Still lines,small appetites
Sand on a vibrating plate collects where the plate stands still. Here each grain is a letter. In silence the grains spell a word; under sound they leave it for the plate's nodal lines, solved from the plate equation itself.
Below the plate, swimmers grow, turn round, sprout streamers and feed them, peck by peck, to the pellets that made them.
01Where the sand rests
Plate controlssquare plate, Poisson 0.3
6mode
A free square plate, Poisson ratio 0.3, solved by Rayleigh-Ritz on a Legendre basis. The numbers are Leissa's frequency parameter, so you can check them against the published table.
Each letter grain carries one character of a sentence by Spinoza (1674, Elwes translation): between finite and infinite there is no comparison
. Zoom in on a nodal line and the line is that sentence, scattered through the sand.
02Small appetites
Swimmers feed on a dissolved pool and grow. At a set mass they turn round and grow two streamers. A grown swimmer that meets a pellet pecks it; every peck moves streamer into the pellet until the swimmer is taken in whole. Pellets leak back into the pool, bud new swimmers and divide.
Mass is conserved, so nothing here runs away. Click to drop food. It costs the pool what it gives the pellet: your attention feeds the colony and starves the water.