Roger and new bride Mary left England for New England in 1630. Roger and his wife Mary travelled on a ship called Lyon. He travelled from Bristol, England and landed at Salem, Massachusetts. The ship set sail from Bristol on December 1, 1630, and after 65 days at sea arrived on February 5, 1631. Roger resided in Massachusetts for a short time, but after some discontent moved to Plymouth.
Wisdom Builder
Three Tidbit Stories
MODE:
Particle Physics.
3 random tidbit stories in about 3 minutes.
1.
Particle Physics Story.
5 Feb 1631
I wrote that Particle Physics Story,
and posted it to TST 8 years ago.
2.
Particle Physics Story.
~125 Million years ago
The last non-mammaliaform cynodonts included the tritylodontids, an advanced family of herbivorous cynodonts. They were close to mammals and shared several mammal-like traits, but they remained outside Mammaliaformes. Their extinction around 125 million years ago marked the end of the non-mammaliaform cynodont line, while mammals—the surviving branch—continued on.
By the Early Cretaceous, around 125 million years ago, the world of the last tritylodontids was no longer the old synapsid world. It was a dinosaur-dominated landscape of warm seasonal forests, floodplains, lakeshores, and volcanic basins. Tritylodontids would have shared these environments with early birds, lizards, amphibians, turtles, pterosaurs, and dinosaurs such as small theropods and herbivorous ornithischians. In places like Early Cretaceous East Asia, the ecosystem also included mammaliaforms and true mammals that were becoming surprisingly diverse, so tritylodontids were not simply “waiting for mammals.” They were living beside them. The Cretaceous ran from about 145 to 66 million years ago, and early mammals and mammal-relatives had already diversified into many ecological roles well before the dinosaur extinction.
Tritylodontids were advanced herbivorous cynodont therapsids, close to mammals but usually placed outside Mammaliaformes. They had small-to-medium bodies, strong jaws, large cheek teeth with multiple cusps, and a well-developed secondary palate, all pointing to a specialized plant-eating lifestyle. Some later forms, such as Fossiomanus sinensis, even show digging adaptations, suggesting they could occupy burrows or fossorial niches. They were among the last non-mammaliaform therapsids, surviving long after true mammals had appeared. That makes them a wonderful “living fossil” style branch in the mammal-side story: not mammals, not primitive throwbacks, but late-surviving cousins carrying an older version of the mammal-line experiment into the age of dinosaurs.
I wrote that Particle Physics Story,
and posted it to TST 3 months ago.
3.
Particle Physics FAQ.
Modern punctuation started with monks in the Middle Ages. They added a space between words. As part of telling the story of the printing press, and that writing is about communication, not rules, in 30 Philosophers, I set it up like this:
“Prior to 900 CE, [writing] had no case—it was all uppercase or lowercase. It had no punctuation at all: no spaces, no commas, no periods, no paragraphs. It was just letters strung together. For example, most historical documents written before 900 CE in the West, particularly Latin and Greek texts, employed scriptio continua, featuring all uppercase letters, with no spaces between words, no punctuation, no paragraphs.
Before around 900 CE, reading was an experience most of us would not recognize. Instead of having grammar guide the reader’s interpretation, they had to interpret the text. Sure, they grew up seeing patterns of words in a string of letters, but a reader of the time would read and interpret the text much more than we accept today. The aim was to convey meaning through the arrangement of words alone. Sometimes the process required rereading the text several times. In fact, there was the profession of a professional reader—someone who would stand in the town square and read announcements the way the authors wanted them read.”
My main point in the book is to empower personal writing style, not the grammar-freak rigid writer of an English class. Communication is king. And, breaking rules here and there, especially for effect, is more than perfectly fine.
After monks “invented” the space, adding grammar was slowly. By the time of the Magna Carta in 1215, punctuation was still mostly just spaces. However, by the time Copernicus published his famous book in the 16th century, we had modern writing with periods, commas, paragraphs, and even chapters.
I wrote that Particle Physics FAQ,
and posted it to TST 2 years ago.