Bioacoustician Bernie Krause is interviewed by Jennifer Ouellette for NewScientist. His project Wild Sanctuary aims to archive nature soundscapes before they are lost to human development.
[hat tip Cocktail Party Physics]
If you enjoyed Neal Stephenson’s geek-historical-fiction Quicksilver and haven’t discovered David Bodanis Passionate Minds, then run, don’t walk, to the nearest bookseller or library. This real-life account of the turbulent relationship between two premier minds of the Enlightenment is not to be missed.
images c/o Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons
The author gives an account of copy protection used by Voltaire. Printers were suspected of making several thousand extra copies of his books and keeping the profits for themselves. He asked the Prauts of Paris to print a few hundred copies of the first half of Zadig and ship them to him for safe-keeping.
What he neglected to tell them was that under similar secrecy he’d had a like-minded printer in Lorraine prepare a few hundred copes of the second half. He now collected the two sets of unbound pages, hired a few nimble-fingered local women, and had them do all the binding and sewing. The swindlers in Paris and Lorraine had been outswindled: he now distributed, through trusted business associates in Paris, small numbers of exactly the edition he wished.
Ranjit describes a sound sculpture using strings instead of chimes. [Video link] (hat tip Make)
Furin are glass wind chimes, a sound of summer in Japan. PingMag interviews furin craftsman Yoshiharu Shinohara, with marvelous photos. (kudos Dinosaurs and Robots)
July 4 Parade in Village of Corrales:
(video download link)
We have been experimenting with 3-D imaging, after viewing the rather impressive wiggle stereoscopy at cursivebuildings. The wiggle viewing method uses an animated GIF to alternate between left and right images, easy to view in a web browser with no additional hardware. Here is an example from Wikipedia Commons:
We use a single camera on a tripod, with a “standard slide bar” from Bogen Manfrotto for quickly moving the camera position approximately the spacing between your two eyeballs for left and right photos. 
(Some photographers recommend a spacing of 1/30 the distance to the object photographed, and a few experiment with large distances for a hyper-stereo effect.)
Garden wiggle stereograph
The open-source software ImageMagick may be used to create the animated GIF. A command line invocation to produce the animated GIF might look like:
convert -loop 0 -delay 20 -dispose None left.jpg right.jpg -layers Optimize stereo.gif
When the wiggle becomes tiresome, alternate methods for viewing stereographs are available. We haven’t mastered the cross-eyed viewing or parallel viewing methods requiring no hardware. We did find this lorgnette stereo card viewer comfortable, effective, and inexpensive.
Garden stereograph for lorgnette viewer or parallel technique
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