• Greenleaf [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    4 months ago

    Yes. And the same Stafford Beer who wanted to build a computer out of a goddamn pond.

    Beer also reported attempts to induce small organisms, Daphnia collected from a local pond, to ingest iron fillings so that input and output couplings to them could be achieved via magnetic fields, and another attempt to use a population of the protozoon Euglena via optical couplings. Beer’s last attempt in this series was to use not specific organisms but an entire pond ecosystem as a homeostatic controller.