Three Things I Learned about Octopuses

So, from recently reading Peter Godfrey-Smith's OTHER MINDS: THE OCTOPUS, THE SEA, AND THE DEEP ORIGINS OF CONSCIOUSNESS (?2016), combined with my subsequently dipping into the much lighter Mather-Anderson-Wood volume OCTOPUS: THE OCEAN'S INTELLIGENT INVERTEBRATE (2010), I've learned several things I didn't know.

#1. the plural of 'octopus' is 'octopuses', not 'octopi'. The latter is a hypercorrection put forth in the eighteenth century by someone who cdn't tell his Latin from his Greek.

#2. octopuses are wicked smart -- by one measure, about as smart as a dog, or half as smart as a cat. They also have individual personalities. Oddly enough though, they are v. short-lived (a year or so for most species, no more than three or four for the longest-lived).

#3. there are at least seventy-two octopuses in Puget Sound, according to a count-the-optopuses survey done by divers at the same time each year.

There was also quite a lot about intelligence and the emergence of consciousness in the Godfrey-Smith book. I wish Mr. Barfield was still around: I'd be fascinated to see what he wd think of it.

Finally, I learned about a geological era I hadn't known about before: the Ediacaran Age. It's part of the PreCambrian, the time just before the Cambrian Explosion. Remarkably enough, none of the animals whose fossils they've found from that period had means to attack other animals or defend themselves from attacks: no horns, armor, pinchers,  &c. They seem to have gone about their lives, pretty much ignoring each other.* The Cambrian introduced something new: predation, after which animals had to play careful attention to each other to either catch prey or avoid becoming prey. Which, by a long and eventful route, led to creatures like us.

--John R.
current reading: Ben Aaronovitch's THE HANGING TREE (the latest in the Rivers of London series)


*although there's one inferred piece of evidence that challenges that: the Cnidarians (jellyfish and anemones) have toxic stingers and are thought on genetic grounds to date back before the Cambrian era.

Tolkien's Cobbler

So, thanks to Jeff G. for this one, a link to the story about a famous Oxford cobbler shutting down shop after many decades and selling off their ledger books, which include orders from famous Oxfordians, such as J. R. R. Tolkien:  boots for playing rugby when an undergraduate, nice (really nice) shoes for when he was a distinguished professor. We've always been told that JRRT was dapper and always took care to dress well;* this helps to bear that out.

http://www.oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk/news/2017-02-01-these-boots-were-made-tolkien-ledgers-iconic-oxford-shoe-shop-duckers-go-under

Being an inveterate Tolkienist myself, I'm delighted to see this story, and bemused that it was Tolkien's name that made the headline, rather than other famous customers of the same shop listed in the piece: Evelyn Waugh (I guess BRIDESHEAD REVISITED is much less popular than THE LORD OF THE RINGS these days), or Oxford legend Basil Blackwell, or Baron von Richtofen (who was the same age as Tolkien after all), or Rowan Atkinson, or Jeremy Clarkson.

And it was nice to see that Tolkien sometimes signed his name as "John R. R. Tolkien". We've been told by his biographer that he usually went by his middle name (or first middle name at any rate), Ronald, yet had evidence from a letter written late in life that he preferred "John". Another little piece of evidence to put in the pile.

Much as I enjoy seeing this piece, it reminds me of a passage I read in a biography of A. E. Housman that I've alway thought a good encapsulation of the value of not losing a sense of perspective. The biography is one I picked up on a remainder table during one of my research trips to Oxford, in 1987.** I was won over at once by a brief passage in the foreword in which the biographer spent a paragraph describing Houseman's shoes. He then stated that every word of that paragraph was true, but none of it was worth knowing. I'm more a 'load every rift with ore' type of writer myself, but it's good to be reminded of the need to have a little perspective now and then.

--John R.
current reading: the new Aaronovitch, Mather-Anderson-Wood on Octopuses.





*as opposed to his friend C. S. Lewis, who just wore whatever was handy. His clothing is sometimes described as shabby -- not because he cdn't afford better, but because that wd be giving in to vanity.

**this was the same visit from which I brought back Mari Pritchard's*** excellent little book GUESTS & HOSTS

***a.k.a. Mrs. Humphrey Carpenter

Tolkien Spotting (Aaronovitch)

So, I've just started reading the latest in Ben Aaronovitch's THE RIVERS OF LONDON books, and was amused to find a Tolkien reference in the first chapter. The main character is speaking, giving his opinion about various prominent London buildings:

"Now, I have . . . views about architecture. 

But there's modern stuff I like. The Gherkin, 

the Lloyd's building, even the Shard -- 

despite the nagging feeling I get that Nazgul 

should be roosting at the top"

This is pretty straightforward and unambiguous; another good example of Tolkien's ubiquity in our culture.

Oddly enough, I'd come across another possible but much less certain example earlier the same day. In a Talking Points Memo post about Trump aid Mike Flynn, TPM founder Josh Marshall wrote

"Flynn already appears to be in the process 

of getting wraithed"*

This struck me as an odd usage, not just Tolkienesque 

but positively Shippeyian. 

I'm curious: has anyone else come across this word 

lately so applied 

(i.e. as Tolkien used it)?

--John R.

just finished: OTHER MINDS: THE OCTOPUS THE SEA, AND THE DEEP ORIGINS OF CONSCIOUSNESS by Peter Godfrey-Smith (?2016).

*http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/don-t-keep-him-waiting


UPDATE: Thanks to the comment by Clive Shergold I've corrected the author's name, which I'd gotten wrong in the initial post.  Thanks Clive.
--John R., 2/2-17.

Three Trillion Trees

So, a while back I saw the announcement that scientist have tried to arrival at some kind of comprehensive estimate of just how many trees there are in the world. The result: three trillion trees.*

That's the good news.

The bad news is that this represents about half the trees we had 12,000 years ago, at the start of the Holocene. So since the end of the last Ice Age we've lost some 46% of the planet's tree cover. This is almost certainly the result of human activity, just as was probably also the case with the mass extinctions of that era -- the mammoth and mastodon and saber toothed tiger and the rest. But even if it weren't, it would be sobering, esp. since by all accounts it's currently accelerating.

Here's the link:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/sep/02/scientists-reveal-there-are-3tn-trees-in-world-new-count


Reading this piece takes me back to Marquette days, when one of the essays I had to teach as part of freshman comp.  was a piece by Otto Friedrich called "There are 00 Trees in Russia". Friedrich's point was that journalists often write pieces calling for specific knowledge they don't actually know, which is filled in by editors and fact-checkers. He gave the specific example of how many trees there were in Russia as an example of an unknowable fact. I guess extrapolation has come of age in the interim, thanks to better statistical sampling (e.g., satellites) and vastly increased computational skills

--John R.


*with a current world population of about seven billion, that's about 500 trees per person. Which is a lot, but possibly not enough.

Gygax Graphic Novel

So, while poking around looking at this and that, I found out that there's a biography of Gary Gygax in graphic novel form due out in a few months (May 9th, to be specific). It's called RISE OF THE DUNGEON MASTER: GARY GYGAX AND THE CREATION OF D&D by David Kushner (text) and Koren Shadmi (art).

I've already put in a pre-order on this item.

Here's a link with a little more information. 

https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Dungeon-Master-Gygax-Creation/dp/1568585594/ref=pd_sim_14_1?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1568585594&pd_rd_r=FSREFTJHP601PBS9T6AF&pd_rd_w=oNJyR&pd_rd_wg=IxxIm&psc=1&refRID=FSREFTJHP601PBS9T6AF

--John R. 

The Yawning Portal

So, I'm so far out of the loop these days that I only just learned last week about the forthcoming new D&D release, a septet of classic adventures adapted to Fifth Edition rules, called The Yawning Portal. According to WotC,* the seven adventures are

Against the Giants

Dead in Thay

Forge of Fury

Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan

Sunless Citadel

Tomb of Horrors

White Plume Mountain

Of these, four are classics: G1-3. Against the Giants (Gygax), C1. Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan (Harold Johnson), S2. White Plume Mountain (Laurence Schick), and S1. Tome of Horrors (Gygax again).

Two more come from the Third Edition Adventure Path: Bruce Cordell's Sunless Citadel and Rich Baker's Forge of Fury (the first and second in that series, respectively).

The seventh wasn't familiar to me, and a little checking revealed the reason why; it's a new piece they've thrown into the mix (presumably like 'greatest hits' albums tend to have a new song added in the hopes it'll become a hit by being on the album**).

It's probably no coincidence that all four of those classics ranked high in DUNGEON magazine's polling of "The 30 Greatest Adventures of All Time" (DUNGEON #116, November 2004), coming in at #1 (Giants), #3 (Tome), #9 (White Plume), and #18 (Tamoachan), respectively, albeit with Against the Giants there included in its mashup form as GDQ1-7.

Personally I never cared much for the Drow series (D1, D2, D3) or its Llothian conclusion (Q1), probably I've only read them and never actually played through the adventures. Same goes for S2: I've heard it praised by enough folks whose opinion I respect (e.g., Bruce Cordell) to conclude I'd like it more if I'd played through it at some point. I did play through G1-G2-G3, which I do have a high regard for.

Two surprising absences from this greatest-hits update/recap, at first glance, would be I6. Ravenloft (which came in at #3 on the DUNGEON list) and T1-4. Temple of Elemental Evil (#5 ibid.), but one of these has already had its stand-along fifth edition treatment: CURSE OF STRAHD, which came out about a year ago.

Here's hoping TEMPLE OF ELEMENTAL EVIL gets a reprint as well.

--John R.


just finished: MacArthur vs. Truman by H. L. Brand (2016)
currently reading: a book on octopus intelligence
just finished: THE STORY OF SAIUNKOKU , second season
currently watching (w. disappointment) RWBY season four.



*
http://dnd.wizards.com/products/tabletop-games/rpg-products/tales-yawning-portal

see also

http://www.forbes.com/sites/toddkenreck/2017/01/05/dds-tales-from-the-yawning-portal-is-games-greatest-hits/#737ae20c7c26

**a trend started by Paul Simon, with "Slip Sliding Away"

Have You Hugged Your Local Barnes & Noble Today?

So, out of the blue Friday week (the 13th) I got an email announcing that one of the area Barnes & Noble has closed. This wasn't one of the ones I go to, being located up in Bellevue's Crossroads mall (that is, some twenty miles away from here), but it's still bad news to see the last major new books bookstore chain diminished by another store. I know some people disparage the 'big box' booksellers for their role in driving out (most of) the independents a decade or two back,* but for me, who grew up in a town without a bookstore, it's a comforting feeling to be able to drop in to a store with so many books I'd like to read right there on the shelf.

Working at home as I do, I sometimes feel the need to get out and about and work somewhere off-site. And when I do, it's more likely than not that I'll pack up the laptop and the headphones and head over to the nearest Barnes & Noble with a Starbucks inside where, if they're not too busy, I'll get a cup of tea (English Breakfast) and work for an hour or two, until the tea runs out or it's starting to look like they cd use the table.

So here's hoping it's just that one store's location that led to its closing and that it's not a sign presaging more to come. Books I can get from Amazon (and do. frequently.), but ambiance requires a bookstore.

--John R.


*some independents survived, such as Seattle's own excellent Elliott Bay Books, the university book store, and Third Place Books.