The Harnessing of Geo-Thermal Energy

This is a subject that usually rises to the upper reaches of my mind whenever I hear climate-change sceptics (or septics, some might call them) or anti wind farm folk going off on one about renewable energy.

The generation of almost limitless power from the seething mass of magma that our continents float lazily upon.

It's the no lose renewable option. No house price depressing windmills or car melting solar panels; no worry about off shore wind farms scything migrating birds out of the sky, or tidal power generators interfering with the movement of fish. You just dig a pipe a few thousand metres into the ground, pour some water down it, and wait for it to flash off into steam and rise up some other pipes to drive a turbine. Nothing to see. Nothing to crash into. Nothing to make your "As seen on Escape to the Country" posh village home lose a few quid off its value.

Geo-Thermal energy is essentially nuclear in origin; fission reactions in Earth's core heat the molten mantle and drive things like volcanoes and hot springs. But this is a clean form of energy, water goes in, steam comes out. No carbon production or geiger clacking waste to dispose of. And the energies involved are so much higher than other renewables.

All this is for the future of course, reliable sources of shallow depth geo-thermal heat are not common. But imagine what could happen when we develop the technology to drill twenty miles down? The power is virtually without end. The science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon foresaw this as the future of the Earth in his classic "Last and First Men" where he wrote of the evolution of humanity over trillions of years.

The potential is there. As a science fiction lover, and writer myself I love wondering where it could end up. I suppose there are hazards too, relating to seismic activity and instabilities in the Earth's crust. People might fear that somewhere like Basildon will end up under ten feet of bubbling lava. But in the end, it will be worth it.

Si

The Pros and Cons

The Wicker Man Kirkcudbright Pilgrimage

Well, as my bird photos slowly sync to my Chromebook to await further editing - oh boy I have some beauties for you, I hope! - I thought I might entertain you with a piece of Kirkcudbright history well known to fans of cult film.

The town's appointment with...The Wicker Man

The Wicker Man is a religious horror thriller, featuring fundamentalist "not before marriage, dear" Christian copper Sergeant Neil Howie (played by Edward Woodward) searching for a missing child on the isle of Summerisle, who's enigmatic community leader Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee) is about to preside over the island's May Day celebrations, celebrations of an iron age Celtic nature that may or may not have a dark purpose behind them..

Released in 1973 with no great distributor support, the film had been shot actually in the autumn of 1972 - the year of my birth - around the Galloway area of South-West Scotland, with towns like Newton Stewart, Creetown and Kirkcudbright playing a major role in the filming.

Within Kirkcudbright itself, the locations featured were exteriors featured during Howie's search for the missing Rowan Morrison; the somewhat bizarre sweetie shop where Rowan's mother cured sore throats with a frog, and exteriors used for a sort of chase scene involving the policeman and a clacking "hobby horse" that played an important part in the ritual festivities.

This last sequence is of particular significance to me, because it took part smack in front of my old house where I lived with my mother. Sadly, we weren't in the town during the filming and indeed I wasn't even born, but many of the older townspeople remember the filming well; indeed I was drinking with a resident last night who had been bought a drink by Sir Christopher Lee himself during filming and who had really enjoyed the town.

Sadly Britt Eckland, who played the community, ahem, deflowerer, Willow Macgregor, was rather less of a hit with the locals for all sorts of reasons.

If you ever watch the film and know the town or see it in these pictures, you will see that it has barely changed at all since 1972, and probably not since 1872. The film is wonderful and I highly recommend it, full of traditional music and mysterious folk atmospheres suggestive of a culture long passed.

You too will share Jim Howie's horror as he reaches the end of his search, I guarantee it.

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 16.10.15

The harbour cottage art gallery, easily recognisable in the film

Mrs Morrison's sweetie shop, now a gallery too

Seen in the hobby horse chase

Also seen in the film. I lived down here.

Down here lived artist Donald Rudd whom I have written about previously. The hobby horse gave a clack right outside the door.

The town prison, or toll booth. The chase ended here.

Yes, it's now an art gallery as well

Iron collar for miscreants

Steampunk Gatherings in Newark

Under the auspices of a good friend of mine, Newark now has a Steampunk Society.

I attend their meetings in an unofficial journalistic capacity, largely because I can't afford the spectacular clobber required although I do look the part in my own way, silver sprayed Doc Martens and all. I'm also a science fiction afficianado, and just love what is strange and different, especially in a very conservative town like this one.

I'm a bit of a "retronaut" as they say.

For those of you unaware of Steampunk, it's a lifestyle movement based on a putative pioneering society where Victorian England made scientific advances without the benefit of valves, transistors and the radio wave. Hence the clothes have a look of true Victoriana with accessories from Jules Verne's and HG Wells' views of the future. Blunderbusses are optional, but look great if you have one.

We are close to Steampunk's mechanically throbbing heart here in Newark; the Lincoln Asylum festival is the largest Steampunk gathering in the country. Hopefully we will all be attending the next one, due to be held in August, I think.

I shall now throw in some photographs from our most recent meeting, at the Flying Circus in Newark a couple of weeks ago. A very interesting looking bunch of people, I'm sure you will agree! Even, might I say, spectacular.

Si

All images and text Copyright CreamCrackeredNature 12.05.15

Mr Spock and the Joys of Non-Neurotypicality

Many better writers than me have already been pretty eloquent in expressing the impact Leonard Nimoy and his creation of Mr Spock had on their lives.

I'm not going to bandwagon jump, nor am I going to pretend that Spock was some kind of inspiration for my love of sci-fi, spaceships and astronomy.

I've written elsewhere of where that came from - the artist Donald Rudd  - but what was actually going through my mind on hearing of Nimoy's death was a piece by Oliver Sacks in his collection "An Anthropologist on Mars". Sacks writes of two autistic people in that anthology, the artist Stephen Wiltshire, and the animal behaviourist Temple Grandin. I think it's in the Grandin piece that Sacks talks of how autistic people often stated that their favourite character from TV was Spock, and his latter day successor Data.

Sacks, who incidentally himself has stated recently that he is not long for the world theorised that it was the portrayal of a person with very non-human emotional needs trying to make sense of a very human environment that appealed to folk with autism. I think also that the fact that the tremendous contribution these people to those around them, and the fact that their colleagues valued them and treated them warmly when they were perhaps not able to respond likewise, would also be influential in this.

Perhaps also the Aspergic love of knowledge and information too would be an attraction.

Seven of Nine, a character who would also would have had "AS Appeal" in addition to her other obvious charms, was not around when Sacks wrote the article. Certainly sat where I am upon my Tourette's spectrum, where it dances with that of Asperger's, I found all these characters fascinating, and enjoyed their relationship with the neurotypical world, although I was and still am very suspicious of how the terms "Neurotypical" and "NT" get thrown around sometimes.

There is a whiff of contempt about it, I occasionally find...albeit a rather understandle whiff.

Still these are terms that have entered common (ish) usage. And it is to Leonard Nimoy "and the character I created" that a huge amount of credit must go to for making not just autistic - or non-neurotypical - people perhaps feel more comfortable in their skins, but anyone who felt that maybe you know, "knowing stuff" was more important than having cool hair.

Si

Vega, neither Vincent or Vic

At this time of year, if you head outside when the sky finally gets properly dark at about 11pm, and look straight up above your head, you will see one of the most attractive sights in the night sky. A brilliant star, brighter than any other in the vicinity, and most notably of all, a star of a beautiful icy blue colour.

This is the brightest star in the constellation of Lyra, the Lyre. It is called Vega - sadly, pronounced Vee-ga Tarantino fans! - and is the third most brilliant star in the night sky visible from the UK. On the cosmic scale it is one of our nearer neighbours at 25 light years away - say a mere 350,000 years travel at Voyager 1 speeds, and is about 40 times more luminous than our sun.

Its strong blue colour - the only naked eye star in the entire sky to be so hued - is down to the fact that it has a surface temperature of up to 10,000 degrees Celcius, compared with just under 6,000 for our sun. To put it simply, the hotter the star, the whiter or bluer it is, and the cooler it is the redder it gets.

Vega in comparison to the sun, from RJ Hall on wikimedia

Vega is also famous for being one of the first stars suspected of having a genuinely extrasolar planet. In 1983 the IRAS infra-red satellite telescope discovered a huge disc of cool material around the star that was believed to be similar to the primordial dust disc around the sun that the earth and other planets fromed from. However, the existence of a planet orbiting Vega has not yet been definitely confirmed, and around a hot, energetic and shorter lived star like Vega the "Goldilocks Zone" may be thin to non-existent.

Not far away from Vega, but sadly entirely invisible to the naked eye, is one of the mst famous objects in the night sky, the 57th object in Charles Messier's catalogue, The Ring Nebula. In small telescopes, it looks like a tiny celestial polo mint, but NASA photos reveal the true wonder of the object, which perhaps to some of you is best known for adorning one of the scanners on the bridge of the original Starship Enterprise!

The Ring Nebula, NASA image

The Creeping Terror of Mars...

It's not there to be seen at the moment, it's crimson brilliance hidden away until it next approaches opposition in a year or so's time. Jupiter entertains all night, Venus glitters in the frozen mornings and soon Saturn will be shaking off his duvet just before the dawn.

But not planet Mars, not for now.

And in some ways, this suits me fine.

To see Mars, late at night, in silence, on your own, is to be reminded of the tentacled terrors that we know DON'T, but REALLY DO, wait for their chance to cross the gulf of space between us and devour our living blood. I go inside after observing Mars, and every hanging coat, every shadow, every shadow cast by a streetlight, becomes an animate creature of terrifying, horrifying, scareifying Martian origin waiting to put a clawed finger on your shoulder the moment your eyes close.

You wake in Sleep Paralysis, and just beyond your frozen visual periphary, an upright bipedal grey martian prepares his probes and samplers for journeys into unmentionable parts. They control the horizontal, they control the vertical. They control the speed with which they open up your stomach and eat your intestines while you watch.

Observing with a telescope at 2am, as I have done, is worse. The green flash of launching cylinders is an imagined nightmare only a heartbeat away, the collapse of civilization under piles of mouldering, mutating red weed.

I shiver with fear every time I look at it. I bet many of you do too, as you stand alone surrounded my menacing whispering trees. But we all come back for more to see the God of War gaze contemptuously down at us, seeding our mind with fears...

Spring hopes as Jupiter kisses the moon

Sorrow again.

The cold deepens and the winds rise. The waning moon is reaching across to kiss Jupiter in the Eastern sky, but never quite reaches it; celestial love denied.

Haloes around the moon show the gathering frost; high snowly looking clouds feather the firmanent.

These are the miserable months, the months of riskily cycling to work on icey roads being sworn at by flatbed truck drivers as my hands freeze purple even within two pairs of gloves. Work is no warmer, there is nothing to huddle against as you try and warm your insides with gestapo ersatz coffee.

Yes there is hope. 615am, the skies are clear, the temperature glacial. But up there are the signs of spring that show that winter will not last forever. Leo the lion rests with Venus below his paws. The bowl of Virgo rises with all its galaxies I've never seen.

And brightest of all, Arcturus the orange harbringer of spring hauls itself into the sky above the streetlights.

Red Star dallyings

Had a couple of pleasant night's observings, the low moon not a major hassle but wiping out the slim as paper chance of observing Messier 33 in Triangulum, which is the latest

Messier 15, Messier 31, Messier 39, Messier 34, Perseus Double Cluster, Mirfak Cluster, One of the Cass Clusters, and milky way stars dripping off the obsidian background.

What I have particularly enjoyed looking at in my 10x50s are the various red and orange stars you can see this time of year - Enif and Scheat in Pegasus, Kocab, Alpha Aries, the soft gold Albireo, and harsher orange to be found not far away in the head of the dragon.

The two orange Andromeda stars are a contrast - Beta is a real red head, a stellar Rita Hayworth, whereas Gamma along the way is the lady with auburn hair, a pastel by Renoir I saw in the Burrell in Glasgow and have never forgotten.

The star that interested me the most however lay over in the Mirfak Cluster in Perseus. An interloper, perhaps, compared to the blue white stars around Mirfak itself, but a real deep, near garnet star red cuckoo in the nest, about Mag 5-6. Can't find any kind of name for it, but it's not my imagination, I've seen pictures of it. For once.

I wish I knew it's designation.