Too many comments about AI and not enough fun facts about isopods! Can anyone tell me more about them? How do their eyes work? They look like blackberries in a lot of the species.
That means that they are made of thousands of small eyes, named ommatidia, each of which detects the light coming from a certain direction, so that all together can provide an image. Each small bump that you see on the surface of their blackberry-like eyes is one of the small eyes, i.e. one of the ommatidia.
Each of the ommatidia is a long tube, having at the interior end one or more photoreceptors. The length of the tube ensures that only the light coming from a direction parallel to the axis of the tube can reach the photoreceptors, instead of being absorbed by the walls of the tube.
In the photographs, it can be seen that even the species that are otherwise mostly transparent have black eyes, or at least eyes of a dark color. This is a requirement for any kind of eye, because in order to detect light it must absorb it. So in many animals where the eyes may not have a more obvious structure they can still be recognized by being black or at least dark spots.
In most compound eyes each of the ommatidia corresponds with 1 pixel of the image that they see, so the number of pixels in an image is only of a few thousands, thus they have poor angular resolution in comparison with vertebrates or cephalopods.
There are compound eyes where several ommatidia correspond to a single pixel, trading off angular resolution for a greater sensitivity in low light, or where each of the ommatidia corresponds to several pixels, because it contains a small lens that can separate the light coming from different directions, projecting it on distinct photoreceptors.
Personally I love a lot about software engineering (iterative problem solving, sorting through complexities, the predictability you mention or at least how things are logical and often deterministic, etc) but I also love being outside and moving my body. After years of sitting behind a computer all day I do day dream about work that fulfills me in other ways. I'm sure if I took a different job and spent all day in the field I would miss software in a similar vein; time is finite and the number of possible ways you can spend it is not.
I really really love both Outer Wilds and the DLC and think the reddit community, when asked, does a great job of providing advice or tips for specific situations without revealing too much.
Such a great book! I thought the whole section on why we age was compelling. The idea that nature can select for mutations which may be beneficial earlier on but have harmful effects after a given time period was new to me.
I strongly recommend both of these books. The Soul of an Octopus is more anecdotal and Other Minds is more academic; in sum they offer not just a fascinating picture of octopuses, but a larger discussion on consciousness and foreign intelligence.
