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Wily Octopi Walk on Two Arms
lousyd writes "Offering hope for new forms of ambulatory robots, biologist Christine L. Huffard, at UC Berkeley, has caught individual octopi sneaking away from predators by using two of their arms as legs. They use the other six arms to make themselves look like coconuts or algae. The research is being done as part of a project on robotics. This reminds me of the Far Side cartoon where the cows drop to all fours when humans come around, but resume standing on two legs otherwise." And I for one welcome our new mollusk overlords.
The point is not to blend in with their surrondings, but to like something uninteresting to whatever they are trying to hide from. A predator that would feast on an octopus would not like pay attention to a piece of seaweed floating by or a coconut bouncing along the sea floor. Speaking of which, if I hadn't read the article, I would not have guessed that those were octopi.
I wouldn't think a black&white striped zebra is that well camoflauged either - but it works.
Long gone are the days when Slashdot has stories before mainstream media. I head this on NPR, oh well Slashdot, so much for being edgy.
Humans are different. We have the guns, and the opposable thumbs with which to use them.
Viral software licensing is not freedom, it is in fact GNU/Socialism.
The original article used "octopuses," which is fine, but then the submitted changed it to "octopi" to make himself look erudite. That is what pisses people like me off - it's not that the Greek is being forgotten, it's that pompous assholes try to show off with fancy classical conjugations but they are completely wrong.
It's almost as irritating as sitting in a class at a 2nd-rate university with a professor who thinks he's an expert but makes mistakes every five minutes during lecture.
Here is the deal though: They need an aqueous environment to move effectively. I suspect that for robotics teams, some combination of hydrostatic muscles and exoskeletons would be necessary, which now that I am thinking about it could be huge for artificial limbs for amputees. [snip] This technology could open the door for more capable artificial limbs and exoskeletons to enhance human movement as well as robotics.
I have no expertise in this area, so this might just be a lot of babble, but what sort of applications might this have with "prosthetic" eyes? It seems (to my uneducated mind) that you could have lenses that change shape and adapt to changing conditions much more rapidly. Perhaps an octopus muscle system girdling the eyeball instead of corrective lenses?
I know that sounds weird, and is probably unworkable for a variety of reasons. It just sounds weird enough for a Johnathon Lethem novel.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
As a linguist (or at least a prospective linguist), I have to disagree with you a little about your above point. Issues of "right" and "wrong" in language really have less to do with etymology and more to do with the whether or not the utterance is grammatical to those who hear it. Octopi has entered the common usage to the level that it does not sound awkward to most people. It is an accepted plural that is even listed in dictionaries. Yes, these dictionaries are descriptive, but that is really the only fair way to look at language.
Languages change. They change at a much slower rate now than they did historically because of increased travel and the need for standardized forms in order to facilitate understanding between groups that are distant from one another, but they still change. These changes are not always grammatical or accurate etymologically, but this is part of language. As much as it irks me, "irregardless" may eventually come into common enough usage that it will be a perfectly acceptable word. I will fight it tooth and nail, damnit, but it really isn't up to me.
I think your assessment of the person who posted this article to Slashdot may be a bit unfair. I doubt that the poster changed the word in an attempt to look erudite. Most people actually think that octopi is the correct plural, so he probably was just "correcting" a word that felt awkward to him. To be honest, despite the fact that I am aware of the "proper" plurals of the word, octopi still sounds more correct to me than either of the other two forms. Because I am a pedant, I don't use it, but I will acknowledge its pervasiveness.