600,000 years or so. The last such eruption was just over 600,000 years ago. The hot spot is still there. These days we call it Yellowstone National Park. We.
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.
I sat there for some time, a young man with more on his mind than in it.
There is actually a certain value in not finding anything,” he said. “It helps cosmologists to work out the rate at which galaxies are evolving.
Clearly there was a need for some inspired and clever experimentation, and happily the age produced a young person with the diligence and aptitude to undertake it.
Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasn’t easy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize.
Buffon’s observations found surprisingly eager support among other writers, especially those whose conclusions were not complicated by actual familiarity with the country.