Stairs incorporate three pieces of geometry: rise, going, and pitch. The rise is the height between steps, the going is the step itself (technically, the distance between the leading edges, or nosings...
Speakers from the Mediterranean region, for instance, like to put their faces very close, relatively speaking, to those they are addressing. A common scene when people from southern Europe and norther...
Space, let me repeat, is enormous. The average distance between stars out there is 20 million million miles. Even at speeds approaching those of light, these are fantastically challenging distances fo...
Somewhere in all this, it was thought, there also resided a mysterious élan vital, the force that brought inanimate objects to life. No-one knew where this ethereal essence lay, but two things seemed...
Sometimes these differences in meaning take on a kind of bewildering circularity. A tramp in Britain is a bum in America, while a bum in Britain is a fanny in America, while a fanny in Britain is—well...
Seven
Salamanders are interesting, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
Sadly, although the source of much enjoyment, Ginger the pig progressed from hunting and killing chickens to lambs and, after a stab at my mother’s ankles, was banished to the freezer before she devel...
Rome was as wonderful as I had hoped it would be, certainly a step up from Peoria.
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 State...
Put in the crudest terms, Australia was slightly more important to us in 1997 than bananas, but not nearly as important as ice cream.
Proteins can't exist without DNA, and DNA has no purpose without proteins. Are we to assume then that they arose simultaneously with the purpose of supporting each other? If so: wow.
Perhaps nothing speaks more eloquently of the variability of spelling in the age than the fact that a dictionary published in 1604, A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Words, spelled words two ways on the t...
Perhaps it would be an idea to require developers to live on their own estates for five years, as a demonstration of their superb liveability. It’s just a thought. I
People want everything. That’s their problem.
People are so addicted to convenience that they have become trapped in a vicious circle: The more labor-saving appliances they acquire, the harder they need to work; the harder theywork, the more labo...
Peale was a lover of birds, and yet did not hesitate to kill them in large numbers for no better reason than that it interested him to do so.
Partly for this reason Sir Thomas Gresham had recently built the Royal Exchange, the most fabulous commercial building of its day. (Gresham is traditionally associated with Gresham’s law—that bad mone...
Out of all the incursions, the only permanent one so far is the present one, and that dates from just twelve thousand years ago, which means that Britain is actually one of the more recent places in t...
Only twenty-six British universities have total endowments greater than the amount given annually to the Ohio State University football team. I