In Central America, the Maya also independently invented the wheel but couldn’t think of any practical applications for it and so reserved it exclusively for children’s toys.
The red shift gives the speed at which galaxies are retiring, but doesn’t tell us how far away they are to begin with.
What if we are all getting stupid at more or less the same rate and we don’t realize it because we are all declining together? You might argue that we’d see a general fall in IQ scores, but what if it’s not the kind of deterioration that shows up in IQ tests? What if it were reflected in just, say, poor judgment or diminished taste? We.
When we reflect upon the works of William Shakespeare it is of course an amazement to consider that one man could have produced such a sumptuous, wise, varied, thrilling, ever-delighting body of work, but that is of course the hallmark of genius. Only one man had the circumstances and gifts to give us such incomparable works, and William Shakespeare of Stratford was unquestionably that man – whoever he was.
It is the patchiness of the record that makes each new find look so sudden and distinct from all the others.
Carleton Coon of the University of Pennsylvania suggested that some modern races have different sources of origin, implying that some of us come from superior stock to others.
Thanks to years of travel at other people’s expense, I have a lifetime supply of soaps, small bottles of shampoo, aromatic lotions, sewing kits, and shoe mitts. I have over eleven hundred shower caps and require now only a reason to use them. I am so well prepared financially that I have money in a range.
Whatever was on your shopping list – linseed oil, two-inch masonry nails, coal scuttle, small can of Brasso metal polish – Mr. Morley had it. I am sure if you said to him, “I need 125 yards of razor wire, a ship’s anchor, and a dominatrix outfit in a size eight,” he would find them for you after rooting around for a few minutes among bird feeders and bags of bone meal. Mr.
Anyway, as should be obvious, his ability to write or not could have had absolutely no bearing on the capabilities of his children.
Bill Tilden was the greatest – and most improbably great – tennis player of the age.
There Kelvin proved himself such a prodigy that he was admitted to Glasgow University at the exceedingly tender age of ten.
WHEN I was brand new to Britain and everything was still a mystery to me, I went with an English friend to Brighton for the day, and there I saw my first seaside pier. The idea of constructing a runway to nowhere was one that would never have occurred to me.
There are many other tree museums in the world – including the fine United States National Arboretum in Washington, DC.
In 1649 the laws were tightened even further – to the extent that swearing at a parent became punishable by death.
Shakespeare’s mother, Mary Arden, provides us with a history that is rather more straightforward, if not tremendously vivid or enlightening.
Not until 1902, at an early meeting of the International Congress of Zoology, did naturalists begin at last to show a spirit of compromise and adopt a universal code. Taxonomy.
She was the mother of eight children: four daughters, of whom only one lived to adulthood, and four sons, all of whom reached their majority but only one of whom, Will, married.
Twice I flushed grouse, always a terrifying experience: an instantaneous explosion from the undergrowth at your feet, like balled socks fired from a gun, followed by drifting feathers and a lingering residue of fussy, bitching noise. I.
Finally, but perhaps above all, human nature is a factor in all this. Scientists have a natural tendency to interpret finds in the way that most flatters their stature.
In 1907, or so it has sometimes been written, Albert Einstein saw a workman fall off a roof and began to think about gravity. Alas, like many good stories this one appears to be apocryphal. According to Einstein himself, he was simply sitting in a chair when the problem of gravity occurred to him.