Hydrogen is a light, odorless gas which, given enough time, changes into people.
The central dogma of molecular biology deals with the detailed residue-by-residue transfer of sequential information. It states that information cannot be transferred back from protein to either protein or nucleic acid.
It may sound ridiculous to say that [Alexander Graham] Bell and his successors were the fathers of modern commercial architecture–of the skyscraper. But wait a minute. Take the Singer Building, the Flatiron Building, the Broad Exchange, the Trinity, or any of the giant office buildings. How many messages do you suppose go in and out of those buildings every day? Suppose there was no telephone and every message had to be carried by a personal messenger? How much room do you think the necessary elevators would leave for offices? Such structures would be an economic impossibility.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Comprising the series of short stories that made the fortunes of the Strand, the magazine in which they were first published, this volume won even more popularity for Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Holmes is at the height of his powers in many of his most famous cases, including The Red-Headed League, The Speckled Band, and The Blue Carbuncle.
Read between January 02 – May 09, 2011
You may remember the old Persian saying, ‘There is danger for him who taketh the tiger cub, and danger also for whoso snatches a delusion from a woman.’ There is as much sense in Hafiz as in Horace, and as much knowledge of the world.
Singularity is almost invariably a clue. The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to bring it home.
Well, moonshine is a brighter thing than fog, …
…as I said then, that a man should keep his little brain-attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.
“My God! It’s Watson,” said he. He was in a pitiable state of reaction, with every nerve in a twitter.
41% Note: An interesting early use of @Twitter…
I should be very much obliged if you would slip your revolver into your pocket. An Eley’s No. 2 is an excellent argument with gentlemen who can twist steel pokers into knots. That and a tooth-brush are, I think, all that we need.
magnifying lens.
87% First reference to Holmes with a magnifying lens in print that I’ve seen.Like
DICTIONARY, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic.
What we call the past is built on bits.
This must certainly be the quote of the week from English author Alan Bennett’s play Forty Years On:
Foster: I’m still a bit hazy about the Trinity, sir.
Schoolmaster: Three in one, one in three, perfectly straightforward. Any doubts about that see your maths master.
Incidentally, I note that ‘HARASS SARAH’ is a PALINdrome, as well as a popular left-wing sport.
The chessboard is the world; the pieces are the phenomena of the universe; the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.
…[the reader] should not be discouraged, if on first reading of section 0, he finds that he does not have the prerequisites for reading the prerequisites.
This is essentially the mathematician’s equivalent of the adage “Fake it ’til you make it.”
A well-trained man knows how to answer questions; an educated man knows what questions are worth asking.
Even by the standards of continuum functional integrals we have hit a new low…
He really has a great sense of humor, doesn’t he?
After the lecture I had the chance to meet him and chat, but the best part was the look on his face when I presented him my copy of Green Eggs and Ham for an autograph. He kindly obliged with the observation that he knew that “this” was coming eventually, but said that I was the first one to ask for a signature on this particular book.
He got his second opportunity just moments later when my freshman year roommate Gary showed up with his own copy. Who knew that we thought so much alike?
Saturday Night Live
