NICOLA CAROLI | BLOG

Candace Wark, Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and her art colleague Shirley Nannini created stunning photographs of air flow using a wind tunnel.

In the article Airflow Art, Koren Wetmore of Illinois Tech Magazine, writes

„Blending science and art, the images reveal the beauty of airflow patterns captured using smoke, light, and colored filters. To visualize the movement of invisible air, Wark and Nannini introduce smoke into the wind tunnel by coating a wire with oil and running an electric current through it. As the oil burns, the smoke gets carried by the air flowing through the tunnel. It passes around and over objects placed in the tunnel, such as tennis balls or flat plates, and then the women photograph the patterns produced downstream. The images’ brilliant colors arise from filters placed over the lights used to illuminate the smoke.

“We work with the lighting, the speed, and various conditions in the wind tunnel until we get these images that people really respond to. For 25 years I’ve been doing scientific photography of flow patterns and they’ve always looked beautiful to me, but until Shirley, I had never thought of them as art.”

Read the full article here: https://magazine.iit.edu/summer-2015/airflow-art

I recently indulged in one of P.G. Wodehouse’s mischievous novels, Heavy Weather. Heavy Weather is part of the Blandings Castle series of stories set at the estate of Lord Emsworth and his family and, as always, involves his beloved pig The Empress of Blandings. 

Every P. G. Wodehouse novel is rife with gloriously silly schemes which more or less fail spectacularly. In Heavy Weather, detective Percy Pilbeam has been hired by Lord Emsworth to watch over his pig but he is soon employed by rival parties, namely Lady Constance, Sir Gregory Parsloe and Lord Tilbury, to secure a potentially scandalous manuscript by the Hon. Galahad, Lord Emsworth’s younger brother. Needless to say, each party has their own dubious reasons to secure, possess or destroy said manuscript and that the coveted pages change hands several times as the plot unfolds.

When Percy Pilbeam finally gets his hands on the manuscript, he finds the perfect hiding place for it in an empty shed, unaware that this is the Blandings pigsty. The next morning, as he is about to retrieve the potentially lucrative pages, he encounters the Empress of Blandings chomping through the last pieces of paper. This does not deter Percy Pilbeam to try and sell the manuscript, however, he then plans to simply pretend to Lord Tilbury that he’s still in possession of it.

Here is the scene of the sale, with much succinct breathing to be heard: Read More

I’ve just finished reading Colm Toíbín‘s novel Nora Webster, set in Ireland in the 1960’s. Nora Webster is a mother of four children who has recently been widowed and we accompany her on her journey of dealing with grief while ensuring her social and financial survival.

The book begins with the loss of Nora’s husband Maurice and ends with the Nora’s memory of losing her mother. Colm Toíbín beautifully shows how loss creates a caesura as well as a continuance, a new life or a new way of living with oneself.

Having tried to paint her living room ceiling by herself, the protagonist Nora Webster injured her shoulder to such an extent that despite taking painkillers she can’t sleep. Lying in bed in the darkness, she connects with her dead husband Maurice and re-lives the relation-ship with her mother, particularly at the time of her mother’s death.