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   Omni Letters (omniletters@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 26-Apr-2025 01:59:54 JST Omni Letters

   Watch the strange, life-like behavior of small ball bearings in castor oil when exposed to an electric field—a fascinating display of self-organization.

   📽: Stanford Complexity Group

   #science

   • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
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     tom jennings (tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org)'s status on Saturday, 26-Apr-2025 02:00:11 JST tom jennings

     in reply to

     @omniletters

     That's really pretty! And compelling. It does make one wonder at the original of living systems, in patterns emerging from seemingly unorganized stimulus... But what do we humans really know.

     The early cyberneticists, Beer, Pask, ... who were very psychedelic incidentally, were intentionally pushing the limits of defining causality, with the now crazy sounding self-emerging, "living?" systems, one of which is the "grew an ear" project involving particular metal salts that exhibited nonlinear growth in solutions in response to electrical current, sourced from the environment.... This ear developed a sensitivity to 50 Hz, which the (British) researchers seem to have overlooked as being their mains power supply frequency...

     https://www.pangaro.com/CCS/CCS-History/CCS-Cariani-Ear.html

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.