LEO’S 2K CELEBRATION ➜ @alix-mei
michael myers in
HALLOWEEN
2007 | dir. rob zombie
Octopus filmed changing colours while sleeping.
i wonder what they are dreaming about
Changing colors duh
What’s really cool about this is that cephalopod (octopus, squid, etc.) intelligence evolved completely separately from intelligence in tetrapods (which includes primates, dolphins, crows… basically any other intelligent animals you can think of). Cephalopods are very, very far away from us on the tree of life. For context, you and a starfish are more closely related than you and an octopus. The last common ancestor of humans and cephalopods was the so-called Urbilaterian, the hypothetical first animal with a left-right symmetric body. This animal almost certainly had, at most, an extremely simple nervous system, without anything resembling a brain.
All this is to say that the fact that this octopus appears to be dreaming means one of two things. Either
a) dreaming is a very, very old thing indeed, going directly back to the Urbilaterian. This would mean that almost every animal, from insects to starfish to sea slugs to newts, is likely to have the ability to dream in some capacity or another (unless they have specifically lost it by evolutionary simplification).
or
b) dreaming evolved entirely independently in cephalopods when they developed greater intelligence. This would suggest, at least, that there’s something very fundamental about dreaming related to intelligence itself, which causes it to emerge independently when sufficient intelligence arises.
Needless to say, either of these outcomes would be really very cool.
I just finished telling you that I am not ashamed of my poverty; but you should know that I am ashamed, I am ashamed of it most of all, afraid of it above all, more than if I had stolen something, because I am so vain, it is as if I have been flayed, and even the air alone now hurts me.
“
| — | Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (via philosophybits) |
In our interview with Greg Woolf, we chat all about the second edition of his book Rome: An Empire’s Story. What’s the book about? Well, It’s a total history of Rome. It starts with the 8th century BCE, when it’s just a scatter of villages, which we only know through archaeology, and it ends up at the 8th century CE, when Arab armies have conquered Egypt and Syria and swept along North Africa and plunged into Spain. For some hundreds of years, the northwest has been ruled by German Kings and so on. I start from a tiny city on the river and end up with a tiny city on the Bosporus and in between, it sort of expands and contracts, just not back to the same point.
We know quite a lot more about very, very early Rome and quite a lot more about late Rome. For early Rome, there have been some studies on how Rome in the centuries before there’s any local writing or local history writing, how it interacts with other Italian people. Again, naturally, that’s the story that also owes a lot to archaeology. So, we have new accounts of that which are not just the Legends of Romulus and Remus and Aeneas and so on, but it’s also stories about how different communities up and down the Italian Peninsula come together, form alliances. You can, if you like, see some of early Rome, not so much as one plucky little people conquering all their neighbours, but actually almost as a sort of process by which different groups of local allies sort of pull it together. And, of course, Rome still reigns at the centre, but you see how the vested interests of landowners and chiefs and warlords all come together to create a kind of, Italy wide project
— BUY ROME: AN EMPIRE’S STORY (SECOND EDITION) —
https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/rome-9780190687458?cc=au&lang=en&— FURTHER READING, SUGGESTED BY GREG —
Archaeologists keep producing more information about the Roman World. Look at http://pompeiisites.org/en/comunicati/the-room-of-the-slaves-the-latest-discovery-at-civita-giuliana/ for a stunning example, the first slave-quarters found at Pompeii.Natural science is changing the way we think about the past. This multidisciplinary team from Yale link massive eruptions of Alaskan volcanoes to traumatic change in the Roman Mediterranean
https://news.yale.edu/2020/06/22/climate-change-and-rise-roman-empireRoman historians now understand migration better than ever before and relate it to modern experience. https://theconversation.com/immigration-how-ancient-rome-dealt-with-the-barbarians-at-the-gate-109933
— SUPPORT US VIA OUR PATREON —
https://www.patreon.com/join/whencyclopedia— BUY OUR MERCH —
https://www.worldhistory.store/— CHAPTERS —
0:00 Introduction
0:44 What is Rome: An Empire’s Story (Second Edition) about?
2:15 Why write a book on the history of Rome?
5:38 What’s different in this second edition?
13:00 What did you find the most surprising when researching the second edition?
15:24 What’s the one thing you think people need to know about your book?
21:24 Outro— WANT TO KNOW MORE? —
Romulus and Remus https://www.worldhistory.org/Romulus_and_Remus/
Archaeology https://www.worldhistory.org/Archaeology/
Roman Empire https://www.worldhistory.org/Roman_Empire/— WATCH NEXT —
Norse America: The Story of a Founding Myth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldOtYQOqCw8
The Founding of Rome: The Story of Romulus and Remus in Roman Mythology https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyxPwsrbaT4
Saturnalia: the Jolliest Ancient Roman Festival! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id–bsV7Wv8
Ancient Democracy: What is Democracy and Where Did it Start? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dd8Kb1jee0Q— ATTRIBUTIONS —
The music used in this recording is the intellectual copyright of Michael Levy, a prolific composer for the recreated lyres of antiquity, and used with the creator’s permission. Michael Levy’s music is available to stream at all the major digital music platforms. Find out more on:
https://www.ancientlyre.com
https://open.spotify.com/artist/7Dx2vFEg8DmOJ5YCRm4A5v?si=emacIH9CRieFNGXRUyJ9
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ1X6F7lGMEadnNETSzTv8A— THUMBNAIL IMAGE —
Oxford University Press & Greg Woolf
Rome: An Empire’s Story (Second Edition)
CopyrightWorld History Encyclopedia
www.worldhistory.org#ancientrome #romanempire #romempire
