I'm not clear on your (EricS's) age (childhood) but I have a full bound
collection of SciAm which might date back that far I'd love to find
someone to take over from me... I already tried unloading them on
Zingale but he ducked that bullet.
Any takers? Old paper and dust?
> Eric writes
> When I was a kid, there was some article (maybe Sci. Am.?) that I
found wonderful.
Bilateral Symmetry may apply to in magazines too :-) Here's a 1973
article in "American Scientist" instead of "Scientific American" :-)
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/how-the-owl-tracks-its-prey
from the article:
Asymmetrical placement of the ears (one higher than the other) allows
the owl to determine both the azimuth (horizontal direction) and
elevation (vertical direction) of sounds.
On Mon, Jul 14, 2025 at 2:33 PM Santafe <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Jul 15, 2025, at 2:41, glen <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Now, I'm sensitive to the argument that all this falls under
parallax, even radially symmetric body types and the 9 octopus
ganglia. And bi- vision, hearing, etc. is a simple form of
parallax: triangulation.
When I was a kid, there was some article (maybe Sci. Am.?) that I
found wonderful.
It had to do with owl ear asymmetries, which are produced by tufts
of stiff feathers at unequal positions in front of whatever
feather-hood (or something) channels sound to the ear canals.
Upshot of the articles was that owls need resolution in the
vertical as well as the horizontal, from phase, intensity, and
packet-arrival-time differences (including what acousticians term
the “head-shaped transfer function”, as I learned some decades
later working among the acousticians for a few years).
Article claimed (I have no way to check without a dive to see what
has been done since) that owls and people have about the same
acuity in lateral position of a sound’s origin, if the sound has
enough shape (so, not a clarinet) to cue from. But people have
terrible vertical acuity. For owls, the vertical acuity is
ballpark-comparable to the lateral.
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