Spectators could, for an additional fee, sit on the stage—something not permitted at the Globe. With stage seating, audience members could show off their finery to maximum effect, and the practice was...
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...
Stephen Hawking has observed with a touch of understandable excitement, that one cannot predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely!
Suddenly we were in Hawaii—tropical mountains running down to sparkling seas, sweeping bays, flawless beaches guarded by listing palms, little green and rocky islands standing off the headlands. From...
Thanks to years of travel at other people’s expense, I have a lifetime supply of soaps, small bottles of shampoo, aromatic lotions, sewing kits, and shoe mitts. I have over eleven hundred shower caps...
That's the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it's gone, it's too late to get it back.
The Seaman’s Practice,
The U.S. Army in 1974 devised a food called funistrada as a test word during a survey of soldiers’ dietary preferences. Although no such food existed, funistrada ranked higher in the survey than lima...
The country accepted it not only willingly, but almost absent-mindedly.
The current best estimate for the Earth’s weight is 5.9725 billion trillion tonnes,
The dining table was a plain board called by that name. It was hung on the wall when not in use, and was perched on the diners' knees when food was served. Over time, the word board came to signify no...
The distance from the surface of Earth to the middle is 6,370 kilometres, which isn’t so very far. It has been calculated that if you sunk a well to the centre and dropped a brick down it, it would ta...
The exhibition for which it was conceived was the dream of a civil servant named Henry Cole, whose other principal claim to history’s attention is as the inventor of the Christmas card
The few surviving photographs of Childe certainly confirm that he was no beauty—he was skinny and chinless, with squinting eyes behind owlish spectacles, and a mustache that looked as if it might at a...
The great Caltech physicist Richard Feynman once observed that if you had to reduce scientific history to one important statement it would be: All things are made of atoms.
The greatest possible irony would be if in our endless quest to fill our lives with comfort and happiness we created a world that had neither. But that of course would be another book.
The most expensive of all was verdigris, which was made by hanging copper strips over a vat of horse dung and vinegar and then scraping off the oxidized copper that resulted. It is the same process th...
The movie was an enormous hit in 1927. With Wings, it confirmed Bow as Hollywood’s leading female star. She received forty thousand letters a week—more than the population of a fair-sized town. In the...
The one thing we have in common with all other living things is that for nearly four billion years our ancestors have managed to slip through a series of closing doors every time we needed them to. St...
The parking lot was almost empty, except for an old bus from which a load of senior citizens were disembarking. The bus was from the Calvary Baptist Church in someplace like Firecracker, Georgia, or B...
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