Lu,
If we could go to one central issue with your discussions, it is that you have believed in what a basic text has told you for a very long time (I think you mentioned fifty odd years).
You need to grasp that occaisonnaly books are written to give a BASIC understanding of a subject to a BASIC user. Keep It Simple Stupid. Good principle. BUT, if you want to know how it ACTUALLY works, you would need to get some post basic course education. in other words - believe everything you read in DAY ONE texts and you will only ever achieve a DAY ONE understanding.
Think of it thus: Is there ANYTHING you have learned outside of your basic engineering course?
Answer Yes: Then maybe not everything on the basic course is all there is to know.
Answer No: You only need to listen to newly graduated mechanics because they have the most recent understanding of the basic texts.
Heedm,
Suprisingly, I am "reliably" told by a slightly nutty relative that the latest experiments have begun to show that Octopuses can recognise individual scientists by their face and can react differently to different known faces (i.e. a personality)!! Apparently they have demonstrated that they are smarter than pigs (the smartest farm animal) This is leading to SPECULATION that they are/might be more intellegent than porpoises, but probably not dolphins. But I bet the greenies wont save them because they are not majestic like whales, nor cute and playful like porpoises.
But (are you listening Lu) if they can prove this intellegence is there, maybe I will no longer believe my high school text book that says dolphins, whales and then porpoises are the sea's most intellegent animals...
