inkbluesky

New dinosaur tracks discovered

Dinosaur footprints made 150 million years ago in the bedrock of what is now Yemen are the first to be discovered in the Arabian Peninsula, say scientists.

The two separate trackways were made by a herd of 11 sauropods, and a lone two-legged plant-eating dinosaur belonging to the ornithopod family.

Imagine that there was an advanced human civilization 150 millions years ago. You’re sitting on the balcony of your hillside condo enjoying some morning coffee as a group of sauropods pass by. The near meter long dragonflies might have been trying to take your box of corn flakes, but all civilizations have their problems.

sandtopia

The Memory Addict

Although with regard to the past, when this is reported correctly what is brought out from the memory is not the events themselves (these are already past) but words conceived from the images of those events, which, in passing through the senses, have left as it were their footprints stamped upon the mind. My boyhood, for instance, which no longer exists, exists in time past, which no longer exists. But when I recollect the image of my boyhood and tell others about it, I am looking at this image in time present, because it still exists in my memory.
—St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, 398

Another topic for those 2AM chats at the coffee house. If you’re immersed in your memories now are they just memories or part of your current reality. Augusten Burroughs whose story is at the link seems not only addicted to his vivid memories, but might be embellishing them a little.

He even remembers a story I told him about fainting from dehydration in a grocery store in the middle of Queens. He admits that, as I was telling it, he was doubting some of its details, wondering if I’d allowed myself to embellish the story over the years, eventually even revising my memory to match the more dramatic version. And he was right: I had.