Quotes About Development

The Greater London Development Plan would have cost a then-colossal £2 billion, making it the biggest public investment ever made in Britain. That was its salvation. Britain couldn't afford it. In the end, the visionaries were undone by the unmanageable scale of their own ambitions. It

vanity as humans that we tend to think of evolution as a process that, in effect, was programmed to produce us.

Homo erectus was the first to hunt, the first to use fire, the first to fashion complex tools, the first to leave evidence of campsites, the first to look after the weak and frail.

You are the product of three billion years of evolutionary tweaks.

Some aspects of language acquisition are puzzling: Children almost always learn to say no before yes and in before on, and all children everywhere go through a phase in which they become oddly fascinated with the idea of "gone" and "all gone.

Jane Jacobs cites it in her landmark work of 1969, The Economy of Cities)

Children do much better with extreme cold than with extreme heat. Because their sweat glands aren't fully developed, they don't sweat freely as adults do.

About 15 percent of girls now begin puberty by age seven.

It's easy to make bricks, but making houses requires far more than throwing a pile of bricks in the air.

successfully. 'Japanese researchers have successfully developed a semiconductor chip made of gallium arsenide' (Associated Press). It was thoughtful of the writer to tell us that the researchers had not unsuccessfully developed a gallium arsenide chip, but also unnecessary. Delete successfully.

With the canal, the cost of shipping a ton of flour from Buffalo to New York City fell from $120 a ton to $6 a ton, and the carrying time was reduced from three weeks to just over one. The effect on New York's fortunes was breathtaking. Its share of national exports leaped from less than 10 percent in 1800 to over 60 percent by the middle of the century; in the same period, even more dazzlingly, its population went from ten thousand to well over half a million.

But if you're not giving the kids the lessons because the parents can't help them, then those kids, when they become parents, won't have the core skills either, will they?

Whatever the losses in warmth and comfort, the gains in space proved irresistible. So the development of the fireplace became one of the great breakthroughs in domestic history: they allowed people to lay boards across the beams and create a whole new world upstairs.

I took a place in one of the lines. Progress

The first two times you heard me speak, I sounded like a fool. I made about as much sense as a top hat on a mule. I wasn't sure a third attempt would do me any better, So I decided that I'd put my thoughts down in a letter.

All Children Have Brain Damage!

As I have discovered by examining my past, I started out as a child. Coincidentally, so did my brother. My mother did not put all her eggs in one basket, so to speak: she gave me a younger brother named Russell, who taught me what was meant by survival of the fittest.

Strive for Progress Not Perfection

times with follow-up questions. Eventually it sank in. The world needs to provide more energy so the poorest can thrive, but we need to provide that energy without releasing any more greenhouse gases. Now the problem seemed even harder. It wasn't enough to deliver cheap, reliable energy for the poor. It also had to be clean.

Solar cells, for example, got almost 10 times cheaper between 2010 and 2020, and the price of a full solar system went down by 11 percent in 2019 alone.

Just think about how many landowners, utility companies, and local and state governments you'd need to bring together to build power lines that could move solar energy from the Southwest all the way to customers in New England. Merely picking the routes and establishing rights-of-way would be a massive undertaking; people tend to object when you want to run a big power line through the local park.

If we can spread the improved breeds and best practices more broadly—especially crossbreeding African cows to be more productive and making higher-quality feed available and affordable—it'll reduce emissions and help poor farmers earn more money.

That's nearly 600 pounds for every person in the country. And we're not even the biggest consumers of the stuff—that would be China, which installed more concrete in the first 16 years of the 21st century than the United States did in the entire 20th century!

that a lot? Over the past decade, we've added an average of 22 gigawatts a year. Now we need to install more than three times that much each year, and keep up the pace for the next three decades.