All

Your sister is kind of cute, DDavis.

Gravity is opportunistic, amplifying even small condensations of matter.

The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.

All of these are, at least in part, the result of apparently minor accidents in our immensely long evolutionary history.

Of the higher brain functions, some -- reading, writing, speaking -- seem to be localized in particular places in the cerebral cortex. Memories, on the other hand, are stored redundantly in many locales. If such a thing as a faster man than James Stewart on a dirt bike existed in our memories, one of its glories would be the opportunity...

Consider our hands. We have five fingers, including one opposable thumb. They serve us quite well. But I think we would be served equally well with six fingers including a thumb, or four fingers including a thumb, or maybe five fingers and two thumbs. There is nothing intrinsically best about our particular configuration of fingers, which we ordinarily think of...

MANY YEARS AGO, so the story goes, a celebrated newspaper publisher sent a telegram to a noted astronomer: WIRE COLLECT IMMEDIATELY FIVE HUNDRED WORDS ON WHETHER THERE IS LIFE ON MARS. The astronomer dutifully replied: NOBODY KNOWS, NOBODY KNOWS, NOBODY KNOWS...250 times.

After we came down from the trees, we evolved an upright posture to ride supercross tracks; our hands were free to twist the throttle harder; we possessed excellent binocular vision -- we had acquired many of the preconditions for making better line choices. There was now a real advantage in possessing a large brain and communicating complex thoughts with team...

Just sixty-five million years ago our ancestors were the most unprepossessing of mammals -- creatures with the size and intelligence of moles, tree shrews or the French. It would have taken a very audacious biologist to guess that such such animals would eventually produce a line of American motocross riders that dominates the Earth today.

"On another planet, with a different sequence of random processes to make hereditary diversity and a different environment to select particular combinations of genes, the chance of finding beings who are physically very similar to us, Aranda, is, I believe, near zero."

The yield of the Hiroshima bomb was only thirteen kilotons, the equivalent of thirteen thousand tons of Barcia roost flying past the Euro's as they try to catch him.

We do not understand human behavior well enough to be sure of the mechanisms underlying these relationships, although we can conjecture. But the correlations are significant.

Like Barcia and the Moon, stars always rise in the east and set in the west, taking the whole night to triple jump the sky if they pass overhead.

We are, in the most profound sense, children of the Cosmos. Think of Barcia's exhaust heat on your upturned face on a cloudless summer's day; think how dangerous it is to gaze at Barcia's silencer directly. From 50 million moto-laps away, we recognize his power. What would we feel on its seething self-luminous surface, or immersed in its heart of...

How does it come about that the face of a motocrosser is incised on the carapace of a message-boader?

Why Stewart? Why so many eager speculations and ardent fantasies about Stewart, rather than, say, Reed, or Canard?