Watch Beautiful Footage of the Rarely Seen Glass Octopus

in Biology, Science | August 3rd, 2021

First things first: the plur­al of octo­pus is not “octopi,” it’s octo­pus­es.

Now, drop every­thing and watch the video above. It’s an extreme­ly rare sight­ing of a glass octo­pus, “a near­ly trans­par­ent species, whose only vis­i­ble fea­tures are its optic nerve, eye­balls and diges­tive tract” notes the Schmidt Ocean Insti­tute. “Before this expe­di­tion, there has been lim­it­ed live footage of the glass octo­pus, forc­ing sci­en­tists to learn about the ani­mal by study­ing spec­i­mens found in the gut con­tents of preda­tors.”

Lim­it­ed sight­ings did not stop the poet Mar­i­anne Moore from see­ing some­thing like this won­drous crea­ture in her mind’s eye:

it lies “in grandeur and in mass”
beneath a sea of shift­ing snow-dunes;
dots of cycla­men-red and maroon on its clear­ly defined
pseu­do-podia
made of glass that will bend‑a much need­ed inven­tion-
com­pris­ing twen­ty-eight ice-fields from fifty to five hun­dred
feet thick,
of unimag­ined del­i­ca­cy.

Glass octo­pus­es have green dots and do not live under “snow-dunes” but in the warm Pacif­ic waters beneath the Phoenix Islands Pro­tect­ed Area (PIPA) near Samoa, and else­where Schmidt Ocean Insti­tute sci­en­tists cap­tured rare footage and “iden­ti­fied new marine organ­isms,” writes Colos­sal, while record­ing “the sought-after whale shark swim­ming through the Pacif­ic Ocean.”

We must admit, Moore got the sense of awe just right….

Marine sci­en­tists from around the world embarked on the 34-day expe­di­tion on the ship Falkor. Using “high-res­o­lu­tion map­ping tools,” Ocean Con­ser­van­cy writes, they sur­veyed “more than 11,500 square miles of sea floor” and observed “not one but two glass octo­pus­es,” with a remote oper­at­ed vehi­cle (ROV) called SuB­as­t­ian.

See sev­er­al views of the glass octo­pus­es — the stars of the show — and dozens more rare and beau­ti­ful crea­tures (such as peren­ni­al inter­net favorite the Dum­bo octo­pus, below, from a 2020 expe­di­tion) at the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s Insta­gram. “We’re at the begin­ning of the UN Decade of Ocean Sci­ence for Sus­tain­able Devel­op­ment,” remarked chief sci­en­tist of the Falkor expe­di­tion Dr. Ran­di Rot­jan of Boston Uni­ver­si­ty. “[N]ow is the time to think about con­ser­va­tion broad­ly across all ocean­scapes, and the maps, footage, and data we have col­lect­ed will hope­ful­ly help to inform pol­i­cy and man­age­ment in deci­sion mak­ing around new high seas pro­tect­ed areas.” Learn more at the Schmidt Ocean Insti­tute here.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

A Rad­i­cal Map Puts the Oceans–Not Land–at the Cen­ter of Plan­et Earth (1942)

The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library Makes 150,000 High-Res Illus­tra­tions of the Nat­ur­al World Free to Down­load

When an Octo­pus Caused the Great Stat­en Island Fer­ry Dis­as­ter (Novem­ber 22, 1963)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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1960s Schoolchildren Imagine Life in the Year 2000: Overpopulation, Mass Unemployment, Robot Courts, Rising Seas & Beyond

in History, Television | August 2nd, 2021

West­ern­ers today enter­tain noth­ing but grim, dystopi­an visions of the future. This in stark con­trast to the post­war decades when, as every­one knows, all was opti­mism. “In the year 2000, I think I’ll prob­a­bly be in a space­ship to the moon, dic­tat­ing to robots,” says an Eng­lish school­boy in the 1966 footage above. “Or else I may be in charge of a robot court, judg­ing some robots, or I may be at the funer­al of a com­put­er. Or if some­thing’s gone wrong with the nuclear bombs, I may be back from hunt­ing, in a cave.” Grant­ed, this was the mid­dle of the Cold War, when human­i­ty felt itself per­pet­u­al­ly at the brink of self-destruc­tion. How did oth­er chil­dren imag­ine the turn of the mil­len­ni­um? “I don’t like the idea of get­ting up and find­ing you’ve got a cab­bage pill to eat for break­fast.”

Inter­viewed for the BBC tele­vi­sion series Tomor­row’s World, these ado­les­cents paint a series of bleak pic­tures of the year 2000, some more vivid than oth­ers. “All these atom­ic bombs will be drop­ping around the place,” pre­dicts anoth­er boy. One will get near the cen­ter, because it will make a huge, great big crater, and the whole world will just melt.”

One girl sounds more resigned: “There’s noth­ing you can do to stop it. The more peo­ple get bombs — some­body’s going to use it one day.” But not all these kids envi­sion a nuclear holo­caust: “I don’t think there is going to be atom­ic war­fare,” says one boy, “but I think there is going to be all this automa­tion. Peo­ple are going to be out of work, and a great pop­u­la­tion, and I think some­thing has to be done about it.”

The idea that “com­put­ers are tak­ing over” now has great cur­ren­cy among pun­dits, but it seems school­girls were mak­ing the same point more than half a cen­tu­ry ago. “In the year 2000, there just won’t be enough jobs to go around,” says one of them. “The only jobs there will be, will be for peo­ple with high IQ who can work com­put­ers and such things.” Anoth­er con­tribut­ing fac­tor, as oth­er kids see it, is an over­pop­u­la­tion so extreme that “either every­one will be liv­ing in big domes in the Sahara, or they’ll be under­sea.” And there’ll be plen­ty of sea to live under, as one boy fig­ures it, when it ris­es to cov­er every­thing but “the high­lands in Scot­land, and some of the big hills in Eng­land and Wales.” Less dra­mat­i­cal­ly but more chill­ing­ly, some of these young stu­dents fear a ter­mi­nal bore­dom at the end of his­to­ry: “Every­thing will be the same. Peo­ple will be the same; things will be the same.”

Not all of them fore­see a whol­ly dehu­man­ized future. “Black peo­ple won’t be sep­a­rate, they’ll be all mixed in with the white peo­ple,” says one girl. “There will be poor and rich, but they won’t look down on each oth­er.” Her pre­dic­tion may not quite have come to pass even in 2021, but nor have most of her cohort’s more har­row­ing fan­tasies. If any­thing has col­lapsed since then, it’s stan­dards of ado­les­cent artic­u­la­cy. As Roger Ebert wrote of Michael Apt­ed’s Up series, which doc­u­ments the same gen­er­a­tion of Eng­lish chil­dren, these clips make one pon­der “the inar­tic­u­late murk­i­ness, self-help clichés, sports metaphors, and man­age­ment tru­isms that clut­ter Amer­i­can speech,” a con­di­tion that now afflicts even the Eng­lish. But then, not even the most imag­i­na­tive child could have known that the dystopia to come would be lin­guis­tic.

Relat­ed Con­tent

Duck and Cov­er: The 1950s Film That Taught Mil­lions of School­child­ren How to Sur­vive a Nuclear Bomb

Jean Cocteau Deliv­ers a Speech to the Year 2000 in 1962: “I Hope You Have Not Become Robots”

For­eign Exchange Stu­dents Debate Whether Amer­i­can Teenagers Have Too Much Free­dom (1954)

The Sum­mer­hill School, the Rad­i­cal Edu­ca­tion­al Exper­i­ment That Let Stu­dents Learn What, When, and How They Want (1966)

Hunter S. Thomp­son Chill­ing­ly Pre­dicts the Future, Telling Studs Terkel About the Com­ing Revenge of the Eco­nom­i­cal­ly & Tech­no­log­i­cal­ly “Obso­lete” (1967)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Cramps Legendary Concert at a California Psychiatric Hospital Gets Revisited in the New Documentary, We Were There to Be There: Watch It Online

in Music | August 2nd, 2021

“Some­body told me you peo­ple are crazy, but I’m  not so sure about that. You seem to be all right to me.” — Lux Inte­ri­or

In the late 1970s and ear­ly 1980s, “San Fran­cis­co was a much more con­ser­v­a­tive place,” says Colum­bia University’s Lin­coln Mitchell in the doc­u­men­tary above, We Were There to Be There. The new film chron­i­cles the leg­endary 1978 appear­ance of psy­chobil­ly punks The Cramps and SF-based art-rock­ers The Mutants at the Napa State Hos­pi­tal, an his­toric psy­chi­atric facil­i­ty in the famous wine-grow­ing area. At the time, Cal­i­for­ni­a’s for­mer gov­er­nor Ronald Rea­gan was con­tend­ing for the pres­i­den­cy after slash­ing social ser­vices at the state lev­el.

There were few polit­i­cal sym­pa­thies in the area for those con­fined to Napa State, as the new doc­u­men­tary above by Mike Plante and Jason Willis shows. Pro­duced by Field of Vision, the film “explores the events that led to CBGB main­stays the Cramps dri­ving over 3,000 miles to per­form,” notes Rolling Stone’s Claire Shaf­fer. We Were There to Be There begins with this cru­cial socio-polit­i­cal con­text, remem­ber­ing the show as “both a land­mark moment for punk rock and for the per­cep­tion of men­tal health care with­in U.S. pop­u­lar cul­ture.”

The doc also explores how the per­for­mances could have made such an impact, when they were “seen by almost no one,” as Phil Bar­ber writes at Vice: “about a dozen devot­ed punkers who drove up with the bands from San Fran­cis­co, and per­haps 100 or 200 patients.” Indeed, the show’s mem­o­ry only sur­vived thanks to “about 20 min­utes of footage of The Cramps’ set shot by a small oper­a­tion called Tar­get Video,” a col­lec­tive formed the pre­vi­ous year by video artist Joe Rees and col­lab­o­ra­tors Jill Hoff­man, Jack­ie Sharp, and Sam Edwards.

The show came about through Howie Klein, a fix­ture of the San Fran­cis­co punk scene who wrote for local zines and booked the club Mabuhay Gar­dens before becom­ing pres­i­dent of Reprise Records. Napa State’s new direc­tor Bart Swain had been stag­ing con­certs for the res­i­dents. Klein promised to send an ear­ly new wave band but sent The Mutants and The Cramps instead, to Swain’s ini­tial dis­may. (He was sure he would be fired after the show.)

Released in 1984, the edit­ed Tar­get release opens with a shot of an atom­ic blast and doesn’t let up. “Maybe you’ve seen the video. If so, you haven’t for­got­ten it,” writes Bar­ber: “The black-and-white images are dis­tort­ed and poor­ly lit. The audio is rough. It’s a trans­fix­ing spec­ta­cle. The Cramps make no attempt to paci­fy their men­tal­ly ill admir­ers. Nor do they wink at some inside joke. They just rip.”

Tar­get Video toured the U.S. and Europe, screen­ing its polit­i­cal­ly-charged punk con­cert films for eager young kids in the Reagan/Thatcher era, who saw a very dif­fer­ent approach to treat­ing peo­ple suf­fer­ing from men­tal ill­ness in the footage from Napa State. The doc­u­men­tary includes inter­views with the Mutants, whose per­for­mance did­n’t make it on film, and fix­tures of the San Fran­cis­co scene like Vicky Vale, pub­lish­er of RE/Search, who pro­vide crit­i­cal com­men­tary on the event.

Despite its rep­u­ta­tion as a bizarre nov­el­ty gig, the show came off as con­trolled chaos — just like any oth­er Cramps gig. “It was a beau­ti­ful, beau­ti­ful thing,” says Jill Hoff­man-Kow­al of Tar­get Video. “What we did for those peo­ple, it was lib­er­at­ing. They had so much fun. They pre­tend­ed they were singing, they were jump­ing on stage. It was a cou­ple hours of total free­dom. They did­n’t judge the band, and the band did­n’t judge them.”

We Were There to Be There will be added to our col­lec­tion of Free Online Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Cramps Play a Men­tal Hos­pi­tal in Napa, Cal­i­for­nia in 1978: The Punk­est of Punk Con­certs

Down­load 50+ Issues of Leg­endary West Coast Punk Music Zines from the 1970–80s: Dam­age, Slash & No Mag

Sun Ra Plays a Music Ther­a­py Gig at a Men­tal Hos­pi­tal; Inspires Patient to Talk for the First Time in Years

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Take an Intellectual Odyssey with a Free MIT Course on Douglas Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize-Winning Book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

in Computer Science, Creativity, Math, MIT, Music, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Psychology | August 2nd, 2021

In 1979, math­e­mati­cian Kurt Gödel, artist M.C. Esch­er, and com­pos­er J.S. Bach walked into a book title, and you may well know the rest. Dou­glas R. Hof­s­tadter won a Pulitzer Prize for Gödel, Esch­er, Bach: an Eter­nal Gold­en Braid, his first book, thence­forth (and hence­forth) known as GEB. The extra­or­di­nary work is not a trea­tise on math­e­mat­ics, art, or music, but an essay on cog­ni­tion through an explo­ration of all three — and of for­mal sys­tems, recur­sion, self-ref­er­ence, arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, etc. Its pub­lish­er set­tled on the pithy descrip­tion, “a metaphor­i­cal fugue on minds and machines in the spir­it of Lewis Car­roll.”

GEB attempt­ed to reveal the mind at work; the minds of extra­or­di­nary indi­vid­u­als, for sure, but also all human minds, which behave in sim­i­lar­ly unfath­omable ways. One might also describe the book as oper­at­ing in the spir­it — and the prac­tice — of Her­man Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, a nov­el Hesse wrote in response to the data-dri­ven machi­na­tions of fas­cism and their threat to an intel­lec­tu­al tra­di­tion he held par­tic­u­lar­ly dear. An alter­nate title (and key phrase in the book) Mag­is­ter Ludi, puns on both “game” and “school,” and alludes to the impor­tance of play and free asso­ci­a­tion in the life of the mind.

Hesse’s eso­teric game, writes his biog­ra­ph­er Ralph Freed­man, con­sists of “con­tem­pla­tion, the secrets of the Chi­nese I Ching and West­ern math­e­mat­ics and music” and seems sim­i­lar enough to Hof­s­tadter’s approach and that of the instruc­tors of MIT’s open course, Gödel, Esch­er, Bach: A Men­tal Space Odyssey. Offered through the High School Stud­ies Pro­gram as a non-cred­it enrich­ment course, it promis­es “an intel­lec­tu­al vaca­tion” through “Zen Bud­dhism, Log­ic, Meta­math­e­mat­ics, Com­put­er Sci­ence, Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, Recur­sion, Com­plex Sys­tems, Con­scious­ness, Music and Art.”

Stu­dents will not study direct­ly the work of Gödel, Esch­er, and Bach but rather “find their spir­its aboard our men­tal ship,” the course descrip­tion notes, through con­tem­pla­tions of canons, fugues, strange loops, and tan­gled hier­ar­chies. How do mean­ing and form arise in sys­tems like math and music? What is the rela­tion­ship of fig­ure to ground in art? “Can recur­sion explain cre­ativ­i­ty,” as one of the course notes asks. Hof­s­tadter him­self has pur­sued the ques­tion beyond the entrench­ment of AI research in big data and brute force machine learn­ing. For all his daunt­ing eru­di­tion and chal­leng­ing syn­the­ses, we must remem­ber that he is play­ing a high­ly intel­lec­tu­al game, one that repli­cates his own expe­ri­ence of think­ing.

Hof­s­tadter sug­gests that before we can under­stand intel­li­gence, we must first under­stand cre­ativ­i­ty. It may reveal its secrets in com­par­a­tive analy­ses of the high­est forms of intel­lec­tu­al play, where we see the clever for­mal rules that gov­ern the mind’s oper­a­tions; the blind alleys that explain its fail­ures and lim­i­ta­tions; and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of ever actu­al­ly repro­duc­ing work­ings in a machine. Watch the lec­tures above, grab a copy of Hofstadter’s book, and find course notes, read­ings, and oth­er resources for the fas­ci­nat­ing course Gödel, Esch­er, Bach: A Men­tal Space Odyssey archived here. The course will be added to our list, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How a Bach Canon Works. Bril­liant.

Math­e­mat­ics Made Vis­i­ble: The Extra­or­di­nary Math­e­mat­i­cal Art of M.C. Esch­er

The Mir­ror­ing Mind: An Espres­so-Fueled Inter­pre­ta­tion of Dou­glas Hofstadter’s Ground­break­ing Ideas

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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