57: Don’t Lose Your Head! and Constructed Languages

Episode notes

Losing your head isn’t good, but what actually happens, and what can it tell us about animals, ethics, and bad science? And what is a constructed language, when does it fail, and when can it be use to make great… art? As they say, Ni Lernu Ĉion!

Content Warning that today’s science topic can be a bit grim, so if you want, you can skip ahead to 54:54

Things we Talk About:
Mike The Chicken
Sea Slug Moving
The Narmer Palette

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:02:36) Don’t Lose Your Head!
(00:54:55) Constructed Languages
(01:36:55) Outro

We also learn about:

Pretty clear cut or chopped, did we need to write this down? why do you die when you lose your head? let’s start with a deep philosophical question: are we our brains? Tom clearly doesn’t know Mike the chicken, Mike was the original pitch for Charlotte’s Web, mooching some slugs, The Mystery of the Beheading of Elysia Marginata, capital punishment comes from beheadings, the guillotine could behead 20 people per hour, “the most gentle of lethal methods”, …do you guys not have the death penalty? ethics of rat euthanasia, Canavero’s bogus self published head transplants, like the language you’re speaking RIGHT NOW, Auxiliary Engineered and Artistic Languages, Tom falls into Ella’s Esperanto trap, Esperanto was banned and persecuted, the benefit of Esperanto is it has no culture, English is a language of exceptions, 1850 to 1920 people were going WILD constructing languages, none of us had heard of Volapük, “a language without umlauts sounds monotonous, harsh, and boring”, the language wars, a priest and an eye doctor trying to solve the tower of babel, Esperanto has “dipthongs – ugly!”, “rattling an hard bony R”, Artlang POP QUIZ, for Tolkeins the languages came first, english is a tapestry of languages and artlangs can convey that, the use of purposefully meaningless artlangs, soo soo! NOOT NOOT! boyhowdy! nonsense languages have universality, citing the pingu fan wiki, is penguinese more universal than esperanto??? Toki Pona, newspeak, “and that brings us strangely and sharply to the end of the topic”, appreciating real turtles and robot turtles.

Sources:

BBC: The Chicken That Lived For 18 Months Without a Head
Britannica: How Mike the Chicken Survived Without a Head
Scientific America: Fact or Fiction?: A Cockroach Can Live without Its Head
New York Times: Meet the Sea Slugs That Chop Off Their Heads and Grow New Bodies
NewsWeek: Did Anne Boleyn Really Speak After She Was Beheaded? Here’s the Science
American Historical Association: Narmer Palette
2023 Paper: “The Most Gentle of Lethal Methods”: The Question of Retained Consciousness Following Decapitation
1975 Paper: EEG Evaluation of Humaneness of Asphyxia and Decapitation Euthanasia of the Laboratory Rat
2013 Paper: Electroencephalographic Evaluation of Decapitation of the Anaesthetized Rat
2011 Paper: Decapitation in Rats: Latency to Unconsciousness and the ‘Wave of Death’
1991 Paper: Pain Perception in Decapitated Rat Brain
New Scientist: Head transplant carried out on monkey, claims maverick surgeon
2019 Paper: First Human Head Transplantation: Surgically Challenging, Ethically Controversial and Historically Tempting
The Guardian: First Full Body Transplant is Two Years Away, Surgeon Claims
The Telegraph: First Head Transplant Successfully Carried Out on Monkey, Claims Surgeon
Vice: Head Transplant Surgeon Claims Human Brain Transplants Are ‘Technically Feasible’
2017 Paper: Surgical, eEthical, and Psychosocial Considerations in Human Head Transplantation
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Constructed languages:
Francois Rabelais
International Auxiliary Languages
Esperanto
Esperanto 2: electric boogaloo
Native Esperanto Speakers
Why Learn Esperanto:
English language exceptions
Creating new words in Esperanto
Volapük
Trüth, Beaüty, and Volapük
Quenya
Quenya Course
Klingon Language Institute
TGIF in Simlish
How Simlish was Created
Penguinese
Penguinese example
Animalese
Animalese example
Polygon on Animalese
Toki Pona:
Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
Experimental languages
Newspeak
Newspeak Dictionary