I’m delighted to share a post from one of my favourite Substack writers, Jordan Taylor, otherwise known as Incautious Optimism. Jordan covers a wide range of engineering topics from Hypersonic Flight to Nuclear Power and much more, with a unique blend of insight and humour. I highly recommend that you check out Jordan’s writing. Today’s post from Jordan’s archive is on a topic that I’m sure will be of interest to Chip Letter readers: computing with air! Ten years ago a creature twitched its tentacles in the Wyss Institute, Harvard University. It looked like an octopus, but looks can be deceiving. It wasn’t a robot either, and held not a gram of metal nor spark of electricity, yet it moved under its own steam. Literally! The Harvard octopus wasn’t alive and had a brain that flowed with vapour, not electrons. It had no cables, no motors, no batteries and no clever little CPU. It was a thing of squishy limbs and chemical power alone, and that was enough. Because the creature’s brain was pneumatic! Octobot was a pretty simple affair and could only power itself for eight minutes at a time through a hydrogen peroxide reservoir and a platinum catalyst, but it was enough to prove the idea that logic doesn’t need to be slaved to silicon. The ersatz synapses firing in that mockery of life weren’t organic and they weren’t electrical either, but an expression of simple physics. …Not so different from us, then. We are also an expression of physics, but ten billion times more complex, and not pneumatic or hydraulic. This is fluidic logic. You can make computers this way. And weird robot octopi are only one application of fluidic logic. It goes far, far further than that, and gets weird. Want to find out about it? 1: Stop The Plane! Beneath our world of silicon sorcery lives a much older one, hidden from view but still alive in those places where air hisses and steam takes orders from mortal men. After all, we controlled very complex machinery long before the invention of the...