Deep Dive: Burning Capitals, Borges’ Labyrinths, and the Thinking Arms of Octopus - August 24, 2025

In this Deep Dive episode, our hosts discuss the burning of Washington in 1814, Jorge Luis Borges’s creative methods, and the autonomous processing of octopus arms.

• 📜 The hosts dissect the British attack on Washington, D.C. in 1814 — the deliberate burning of the White House and Capitol, its tactical and psychological impact on a young nation, and how targeting symbolic infrastructure disrupted communications, records, and administrative continuity.
• 🎂 A birthday spotlight on Jorge Luis Borges: conversation focuses on Borges’s role as an Argentine writer and librarian, how his experiences shaped Ficciones and The Aleph, and the engineering-like construction of his stories with nested structures, mirrors, labyrinths and conceptual paradoxes.
• 💡 Fact of the day — octopus arms can “think” for themselves: the hosts describe decentralized neural processing in octopus limbs, how autonomous arms function like independent control units, and the implications for coordination, parallel processing and biological control architectures.

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