According to one survey, half of people under the age of thirty said they would sacrifice their sense of smell rather than part with a favored electronic device.
Happiness is a good bank account, a good cook and a good digestion. – jean-jacques rousseau.
As late as the 1930s, almost half of London streets were still lit by gas.
The stomach holds about one and a half quarts, which is not very much compared with other animals. The stomach of a big dog will hold up to twice as much food as yours does.
The result is a language that is wonderfully fluid and accommodating, but also complex, undirected and often puzzling – in a word, troublesome.
Even now the only certain way to tell if a brain is working is if its owner says it is.
The reason for this is that the rules of English grammar were originally modeled on those of Latin, which in the seventeenth century was considered the purest and most admirable of tongues. That it may be. But it is also quite clearly another language altogether. Imposing Latin rules on English structure is a little like trying to play baseball in ice skates.
English also has a commendable tendency toward conciseness, in contrast to many languages.
Almost no one ever notices it, but our thumbs are on sideways. The thumbnail faces away from the rest of the fingers.
Too often for such people the notion of good English has less to do with expressing ideas clearly than with making words conform to some arbitrary pattern.
Just passing through a door, being inside, surrounded by walls and a ceiling, was novel.
Remarkably, Darwin hadn’t finished with barnacles yet. Three years later he produced a 684-page study of sessile cirripedes and a more modest companion work on the barnacle fossils not mentioned in the first work. “I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before,” he declared upon the conclusion of the work, and it is hard not to sympathize.
Exercise regularly. Eat sensibly. Die anyway.
A breakfast recorded by the Duke of Wellington consisted of ‘two pigeons and three beefsteaks, three parts of a bottle of Mozelle, a glass of champagne, two glasses of port and a glass of brandy’ – and this was when he was feeling a little under the weather.
I was weary of the trail, but still strangely in its thrall; found the endless slog tedious but irresistible; grew tired of the boundless woods but admired their boundlessness; enjoyed the escape from civilization and ached for its comforts. I wanted to quit and to do this forever, sleep in a bed and in a tent, see what was over the next hill and never see a hill again. All of this all at once, every moment, on the trail or off. “I don’t know,” I said. “Yes and no, I guess. What about you?” He.
Atul Gawande has written, “is getting clinicians like me to do the one thing that consistently halts the spread of infections: wash our hands.
As late as 1921, twenty-seven people perished in a stove fire on a train near Philadelphia.
Jules Feiffer once drew a strip cartoon in which the down-at-heel character observed that first he was called poor, then needy, then deprived, then underprivileged, and then disadvantaged, and concluded that although he still didn’t have a dime he sure had acquired a fine vocabulary.
Even with the advantage of clothing, shelter, and boundless ingenuity, humans can manage to live on only about 12 percent of Earth’s land area and just 4 percent of the total surface area if you include the seas. It is a sobering thought that 96 percent of our planet is off-limits to us.
Today the National Park Service employs a more casual approach to endangering wildlife: neglect. It spends almost nothing – less than 3 percent of its budget – on research of any type, which is why no one knows how many mussels are extinct or even why they are going extinct.