Columbus never found Antilla or anything else he was looking for. His epochal voyage of 1492 was almost the last thing—indeed almost the only thing—that went right in his life. Within eight years, he...
The people are immensely likable— cheerful, extrovert, quick-witted, and unfailingly obliging. Their cities are safe and clean and nearly always built on water. They have a society that is prosperous,...
Looked at from above, west London isn’t so much a city as a forest with buildings.
The 1920s was a great time for reading altogether—very possibly the peak decade for reading in American life. Soon it would be overtaken by the passive distractions of radio, but for the moment readin...
I didn’t ask for twenty quarter-pound cheeseburgers, I asked for four quarter-pound cheeseburgers five times. Same thing, he said. It’s not the same thing at all. You can’t be this stupid. Two
She had, I realized, Retail Tourette’s Syndrome, a compulsion to blurt advice. There was nothing she could do about it.
If all the ice sheets melted, sea levels would rise by 60 metres.
It was always Christmas at my grandparents’ house, or Thanksgiving, or the Fourth of July, or somebody’s birthday. There was always happiness there.
The average asteroid actually will be about one and a half million kilometres from its nearest neighbour.
The 1920s was a great time for reading altogether—very possibly the peak decade for reading in American life.
I'm quite certain that if the rest of the world vanished overnight and the development of cricket were left in Australian hands, within a generation, the players would be wearing shorts and using the...
Experimentation without mathematical explanation is blind; mathematical explanation without experimentation is empty.
The next time you spray on Chanel No. 5 (assuming you do), you may wish to reflect that you are dousing yourself in distillate of unseen sea monster.
Wallace’s theory was, by Wallace’s own admission, the result of a flash of insight; Darwin’s was the product of years of careful, plodding, methodical thought. It was all crushingly unfair.
It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.
When Daniel Boone is uneasy, you know it’s time to watch your step.
So woods are spooky. Quite apart from the thought that they may harbor wild beasts and armed, genetically challenged fellows named Zeke and Festus, there is something innately sinister about them, som...
Velleity, which describes a mild desire, a wish or urge too slight to lead to action.
Just reaching the centre of our own galaxy would take far longer than we have existed as beings.
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which states that the electron is a particle but a particle that can be described in terms of waves.
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