Virtual tree-planting

Lake McArthur

Watercolour and oil pastel

©2018 Charlene Brown

I’ve never been to Lake McArthur, although it's quite close to Lake O'Hara in Yoho National Park.  This painting is based on some pictures of Lake McArthur I found on the internet. I had assumed the stunted timberline-type trees were larch, a deciduous conifer that changes colour, spectacularly, in the fall. After looking more closely at various photographs, I realized they were spruce, a regular conifer. But I had my heart set on orange trees, so these are transplants from the Opabin Plateau, behind and below the mountain on the extreme left. I’ve been there and I know the plateau has lots of larch, because I've painted them. 

Elevate viewpoint and telescope perspective

Springtime in Victoria

Watercolour and oil pastel

©2018 Charlene Brown

Here we are in Victoria, complaining about  our late spring while the rest of the country is still enduring ice storms and record-breaking April snowfalls. Our snow storms are pink, and consist of petals from plum and cherry trees which began blossoming in March (should have been

February) and the tulip magnolias are now in full bloom.

The title of this blog post hints at how I composed this view of Victoria Harbour. It is based on a panorama photograph taken from a much lower angle, which only hints at the various details. Individual blossoming trees cannot actually be seen in the original, and putting three cruise ships at Ogden Point was a bit of a stretch.  The cruise season is barely underway and so far we’ve only had two ships stop here on their way from the Caribbean to the Alaska run.

Industrial Symbiosis Haiku

Ottawa, the view from Gatineau

Watercolour and crayon

©2018 Charlene Brown

The ultra modern National Gallery of Canada, far left, was designed to reflect the design of the Gothic Revival Parliamentary Library across the Rideau Canal from it, just to the left of the Peace Tower in the picture on the left.

Quantum computing, working with qubits, is different from (well really, much better than) binary digital computing which can only have two values, 0 and 1. Qubits can hold exponentially more information than bits. 

The enhanced capability of quantum computing will be handy for designing something as complex as industrial symbiosis, which is an association between two or more industrial facilities or companies in which the wastes or by-products (such as CO₂) of one become the raw materials for another.

Haiku beyond Fossil Fuels

Off Bonavista

Watercolour and crayon

©2018 Charlene Brown

At first glance, this haiku doesn’t seem to relate to icebergs directly, but may hint at a connection to climate change...

Inductive charging uses an electromagnetic field to charge a battery-powered device wirelessly.

A zero-carbon emitter is an energy producer that doesn’t give off CO₂ or CH₄ – something beyond fossil fuels, in other words.

Expanding Archaeological Sketches

Palastruine at Carnuntum

Watercolour, oil pastel and marker

©2018 Charlene Brown

Recently, I have enlarged some of the sketches I made on UVic Travel Study Programs in Tunisia and Libya in 2006 and Egypt in 2008. 

This painting is the second enlargement of one of the sketches I made during a Travel Study Program in theBalkans in 2014.  As I mentioned when I posted the original sketch, this part of the Roman archaeological site at Carnuntum, about half way between Vienna and Bratislava, was so large and elaborate that it was mistakenly labelled the palastruine (Palace Ruin).  It is, in fact, a spa complex, possibly the largest Roman Baths north of the Alps.

The added dimension of time

Pincher Creek wind turbines

The area shown in this painting is a particularly windy part of ­Alberta, the province widely portrayed as the source of the world’s dirtiest oil.

A liquid battery is one that stores energy in liquid salt solutions which can last for over a decade, using modified molecules in the electrolytes so that they’re stable, water-soluble and resistant to degradation over (the added dimension of) time. Storage batteries such as lithium-ion packs can easily become useless after a few years of heavy use.

Post that explains this haiku project can be found by clicking on Computer-Generated Clean Energy Haiku