Worse still, it isn’t actually necessary to look to space for petrifying danger. As we are about to see, Earth can provide plenty of danger of its own.
This was 1990 the year that communism died in Europe and it seemed strange to me that in all the words that were written about the fall of the iron curtain, nobody anywhere lamented that it was the en...
Second, you are alive. For the tiniest moment in the span of eternity you have the miraculous privilege to exist.
Portability also explains why many old chests and trunks had domed lids- to throw off water during travel. The great drawback of trunks, of course, is that everything has to be lifted at to get things...
Nowadays, and speaking very generally, geological time is divided first into four great chunks known as eras: Precambrian, Palaeozoic (from the Greek meaning old life), Mesozoic (middle life) and Ceno...
Marrying cousins was astoundingly common into the nineteenth century, and nowhere is this better illustrated than with the Darwins and their cousins the Wedgwoods (of pottery fame). Charles married hi...
Language is more fashion than science
I remember reading once how some Stone Age Indians from the Brazilian rain forest with no knowledge or expectation of a world beyond the jungle were taken to Sao Paulo or Rio, and when they saw what i...
I know this goes without saying, but Stonehenge really was the most incredible accomplishment. It took five hundred men just to pull each sarsen, plus a hundred more to dash around positioning the rol...
He had been born Thomas Pain, though upon arrival in America he whimsically changed the spelling to Paine, and he was about as unlikely a figure to change the course of history as you could imagine. A...
Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception.
By the 1920s if you wanted to work behind a lunch counter you needed to know that 'Noah's boy' was a slice of ham (since Ham was one of Noah’s sons) and that 'burn one' or 'grease spot' designated a h...
It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of...
Needless to say is a harmless enough expression, but it often draws attention to the fact that you really didn’t need to say it.
Affect, effect. As a verb, affect means to influence (‘Smoking may affect your health’) or to adopt a pose or manner (‘He affected ignorance’). Effect as a verb means to accomplish (‘The prisoners eff...
Advance planning. The advance in advance planning is always redundant. All planning must be done in advance.
We started this chapter with three points: life wants to be; life doesn’t always want to be much; life from time to time goes extinct. To this we may add a fourth: life goes on. And often, as we shall...
Tunney has all the makings of a hero – he was clean living, intelligent, polite, reasonably good-looking – but, like Lou Gehrig, he lacked the chemistry that stirred affection.
The Pacific is about a foot and a half higher along its western edge—a consequence of the centrifugal force created by the Earth’s spin. Just as when you pull on a tub of water the water tends to flow...
Taxonomy is described sometimes as a science and sometimes as an art, but really it’s a battleground.