Red Rock above Green Trees

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Location Taken: Gros Morne National Park, Newfoundland
Time Taken: July 2012

There’s an odd bit of rock along the western coast of Newfoundland. Amongst all the green tree-covered hills, a bit of bare red rock pokes out between the peaks. It’s not bare from altitude or weather, but from the type of rock it’s made of.

It’s actually a hunk of the Earth’s mantle thrust out to the surface. It’s full of peridotite, which is common in the mantle, but rarely makes it all the way to the surface. And peridotite is full of nickel, far too much of it for most plants to handle. So the rock stays bare.

It’s also a harder rock, still possessing the square edges that formed when this chunk cracked apart and was shoved to the surface from its deep roots. This creates even more of a contrast with the eroded hills, worn down by rain and the work of tree roots. And the area was scoured with glaciers during the last ice age, forming the fjord I was standing in when I took this photo as well as the one on the other side of the block of mantle. But there are no fjords criss-crossing the hard red rock.

Snow does fall on it, and there are some notches where the snow lasts into the summer, feeding waterfalls, but it’s not etched by ice and rain as easily. It stands strong against the harsh conditions.

  

A Map of an Unknown World, which I guess makes it at least a little known

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Time Drawn: February 2007

Add “Maps” to my ever-growing list of arty things I should do more of.

I love maps. I love poring through atlases, finding interesting twists of land or oddly named towns. I love the look of them, both ancient and modern. And, on a higher level, I love that they carry both beauty and knowledge.

Perhaps that’s why I have a minor in Geography. Now, part of it is just that my college didn’t have a Geology department and the classes about rocks got shoved in with that set. But really, Geology tends to be about the “what” of the earth – naming and locating rocks and features. While high-level Geography is about the “why”. Mind you, that’s not the “where”, though that is it’s focus in the entry levels of the field. But when you get to the college level, just knowing which particular mountain is the tallest (Mauna Kea, by the way) isn’t that important.

It’s much more about why this rock formation formed, or why these people settled here. At my school, they separated them into Physical Geography and Human Geography, and both were fascinating. AND they offered a Cartography course. Which I, of course, took.

Not that this particular map follows the guidelines I was taught in that class that closely. It’s more of a concept map, filled with notes and only roughly laying out what the land is like. Though I still used contour lines to mark height, and I used what I learned in the Physical Geology classes to lay out rain patterns and currents, while my Human Geography classes came in handy for locating towns and roads.

It’s from a long-defunct comic story my sister and I were working on together. It only got so far before we got distracted by school and other projects, but I still have art from it hanging around. I’m not likely to continue this story, which is why I don’t mind revealing my notes. Assuming you can read them anyway, I’ve got a bit of a chicken scratch style of writing, developed due to only needing to hand-write notes for myself where speed was of the essence, and it didn’t matter if anyone else could read it. Or if I could read it, for that matter. I rarely read my notes. I just needed to take them to get the kinesthetic memory going.

Which is part of why I can remember what each and every note on this map meant, even if I can’t read them and it has been five years since I made it. I just look at them, remember writing them, and bam, I know what it says without even having to read the whole thing. Kinda handy, that.

  

Brilliant Petals of the Poppy Flower

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Location Taken: Readfield, Wisconsin
Time Taken: June 2012

Ah, the poppy.

So brilliantly colored.

So historically dangerous.

It’s an odd mix. Beautiful flower and bringer of destruction. There’s a tendency for humans to associate dangerous with ugly, but opium and all its variations comes from such a pretty plant. Although, opiates are used for medical painkillers as well, so it does have some healing aspects as well. And poppy seeds are just tasty.

And very few flowers get quite this vibrant a red.

  

Falling through the Ages- wait, make that Temperatures

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Time Drawn: September 2012

You ever play with physics while bored? It’s great.

Let me set the scene. It’s a hot, muggy day. About 85 degree F, and around 90% humidity. Aka so much humidity you feel like you’d do better with gills instead of lungs. I was at my job at the renn fest, selling Italian ice out of a cooler at my cart. Yes, that’s outside, yes, it was more than a little miserable.

Now, the ices come in large plastic bags, which hold about 25 of the orange-sized treats. I have two bags, one for each flavor, in my cooler. It’s a lidless cooler. I think it had a lid once, but it broke off and got lost, and got in the way anyway.

Besides, each ice is surrounded by, well, ice. All of it deliciously flavored, but that doesn’t prevent it from cooling the air around it. And since warm air rises, the cooler becomes filled with the cold air and actually keeps things nicely chilled. On the really hot days I’ll have to occasionally shift the ices around to move the ones at the top to the bottom to refreeze, but that’s about all I need to do.

Anyway, on to the physics!

The amount of water the air can hold (aka humidity) is highly dependent on the temperature. As air heats up, it becomes less dense. There’s more energy, so air molecules can move around more, which means they claim a larger space. But the water can fit in those spaces as well, and the higher the temperature, the more water can cram itself into the air.

Now, when the temperature drops, the spaces start shrinking. And the water starts getting squeezed out. It’s not quite spontaneous rain, but if you ever notice water droplets on things when it’s not raining, that’s it. It condenses out of the air, falling onto nearby surfaces.

Which was really obvious on the clear plastic covering my ices.

I’d wipe away the droplets and new ones would form within seconds. Since the ices were cooling the very humid air around them, the condensation was going crazy.

Now for the fun bit.

As the condensation increased, larger droplets formed. Just a simple matter of enough water getting together, after all. Eventually those droplets got large enough that gravity started to overcome the rather weak friction holding them to the sloping surfaces of the plastic bag. And then, quick as could be, the droplet would head down into the lower parts of the cooler.

Where it would freeze.

It was below freezing in the bottom four inches of the cooler, you see. That was where the air that matched the temperature of the ices fell to. And the droplets hit that cool air and did what water does, turning white and solid.

I accumulated a rather nice amount of ice at the bottom of the cooler by the end of the day. Which was nice, since it was clean water and I could use it to cool off my overheating self.

And well, I had great fun playing with the states of water. I’d first watch the humidity condense on the plastic, shifting from gas to liquid. Then, once enough had gathered, I’d push the droplet down into the lower area and watch it freeze from liquid to solid. Then, once that was done, I’d pick up the ice, and it would melt on my fingers back to liquid. Then I’d set it on the railing of my cart and watch it evaporate back into water vapor.

Times like that make me glad we live on a planet where such an interesting material as water can be in all three states of matter in the normal temperature variations of the biosphere. It’s so much fun.

  

A Shot on the Wall

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Location Taken: Timonium, Maryland
Time Taken: May 2012

I love walking into restaurants (or other places, for that matter), and seeing weaponry on the wall.

This crossbow was at an Irish pub we tried while looking for a place to eat during a Science Fiction Convention. An Poitin Stil, to be specific, on York Road in Timonium. We liked it enough to eat there three times during the four days we were at the con.

They had more than just this one crossbow, mind you. There were shields on the wall, and fine polearms. There was an antique pistol display in another part of the eating area. And, of course, a bunch of swords.

It’s most often swords I see, since they’re the weapon with the most cultural mystique about them, what with all the stories about dashing swordsmen and kings pulling swords from stones. I’m actually not that fond of them. Give me polearms any day.

I remember the first time I visited the Art Institute in Chicago. If you’ve never been there, they have an area showcasing medieval arms and weaponry. Including a fantastic selection of polearms, from glaives to halberds to guisarmes. I just stared at them for a while, looking at all the intricate details that made each type distinct. And then sat down and sketched them, since, well, I was there on an art class field trip and we had to make sketches…

Crossbows, while not one of my favorite weapons, have a lot going for them. They’ve got a lot of intricate parts with plenty of space for decoration, and are quite powerful without relying on explosive components like the pistols and artillery that became the ranged weapons of choice after the crossbow. And they don’t require quite as much skill as a bow in order to be competent with it, making it more accessible.

And they are pretty.