Mispronouncing “buoy.” The thing that floats in a navigation channel is not a “boo-ee.” It’s a “boy.” Think about it. Would you call something that floats “boo-ee-ant”? Also, in a similar vein, pronouncing Brett Favre’s last name as if the “r” comes before the “v.” It doesn’t, so stop it. Hotel.
We need to understand why in a society so dependent on technology, a society that benefits so richly from the results of engineering, a society that rewards engineers so well, engineering isn’t perceived as a desirable profession.
All else in every direction was quiet, agreeable, timeless English countryside.
Buffon found himself threatened with excommunication for expressing it. A practical man, he apologized at once for his thoughtless heresy, then cheerfully repeated the assertions throughout his subsequent writings.
The best indicator of personal risk is whether you have fallen much before. Accident proneness is a slightly controversial area among stair-injury epidemiologists, but it does seem to be a reality. About four persons in ten injured in a stair fall have been injured in a stair fall before.
People want everything. That’s their problem.
Science is about making stuff, just as much as it is about understanding stuff.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s grandfather Warren Delano made much of the family’s fortune by trading opium, a fact that the Roosevelt family has never exactly crowed about.
Vesto Slipher, of the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, was the first person to notice that distant galaxies appeared to be moving away from us – evidence that the universe was not, as everyone had long assumed, static.
Nearly 90 per cent of the planet’s ice is in Antarctica and most of the rest is in Greenland.
My father once owned a McGregor Glen Plaid Visa-Versa Reversible Jacket and got real pleasure from showing people, including total strangers, how you could turn it inside out and have a second, bonus jacket. “That’s why it’s called Visa-Versa,” he would explain, as if revealing one of the secrets of the universe.
Lord Kelvin, who throughout his career produced revolutionary scientific theories and was arguably the first scientist to become wealthy by patenting his work. Despite his undoubted brilliance, he was chronically, and indeed dismally, unable to determine the age of the.
The most notable feature about anecdotes involving toilet practices is that they always – really, always – involve people from one country being appalled by the habits of those from another.
Astronomers today believe there are perhaps 140 billion galaxies in the visible universe.
They explained to me that this is simply an affliction of age. The older you get the more it seems the world belongs to other people.
The wonder of cells is not that things occasionally go wrong, but that they manage everything so smoothly for decades at a stretch.
All that is missing to connect her with Shakespeare is anything to connect her with Shakespeare.
Charles Darwin announced that the geological processes that created the Weald, an area of southern England stretching across Kent, Surrey and Sussex, had taken, by his calculations, 306, 662, 400 years to complete.
I mentioned my observation that the world seems to be filling up with imbeciles. They explained to me that this is simply an affliction of age.
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.