There is the odd exception, like Albert Einstein, but as a breed, scientists tend not be very good at presenting themselves.

It was the kind of pure, undiffused light that can only come from a really hot blue sky, the kind that makes even a concrete highway painful to behold and turns every distant reflective surface into a little glint of flame. Do you know how sometimes on very fine days the sun will shine with a particular intensity that makes the most mundane objects in the landscape glow with an unusual radiance, so that buildings and structures you normally pass without a glance suddenly become arresting, even beautiful? Well, they seem to have that light in Australia nearly all the time.

The great failure in education, much of the time, is the lack of excitement and stimulus

South Dakota... is like the world's first drive-through sensory deprivation chamber.

There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.

99.99 percent of all species that have ever lived are no longer with us.

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 make you feel small & confused & vulnerable, like a small child lost in a crowd of strange legs. Stand in a desert or prairie & you know you are in a big space. Stand in the woods and you only sense it. They are vast, featureless nowhere. And they are alive.