A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much vitamin C as the average person today.
It is an extraordinary fact that having good and loving relationships physically alters your DNA.
Talking about a scenic route in southeast Iowa is like talking about a good Barry Manilow album. You have to make certain allowances. Compared with an afternoon in a darkened room, it wasn’t bad. But compared to say, the coast road along the Sorrentine peninsula, it was perhaps a little tame.
Where America really differs from other countries is in the colossal costs of its health care.
The inescapable conclusion is that higher spending in America doesn’t necessarily result in better medicine, just higher costs.
Nowadays they don’t show test patterns at all on American TV, which is a shame because given a choice between test patterns and TV evangelists, I would unhesitatingly choose the test patterns. They were soothing in an odd way and, of course, they didn’t ask you for money or make you listen to their son-in-law sing.
Suicide by lifestyle takes ages.
The difference between herbs and spices is that herbs come from the leafy part of plants and spices from the wood, seed, fruit, or other nonleafy part.
Nowadays many people breed peppers specifically to make them as hot as possible. The record holder at the time of writing is the Carolina Reaper at 2.2 million Scovilles. Capsaicin in pure form has 16 million Scovilles. A purified version of a Moroccan spurge plant – a cousin of the innocuous common garden flowering euphorbia – has been measured at 16 billion Scovilles.
The urge to switch from subjunctive to indicative is, to paraphrase Alastair Fowler, always a powerful one.
This was a matter of real concern for bakers because every loaf of bread loses weight in baking through evaporation, so it is easy to blunder accidentally. For that reason, bakers sometimes provided a little extra – the famous baker’s dozen.
I now know that there is a happy abundance of science writers who pen the most lucid and thrilling prose – Timothy Ferris, Richard Fortey, and Tim Flannery.
The fact is, we are still very much in an ice age; it’s just a somewhat shrunken one – though less shrunken than many people realize. At the height of the last period of glaciation, around twenty thousand years ago, about 30 percent of the Earth’s land surface was under ice.
In essence what relativity says is that space and time are not absolute, but relative to both the observer and to the thing being observed, and the faster one moves the more pronounced these effects become.
Behaviorally modern human beings – that is, people who can speak and make art and organize complex activities – have existed for only about 0.0001 percent of Earth’s history.
We are very lucky, it appears, to get any good weather at all. Even less well understood are the cycles of comparative balminess within ice ages, known as interglacials. It is mildly unnerving to reflect that the whole of meaningful human history – the development of farming, the creation of towns, the rise of mathematics and writing and science and all the rest – has taken place within an atypical patch of fair weather.
For all their devoted attention, your atoms don’t actually care about you – indeed, don’t even know that you are there.
Whole continents sagged under the weight of so much ice and even now, twelve thousand years after the glaciers’ withdrawal, are still rising back into place.
It shows that for most of its recent history Earth has been nothing like the stable and tranquil place that civilization has known, but rather has lurched violently between periods of warmth and brutal chill.
Without the Moon’s steadying influence, the Earth would wobble like a dying top, with goodness knows what consequences for climate and weather. The Moon’s steady gravitational influence keeps the Earth spinning at the right speed and angle to provide the sort of stability necessary for the long and successful development of life.