Solar energy and the Stirling engine.

The Guardian reports that a combination of mirrors to focus the sun's heat and a Stirling engine to drive a generator could be the game changer for solar energy. The Stirling engine works by moving gas between a heated cylinder and a cooled one, or by moving the gas between a heated and a cooled end of a single cylinder. Any source of heat will work. Wikipedia has an article about it here. Stirling Builder is dedicated to the engine, and has some free instructions on how to build one. The main advantage of  Stirling's invention is that it can exploit much smaller temperature differences than the steam engine.

Prometheus (2012)

     Prometheus (2012) [D: Ridley Scott. Noomi Rapace, Guy Pearce, Michael Fassbender, et al] A couple archeologists (Rapace and Marshall-Green) find a Significant Cave Painting on Skye, of all places. The painting shows the same constellation as found in other ancient images (here Scott and his writers use a rather loopy speculation), and apparently persuade the Weyland Corporation to fund an expedition to the far side of the galaxy to find the Planet of Origin. It seems the human race was seeded on Earth by some genetic engineers who used their own DNA to make us. Or whatever. A good deal of Mystery and Mayhem ensues, only Rapace survives, but on the Origin Planet the Alien we know and love to fear has been born.
     As several reviewers on IMDb have pointed out, the plot is full of holes, the characterisation is variable, and the Deep Questions that supposedly animate the story aren’t really answered. Actually, they’re not very clearly put.
The best you can say for this movie is that it’s interesting. The visuals are pretty good, and Rapace plays a thankless role well. So does Fassbender as David the bio-robot. Worth a look if you want to know something more about the Alien universe.
     About the title: Prometheus was the god who gave humans fire, despite Zeus's prohibition. For this he was chained to a rock where an eagle came and ate his liver every day. Being a god, the liver grew back. I suspect we're supposed to think of the pale-grey creators as Prometheus, but in such a thematically muddled story, it doesn't really matter. *½

A Mourning Wedding (2004)

 

    Carola Dunn. A Mourning Wedding (2004) Daisy Fletcher has travelled to the Haverhill country home to assist at her friend Lucinda’s wedding. Lucinda’s Aunt Eva is murdered sometime during the night, and almost immediately Det. Supt. Alec Fletcher is ordered to investigate. Of course it’s a family member who’s responsible. Daisy supplies the nudge needed, of course. Lucinda’s uncertainty about getting married is happily resolved. Oh, and Daisy’s pregnant. So that’s all right.
     Another nicely done pastiche of the English country house mystery set on the 1920s. Dunn is good at keeping the story moving, and at drawing characters just far enough off the stereotypical that we blissfully accept them as real long enough to get to the end of the story. Well done puzzle, too. **½

Grantchester (2013)

     Grantchester (2013) Series 1, 6 episodes. [D: James Norton, Robson Green, Morven Christie] The Rev. Sidney Chambers (Norton), like Father Brown, stumbles into investigations of murder. His police partner and opponent, Detective Geordie Keating (Green), becomes his friend. His love interest, Amanda Kendall (Christie), marries another man for social (and economic) reasons. The cases are morally ambiguous, but both Chambers and Keating value truth and justice and realise that the law may hinder both.
     The scripts, based on a series of novels by James Runcie, are well written, high on ambiguity, irony, and psychological complexity, but with a clear narrative arc. The mood varies, the photography is excellent, the acting shows us people conflicted in ways they don’t fully understand. Good and evil are implicated in each other; no one is perfect. This is one of the very few narratives that understands sin. It’s the only series that I’ve kept on the PVR. ****

Amanda Cross. The Players Come Again

     Amanda Cross. The Players Come Again (1990) A publisher asks Kate Fansler to write a biography of Gabrielle Foxx, wife of a Very Important Modernist Novelist. Ann Gringold, connected to the Foxxes through childhood friendship with Dorinda Goddard and Nellie Foxx, has written a memoir, and has custody of Gabrielle’s papers. There follows a meandering tale of travels and conversations and revelations and direct and indirect commentary on the academic literature racket. There is a murder, far in the past, but it’s not relevant to the problem of whether Kate will write the biography. What matters is how four lives intersected, and how Kate (and therefore we) realise that no life can be fully known. Biography, like any narrative, is made from limited materials.
     All three women, now in their 60s, have made peace with their pasts, and have freed themselves from their connections to men. They have found out how to live on their own terms, which for two of them does include a man, but not a husband. Kate likes them all. We realise that the reason she’s married Reed Amhearst (who has a walk-on role) is that each expects the other to be autonomous. An ideal marriage is one of equals, but to be an equal partner you must know yourself.
     Not a conventional mystery, but a good read. ***

Visual Illusions

Visual illusions remind us that we don't see what's really there. In fact, we can't see it. The "real world" is an illusion created by our brains, with "I" at the centre (more or less). See Distractify for a really nice collection. Warning: Distractify is addictive.

From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia

     From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia (Art Gallery of Ontario, to 15 August 2015)
We’ve always liked Emily Carr’s pictures, but we’ve seen very few of them. So it was a treat to see so many of her paintings and drawings in one place. We went through the show once, then had lunch with Sowtons, then went through the show a second time. That hour or so of percolation through the subconscious helped: I was more sure of what I liked and why.
     Like many artists, Carr was always trying to define her vision, to find ways of expressing and sharing her experience. Every one of her rare meetings with other artists in Canada and Europe prompted her to experiment with composition, brushwork, and colour. She saw movement or life everywhere. It’s hard to realise that the totems and houses that she painted in her early years were in fact derelict and rotting away. In her last paintings she overlays the nearly abstract arrangements of sky, earth, sea, and trees with swirling strokes that express her sense of movement, of intense interaction between these elements. The most effective paintings show trees and earth rising into a blazing whirlpool of light. Lawren Harris gave her the confidence to move towards abstraction. She knew her energetic brushwork looked like van Gogh’s; her comment that van Gogh was crazy but knew about “go” or life shows I think that she was proud of the implied compliment, but characteristically played it down.
     The show also includes drawings and sketchbooks. Carr was trained in water colours, like many young women of her class and time. She clearly had superior talent; her watercolours of totem poles and villages show great technical skill and are more than mere documentation. She made up a lovely little book narrating a tour to Alaska that she took with her sister. Her later sketchbooks show that she tested her visual ideas obsessively, returning again and again to trees, sketching them as flowing forms that become gestures as much as pictures.
     The show included vitrines displaying artworks, masks, and other objects made by West Coat First Nations. These give us a context for Carr’s fascination with First Nations art, but also remind us that for many Europeans their beauty must have been an uncomfortable revelation.
     A good show. Go see it. ****