151–160 of 277 posts
"It's true that our innovative management technique - Continuous Tactile Feedback - can look a little rough to the untrained eye, but our Food Collection Engineers are actually very well treated."
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While I'm all for a history lesson (and the double-I octopii is indeed simply incorrect) I take issue with anyone insisting that "octopi" is wrong: 1. Language is neither static nor a series of rules to be blindly followed. The way a word was pluralized 1400 years ago has limited relevance today. 2. As noted just about everywhere, "octopodes" looks insane in any modern English sentence because we don't pluralize any…
> 2... It also moves the emphasis to the second syllable. Octopods - 8 times better than regular pods.
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Ok, one step up then, why should it be illegal?
i find your questions a little funny as i had this sort of conversation already dozens of times and i know where this is coming from and where it's going. i mean i've been a vegetarian myself for more than a decade (am not anymore) and i took pleasure in leading people who initiated discussions around it ad absurdum. in germany there was a case of cannibalism many years ago where a guy known by the name Armin Meiwes…
If you remove intelligence (or something quite similar) as the criteria, what do you have instead?
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I wonder why it is that "octopuses" just kind of sounds wrong? Is it the repeated "s" at the end? But we have no problem saying "buses" or "rebuses". Is it something to do with the plural of "fish" just being "fish"? But we have no problem making whales and dolphins plural with an -s. Is it that "-puses" sounds slightly vulgar, like we're talking about multiple female genitalia? I genuinely don't know. All I know is…
Because it turns it into a four-syllable word with three consecutive unstressed syllables. It has bad meter and ruins the meter of almost any sentence constructed around it.
How much of a leap is it to say that octopuses have effectively domesticated fish, the way early humans might have turned docile wolves into hunting companions?
It depends on your definition of domestication. One could easily argue that ants have domesticated aphids so I don’t think the concept depends on the intelligence of the domesticator so much as the symbiotic relationship between species. However the usual definition of domestication is specific to humans. The aforementioned aphid farming and the octopodes in TFA are technically in mutualistic relationships.
> The best-studied insect-associated domestication is that of the attine ants...and the majority cultivate parasol mushrooms in the Leucocoprineae [58]. The ants plant sessile fungal cultivars, manage growth conditions by regulating temperature and moisture and fertilizing the fungal gardens, protect their crop from other herbivores, parasites, and disease, and harvest the cultivated fungi for food [4,58]. This coevolved domestication system has turned ants into obligate fungivores, as experimental removal of the fungal crop results in reduced reproduction and increased mortality among ants [58]. For the fungi, the ants increase their fitness relative to the free-living state by increasing their proportion across generations, providing for geographic dispersal and protecting the fungi against parasites and pathogens [58]. In the higher attine ants, the fungal cultivars are obligate mutualists and cannot grow in a free-living state [58]. It should be noted that fungi may not be the only ant domesticates; some ants tend to hemipteran insects like aphids and treehoppers in a system reminiscent of human animal husbandry [4,10].
I would call this domestication, full stop.
[0] https://www.cell.com/trends/ecology-evolution/fulltext/S0169...
I used to love eating octopus, but since I've learned so much about their intelligence, I have not been able to bring myself to do so, anymore. I have the luxury of choice. There are many, in this world, that do not.
just because something is intelligent is no reason not to eat it imho
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just because something is intelligent is no reason not to eat it imho
This is an honest question, I'm not making a joke. Why shouldn't we eat _you_ then?
aside: me after reading the headline: Shouldn't that be Octopii? But no! "The plural form octopii is doubly incorrect. Firstly, octopus derives from Greek, not Latin; its etymologically-consistent plural form is octopodes. Secondly, even if octopus were a second-declension Latin noun, the plural form would be octopi; in the correct plurals radii and gladii, with which octopii is analogous, the first ‘i’s are part of…
While I'm all for a history lesson (and the double-I octopii is indeed simply incorrect) I take issue with anyone insisting that "octopi" is wrong: 1. Language is neither static nor a series of rules to be blindly followed. The way a word was pluralized 1400 years ago has limited relevance today. 2. As noted just about everywhere, "octopodes" looks insane in any modern English sentence because we don't pluralize any…
This is why I would prefer say axises, basises, indexes, and matrixes. I mean as plurals of their respective singulars, not as plurals of octopus.
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The best plural is simply keeping the word the same as the singular. I.e. "octopus". There are many animals using this form, e.g. fish, deer, elk, salmon, buffalo. E.g. Look at all those octopus. All the divers I know say it this way, easy to say, understand, doesn't make you sound like an asshole.
This is what I would say. It does beg the question though, how’d we come up with the list of animals to pluralize like that? Why “five birds” but not “five deers?”
There are also some middle-ground words like "Shark". One goes fishing for "shark" like they would "fish" but it is more common to say "several sharks" using a plural as opposed to "several fish" using the singular. But "fishes" is still a word, which likely goes back to ruling classes who ate fish but generally did not hunt them as they would have deer.