[FRIAM] bilateria

[Santafe]

This is a neat article, Stephen, thank you.

Still trying to find enough minutes in a row to finish reading it.

Some of the stroboscopic pictures look familiar, enough that I might have seen them used (or may be imprinting from seeing them later).  I am struck at how good an article it is, in terms of the original author’s talking about how he controls the confounds needed to try to narrow down an argument.  In our current age of glam, it is hard to imagine anyone in science communication's having enough respect to readers to suppose they have that much patience.

I am sure that, this article or another, it was Konishi’s work that I saw.  Delightful to be put back in contact with it.

And the easter-egg surprise: who was there a decade before everybody else, _again_?  Roger Payne.  That guy had taste, and a sense of how to make things impactful in an enduring way, that one seldom finds.

Many thanks, 

Eric



> On Jul 15, 2025, at 9:00, Stephen Guerin <stephen.guerin at simtable.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> > 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 <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.americanscientist.org%2farticle%2fhow-the-owl-tracks-its-prey&c=E,1,Byv1FvBA05AMxggpDTTHV1b7_9kW0dD59GD6JP3L8D2yUjEfSfVnbW-zqfuhCgPLcEk6dcH0D5RqS3qh0uM-yWNIeiw-3AkWwoVccFWW2HVDvE5lVQ,,&typo=1>
> 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 <desmith at santafe.edu <mailto:desmith at santafe.edu>> wrote:
>> > On Jul 15, 2025, at 2:41, glen <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com>> 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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