Meet the Amazing Sierra Newt

...! I join generations of gobsmacked naturalists in saying O. M. G. Meet the Sierra newt (Taricha sierrae). I’m a dryland girl and don’t have much acquaintance with the salamander family, though I have spotted these guys over the years during different trips to the mountains. Last week, I was camping in the Southern Sierras and saw several of them around the campground and out in the forest. The area seemed oddly newt-rich. One even waddled right pa...

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Restoring the Original Black Box: Our Western Electric 534A Subset

...justments to the ringer were relatively easy to make. For your listening pleasure I posted a video of the interior of our ringer box in action. This, ladies and gentlemen, is what it sounded like when the phone rang in 1920s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2VHhmKTFsQ And, yes, I will be making this available as a ringtone in about a week. Though, I’ll note, you probably won’t be able to fix your iPhone 96 years in the future. Does your old house...

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Tree Rings Turned Into Music

http://vimeo.com/traubeck/years Artist Bartholomäus Traubeck’s “Years” plays the rings of a tree like a record. It is mapped to a scale which is again defined by the overall appearance of the wood (ranging from dark to light and from strong texture to light texture). The foundation for the music is certainly found in the defined ruleset of programming and hardware setup, but the data acquired from every tree interprets this ruleset very different...

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