Pluto is about 40 AUs from us, the heart of the Oort cloud about fifty thousand. In a word, it is remote. But.
Mouritsen and Klavs Styrbaek in their fascinating study, Umami: Unlocking the Secrets of the Fifth Taste, “MSG is the food additive that has been subjected to the most thorough scrutiny of all time,” and no scientist has ever found any reason to condemn it, yet its reputation in the West as a source of headaches and low-grade malaise now appears to be undimmed and permanent.
The exhibition for which it was conceived was the dream of a civil servant named Henry Cole, whose other principal claim to history’s attention is as the inventor of the Christmas card.
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.
Part of the power of travel is that you stand a good chance of being hollowed out by it.
The British are surely the only people in the world who have made a culinary feature of boiled cartilage and phlegm.
Sadly, although the source of much enjoyment, Ginger the pig progressed from hunting and killing chickens to lambs and, after a stab at my mother’s ankles, was banished to the freezer before she developed a taste for small children.
To help us deal better with this fractional lag, the brain does a truly extraordinary thing: it continuously forecasts what the world will be like a fifth of a second from now, and that is what it gives us as the present. That means that we never see the world as it is at this very instant, but rather as it will be a fraction of a moment in the future. We spend our whole lives, in other words, living in a world that doesn’t quite exist yet.
Thirty-six years later the Dutchman Abel Tasman was sent to look for the fabled South Land and managed to sail 2,000 miles along the underside of Australia without detecting that a substantial land mass lay just over the left-hand horizon.
It is right to give Thomas Edison the credit for much of this, so long as we remember that his genius was not in creating electric light, but in creating methods of producing and supplying it on a grand commercial scale, which was actually a much larger and far more challenging ambition. It was also a vastly more lucrative one.
Trinil skullcap.
I mention all this to make the point that if you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn’t choose human beings for the job.
The 1920s was a great time for reading altogether – very possibly the peak decade for reading in American life.
Nether Hambleton and Middle Hambleton.
Now this little gal isn’t much of a singer,” she would say. “She learned singing by a correspondence course, and she missed a coupla lessons, but she’s the nicest little gal in the whole show, so I want ya to give her a big hand.
But then, I suppose, that is the thing about the internet. It is just an accumulation of digital information, with no brains and no feelings – just like an IT person, in fact.
She would only make me take my seat if I didn’t act calm and Swiss about it all.
Similarly, no one has ever come close to explaining why our fingers wrinkle when we have long baths. The explanation most often given is that wrinkling helps them to drain water better and improves grip. But that doesn’t really make a great deal of sense. Surely the people who most urgently need a good grip are those who have just fallen in water, not those who have been in it for some time.
Balchen happened to be at the wheel.” This was breathtakingly disingenuous. In fact, Balchen had been flying for hours and very probably saved all their lives with his skillful landing. The.
It is curious to reflect that we have computers that can effortlessly compute pi to 5,000 places and yet cannot be made to understand that there is a difference between time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana or that in the English-speaking world to make up a story, to make up one’s face, and to make up after a fight are all quite separate things.