Sagan’s devotion to science in the public interest is the REASON I went into science.  I am much better at arts and humanties, but that romance serves me well in my field.  There is so much I can say about this.  I believe that the greatest challenges of our time — climate change, peak oil, energy security and poverty, and food production — are all impeded by scientific ignorance, often times the responsibility of religion.  I could lay it out in detail, but Sagan is far more exquisite.

Actually, I used muscles from a great little seafood market/deli.  It’s one of the best deals in town.  Why pay $40 for a seafood dinner when you can get fresh catch in a soup, salad, or sandwich for $5-10?  Sure, it’s not a filet, but you can buy that there for cheaper than the grocery store and filet it yourself, too.

What I did in brief:

• 18 muscles, scrubbed.  Then put on the top rack of the grill for 5 minutes until the shells open.
• 2 strips of bacon fried well and then diced/sliced.
• 3 cloves of garlic fried until brown in the leftover bacon fat
• Mix in slightly less than 1/2 cup of italian bread crumbs and a little bit of olive oil.
• Add some tobasco sauce, salt, and pepper until all fat and oil are absorbed into a doughy mixture.
• Open the muscle shells and cut the muscles so they are on the half shell.
• Add stuffing on top of the muscle.
• Add 1-2 drops more tobasco on top of the stuffing.
• Return to the grill, on the half shell, for 5 minutes.
• Serve and eat.

DELICIOUS.  I was worried they wouldn’t turn out well because I had never made them before, but everyone at the bbq enjoyed them.  I will DEFINITELY add this to my cooking repertoire since it only cost $7 for all the ingredients.  Add a salad, and that is a dinner for 3.

I really want to post Charles Moore talking about the garbage gyre in the Pacific but it’s not yet on the youtube channel and wordpress won’t embed their videos withouth special plugins that I don’t have [and can't install].

• 1 Spaghetti squash
• 1/2 red pepper
• 1 zucchini squash
• 1/2 tomato
• 1 carrot

I sliced the pepper and zucchini and carrot and baked them after draping them in salt and olive oil.  I cooked the spaghetti squash in the microwave, first heating it enough to easily cut open and remove the seeds, and then the slices face down in a pan of water.  Once it was done, I dug that shit out with a wooden spoon and put it in a pasta bowl and then added the veggies and stirred it up. I topped it with a sprinkle of feta cheese.

How could it have been better?  I purposefully did not fry the vegetables, opting to bake them, but I think sauteeing them with some onion and garlic would have added much flavor.  Often when I make pastas I add some cajun seasoning or cayenne pepper to the veggies, and that would have mixed great with the pepper and zucchini.  I think I’ll resort to grilling veggies instead of baking them as I cut back on sauteeing [I don't really fry too much and there is a difference].

I finished Bittman’s “Food Matter’s” and I think a good goal will be to steal one recipe a week.

Tonight I made Cajun Jamabalay.

• 1 can kidney beans
• 1/2 onion
• 1/2 red pepper
• 3/4 cup rice
• 2 stalks (or is it stems that form the stalk?) celery
• 1/2 cup corn
• Cajun pepper (or cayenne)
• Black pepper
• 1 large tomato
• 1 clove garlic

How to cook it?  I live alone, so I just go at it.  Rice separate.  Carmelize onions in a separate pan before adding garlic and celery.  Then add beans and the tomato (diced).  Add the rest, including seasonings, and bring to a boil.  Then turn down heat and put it on simmer.  When rice is finished, stir it in.

I was NOT optimistic in advance and was worried I should have used canned tomatoes but it turned out delicious and I ate more than I intended.  Appropriate pepper seasonings are necessary for spice or it may have been bland, but this will become one of my staples alongside mujaddara (which I can only get to come out right 50/50, so I’ll need to post specific instructions once I determine what is going wrong, must likely frying the lentils too long, too hot before boiling leading to a burnt flavor).

Now if you excuse me, I have to finish reading Mark Bittman’s “Food Matters.”

The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. From it we have learned most of what we know. Recently, we have waded a little out to sea, enough to dampen our toes or, at most, wet our ankles. The water seems inviting. The ocean calls.

–Carl Sagan

Today was a tale of two days.  One thing excited me; one bummed me out.  What bummed me out was Salsa class.  I stood in the wrong part of the beginning of class and had to dance with all the women I did not want to dance.  This is not all about who I think is attractive.  It is not even about who knows how to dance as most people are beginners.  What it is about is people who think they know how to dance when in reality, they don’t, and they mess everything up.  Some instructors teach the woman to kick her leg out and to the side during the basic; and that is wrong.  It does not look sexy.  And it sucks for the dude, because it creates a rotation and makes it impossible to lead.  But in the spirit of trying to not complain for 21 days straight, I need to turn it into something neutral or positive: I got a nickname in class that is going to stick.

Onto other items: Google just released Google Earth 5.0, and a new feature is an incredible amount of ocean information.  They have much better resolution for their global bathymetry and in some places, local DEMs.  I’m bummed some of my favorite locations have no information but I guess that means I’ll just have to contribute.

I can’t get some of the features in this video to work and I’m a little disappointed in the initial results as a research/GIS tool, but then again I am biased since I grid my own data that is higher resolution than anything Google can reasonably work with and I use similarly more advanced 3D visualization software.  As far as I am concerned, the new version is not an improvement for research purposes as I still have to overlay all my information manually.  But for educational purposes, it is outstanding, and this adds a bunch of options for the Where on Google Earth contests [they show an image with coordinates off and your job is to try and find it].  It will be easy to say “this is the ocean” when they use the new feature since the bathymetry obviously does not have satellite vegetation for color, but occupying 72% [and growing] of the Earth’s surface, there is room for lots of fun.  I can’t wait.

Carl Sagan is who interested me in science.  Reading Cosmos and Pale Blue Dot absolutely blew my mind.  I knew I wanted to be a scientist and I wanted to protect the Earth: the only home we’ve ever known.  This is where we make our stand.  The tasks of abating peak oil and climate change are daunting — even to a technophile — but where there is uncertainty lies opportunity.  Sagan was an optimist.  He was an excellent scientist, and an even greater scientific communicator who unfortunately never received the accolades he deserved for his role in popularizing science.  Regardless or your religious, political, and economic ideologies, his quote from Pale Blue Dot (set to numerous videos, I use the one I like the best) truly does impart how vital it is for us to treat each other more kindly and engage in sustainability.

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.