Revueltas, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico
Sunday, March 23, 2025
Favourite Google Streetview ‘location’ paintings from 2010
Revueltas, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico
Sunday, March 16, 2025
Favourite Google Streetview ‘location’ paintings from 2011
Koyukuk River crossing, Alaska, USA
Sunday, March 9, 2025
Thermovoltaic systems
Thermovoltaics is a technology that converts heat into electricity. Waste heat is everywhere. Globally, of the energy used to power the industries that the world needs such as cement and steel, approximately 60% is simply lost as waste heat.
Industrial activities account for about one third of total energy consumption and urgently need to cut CO2 emissions.
In 2022, the energy intensity of the cement sector reached 100 kWh per tonne, with fossil fuels as the primary source of thermal energy. Globally, iron and steel manufacturing consumes 8% of total energy demand, contributing to 2.6 billion tonnes (gigatonnes) of CO2 emissions annually.
Addressing the emissions from these industries and finding ways to capture and productively use the vast amounts of industrial waste heat are critical steps in the fight against climate change.
Sunday, March 2, 2025
Favourite Google Streetview ‘location’ paintings from 2012
Sunday, February 23, 2025
Favourite Google Streetview Virtual Paintout ‘locations’ from 2013
Friday, February 21, 2025
Second round of my AI painting adventure
At the end of my February 5 blog post, I promised to keep you posted on my ongoing attempts to improve my hellebore painting with AI Image generation software.
Using Adobe Firefly™ I started with the instruction: purple hellebores about 10 inches high with light dusting of snow and evergreen forest background
Which yielded the above suggestions.
Without pointing out that if I’d wanted magenta hellebores I’d have said
so, I continued the operation using only the first picture. (or not, as it turned out)
I uploaded my original hellebore painting as a composition reference. Then I asked for some special effects ̶ baroque, geometric, doodle and science fiction. Here’s what I got instead.
They all seem to be edging toward the composition I requested… but have
lost their forest backgrounds! And their
baroque, geometric, doodle and science fiction instructions.
Apparently I still have to ‘educate’ the Firefly AI using my language and my pictures.
Or I can admit defeat and just use Adobe Photoshop™ (see above). I’ll try again, probably not with Firefly, and keep you posted.
Sunday, February 16, 2025
Favourite Google Streetviews from 2014
Along Ruta 7, Southern Parks area of Chile
Wednesday, February 12, 2025
Thawing Permafrost
Melting glaciers and thawing permafrost on Bylot
Island NU
watercolour and crayon
©2025
Charlene Brown
As the Arctic warms faster than any region
on Earth, attention has largely been focused on the rapid disappearance of
Arctic sea ice. But major changes are also taking place on land, and one of the
most striking is the thawing of vast swaths of permafrost, the frozen layer of
soil underlying the Arctic tundra and taiga.
This thawing compounds the effects of climate change by releasing vast amounts of GHGs. It is already changing the Arctic landscape, causing landslides, draining lakes, altering vegetation and even beginning to shift animal and bird species habitats. Ecosystem changes make it increasingly difficult for subsistence indigenous Inuit and Arctic animals to find food.
Permafrost slumps result when the ice in
the permafrost melts and the soil collapses.
As slumping expands, parts of the landscape are being transformed into
nothing but mud, silt, and peat.
Some areas in the Arctic appear to be
emitting even more carbon than they are storing, worsening climate change
impacts by increasing the frequency of extreme weather events and wildfires.