So I’m going on about cellular automata all the time and you’re thinking, “Yes, but can CAs get me high?” I’ll say! Stephen Wolfram’s mascot is the textile coneshell, famous for having a one-dimensional CA wrapped around its shell.
Now as it happens, these little guys are fierce carnivore predators, prowling around in search of small fish to harpoon. See the Cyber Diver News Network for details.
The harpoon is a tiny barb laden with a venom called a conotoxin!
(These two pictures are from a conotoxins interest group.)
And today an article in the Washington Post [registration required to view] reports that a new conotoxin-derived pain-killing drug named Prialt has been approved. And we know all about “pain-killers,” right? Prialt is said to be a thousand times as strong as morphine. It’s so powerful that if its injected into your muscles or blood stream, it stops your heart — the only way to take Prialt is to inject it into your spinal cord so that it goes straight to the brain. And, natch, a relatively common side-effect is hallucinations.
The world broke into cellular automata, at first in patches and then in chunks. A pair of gliders scuttled by, unweildy as crabs on stilts. As I spoke, the sounds from my mouth became long strings of oscillators. And then a Zhabotinsky jellyfish engulfed me.