#billbryson — Public Fediverse posts

I made this! Turn Right At The Rainbow is now available

It’s been nearly five years since I published a book. About time I published another. I am thrilled to announce the launch of Turn Right At The Rainbow: A Diary of Househunting, Happenstance & Home. What’s it like? Here are a few reviews to help you decide. (Back soon with a post on writing and… Continue reading I made this! Turn Right At The Rainbow is now available…
https://nailyournovel.wordpress.com/2026/03/05/i-made-this-turn-right-at-the-rainbow-is-now-available/

#Howtowriteabook #bestmemoirs #BillBryson #booksabouthome #booksabouthousehunting

Historical Connections: Antoni van Leeuwenhoek & Jan Vermeer

From Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything":

The first person to describe a cell was Robert Hooke, whom we last encountered squabbling with Isaac Newton over credit for the invention of the inverse square law. Hooke achieved many things in his sixty-eight years — he was both an accomplished theoretician and a dab hand at making ingenious and useful instruments — but nothing he did brought him greater admiration than his popular book Microphagia: or Some Physiological Descriptions of Miniature Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses, produced in 1665. It revealed to an enchanted public a universe of the very small that was far more diverse, crowded, and finely structured than anyone had ever come close to imagining.

Among the microscopic features first identified by Hooke were little chambers in plants that he called cells because they reminded him of monks' cells. Hooke calculated that a one-inch square of cork would contain 1,259,712,000 of these tiny chambers, the first appearance of such a very large number anywhere in science. Microscopes by this time had been around for a generation or so, but what set Hooke's apart were their technical supremacy. They achieved magnifications of thirty times, making them the last word in seventeenth-century optical technology.
So it came as something of a shock when just a decade later Hooke and the other members of London's Royal Society began to receive drawings and reports from an unlettered linen draper in Holland employing magnifications of up to 275 times. The draper's name was Antoni van Leeuwenhoek. Though he had little formal education and no background in science, he was a perceptive and dedicated observer and a technical genius.
To this day it is not known how he got such magnificent magnifications from simple handheld devices, which were little more than modest wooden dowels with a tiny bubble of glass embedded in them, far more like magnifying glasses than what most of us think of as microscopes, but really not much like either. Leeuwenhoek made a new instrument for every experiment he performed and was extremely secretive about his techniques, though he did sometimes offer tips to the British on how they might improve their resolutions.[40]

[40] Leeuwenhoek was close friends with another Delft notable, the artist Jan Vermeer. In the mid-1660s, Vermeer, who previously had been a competent but not outstanding artist, suddenly developed the mastery of light and perspective for which he has been celebrated ever since. Though it has never been proved, it has long been suspected that he used a camera obscura, a device for projecting images onto a flat surface through a lens. No such device was listed among Vermeer’s personal effects after his death, but it happens that the executor of Vermeer’s estate was none other than Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, the most secretive lens-maker of his day.

@unamccormack

Here are some of mine:

#tolkien
#patrickrothfuss
#terrypratchett
#isaacasimov
#georgeorwell
#stephendonaldson
#williamgibson
#guygavrielkay
#margaretatwood
#billbryson
#nealstephenson

the Bible – God’s guide for life #1 Introduction

INTRODUCTION

The American Bill Bryson wrote a book about his experiences in Britain called Notes from a Small Island. In it he describes an the English approach to travel:

Welcome to Shepton Mallet sign (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If you mention in a pub that you intend to drive from, say, Surrey to Cornwall… your companions will puff their cheeks, look knowingly at each other, and blow out air as if to say, ‘Well, now that’s a bit of a tall order,’ and then they’ll launch into a lively and protracted discussion of whether it’s better to take the A30 to Stockbridge and then the A303 to Illchester or the A361 to Glastonbury via Shepton Mallet. Within minutes the conversation will plunge off into a level of detail that leaves you as a foreigner, swivelling your head in quiet wonderment.

‘You know that lay-by outside Warminster, the one with the grit box with the broken handle?’ one of them will say. You know, just past the turnoff for Little Puking but before the B6029 mini-roundabout. By the dead sycamore.’

At this point, you find you are the only person in the group not nodding vigorously.

This sounds rather like life to me – lots of people telling you the way to go but your head swivels and you find you are “not nodding vigorously”. The difference is that the people in Bryson’s ‘local’ actually knew the way, the route was clear in their minds. And, of course, life is not like that. I see the equivalent of cars driving around in circles, ending up in cul-de-sacs and going the wrong way up a one-way street all the time. Why?

Let’s go somewhere far bigger than Britain to think about this. One of the The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams says at the beginning

“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.”

The next page reads:

“There is another theory which states that this has already happened”

In other words you can’t make sense of things because it’s all a meaningless jumble anyway. Humanly speaking, it seems everything is confusion. But it need not be. Instead of a guide to the galaxy we need a guide to life. And there is one, one that is increasingly being ignored but has proved to be a sure handbook for tens thousands, if not millions, of people for centuries.

A good guide will not only tell you the way to your destination, but give advice, point out useful things along the way, tell you how to avoid problems and also tell you what to do if you get into trouble. The guide we will be looking at in this seminar series is all this and more. Above all a guide must be reliable. How do we know this ’Guide to Life’ is reliable? Because it is the handbook written by the giver of life. The Bible is the Maker’s Handbook.

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You may find more about the Guide for life

1. What Are You Seeking?
2. Lovers of God, seekers and lovers of truth
3. To create a great journey
4. Bible a guide – Bijbel als gids

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Related articles

• The answer to life, the universe and everything, including gun violence and world peace, is (once again) 42 (chrisblattman.com)
• Our Favorite Books of 2015 (ecommercefuel.com)
• Gifts for Travellers and a Giveaway (thetravelbunny.com)
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Wirral Council (johnbrace.com)
• Christmas books 2015: the best for the armchair traveller (telegraph.co.uk)

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#Bible #BillBryson #DouglasAdams #GiverOfLife #GreatBritain #Guide #GuideGod #GuideToLife #MakerSHandbook #MakingSenseOfThings #Route #Universe