Oliver Wendell Holmes and Stereoviewing

Holmes-style stereoviewer (Image via Wikipedia)

The history of 3-D from stereoscope to : The New Yorker

The New Yorker has an interesting piece on the development of 3-D stereoscopy, really a review notice of Ray Zone's book Stereoscopic Cinema and the Origins of the 3-D Film, 1838-1952, and really a book about movies. I find some of it a bit breathless about Avatar. (Oy!) 

But there's this bit on Oliver Wendell Holmes and the 19th C stereoscope (stereoviewer):

He [Holmes] was not the inventor of the stereoscope; that honor belongs to Charles Wheatstone, a British scientist who had built a more cumbersome device twenty years earlier. But Holmes’s lighter version sold en masse, and, in an even more fervid article from 1861, he guided stereoscopists on a grand verbal tour of the world, and promised them a trance—“a dream-like exaltation of the faculties, a kind of clairvoyance, in which we seem to leave the body behind us and sail away into one strange scene after another.”

I've written more on stereoviews and my collecting here. (Below: Images of New York from my collection.)

 

Books and Twitter: Neither Luddite nor Biltonite (George Packer in the New Yorker)

Neither Luddite nor Biltonite: Interesting Times : The New Yorker

Image via Wikipedia

George Packer at the New Yorker writes:

Just about everyone I know complains about the same thing when they’re being honest—including, maybe especially,, people whose business is reading and writing. They mourn the loss of books and the loss of time for books. It’s no less true of me, which is why I’m trying to place a few limits on the flood of information that I allow into my head. The other day I had to reshelve two dozen books that my son had wantonly pulled down, most of them volumes from college days. I thumbed idly through a few urgently underlined pages of Kierkegaard’s “Concluding Unscientific Postscript,” a book that electrified me during my junior year, and began to experience something like the sensation middle-aged men have at the start of softball season, when they try sprinting to first base after a winter off.

Packer also comments briefly on Twitter, journalism, and information overload.

Interesting to compare the February 5, 2010 Chronicle of Higher Education articles on attention span, memory and distraction from multitasking (David Glenn, "Divided Attention", Chronicle Review, pB6, 2/5/2010).

(h/t Andrew Sullivan, Daily Dish)

Neil Gaiman’s fantasies : The New Yorker

An interesting interview and profile on the comic book writer-turned fiction/fantasy writer, Neil Gaiman.

Neil Gaiman’s fantasies : The New Yorker

The New Yorker piece doesn't talk much about his Sandman series with DC in the 1990s, but the series did change a small segment of the comic book market, to one without super heroes and with more literary themes. Gaiman also had the clout with DC to kill his hero and end the series, even if there were some (unfortunate) spin-offs.