a oppose psycelium.
The mushroom internet.
Mushrooms communicate with each other using up to 50 ‘words’, scientist claims. (Study.)
https://www.metafilter.com/194941/Not-what-I-usually-associate-with-talking-mushrooms
quotes from the metafilter comments:
fairmettle
Sauté is a curse word in mushroom.
acb
The words, of course, would technically count as fungible tokens.
mhoye
Every time I see a revelation like this, I have a set of feelings about the universe that make me feel uncomfortably like some weird all-are-one cosmic-love hippy, a complete break from my usual workaday sense of self, but between the idea that the consciousness of the observer matters in physics in some fundamental but not-at-all-understood way, and the fact that we never, ever seem to discover that anything is less smart, less sensate or communicative than we’d expected, I get this overwhelming sense of the universe’s connectedness. It really seems like if enough matter just finds itself in one place and gets complex enough, eventually it wants somebody to talk to.
Maybe the question isn’t “where is all the dark matter”, it’s “how does the matter we can see talk to itself, how can we listen and understand.” Maybe the opposite of entropy is love.
Anyway, back to spreadsheets.
clawsoon
Note that another scientist quoted in the article calls the conclusion “overenthusiastic”, which I assume is a British compliment.
Sylvia Plath, Mushrooms
Overnight, very Whitely, discreetly, Very quietly
Our toes, our noses Take hold on the loam, Acquire the air.
Nobody sees us, Stops us, betrays us; The small grains make room.
Soft fists insist on Heaving the needles, The leafy bedding,
Even the paving. Our hammers, our rams, Earless and eyeless,
Perfectly voiceless, Widen the crannies, Shoulder through holes. We
Diet on water, On crumbs of shadow, Bland-mannered, asking
Little or nothing. So many of us! So many of us!
We are shelves, we are Tables, we are meek, We are edible,
Nudgers and shovers In spite of ourselves. Our kind multiplies:
We shall by morning Inherit the earth. Our foot’s in the door.