I picked up a rescue dog from the humane society last night. I'm calling him "Bogie" (I love Bogart movies!)It is so good to have Isaac home. What was to be two or three days in the hospital became four weeks and it was getting old for all concerned.
He lost a lot of weight, but we've started him on soft foods, so he is eating for the first time in a month. Very cool.
In my classroom I have a poster I made: "Questions are more important than answers. Answers are often wrong, questions never are."
I love learning new things. I will come across an odd fact follow that rabbit trail, and the trails which branch off it.
For example, the other day I read something odd about the octopus and looked the creature up. I read the wikipedia article three times, and also read about the hectocotylus, muscular hydrostats, and the Hawaiian creation myth.
Amazing creatures! I am still reeling over the bizarre qualities this animal possesses.
While the females guard their eggs until they hatch, the infant offspring (up to 200,000 of them) are left on their own to learn how to survive. They do this without, apparently, any instruction and no instinctual knowledge. They learn everything from scratch!
Experiments show they have short and long term memory, and have amazing problem solving capabilities.
After reproduction the males and females die, not of starvation (though they usually cease to eat) but because an organ behind their eyes releases a toxin. They self destruct! Elements of their reproduction were described by Aristotle but not believed until rediscovered in the 19th century.
Their limbs can detach and be autonomous for a while, even mimicing surrounding objects (in appearance and movement).
They have three hearts. One for each gill and one for the rest of their body.
The have multiple types of cells which can alter their color. They can make themselves look like almost anything around them. They have been observed to mimic a plant, will move about on only two legs to maintain the illusion.
The ink they emit not only hides them visually but deadens the sense of smell of other creatures.
He lost a lot of weight, but we've started him on soft foods, so he is eating for the first time in a month. Very cool.
In my classroom I have a poster I made: "Questions are more important than answers. Answers are often wrong, questions never are."
I love learning new things. I will come across an odd fact follow that rabbit trail, and the trails which branch off it.
For example, the other day I read something odd about the octopus and looked the creature up. I read the wikipedia article three times, and also read about the hectocotylus, muscular hydrostats, and the Hawaiian creation myth.
Amazing creatures! I am still reeling over the bizarre qualities this animal possesses.
While the females guard their eggs until they hatch, the infant offspring (up to 200,000 of them) are left on their own to learn how to survive. They do this without, apparently, any instruction and no instinctual knowledge. They learn everything from scratch!
Experiments show they have short and long term memory, and have amazing problem solving capabilities.
After reproduction the males and females die, not of starvation (though they usually cease to eat) but because an organ behind their eyes releases a toxin. They self destruct! Elements of their reproduction were described by Aristotle but not believed until rediscovered in the 19th century.
Their limbs can detach and be autonomous for a while, even mimicing surrounding objects (in appearance and movement).
They have three hearts. One for each gill and one for the rest of their body.
The have multiple types of cells which can alter their color. They can make themselves look like almost anything around them. They have been observed to mimic a plant, will move about on only two legs to maintain the illusion.
The ink they emit not only hides them visually but deadens the sense of smell of other creatures.
They can move by crawling, walking, or using their jets. They have been observed crawling from one tide pool to another in the open air and have crawled onto the decks of fishing ships to get at crabs.
They have been observed to use tools.
They are so intelligent that the UK Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 has granted them honorary vertebrate status so they may only be experimented on with anesthesia.
Perhaps one of the most astonishing things I learned about them is that their oxygen transporting element is copper not iron. They have blue blood. (interesting they can eat iron based creatures and iron based creatures can eat them.) The copper is in proteins spread through their blood plasma not in something akin to red blood cells as ours are.
What an amazing animal!
If such a creature were sentient, and had a soul, what sort of connection might it have with the Creator? God would seem more alien to them than to us because they do not have the concept of community, of family, that we do. They might relate to the idea of a trinity through the concept of autonomous limbs connected into a single being, but the idea of love and sharing emotional bonds would probably be impossible.
How would such a sentient being understand truth? Truth would be measured in such things as a sense of touch that includes taste, a sense of vision that includes polarized light, but the idea that everything is illusion, since their own bodies routinely mimic reality easily, would make the idea of falsehood as normal as empirical truth.
Would the concept of eternal life be beyond their comprehension since their bodies self destruct at a given time? Old age is impossible for them. They would see life as fleeting and of little value since so few of their offspring endure (which they don't even understand since they have many but never live long enough to witness them). No mates, no children, just solitary lives of mimicry and illusion... the tang of copper at their touch rather than the savor of iron in their mouths.
About this point, dear reader, you are probably shaking your head. Not at the strange mind a sentient octopus might have, but at the strange mind this writer has. :)
That's OK.
That is the real point of this post. My mind. I'm amused I ponder such things. Makes me smile that I wander into such musings. What really gives me a the thrill is when I think about the strangeness of the universe and the possibilities beyond the fields we (I) know.
What a wonderful gift the Lord has given me!
