This brings to mind an interesting anecdote about The Friendly Orange Glow of the first plasma displays.
A colleague who was involved with our work on vector potential communication utilizing relativistic electrons in neon indicator bulbs, just happened to have been a (UniHi) high school student retained by Don Bitzer as a technician fabricating the very first prototype of single “pixel” of a plasma display using nearly the identical gas mixture as neon indicator lamps.
After I rescued him from a virtual suicidal crash following the death of the principle experimental physicist on our vector potential communication project, he bought a bunch of these neon Christmas lights as nightlights for his portion of my house. He noticed that there was a statistical distribution of instabilities in these lamps – some being very unstable and some being only occasionally unstable.
As those who have looked into vector potential models of electrodynamics eventually discover, there is a lot of fringe-science out there that extends into realms of not just psychotronics but psi phenomena. Chaotic instability in physical systems are places where small perturbations can have large butterfly-effects, but they won’t be noticed if the system is always in chaos. So he thought the bulbs that were usually stable might provide a way of testing a kind of psychokinesis – and he started focusing his attention on one of them with the intent of increasing the frequency of transition into a chaotic state. Well, keeping in mind that he was not very stable himself at the time, he thought that he noticed an effect.
I inherited his string of Christmas lights when he returned to Silicon Valley, but cannot attest to this phenomenon myself.
PS: These neon Christmas lights are decreasingly available.