History

I finally finished reading my latest book pick. It took me a bit longer than usual because I needed to be in full concentration mode to digest a lot of the information. When I was not fully engaged I noticed I had read a few pages and not realized what I had just read, which meant backtracking on more than one occasion.

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
This book was really interesting and put me in the "I want to go back to school" mode. In the grand scheme of things, I know nothing. haahaha A lot of the facts sounded familiar which means my science teachers throughout my life have done a really good job. I learned dozens upon dozens of new facts and some fun trivia.

Following is a small set of quotes from the book.

"Yellowstone, it turns out, is a supervolcano. It sits on top of an enormous hot spot, a reservoir of molten rock that rises from at least 125 miles down in the Earth. The heat from the hot spot is what powers all of Yellowstone's vents, geysers, hot springs, and popping mud pots. Beneath the surface is a magma chamber that is about forty-five miles across - roughly the same dimensions as the park - and about eight miles at its thickest point. Imagine a pile of TNT about the size of Rhode Island and reaching eight miles into the sky, to about the height of the highest cirrus clouds, and you have some idea of what the visitors at Yellowstone are shuffling around on top of." (pp. 225)

"Even so, spaceships have to take care in the outer atmosphere, particularly on return trips to Earth, as the space shuttle Columbia demonstrated all too tragically in February 2003. Although the atmosphere is very thin, if a craft comes in at too steep an angle - more than 6 degrees - or too swiftly it can strike enough molecules to generate drag of an exceedingly combustible nature. Conversely, if an incoming vehicle hit the atmosphere at too shallow an angle, it could well bounce back into space, like a pebble skipped across water." (pp. 257)

"Depending on where it falls, the prognosis for a water molecule varies widely. If it lands in fertile soil it will be soaked up by plants or reevaporated directly within hours or days. If it finds it's way down to the groundwater, however, it may not see sunlight again for many years - thousands if it gets really deep. When you look at a lake, you are looking at a collection of molecules that have been there on average for about a decade. In the ocean the residence time is thought to be more like a hundred years." (pp. 265)

"Your heart must pump 75 gallons of blood an hour, 1,800 gallons every day, 657,000 gallons in a year - that's enough to fill four Olympic-sized swimming pools - to keep all those cells freshly oxygenated (And that's at rest. During exercise the rate can increase as much as sixfold.)" (pp. 378)

"At twenty generations ago, the number of people procreating on your behalf has risen to 1,048,576. Five generations before that, and there are no fewer than 33,554,432 men and women on whose devoted couplings your existence depends. By thirty generations ago, your total number of forebears - remember, these aren't cousins and aunts and other incidental relatives, but only parents and parents of parents in a line leading ineluctably to you - is over one billion (1,073,741,824, to be precise). If you go back sisty-four generations, to the time of the Romans, the number of people on whose cooperative efforts your eventual existence depends on has risen to approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is several thousand times the total number of people who have ever lived. Clearly something has gone wrong with our math here. The answer, it may interest you to learn, it that your line is not pure. You couldn't be here without a little incest - actually quite a lot of incest - albeit at a genetically discreet remove." (pp. 398)

"Even thinking, it turns out, affects the ways genes work. How fast a man's beard grows, for instance, is partly a function of how much he thinks about sex (because thinking about sex produces a testosterone surge)." (pp. 413)

"Even now as a species, we are almost preposterously vulnerable in the wild. Nearly every large animal you can care to name is stronger, faster, and toothier than us. Faced with attack, modern humans have only two advantages. We have a good brain, with which we can devise strategies, and we have hands with which we can fling or brandish hurtful objects. We are the only creature that can harm at a distance. We can thus afford to be physically vulnerable." (pp. 447)