Why Is This Octopus Drunk?

From time to time, I’ll come across something that makes me really curious. This feeling has been with me for my entire life—I’m curious by nature, and while some parents might have discouraged this nature, I think my folks did a great job of encouraging exploration and fostering lifetime curiosity in me.

Unfortunately, I learned to suppress this instinct as life dragged on. Why? Because it has been very, very difficult to find answers to questions for most of my life. If you wanted to know the answer to something fairly complex or nonintuitive back in the day, you needed to read books.

No problem—I loved reading books! The only problems were figuring out which books might contain the answers you were looking for, and then actually getting your hands on them.

Even further: there were lots and lots of books written by the end of the 20th century, probably at least a hundred million. That’s a lot of books! Tons of academic and literary answers could be found in them. However, suppose yo…