I ordered a coffee and a little something to eat and savored the warmth and dryness. Somewhere in the background Nat King Cole sang a perky tune. I watched the rain beat down on the road outside and told myself that one day this would be twenty years ago.
You have three chromosomes, Bryson. X, Y, and Fuckhead.” – Katz.
Nothing – really, absolutely nothing – says more about Victorian Britain and its capacity for brilliance than that the century’s most daring and iconic building was entrusted to a gardener.
I hung up again and looked at Katz. “What is it with this town? I’ve blown more intelligent life into a handkerchief.
If a product or enterprise doesn’t constantly reinvent itself, it is superseded, cast aside, abandoned without sentiment in favor of something bigger, newer, and, alas, nearly always uglier.
It may not look it, but all the glass on Earth is flowing downwards under the relentless drag of gravity. Remove a pane of really old glass from the window of a European cathedral and it will be noticeably thicker at the bottom than at the top.
People in New York go to Calcutta to get some relief from begging.
In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one’s face.
If there’s one thing the AT teaches, it is low-level ecstasy – something we could all do with more of in our lives.
Brain cells last as long as you do. You are issued with a hundred billion or so at birth and that is all you are ever going to get. It has been estimated that you lose five hundred of them an hour, so if you have any serious thinking to do there really isn’t a moment to waste.
Rat bites are almost certainly under reported because only the most serious cases attract attention, but even using the most conservative figures, at least fourteen thousand people in the United States are attacked by rats each year.
Experimentation without mathematical explanation is blind; mathematical explanation without experimentation is empty.
At all events, thanks to the work of Clair Patterson, by 1953 the Earth at last had an age everyone could agree on.
On another occasion, he stared at the Sun for as long as he could bear, to determine what effect it would have upon his vision.
And as you are about to see, it not only produces the best science, but also some of the very best science writing.
The core of a neutron star is so dense that a single spoonful of matter from it would weigh more than 500 billion kilograms.
Lobsters bred in such abundance around Britain’s coastline that they were fed to prisoners and orphans or ground up for fertilizer; servants sought written agreements from their employers that they would not be served lobster more than twice a week.
That’s the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it’s gone, it’s too late to get it back.
Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding.