In which my imagination rampages outside the edges of the mundane facts (2024)

Maybe with the alien geometery, they could solve the Rubik's Hypercube: http://www.superliminal.com/cube/cube.htm

Little do the humans know that they are actually the 4th most intelligent species on the Earth. First are the mice, then the dolphins, then the octopi. Like the mice, the octopi are pan-dimension beings placed here as part of a research project to discover the answer to question about life, the universe, and everything.

Once the answer is found, then BAM! Its payback time for all those years of calamari appetizers.

Beware, humans. Your time is near.

"...whenever the cube was turned, the facing side remained red. Upon further examination, high-speed photography revealed a previously-unknown SEVENTH side!"

--A Child's Garden of Alien Overlords, published 2012

Hey, maybe the octos could be put to work designing the atheist version of the Jack Chick tracts that you called for a few posts ago.

Speaking of which: The big, big, BIG problem that the atheists have versus the non-atheists is this: People Don't Want To Die. Furthermore, they don't even want to admit that they WILL die, and that death is forever. (This is especially true of Americans, who even if they aren't actively religious are always looking for ways to cheat death through exercise and vitamins and such.)

You might want to start out the slick pamphlet by getting that big ol' stumbling block dealt with immediately.

The other thing they always say about pigs. "Contrary to popular belief, pigs are actually very clean animals. They just role in the mud because they don't have sweat glands." I don't think the pigs motivation is relevant here. Here are 2 comparable statements.

"I don't stink. I just haven't bathed in 11 years because I'm afraid of the water."

"I'm not gay. I just stick my thingy in another man's hoopty-doo because it feels good"

Phoenix Woman @ #10:

Speaking of which: The big, big, BIG problem that the atheists have versus the non-atheists is this: People Don't Want To Die. Furthermore, they don't even want to admit that they WILL die, and that death is forever.

And, secondarily, people don't want their deceased friends and loved ones to be dead, forever, either.

As for their deceased enemies.....believing in a Hell is a way to think that they (the enemies) are worse than dead (as well as being a way to keep other people in line, of course).

Brownian, don't be silly. You can always tell when someone has peeled off the stickers.

What they'll do is turn one face 45°, then apply pressure to the corner until the blocks come apart. Putting them back together in the correct fashion is a simple and undetectable cheat.

Not that I would do such a thing, mind you. But those octopuses are a sneaky lot.

@ Jose:

I've just been itching for a good pig rant.

Uh, yeah, I've had a hankerin' for one of those myself...

I have a pig and I'm not sure where people get their estimations of their intelligence or cleanliness from. I'll grant that Hammy isn't as dumb as a sheep but I've yet to see any glimmer of problem solving from him, and he loves mud. He also seems to have no idea of the fate awaiting him in the fall.

My goats on the other hand are clearly intelligent, problem solving animals, the sheer number of ways they have managed to escape the pasture is evidence of that. They never go anywhere though just outside the pasture or back into the barn so I'm convinced they do it simply for fun. Now my goats are pets and therefore not destined to be dinner so I have no idea if they would figure it out if they were.

-Back on subject

I hate my stupid pet octopus. He can only solve my lame ass Rubik's Magic. Do you remember the Rubics Magic? Its commercial jingle went something like this.

What's made out of tiles and fishing line.

Cashing in on the cube sure feels fine.

Can only be solved by a really smart swine.

What is it!

Whyyyyyyyyy, It's magic!

Oh Lord, help me to stop thinking about pigs.

Now my goats are pets and therefore not destined to be dinner so I have no idea if they would figure it out if they were.

Try eating one. Tastes terrible, doesn't it? Now you know why they eat all that garbage.

There pet pig owners that swear that the pigs are far, far easier to train than dogs.
The other consideration, Noadi, is that you said you have A pig? Solitude is lulling. Piggy might be more inclined to do stuff if he had a companion, who knows?

Btw, if an octopus solves a cube, I'm going to eat one for dinner.

But Inky, I don't think a Rubiks Cube would taste very nice. ;)

Also, I'm not sure if you are talking about pigs or goats, llewelly, but they both can be quite tasty. BBQ goat and homebrewed porter make a very nice Sunday afternoon.

What they'll do is turn one face 45°, then apply pressure to the corner until the blocks come apart. Putting them back together in the correct fashion is a simple and undetectable cheat.

Oh, you can tell those too. After awhile the plastic become loose and you end up with a rattling Rubik's.

Try eating one. Tastes terrible, doesn't it? Now you know why they eat all that garbage.

Gasp! Blasphemer! There is nothing so delectable as barbequed goat, and once you've staved off a cold with a little goat neck soup you'll never go back to chicken noodle again.

Jose@8

The Pig

In England once there lived a big
And wonderfully clever pig.
To everybody it was plain
That Piggy had a massive brain.
He worked out sums inside his head,
There was no book he hadn't read.
He knew what made an airplane fly,
He knew how engines worked and why.
He knew all this, but in the end
One question drove him round the bend:
He simply couldn't puzzle out
What LIFE was really all about.
What was the reason for his birth?
Why was he placed upon this earth?
His giant brain went round and round.
Alas, no answer could be found.
Till suddenly one wondrous night.
All in a flash he saw the light.
He jumped up like a ballet dancer
And yelled, "By gum, I've got the answer!"
"They want my bacon slice by slice
"To sell at a tremendous price!
"They want my tender juicy chops
"To put in all the butcher's shops!
"They want my pork to make a roast
"And that's the part'll cost the most!
"They want my sausages in strings!
"They even want my chitterlings!
"The butcher's shop! The carving knife!
"That is the reason for my life!"
Such thoughts as these are not designed
To give a pig great piece of mind.
Next morning, in comes Farmer Bland,
A pail of pigswill in his hand,
And piggy with a mighty roar,
Bashes the farmer to the floor...
Now comes the rather grizzly bit
So let's not make too much of it,
Except that you must understand
That Piggy did eat Farmer Bland,
He ate him up from head to toe,
Chewing the pieces nice and slow.
It took an hour to reach the feet,
Because there was so much to eat,
And when he finished, Pig, of course,
Felt absolutely no remorse.
Slowly he scratched his brainy head
And with a little smile he said,
"I had a fairly powerful hunch
"That he might have me for his lunch.
"And so, because I feared the worst,
"I thought I'd better eat him first."

Roald Dahl

I saw this headline, and I'm glad that you're apparently free on bail already:
man in court over octopus p*rn pictures

Handing octopuses Rubik's cube, eh?

Wouldn't octopuses have a evolsolutionary advantage over humans in solving the puzzle, being eight legged creatures solving a six sided creation?

Although I'd be mighty impressed with an octopus' being able to solve the cube, I'd think it would be of even greater benefit to humankind if octopuses could figure out how to reset digital watches--and that skill would be even more impressive if they could do so without having to read the instruction booklet, and if they could find said instruction booklet without an hour's long search.

It's all Teh Interwebs:
Man's 'sex with octopus' images

Larry said:

...then the octopi.

octopuses or (pedantically) octopodes, it's a Latinized form of the Greek word oktopous not a second declension Latin word.

[Grammar nazi hat off]
"People called Romane go the house?!..."

octopuses or (pedantically) octopodes, it's a Latinized form of the Greek word oktopous not a second declension Latin word.

Damn! I always get those second declension Latin words mixed up.

What a missed opportunity. Someone really should make a cube which somehow dispenses food... more of a puzzle box I suppose. My mind has been on this general topic for a bit, since I've been trying to come up with more interesting ways to 'hide' my cat's food (just hiding it doesn't provide much entertainment anymore and she has figured out how to open a flip top box very reliably.) I really should hack together an electronic/robotic setup with a switch which opens a container... then move the switch and box to different locations, put in a time delay, add more switches and a visual feedback panel, make getting the proper sequence of switches required, ect ect.

Anyways, we really need to breed / engineer some extra lifespan into cephalopods.

Remember Churchill on animals: "Cats look down on us, dogs look up tp us, but pigs - they treat us as equals!"

No references yet to the non-Euclidean geometry of Lovecraft?

Let me tell you, being L3-handed (armed?, tentacled?) really makes it a bear to use scissors (unless you buy some from The L3 Store.)

Also Inky @ #23, "Btw, if an octopus solves a cube, I'm going to eat one for dinner."

You'll be pooping colored plastic bits for days.

PZ:

Off topic, but would you mind (in your so plentiful free time ;-) ) doing a post or few on the software and methods you use in your research? I'm more interested in the software part as my school doesn't have any bioinformatics or similar stuff yet, but I figure the methods would be cool as well.

Cheers

OT-Tonight on AC 360 ..."TONIGHT: Atheist soldier's suit
A soldier's life threatened, his career ruined. He says it's because he's an atheist. Is the military now a Christian organization? Tonight, 10 ET"

P.S. Souls of the animal kingdom come to me - Eagle, Fox, Bottlenose dolphin, OCTOPUS, House cat! :-)

Re: #13

Don't worry, after the newts win the war and drive us to extinction they'll eat the octopodes.

Shoulda left them on that island.

The first mistake was leaving the cutting torch by the octopus tank...

Maybe once an octupus learns to solve the Rubic's Cube, it will learn to design better ethological experiments. I mean holy cow, how much can we anthropomorphize? An octopus does exactly what it evolve to do: contribute to the ecosystem around it, and do octopus-type things. Who gives a rat's behind if it can solve a human puzzle?

Sadly we most likely won't show respect towards "dumb" animals, like snails, even though they are just doing what they evolved to do. Even more disturbing is that some octopus experiments involve taking them right from the ocean and / or breeding them and dooming them to a life of captivity - which is unacceptable.

Although it would be cool to deep-sea dive and discover that an octopus and his mermaid friends in a game of chess!

their casual use of the word "family" bothers me.

not just casual, but wrong.
I can see why it would bother anyone.

You're right to call them on it. If they wish to use a casual term, they should use one that doesn't already have a scientific usage that is incorrectly applied here.

yeah, I agree that saying the three groups are "related" would have been far better.

pelecypods, gastropods, and cephalopods are of course different families, for those confused about the issue.

they are related under the phylum Mollusca.

just to compare, we belong to the phyllum chordata, which includes a rather diverse bunch of orders and families, to be sure.

a cephalopod is not really a snail with 8 arms, any more than we are fish with legs and lungs*.

*to avoid confusion, I'll avoid references to descendants of Dagon ;)

Even more disturbing is that some octopus experiments involve taking them right from the ocean and / or breeding them and dooming them to a life of captivity - which is unacceptable.

why?

I've kept fish in captivity for years. Provided with good habitat and ample food, they behave much as their "wild" counterparts do, including breeding.

sorry, but for some things, there simply is no substitute for being able to study animals under controlled conditions.

...Who gives a rat's behind if it can solve a human puzzle?

understanding the visual-spatial abilites of any given critter tells us a lot about how it can, or could, interact with its environment.

always useful information for species management, if you simply are uncurious at all as to how any particular species processes information.

for those who ARE interested in how other species process information, it can give us good comparative data to help us understand how WE process information.

or did you somehow think we understand all there is to know already about how humans themselves process information?

Wow, I never new that "Octopuses belong to the same family as slugs and snails

please tell me you were trying to provide an example of how someone would confuse the casual usage of "family", just as was derided by myself and Escuerd?

If not, let me repeat myself:

they don't belong to the same family (octopuses are cephalopods, and "snails" are gastropods).

they do however, belong to the same phylum (molluscs).

Now wait a minute! How the devil do you determine 'handedness' in a creature that's got EIGHT bloody hands?!?!?!?

Are there words to describe the condition of having the #3 arm dominant over the #7 one?

Dr. PZ, what is the correct word for the plural of octopus? I heard it was Octi, but that was years ago, in a S-F novel that I can't remember the name of now...

Dr. PZ, what is the correct word for the plural of octopus? I heard it was Octi, but that was years ago, in a S-F novel that I can't remember the name of now...

the answer is:

it depends on who you ask, and whether you are speaking about a group of the same kind, or a collection of different kinds.

most biologists I know (including myself) consider the plural of a group of the same species to be the same as the singular:

one blue-ringed octopus, a group of blue-ringed octopus.

we add the suffix -es to denote description of a collection of different species:

one species of octopus, many different species of octopuses.

same is applicable to many other common names, for example, fish.

one fish of the same type, many fish of the same type.

one fish of one type, many fishes of different types.

I'm not a linguist, so never can recall what the proper terminology is for this form of the plural, but someone around here mentioned it a while back in another thread.

Hellraiser. Puzzlebox. Octopuss*s. Rubik's Cube.

You see where this is heading??

You see where this is heading??

the only difference being tentacles with toothed-suckers instead of chains with hooks?

We have such sights to show you!

Pointless exuberant comment begin>>

Chirality matters biatches!

>>pointless exuberant comment end

#67, cory

Cthulhu! Fthagn, Cthulhu! Ia, br'kek eish wmblah, nugga wugga xzxwz? Yarble gffuf 'dominion', znargle bffuf Rley'eh. Cthulhu, tik'ty-pu!
The starts are right!

Plural for octopus: octopoi, octopie, octupusen, octopii, octopusmey (klingon), octopoj (esparanto), and octoprim (elven) are all acceptable plurals of octopus, in my not so humble opinion.
I certainly use a variety of plural forms in my computer-code to add some colour of the dreary lives of the maintenance programmers. I'm a generous soul like that.

they don't belong to the same family (octopuses are cephalopods, and "snails" are gastropods)

...and those are different Classes, to those still wed to the orthodoxy of the Linnean hierarchy.

most biologists I know (including myself) consider the plural of a group of the same species to be the same as the singular...we add the suffix -es to denote description of a collection of different species

Eh, that's true for fish and fishes...and not much else. I don't know any cephalopodologists, so I'll grant you the usage for octopuses too. Nobody says "5 turtle" or "a group of mouse."
Use of the singular for the plural is known as the "sportsmen's plural" because it's used mostly for animals people like to shoot and hook. "A brace of pheasant," e.g.