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Manual pages can be found here, here and here.

The Audible Audubon are a series of cards – one per species. On one side there is a picture of the bird; on the other, a brief narrative description and a clear record.

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Put the card in the microphonograph and out come calls!

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A nice little bit of late-70′s tech and a reminder of how much more available info is now that it’s digitally encoded in semi-standardized ways (see Sibley and Audubon iOS apps).

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Update – here’s a link to the spinny version.

Update II – pano taken during a lunchtime walk to a local bog here.

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Then there’s the intriguing info on where the insects were collected:

The only other information known is that the butterflies and insects were collected from the Aralia (spikenard) and related Tetrapanax papyrifera (pith paper tree) plant species.

Followed by a link to the Harvard Herbarium for more info on the pith paper tree. The Herbarium rates a big marker pin on my mental map – it’s close, houses the Blaschka’s glass plant models and – most important for me – was the base of operations for Richard Evans Schultes (prev. posts here and here). I’ve wandered around the Herbarium website before, but today – thanks to peacay – I kicked around the Botany Library On-Line Exhibits (not sure I’ve ever happened upon this part of the site before). There’s a nice series on book covers/bindings:

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a section on the ‘other’ Amanita (phalloides)

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and then there’s this, from the Economic Botany Clipping File:

Dr. Schultes teaching in the Nash Lecture Hall

Painting by Hannah Barrett, November 1994

The caption in the tiles says, “Richard Evans Schultes, Director Emeritus, demonstrating the blowgun in the Nash Lecture Hall, the Botanical Museum, Harvard University, 15 November 1994.” Ethnobotanical explorer in lab coat? Check. Blowgun, darts and quiver? Check. Little potted cactus ($100 says Lophophora williamsii)? Check. More interesting details that I’ll leave for you, the reader? Check. I’m curious as to what molecule is diagrammed on the chalkboard…

One last picture to end the post – from the book Beata Ruris Otia Fungis Danicis Impensa. Enjoy!

]]> http://hawkdog.net/wordpress/archives/2652/feed 7 http://hawkdog.net/wordpress/archives/2546 http://hawkdog.net/wordpress/archives/2546#comments Tue, 18 May 2010 11:11:25 +0000 dr.hypercube http://hawkdog.net/wordpress/?p=2546 “You got AR on my wunderkammer!” “Your wunderkammer is all up in my AR!” All together, now – “Om, nom, nom.”

The video demo of AR tech:

The AR page is here (the AR app requires a printed image and a webcam).

The Augsburg Cabinet minisite is here.

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Via Super Punch.

…on the eve of the first world war and the Russian Revolution, photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii talked Nicholas into backing his plan to capture the Russian Empire on digichrome glass plates. Between 1909-1912, and again in 1915, he completed surveys of eleven regions, traveling in a specially equipped railroad car provided by the Ministry of Transportation.

Well worth searching/browsing for a while; it makes me want to pull out my copy of Arseniev.

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I wonder what the graffiti says? Also, looks like a Turkman ak öý or gara öý  – the Central Asian version of the ger – to me.

This is why core dumps are (or were) so named – little donuts, one per bit.

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They weren’t exactly mass producing these back in 1966.

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The nameplate:

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And click here for a ‘did he really say it’ regarding the post’s title.

With all this percolating in my head, I came across the work of Isabel Samaras in Juxtapoz. Her latest exhibition is called “Into the Woodz”:

I guess the theme is “Woodland Fabulous”!  When I started with the paintings of Goldilocks and Baby Bear I wanted to put in some nice solid visual clues so you’d know who they were without having to be told — there’s a bowl a porridge, some “Just Right” brand oats, and I gave Baby a big gold dookie rope necklace with a gold nameplate that said “BABY” on it.

I had been doing all these animal drawings in my sketchbook and had given some of them necklaces made from gold foil chocolate wrappers.

It suited him so well that I added a gold tooth with a diamond chip and a bling ring and Goldy got some huge gold doorknocker earrings.  I started pulling out old records I had from the 80s – Rob Base & D.J. E-Z Rock, EPMD, Salt-n-Pepa, Derek B, Kool Moe Dee, Sweet Tee and RunDMC.  Next thing I knew I was painting a porcupine with gold “love/hate” rings and a bunch of mockingbirds having a rap war sitting on a big boom box.

Mocking Box (The Rap Wars)

[I chose this one because I've heard of some urban mockingbirds greeting the dawn by imitating car alarms - life = art.  Dr. H]

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The next piece was set deep among the trees and I just never left.  I became one of the girls who didn’t come out of the woods!  And I started to wonder ‘who else might be in there’?  Forests are wonderfully mysterious places—if you go to an intensely old one with massive moss covered trees you really do half expect to see a party of dwarves marching along or odd things springing out at you. They’re magical places.

In this case the animals are a bit “urbanized”—they’ve come into contact with human culture and taken a few things back into the woods with them. *

Some wonderful grist for my “we see our reflection in everything” mill. I don’t think it was specifically her intent (that’s why art doesn’t come with an instruction sheet), but the image of a squirrel with a rope and a gold nut really makes concrete for me the way stories and myth make animals avatars of certain human characteristics – for dolphins, the intelligent and peaceful  older brother. On a slight tangent, the painting on Isabel’s book calls another favorite artist to mind.

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For folks who want more, Ms. Samaras has a blog and – as noted – a book.

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When my Netvibes feed from Bibliodyssey popped up a new post with the title “A Cabinet of Natural Curiosities“, I couldn’t click over to Peacay’s place fast enough. In amongst the monitors and birds of paradise was this fellow:

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The birds look reasonable and I recognise the Flying Dragon, but I think Albertus Seba may have gotten a feejee mermaid style gaff as well – I’m not sure there are any Revelation lizards crawling/squirming/dragging around – but I could be wrong. That hasn’t stopped folks from rendering the Beast in Lego (h/t Tom B.).

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Let’s see… From delphine rape to the Whore of Babylon in Lego. Yep, that about covers it.

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After you’ve taken in the Purcell show, there’s all the rest of the HMNH to wander around in – the Sea Creatures in Glass will be on display until March 1 – time’s getting short.

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I took along some party favors for the post-lecture get together – a big thank you to Leighton Jones at Floating Point Digital Images for getting said favors to me as quickly as he did.

Owl Eggs (c) Rosamond Purcell

The Harvard Museum of Natural History opens a new exhibition Egg & Nest: Photographs by Rosamond Purcell on February 12th, 2009. World-renowned photographer Rosamond Purcell’s photographs of exquisitely elegant eggs and remarkable nests present an artist’s view of natural history. Egg & Nest will be on display only through March 15th.

In her artist statement in the exhibition Purcell states, “Visually nothing could be more different than an egg and a nest. The first is always perfect, no matter what the outer variations in shape; an egg is endless, irreducible. A nest, on the other hand is an artifact assembled by beak and claw, often messy, but always adapted to the needs of the next generation of birds. ” *

(2/9) Promoted from comments – Denise lets us know that, ” There’s a slide show of a number of the book’s images at the Harvard University Press website: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/features/puregg/“. Also, Curious Expeditions posted a review of Egg and Nest at almost the same time as I put this post up – great minds and all that!

If anyone else – blogrolled or otherwise – is on the Weblog Award list, sing out. There’s a bunch in the right margin that should be…