90: Octopuses & The Paralympics

Episode notes

How strange are octopuses really? We’re going to be debunking some claims, then rebunking them with some real, amazing facts about our fellow earthlings. And what the history of the paralympics? What can we learn from its attempts and its failures and its importance in sports?

See Tom’s Science Game Show in NYC!

Things we Talk About:
Octopus Virus Diagram
Snail Nervous System Diagram
Octopus Maze Image
Video of Octopus Opening a Jar
Video of Octopus Camouflage
Paralympics Ad

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:02:56) Octopuses
(00:55:08) The Paralympics
(01:41:44) Outro

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We also learn about: Censoring octopussy, 3 science communicators get rabid over a dubious study, octopi are so smart they could only have come about from fertilized eggs aboard an asteroid, cephalopods evolved a central nervous system independently with ganglia, the “head” of an octopus is where there other organs are, octopi don’t have 5 brains but they do have a lot of distributed neurons, each sucker is a finger-nose-tongue that can make decisions on its own, octopi have terrible hand eye coordination but can learn to be better at it, Ella thinks “man this would be a great topic for the podcast”, octopi are aliens in the metaphorical sense – and maybe it’s a bad metaphor, I’m not a playing I’m developing flexible behavioral strategies, octopuses play pully downy rather than keepy uppy, the criteria of play, we thought Ella was going to compliment Tom but of course that wasn’t it, octopus cities have populations between 2 and 11, Ella’s gerrymandering octopus city, its more about shared resources and cheaper rent than grand designs, octopus color changing is way more than just pixel cells, but… octopuses are colorblind, their sucker opsins sense color and send directly to chromatophores, octopuses can know a color without seeing it, these are amazing earthling behaviors, Ella was looking for a simple un-nuanced not heavy misc topic, the first Stoke Manderville games, fuck you we’re doing our games on the same day, the organizer of that first game had uhhhhh bad views on disabled people, the Paralypics grew really fast because there was a huge demand for it, Ella loves murderball, goalball and boccia are Paralympic unique sports, the classification system of the Paralympics, the work that goes into the classification system and the flaws and harms it can sometimes have on the athletes, as human as it is to run fast it’s human to cheat, the Spanish ID baseball scandal halted ID sports for 10 years, how the Paralympics and the public views the Paralympians, Ella unfortunately doesn’t solve ableism by the end of the topic, I hear enough of Tom on the show already.

Sources:
Octopus Virus Diagram
Snail Nervous System Diagram
Octopus Maze Image
Octopus Neuroecology
How Octopuses Control their Body
Discover Mag: Octopus Intelligence
The Amazing Octopus Maze Study
OPB: Octopus Intelligence
Convergent Evolution of Brains
Experimental Evidence for Spatial Learning in Octopuses
SciAm: The Mind of an Octopus
Octopus Problem Solving
Play in Octopuses
Octopus City Study
BBC: Octopus City
Neural Control of Cephalopod Camouflage
Octopus Camouflag Study
Octopus Aging and Evolution Paper
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Sage: Deaf History of Sport
Olympedia: George Eyser
Wiki: George Eyser
Olympics: Oliver Halassy 
Paralympic.org: History 
International Wheelchair & Amputee Sports Federation: Paralympic Games 1960 – 1992
Paralympic.org: Paralympic Games
BBC: Stoke Mandeville Games
Paralympic.org: Who We Are
Paralympic.org: Paris 2024 Sports
Washington Post: Wheelchair Rugby 
Top End Sports: Discountinued Paralympic Sports
SBS News: Sports that Don’t Have an Olympic Equivalent
Olmypics: Boccia
Paralympic.org: Classification
BBC Inside Science: Classification
BAA.org: Parathletics Divisions
BBC: Tully Kearney 
Paralympics GB: Classification
BBC: Spain ID Basketball and ID in Paralympics
The Conversation: When Paralympic Atheletes Fake the Extent of their Disability
Vice: Spain ID Basketball (translanted)
The Conversation: Why somne Disabled People are Critical of the Paralympics 
Dis(Empowering) Paralymoics Histories by Danielle Peers
Guardian: Channel 4 Superhuman Ad
Guardian: Channel 4 New Ad
Blog: Paralympics, Good or Bad for Disabled People