I'm a Stranger Here Myself by Bill Bryson Read Free Book Online

you have a long version of the SLC6A4 gene, you are very probably easygoing and serene, whereas if you have the short version you can’t leave home without saying at some point, “Stop the car. I think I left the bathwater running.”
    What this means in practice is that if you are not a born worrier you have nothing to worry about (though of course you wouldn’t be worrying anyway), whereas if you
are
a worrier by nature there is absolutely nothing you can do about it, so you may as well stop worrying, except of course you can’t. Now put this together with the aforementioned findings about absentmindedness at the University of Somewhere Cold, and I think you can see that our genes have a great deal to answer for.
    Here’s another interesting fact from my “Genes and So On” file. According to Richard Dawkins in
The Blind Watchmaker,
each one of the ten trillion cells in the human body contains more genetic information than the entire
Encyclopaedia Britannica
(and without sending a salesman to your door), yet it appears that 90 percent of all our genetic material doesn’t do anything at all. It just sits there, like Uncle Fred and Aunt Mabel when they drop by on a Sunday.
    From this I believe we can draw four important conclusions, namely: (1) Even though your genes don’t do much, they can let you down in a lot of embarrassing ways; (2) always mail your letters first, then buy the tobacco; (3) never promise a list of four things if you can’t remember the fourth one; and (4).

I have a teenage son who is a runner. He has, at a conservative estimate, sixty-one hundred pairs of running shoes, and every one of them represents a greater investment of cumulative design effort than, say, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. These shoes are amazing. I was just reading a review in one of his running magazines of the latest in “Sport Utility Sneakers,” as they are evidently called, and it was full of passages like this: “A dual density EVA midsole with air units fore and aft provides stability while a gel heel-insert absorbs shock, but the shoe makes a narrow footprint, a characteristic that typically suits only the biomechanically efficient runner.” Alan Shepard went into space with less science at his disposal than that.
    So here is my question. If my son can have his choice of a seemingly limitless range of scrupulously engineered, biomechanically efficient footwear, why does my computer keyboard suck? This is a serious inquiry.
    My computer keyboard has 102 keys, almost double what my old manual typewriter had, which on the face of it seems awfully generous. Among other typographical luxuries, I can choose between three styles of bracket and two kinds of colon. I can dress my text with carets (ˆ) and cedillas (˜). I can have slashes that fall to the left or to the right, and goodness knows what else.
    I have so many keys, in fact, that over on the right-hand side of the keyboard there are whole communities of buttons of whose function I haven’t the tiniest inkling. Occasionally I hit one by accident and subsequently discover that several paragraphs of my w9rk n+w look l*         ke th?s, or that I have written the last page and a half in an interesting but unfortunately nonalphabetic font called Wingdings, but otherwise I haven’t the faintest idea what those buttons are there for.
    Never mind that many of these keys duplicate the functions of other keys, while others apparently do nothing at all (my favorite in this respect is one marked “Pause,” which when pressed does absolutely nothing, raising the interesting metaphysical question of whether it is therefore doing its job), or that several keys are arrayed in slightly imbecilic places. The delete key, for instance, is right beside the overprint key so that often I discover, with a trill of gay laughter, that my most recent thoughts have been devouring, PacMan-like, everything I had previously written. Quite often, I somehow hit a combination of