With their radio telescopes they can capture wisps of radiation so preposterously faint that the total amount of energy collected from outside the solar system by all of them together since collecting...
Woods are not like other spaces. To begin with, they are cubic. Their trees surround you, loom over you, press in from all sides. Woods choke off views & leave you muddled & without bearings. They mak...
Work expands to fill the time available for its completion, still known as Parkinson’s Law.
Am not at all sure how we should tackle such a crisis, but on the basis of what we know so far, I would suggest, as a start, quarantining Texas. I
Assumed to be australopithecines because there are no other known candidates. I
Began to feel that queasy guilt that you can only know if you have lived among the English—a terrible suspicion that any pleasure involving more than a cup of milky tea and a chocolate digestive biscu...
Can take up to ten million years to clean an ocean—but if you are not in a hurry it is marvellously efficient. Perhaps
Contagious, infectious. Diseases spread by contact are contagious. Those spread by air and water are infectious. Used figuratively (‘contagious laughter’, ‘infectious enthusiasm’), either is all right...
He was the most gifted English scientist of his age, but also the strangest. He suffered, in the words of one of his few biographers, from shyness to a ‘degree bordering on disease’19. Any human conta...
Here is a new rule: If you are too stupid to spell disappointed even approximately correctly, you are not allowed to take part in public discourse at any level. Trawling
If you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn’t choose human beings for the job. But
Isotopes and a type of phosphate called apatite, which together provide strong evidence that the rock once contained colonies of living things.
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.
Loony hillbillies destabilized by gross quantities of impure corn liquor and generations of profoundly unbiblical sex;
Meat was any food (the sense is preserved in meat and drink and in the English food mincemeat, which contains various fruits but no meat in the sense that we now use it).
No small achievement when you consider the British climate, the fact that Blackpool is ugly, dirty and a long way from anywhere, that its sea is an open toilet, and its attractions nearly all cheap, p...
Obligatory
Other such
Past. Often a space-waster, as in this example: ‘She has been a teacher at the school for the past 20 years’ (Independent). In this sentence, and in countless others like it, ‘the past’ could be delet...
Person says to you, How do you do? he will be taken aback if you reply, with impeccable logic, How do I do what? The complexities of the English language are
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