The nineteenth century was already a chilly time. For two hundred years Europe and North America in particular had experienced a Little Ice Age, as it has become known, which permitted all kinds of wintry events – frost fairs on the Thames, ice-skating races along Dutch canals – that are mostly impossible now.
They maintain their own DNA. They reproduce at a different time from their host cell. They look like bacteria, divide like bacteria, and sometimes respond to antibiotics in the way bacteria do.
It is a truly astounding fact that for the longest time the people who were most intensely interested in the world’s living things were the ones most likely to extinguish them.
It was like being in the midst of an ugly-building competition. For the better part of a decade architects had been arriving in the area and saying, “You think that’s bad? Wait’ll you see what I can do!
Such actions underline the one almost inevitable shortcoming of national academies. However progressive and far-seeing they may be to begin with, they almost always exert over time a depressive effect on change. So.
One-third of the landscape of the lower forty-eight states is covered in trees – 728 million acres in all. Maine alone has 10 million uninhabited acres. That’s 15,600 square miles, an area considerably bigger than Belgium, without a single permanent resident. Altogether, just 2 percent of the United States is classified as built up.
Almost certainly the most memorable finding of recent years with respect to microbes was when an enterprising middle school student in Florida compared the quality of water in the toilets at her local fast-food restaurants with the quality of the ice in the soft drinks, and found that in 70 percent of outlets she surveyed the toilet water was cleaner than the ice.
Gatlinburg is a shock to the system from whichever angle you survey it, but never more so than when you descend upon it from a spell of moist, grubby isolation in the woods. It sits just outside the main entrance to Great Smoky Mountains National Park and specializes in providing all those things that the park does not – principally, slurpy food, motels, gift shops, and sidewalks on which to waddle and dawdle – nearly all of it strewn along a single, astoundingly ugly main street.
Just sitting quietly, doing nothing at all, your brain churns through more information in thirty seconds than the Hubble Space Telescope has processed in thirty years.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect is essentially being too stupid to appreciate how stupid you are. That sounds like a pretty good description of the world to me. So.
If everybody else in the world became the size of Americans, it would be equivalent to adding one billion people to the world’s population.
If you are going to have a system of hereditary privilege, then surely you have to take what comes your way no matter how ponderous the poor fellow may be or how curious his taste in mistresses.
Blenheim Palace, home of the Dukes of Marlborough, whose achievements over the last eleven generations could be inscribed with a Sharpie on the side of a peanut.
So the history of household life isn’t just a history of beds and sofas and kitchen stoves, as I had vaguely supposed it would be, but of scurvy and guano and the Eiffel Tower and bedbugs and body-snatching and just about everything else that has ever happened. Houses aren’t refuges from history. They are where history ends up.
No country has given the world more incomparable literature per head of population than Ireland, and for that reason alone we might be excused a small, selfish celebration that English was the language of her greatest writers.
It is a strange, nonintuitive fact of existence that photons of light have no color, sound waves no sound, olfactory molecules no odors.
I am a little dubious about this myself because I think that if you give anyone anywhere an extra twenty minutes, they will just have a cup of coffee. It’s what you and I would do. It’s what anyone does with twenty minutes.
It contains a giant scale model of a proposed civic quarter in a style that might be called Canberra Meets Nazi Nuremberg.
With his Gallic charm and chestful of medals, Nungesser proved irresistible to women and in the spring of 1923 after a whirlwind romance, he became engaged to a young New York socialite with the unimprovably glorious name of Consuelo Hatmaker.
And what a joy it is to walk in it. England and Wales have 130,000 miles of public footpaths, about 2.2 miles of path for every square mile of area.