I was listening to The Salmon of Doubt, the posthumously published book with material collected from the computer used by Douglas Adams. Douglas Adams: what a brilliant, witty and fabulously engaging man!
His sharp and hilarious analysis of the phrase "it turns out" is a great Adamsian moment:
"..am I alone in finding the expression 'it turns out' to be incredibly useful? It allows you to make swift, succinct, and authoritative connections between otherwise randomly unconnected statements without the trouble of explaining what your source or authority actually is. It's great. It's hugely better than its predecessors 'I read somewhere that...' or the craven 'they say that...' because it suggests not only that whatever flimsy bit of urban mythology you are passing on is actually based on brand new, ground breaking research, but that it's research in which you yourself were intimately involved. But again, with no actual authority anywhere in sight."
- Log in to post comments
More like this
When I was a child, I picked up a book called Last Chance to See. You've probably heard of the author - he's world renowned for his humorous science fiction which has secured his place in the hearts of geeks everywhere. But this book wasn't about travelling the universe with a trusted towel; it…
Let's start with CheMystery.
This is a fun graphic novel mystery book by C.A. Preece and Josh Reynolds. Two cousins experience an incident that would make a physicist cry, but that works in a chemistry book because they now have the ability to observe and change matter. So this is a superhero…
Casey Luskin is once again hard at work in the Discovery Institute quote mines. In his latest effort, he tries to make the case that a recent review article by Kevin Padian and the Panda's Thumb's own Nick Matzke contains "veiled threats" designed to intimidate cdesign proponentsists. Casey dives…
It's Towel Day. I've got mine right here next to the computer. Incredibly useful things, towels.
Just in case you are unaware of the importance of your towel, take it away, Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an…