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

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 54:54Things we Talk About:Mike The ChickenSea Slug MovingThe Narmer PaletteTimestamps:(00:00:00) Intro(00:02:36) Don't Lose Your Head!(00:54:55) Constructed Languages(01:36:55) OutroSupport us with a Max Fun Membership!Join our Discord!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 HeadBritannica: How Mike the Chicken Survived Without a HeadScientific America: Fact or Fiction?: A Cockroach Can Live without Its HeadNew York Times: Meet the Sea Slugs That Chop Off Their Heads and Grow New BodiesNewsWeek: Did Anne Boleyn Really Speak After She Was Beheaded? Here's the ScienceAmerican Historical Association: Narmer Palette2023 Paper: "The Most Gentle of Lethal Methods": The Question of Retained Consciousness Following Decapitation1975 Paper: EEG Evaluation of Humaneness of Asphyxia and Decapitation Euthanasia of the Laboratory Rat2013 Paper: Electroencephalographic Evaluation of Decapitation of the Anaesthetized Rat2011 Paper: Decapitation in Rats: Latency to Unconsciousness and the ‘Wave of Death’1991 Paper: Pain Perception in Decapitated Rat BrainNew Scientist: Head transplant carried out on monkey, claims maverick surgeon2019 Paper: First Human Head Transplantation: Surgically Challenging, Ethically Controversial and Historically TemptingThe Guardian: First Full Body Transplant is Two Years Away, Surgeon ClaimsThe Telegraph: First Head Transplant Successfully Carried Out on Monkey, Claims SurgeonVice: Head Transplant Surgeon Claims Human Brain Transplants Are 'Technically Feasible'2017 Paper: Surgical, eEthical, and Psychosocial Considerations in Human Head Transplantation---Constructed languages:Francois RabelaisInternational Auxiliary LanguagesEsperantoEsperanto 2: electric boogalooNative Esperanto SpeakersWhy Learn Esperanto:English language exceptionsCreating new words in EsperantoVolapükTrüth, Beaüty, and VolapükQuenyaQuenya CourseKlingon Language InstituteTGIF in SimlishHow Simlish was CreatedPenguinesePenguinese exampleAnimaleseAnimalese examplePolygon on AnimaleseToki Pona:Sapir–Whorf hypothesisExperimental languagesNewspeakNewspeak Dictionary Thanks to everyone who participated in this year's MaxFunDrive! Still want to get in on the action? Follow this link to support this show (and get in on our limited-time keychain sale to benefit the Center for Constitutional Rights): https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn