90: Octopuses & The Paralympics
90: Octopuses & The Paralympics  
Podcast: Let's Learn Everything!
Published On: Thu Aug 14 2025
Description: 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 DiagramSnail Nervous System DiagramOctopus Maze ImageVideo of Octopus Opening a JarVideo of Octopus CamouflageParalympics AdTimestamps:(00:00:00) Intro(00:02:56) Octopuses(00:55:08) The Paralympics(01:41:44) OutroSupport us with a Max Fun Membership!Join our Discord!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:The Infamous Octopuses from Space PaperLive Science: Octopi are Not AliensSciAm: Are Octopuses Smart?Octopus NeuroecologyHow Octopuses Control their BodyDiscover Mag: Octopus IntelligenceThe Amazing Octopus Maze StudyOPB: Octopus IntelligenceConvergent Evolution of BrainsExperimental Evidence for Spatial Learning in OctopusesSciAm: The Mind of an OctopusOctopus Problem SolvingPlay in OctopusesOctopus City StudyBBC: Octopus CityNeural Control of Cephalopod CamouflageOctopus Camouflag StudyOctopus Aging and Evolution Paper---Sage: Deaf History of SportOlympedia: George EyserWiki: George EyserOlympics: Oliver Halassy Paralympic.org: History International Wheelchair & Amputee Sports Federation: Paralympic Games 1960 - 1992Paralympic.org: Paralympic GamesBBC: Stoke Mandeville GamesParalympic.org: Who We AreParalympic.org: Paris 2024 SportsWashington Post: Wheelchair Rugby Top End Sports: Discountinued Paralympic SportsSBS News: Sports that Don't Have an Olympic EquivalentOlmypics: BocciaParalympic.org: ClassificationBBC Inside Science: ClassificationBAA.org: Parathletics DivisionsBBC: Tully Kearney Paralympics GB: ClassificationBBC: Spain ID Basketball and ID in ParalympicsThe Conversation: When Paralympic Atheletes Fake the Extent of their DisabilityVice: Spain ID Basketball (translanted)The Conversation: Why somne Disabled People are Critical of the Paralympics Dis(Empowering) Paralymoics Histories by Danielle PeersGuardian: Channel 4 Superhuman AdGuardian: Channel 4 New AdBlog: Paralympics, Good or Bad for Disabled People