Walking Your Octopus: A Guidebook to the Domesticated Cephalopod is an illustrated book by artist Brian Kesinger about the adventures of a Victorian-era lady and her land octopus. The book is available as a hardcover on Amazon and as an e-book for iOS.
via Boing Boing
cartoon courtesy of xkcd.com under a cc-by-nc license
Science works by proposing and disposing of hypotheses. Hypotheses come from a lot of places: previous research results, modeling, inspiration, and plain old intuition. Our intuition is a good source of scientific hypotheses because our species has evolved to possess an implicit model of the natural world that allows us to move, eat, balance, and so forth. Of course, this model is not perfect nor is it explicit. Which is why we need science. Nevertheless, it is a good source of hypotheses, and our intuitions about where things go when we throw them are an excellent place to begin elaborating, say, a classical mechanical account of projectile motion, regardless of where in the world you are when you throw something. This is because physical laws operate uniformly on earth, modulo extremely advanced concerns in quantum physics or the philosophy of science.
Given this, it may appear reasonable to suppose that our intuition could be a good source of hypotheses regarding society and culture. After all, humans are a single species and evolved in more or less the same way, and so the intuitions we have about how we live our lives should apply to all human commuities.
In fact, however, this is not a case. There is considerable variation in the organization of human conduct. There are evolutionary reasons for this since, as you can imagine, it results in populations that are highly adaptive. ‘Culture’ is the term that anthropologists use to describe the arbitrary, conventional structures of meaning which orient conduct in human communities. The laws of physics operate uniformly across the planet, while cultural systems vary. Anthropology is the science which studies human behavioral diversity. Because culturally-influenced conduct can take radically different forms in different places, it is foolhardy to use intuitions developed in one culture as a source of hypotheses about another. For this reason, it is reckless practice for natural scientists to stray into the expert territory of our discipline simply because they believe that if they are good at testing hypotheses in one realm they must be good at it in another.
A good analogy to using the intuitions of one culture to to generate hypotheses about another culture would be to imagine a non-physicist with pre-theoretical intuitions about motion creating hypotheses about life aboard the international space station. Expectations about momentum, weight, and the behavior of fluids will founder in a micro-gravity environment. Because they have not had experience in microgravity, their intuitions will be incorrect.
Simply because you are very good at shark embryology does not mean that you are ready to speak authoritatively about human societies. And, I am sure you will agree, vice versa.
Often times specialized language in the life sciences is considered as a sign that those fields are mature and specialized, while specialized language in the human sciences is merely obfuscation or meaningless jargon. There seems to be an assumption that because biologists engage in marriage, commensality, and linguistic interaction they should, in principle, be able to understand all technical writing about these subjects. And yet somehow biologists think it obvious that layman cannot understand the the technical terminology of biochemistry, despite the fact that all laymen have metabolisms.
The analogy to microgravity is useful because demonstrates two other things.
First, our intuitions about the physical world are not completely wrong in micro-gravity. Because the space station and Los Angeles are located in the same universe, there are underlying basic similarities between both environments, and humans can adapt (because they are cultural) to both of them. Similarly, it would be wrong to argue that it is prima facie invalid to use intuitions developed in one culture to form hypotheses about another. It simply results in hypotheses which are deeply flawed, but which nonetheless have considerable appeal to people because they seem intuitively correct to them.
In fact, anthropologists spend a major part of their time dealing over and over again with hypotheses which have been definitely proven wrong — black people are ‘genetically’ good at singing, heterosexual monogamy is ‘natural’ — but which are consistently reinvented by people because these hypotheses appeal to those people’s (culturally shaped) intuitions. When anthropologists refuse to engage in discussion with laymen about these hypotheses, we are sometimes accused of being obsessed with political correctness or opposed to the ideals of scientific argumentation. In fact, the situation is somewhat different: we are acting like scientists who are too weary to engage with laymen who argue that a geocentric model of the universe is correct, and who furthermore adduce evidence to support their claims by pointing out that there is much evidence on their side. For instance, sources from the Internet (often from thirteenth century Europe) arguing for a geocentric view of the universe as well as the obvious fact that the sun sets regularly while the earth does not move.
Just as it takes a special sort of biologist to spend all of his time explaining evolution to creationists, so too does it take a special sort of anthropologist to give up their research and teaching and spend precious time explaining to the public sphere why their intuitions are wrong. It is a sign of progress that we consider some questions settled, at least until disconfirming data — not mere intuitive dissatisfaction with our findings — is made evident.
Second, just as the space station and Los Angeles occupy the same physical universe, so too do human communities share an underlying biological constitution. Just as our intuitions about the physical world can be improved through examination of many different physical environments (I imagine this would include microgravity, nanoscale, and low-temperature environments) so too can our intuitions regarding social life be improved by learning about places with different cultural orders. In making this argument about our intuitions I am not arguing that science is impossible or that people from other cultures are fundamentally inscrutable.
Indeed, it is to the credit of physicists that they have been able to develop models of the world that are sufficiently general that they can explain the dynamics of movement in both microgravity and normal Earth gravity. Indeed, Microgravity is a compelling experimental environment precisely because it allows us to increase the power of scientific models in a wide variety of scientific disciplines. Anthropology, similarly, requires cross-cultural research to develop theoretically. And this is the goal of (many) anthropologists.
Expertise in one academic discipline does not automatically translate to competence in another academic discipline. It is not the case that one discipline’s present is somehow destined to be another’s future. Different disciplines develop in different ways theoretically and methodologically, because of the nature of the object they study and the questions they are asking.
SeanthFox trickster share
Trick fox last weeks #twoodle fox, skateboard
Seanth~2:50 in. "He wants a ploice officer to come to his residence. He apparently has evidence of Bigfoot."
lol
NÓTT
[noun]
Nordic mythology: female personification of night.
Etymology: Old Norse for “night".
One of my favorite finds ever.
Best unintentionally funny ad copy of all time.
Get “Big Dick” and be envied by every boy in town.
“Big Dick” is modeled as closely as a toy can be after its big brother at the front.
[From zoomar’s awesome collection]
We’ve all been saying as much, but right now Charles Pierce is — to paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson talking about himself — really writing the fuck out of words:
Some night very soon, if he so chooses, George Zimmerman can load his piece, tuck it into the back of his pants, climb into his SUV, and drive around Sanford, Florida looking for assholes and fucking punks who are walking through neighborhoods where he, George Zimmerman, defender of law and order, doesn’t think they belong. He can drive around Sanford, Florida and check out anyone who is dressed in such a manner as might frighten the average citizen who has been fed a daily diet of “Scary Black Kids” by their local news and by their favorite radio personalities, and who is dressed in such a manner as might seem inappropriate to their surroundings as determined by George Zimmerman, crimebuster. He can drive around Sanford, Florida until he spots an asshole or a fucking punk and then he can get out of his SUV, his piece tucked into the back of his pants, and he can stalk the asshole or the fucking punk, the one who is in the wrong neighborhood, or who is dressed inappropriately, at least according to George Zimmerman, protector of peace. If the asshole, or the fucking punk, turns around and objects to being stalked — or, worse, if the asshole, or the fucking punk, decides physically to confront the person stalking him — then George Zimmerman can whip out the piece from the back of his pants and shoot the asshole, or the fucking punk, dead right there on the spot. This can happen tonight. That is now possible. Hunting licenses are now available and it’s open season on assholes, fucking punks, and kids who wear hoodies at night in neighborhoods where they do not belong, at least according to George Zimmerman, defender of law and order, crimebuster, and protector of the peace, because that is what American society has told George Zimmerman, and all the rest of us, is the just outcome of what happened on one dark and rainy night in February of 2012.
    
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Remember that time Gandalf convinced the whole party to flee so that he could take out the Balrog and not have to share any of the XP? Shows up the next session with fancy new robes and everything. What a jerk.
Best literary analysis ever.
Lol
A reader writes, "Someone was nice enough to scan the pages of a Cyrillic alphabet book from the 1930's. The book encouraged adult literacy through erotic drawings of figures in various acts of copulation. Note: flying penises, lesbian acts and cloven hoofed demons appear. Male homosexual acts, do not."
These images are obviously NSFK (not safe for Kremlin). The artist was Sergei Merkurov, who went on to become a People’s Artist of the USSR. As the accompanying text notes, it's a fascinating look at the libertine sexuality of the pre-Stalinist period.
Soviet-era erotic alphabet book from 1931 [Советская эротическая азбука 1931 года] 
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SeanthBlack lodge share
ilovecephalopods:windandsails:
Cuttlefish blends in with living room.
There’s something really adorable about a cuttlefish settled on a miniature chaise lounge.
My hair for the LOTR-matathon this year!
Fishtail braids, french braids, regular braids… Sooo many braids! ^^’
what the actual fuck if cats aren’t born on drugs then i don’t even know
HAHAHAHAHHAAHAHAHAH IM CRYING
SeanthNew Mexico share
Perfectly Timed Photo of the Day: Lightning Steals the Thunder During Fireworks
Redditor AJ192 took this spectacular photograph of a lightning in the middle of a fireworks show at Balloon Fiesta Park in Rio Rancho, New Mexico.
