{"id":307,"date":"2004-12-29T08:49:05","date_gmt":"2004-12-29T16:49:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/wordpress\/?p=307"},"modified":"2004-12-29T08:49:05","modified_gmt":"2004-12-29T16:49:05","slug":"conotoxins-or-cellular-automata-can-get-you-high","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2004\/12\/29\/conotoxins-or-cellular-automata-can-get-you-high\/","title":{"rendered":"Conotoxins, or Cellular Automata Can Get You High!"},"content":{"rendered":"

So I’m going on about cellular automata all the time and you’re thinking, “Yes, but can CAs get me high<\/i>?” I’ll say! Stephen Wolfram’s mascot is the textile coneshell, famous for having a one-dimensional CA wrapped around its shell.<\/p>\n

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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<\/a> for details.<\/p>\n

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The harpoon is a tiny barb laden with a venom called a conotoxin!
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(These two pictures are from a conotoxins interest group<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

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And today an article in the Washington Post<\/i><\/a> [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<\/i> so that it goes straight to the brain. And, natch, a relatively common side-effect is hallucinations<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}