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...
Before the shift house was pronounced hoose (it still is in Scotland), mode was pronounced mood, and home rhymed with gloom, which is why Domesday Book is pronounced and sometimes called Doomsday. (Th...
An American going into a London department store with a shopping list consisting of vest, knickers, suspenders, jumper, and pants would in each instance be given something dramatically different from...
A foreigner could be excused for thinking that to know set is to know English.
A few months earlier, when a state official named Bud Dwyer was similarly accused of corruption, he called a press conference, pulled out a gun and, as cameras rolled, blew his brains out. This led to...
Presumably, a confused person would be too addled to recognize that he was confused. Ergo, if you know that you are not confused then you are not confused. Unless, it suddenly occurred to me--and here...
There any evidence that Henry ever uttered the other famous remark attributed to him: I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death. Indeed, there is no evide...
The people who were most intensely interested in the world’s living things were the ones most likely to extinguish them. No-one
Stromatolites—a kind of living rock made by billions and billions of microscopic cyanobacteria. The tiny respirations of these organisms over millions of years largely created Earth’s oxygen-rich atmo...
Of all the disciplines in science, paleoanthropology boasts perhaps the largest share of egos,
Like physics before it, Woese wrote, has moved to a level where the objects of interest and their interactions often cannot be perceived through direct observation. In
If you wish to end up as a moderately advanced, thinking society, you need to be at the right end of a very long chain of outcomes involving reasonable periods of stability interspersed with just the...
And all children everywhere go through a phase in which they become oddly fascinated with the idea of gone and all gone.
Amoral, immoral. Amoral describes matters in which questions of morality do not arise or are disregarded; immoral applies to things that are evil.
Among them Pleistocene (most recent), Pliocene (more recent), Miocene (moderately recent) and the rather endearingly vague Oligocene (but a little recent).
Your bed alone, if it is averagely clean, averagely old, averagely dimensioned, and turned averagely often (which is to say almost never) is likely to be home to some two million tiny bed mites, too s...
You would be hard pressed, I would submit, to find a better pairing of occurrences to illustrate the divine and felonious nature of the human being—a species of organism that is capable of unravelling...
Where the weather is concerned, the Midwest has the worst of both worlds. In the winter the wind is razor sharp. It skims down from the Arctic and slices through you. It howls and swirls and buffets t...
When you feel the sun warm on your back on a summer’s day, it’s really excited atoms you feel. The higher you climb, the fewer molecules there are, and so the fewer collisions between them.
When they aren’t being incompetent, city officials like to relax with a little corruption.