In the United States alone, more than eighty million people suffer from cardiovascular disease, and the cost to the nation of treating heart disease has been put as high as $300 billion a year.
Based on what we know now and can reasonably imagine, there is absolutely no prospect that any human being will ever visit the edge of our own solar system – ever.
In 1755, some seventy years after the last dodo’s death, the director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford decided that the institution’s stuffed dodo was becoming unpleasantly musty and ordered it tossed on a bonfire. This was a surprising decision as it was by this time the only dodo in existence, stuffed or otherwise. A passing employee, aghast, tried to rescue the bird but could save only its head and part of one limb.
To agree with Ingold is no to say that everything must be local first and last, nor to deny that there are environmental problems on a planetary scale. It is to say that they are not the planet’s problems. They are ours.
Shakespeare used 17,677 words in his writings, of which at least one-tenth had never been used before. Imagine if every tenth word you wrote were original. It is a staggering display of ingenuity. But.
There is a painting by Asher Brown Durand called “Kindred Spirits,” which is often reproduced in books when the subject turns to the American landscape in the nineteenth century.
It was one of those buildings that you don’t so much as look at as bathe in.
Indeed, it has been suggested that there isn’t a single bit of any of us – not so much as a stray molecule – that was part of us nine years ago.
This is a point known to geology as the KT boundary1 and it marks the time, 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs and roughly half the world’s other species of animals abruptly vanish from the fossil record.
That a word or phrase hasn’t been recorded tells us only that it hasn’t been recorded, not that it hasn’t existed. The.
In 1964, the largest earthquake ever recorded in North America rocked Alaska with 200,000 megatons of concentrated might, the equivalent of 2,000 nuclear bombs. Almost 3,000 miles away in Texas, water sloshed out of swimming pools. A street in Anchorage fell twenty feet. The quake devastated 24,000 square miles of wilderness, much of it glaciated. And what effect did all this might have on Alaska’s glaciers? None.
Back at the hotel, I showered, then sat on the edge of my bed watching TV, waiting for it to be time for a drink, and wondering how many tens of thousands of days have passed since BBC One last showed a program that anyone not on medication would want to watch.
It has sometimes been said that prudery reached such a height in the nineteenth century that people took to dressing their piano legs in little skirts lest they rouse anyone to untimely passion. Thomas.
In fact, if you are in a partnership now with someone from your own race and country, the chances are excellent that you are at some level related.
Looked at from above, west London isn’t so much a city as a forest with buildings.
So Whitney’s gin not only helped make many people rich on both sides of the Atlantic but also reinvigorated slavery, turned child labor into a necessity, and paved the way for the American Civil War. Perhaps at no other time in history has someone with a simple, well-meaning invention generated more general prosperity, personal disappointment, and inadvertent suffering than Eli Whitney with his gin.
Although the creation of a universe might be very unlikely, Tryon emphasized that no one had counted the failed attempts.” Martin.
His point, of course, is that it is easy to make any banal situation seem extraordinary if you treat it as fateful. So.
Queen Elizabeth, in a much-cited quote, faithfully bathed once a month “whether she needs it or no.
And to see a plant grow armed with the knowledge that it does so out of thin air – that is, after all, where the carbon that makes up most of its mass comes from – is to realise that something else must be restoring that nutritive goodness to the atmosphere.