HOW TO ENHANCE FOOD INTO CUISINE AT 15 CRAIGSIDE

Ninety percent of residents at 15 Craigside eat 90% of their meals in our dining room.  As our monthly charge provides 3 meals/day, anything not consumed is money wasted.  However, there are a few, for a variety of reasons--like to cook themselves, solitude, meal enhancement, plus whatever--who might come down for breakfast, lunch and dinner perhaps only 20% of the time.  I am one of them.  Mind you, if I have a $10 Zippy's bento lunch, I'm really paying $27 or so, for that difference is what we charge guests for this meal.

We have the option of paying $1.50 for take-out.  I do this quite often.  Today, I will take a typical dining room meal and improve it from food into cuisine.

The day started walking 18 holes at Ala Wai with my neighbor John.  On the way home I stopped by Marukai and purchased a few items to upgrade the meal.  Here is what 15 Craigside provided:

Not bad, you say, and you are right.  However, here is what I did.  First, I cut two scallops into eighth-of-an inch pieces, and fried them with garlic (8 cloves, sliced) in a generous amount of olive oil until most of the moisture evaporated out of the scallops.  This coaxes out that special taste.  Then those clams were added to the mix:

Plus the tomato/broccoli from the salad:

The basil and chili pepper from my lanai herb garden:

On my lanai with balsamic / truffle oil salad, a Stanford Governor's Selection Chardonnay and bottle of beer:

Music from my iPad to this JBL bluetooth speaker.  I've already used 25 of these calamansi, but a lot more left, plus basil:

Here is just one serving:

There was enough seafood linguini for three people, as I had four servings.  Walking on a golf course three times this past week allows me to eat and drink anything I want.  There is something exceptional about a fine meal in solitude with a view.

While at Marukai I also couldn't resist this Matsuzaki Wagyu Beef, which I'll have some time this weekend:

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WHAT PART ARE YOU PLAYING IN REDUCING CLIMATE WARMING?

Let's say President Donald Trump and leaders of the fossil fuel industry deserve a rating of 1 for being the worst offenders of global warming, with Al Gore being a 7 and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change a 10 .  Why 7?  There is that carbon footprint problem.

Where are you?   Certainly, the USA is among the worst countries.  But that's because developed nations become so by using more energy.  Would you want to live in Eritrea and feel proud that you are responsibly doing your part?

Incidentally:

. . . the average world citizen has an eco-footprint of about 2.7 global average hectares while there are only 2.1 global hectare of bioproductive land and water per capita on earth. This means that humanity has already overshot global biocapacity by 30% and now lives unsustainably by depleting stocks of "natural capital"^[67]

But we are not the worst offenders.  Luxembourg (in the box to the right) is #1 with 15.82 global hectares/person.  You'd never guess which country is #2.  Aruba at 11.88, Qatar 10.8, Australia 9.31 and the USA, #5 at 8.22.  On the other end of this comparison are #188 Eritrea at 0.49 gha/person, Timor-Leste 0.48, Haiti 0.61, Bangladesh 0.72 and #184 Pakistan 0.79.  The U.S. has 17 times the ecological footprint (measure of human impact on Earth's ecosystem) of Eritrea.

Want to know how you do?  Ecological Footprint will tell you.  Click on this.  Want to do this yourself, click here.  Carbon footprint.  Same thing, but click here.  However, watch it, for this site wants you to donate money to the cause.  They kind of all do.

Relative to time, there is something called Earth Overshoot Day (EOD), the day when humanity has exhausted nature's budget for the year.  After this day, we begin to draw down resource stocks.  In 1987, EOD occurred on December 19  In 2017, EOD was August 2, and last year, August 1.  Here by country:

The individual who gets most of the flack for having a Godzilla-like ecological footprint is Al Gore.  Reports The Daily Signal:

• Gore's 20-room mansion in Tennessee consumes 21.3 times the average household electricity.
• Have you kept track of his travel schedule?

Of course, while all the above is true, The Daily Signal is a conservative website published by The Heritage Foundation.

Liberal publications too cover this footprint issue.  The New York Times likes to place the blame on you with these details:

• Fly from New York to Los Angeles and back:  melt an additional 64 square feet of Arctic ice/person.
• Reporter Andy Newman (right) took his family of three on a vacation:  melted 90 square feet of Arctic ice
• flew from New York to Miami
• drove 600 miles
• stayed in a funky Airbnb

• The average American is responsible for the serious suffering or death of two future people.
• If you cruise instead, the most efficient ships these days still emit 3 to 4 times more carbon dioxide per passenger mile than commercial jets.
• You can, of course, atone for your emission sins by purchasing carbon offsets for $10/metric ton.  The money goes to things like planting trees, saving the methane from landfills, building wind farms and capturing the burps and farts of cows.  I wonder how they do that.

So back to Donald "Climate Warming is a Hoax" Trump:

Even Donald Trump made this case as a candidate, using it to attack Barack Obama. “You know, he talks about the carbon footprint, OK?” Trump said during a July 2016 campaign speech. “He wants to solve the carbon footprint, but he gets on an old 747 that’s spewing stuff into the air.” (It’s worth noting that Trump’s travel habits are much more ostentatious than Obama’s.)

Trump's campaign planes alone had the footprint of 500 Americans for a year:

Earlier this year:

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace: “The whole climate crisis is not only Fake News, it’s Fake Science. There is no climate crisis, there’s weather and climate all around the world, and in fact carbon dioxide is the main building block of all life.” @foxandfriends Wow!

103K

2:29 AM - Mar 12, 2019

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According to Greenpeace, however, Moore is not a co-founder but rather "a paid spokesman for a variety of polluting industries for more than 30 years."

Moore, who is not a climate scientist but who has degrees in forest biology and ecology, played a significant role in Greenpeace Canada for several years early in the organization's existence, according to Greenpeace's website, but he did not help found it.

Note:  according to that tweet, 64,800 people are thus talking about this.  Fake news, especially the constant onslaught from our PUS (President of the United States), do influence people.  Want to know more?

• Skeptical Science Weekly Climate Change and Global Warming News:  Did you know, for example, that 87% of Americans are unaware there's a scientific consensus on climate change?  What is this consensus?  97%!!!

• Here is Gallup poll on American's views on global warming:  Download File 190325ClimateChange.pdf  (357 KB)
• There's a 99.9999% chance that humans are the cause of global warming, a February study reported. That means we've reached the "gold standard" for certainty, a statistical measure typically used in particle physics.
• How has climate change impacted Earth in 2019, so far?

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KING KAMEHAMEHA VI: Potential Candidates

This is my fifth posting since last week on the stand-off between "the Hawaiians" and Governor  David Ige (here with kupuna Napua McShane Burke) about building the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea:

• A GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY FOR HAWAIIANS:  A Star-Advertiser poll had recently indicated that 95% of Yes/No votes on this issue sided with "Yes, its time/overdue to begin construction."  I suggested that the timing was ideal for a progressive "Hawaiian" leader to emerge with a solution that would benefit Hawaiians, all stakeholders, astronomers and the State of Hawaii. This modern-day King Kamehameha could thus unite all Hawaiians, but not only for themselves, but to include the entire State of Hawaii and scientific world.  Protests tend to be selfish in objective to only help the griper.  Why can't there be an explication to advance everyone?

• REFLECTIONS FROM PURGATORY:  Now four days into the protest/protector activity on Mauna Kea, the Star Advertiser had a follow-up poll, showing that 96% of the state population indicated that Governor Ige was too lenient or doing just about right.  When was the last time you got any kind of political matter so one-sided?
• PRINCE LOT HULA FESTIVAL:   Forty-two years of the Prince Lot festival, and who knew that he was the last King Kamehameha, #5?
• UKULELE FESTIVAL, MOMOSAN AND MARCH OF THE PROTECTORS:  Having been in the midst of this march in Waikiki, my thoughts were:

Frankly, I think it would be a heck of a lot more productive if they found a cause to promote something good instead of again preventing something from happening.  After going around the world a few times, I'm distressed that while amazing progress is surging in parts of the globe, Hawaii is in this self-imposed rut.

So here we are, eleven days into this affair, and the Mauna Kea protectors have made definite progress, solidifying their intent to totally stop construction.  While those 95%/96% support for TMT polls seem extraordinarily high, previous surveys have generally indicated that more than three-quarters of the state likewise feel the same.  A little more than a year ago Mason-Dixon Polling & Research indicated that support for TMT among Native Hawaiians stood at 70%.

So why is the State and County stymied in this legally approved project?  Thus far, $450 million of the $1.4 billion budget have already been spent.  If TMT is killed, this just adds to the death of the Superferry, geothermal development on the Big Island and wind farms on Molokai.  How did this ever happen, but the Honolulu Rail Transit now will most probably be completed, although the termination of this earlier effort by Councilwoman Rene Mansho in 1992 means that Hawaii residents will this time pay for most of it.  

Regarding TMT, if it never begins construction, that will mean a slow spiral to obscurity for what today is the primary space view site in the Northern Hemisphere.  Again, the continued vaporization of "good" jobs for the next generation.

The protestors are now getting the support of prominent politicians like Bernie Sanders and actors like Duane The Rock Johnson.  Which led me to speculate on potential candidates for King Kamehameha the sixth.  The Rock has been announced to play the role of King Kamehameha I, and his presence yesterday no doubt was a publicity stunt for him.  He had earlier, of course, been panned by Hawaiian leaders for this honor, mostly for being Samoan and not Native Hawaiian.  Heck, he went to McKinley High School, like me.  How much more local can you get?

To quote from Healani Sonoda-Pale, a spokesperson for Ka Lahui Hawaii Political Action Committee:

I am an Indigenous Hawaiian who has Samoan ancestry. I don’t get these things confused. The Rock is NOT a descendant of Hāloa. Only Hawaiians, such as Kamehameha, trace our genealogy back to Hāloa. The Rock is not Hawaiian, he has no kuleana (entitlement and responsibility) to our stories.

So who is Haloa?  A Hawaiian mythological figure who was born of Hawaiian gods, and is the ancestor of the Hawaiian people.  Frankly, I miss the relevancy.

In any case, could Duane The Rock Johnson serve a role in forming a partnership to build TMT with the majority of Native Hawaiians?  Sure he can.  He might need to step back about becoming Kamehameha I on the screen, but thus gain more valuable respect as King Kamehameha VI.

Another individual who has bravely entered the controversy is part-Hawaiian Samuel Wilder King II, one of the leaders of Imua TMT.  Samuel Wilder King was the eleventh Territorial Governor of Hawaii from 1953 to 1957.  King II is organizing a  pro-TMT rally at the State Capitol, 4:30 PM this afternoon.  He already is a King, so just add Kamehameha VI.

King Kamehameha VI could just as well be a Queen Kamehameha VI, so perhaps Malia Martin, also a member of Imua TMT, might grow into that role.  With gender equity today, a female leader might well just be the tonic to bring people together.

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THE SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY OF EVERYTHING

Stephen Hawking in 1988 wrote A Brief History of Time.  There is only one equation,  E = mc², for this is a popular book on cosmology for the non-specialist.

National Geographic published Science of Everything, answering all the questions about how things work.  But it costs $40 and only goes into technology.

In 2016 came God, Cosmology & Nothingness by Garrison Gibson.  Those three publications pretty much includes everything I will crystalize just into this one posting.

In the beginning begins with a conflict.  Scientists say there was a Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, and most religions turn to a Supreme Being as the creator.  In the Western world there is a general awareness of the Christian Genesis, while the Koran has fragmented passages of how it all started.  Did you know that in Hindu texts Brahma emerged from an egg and created the world?  There are variations.  As best as I can determine, there is no beginning in Buddhism, and that evolution might well be okay.  Depending on who you believe, the Biblical start was around 4,000 years ago, although The Bible seems to imply something on the order from 6,000 to 10,000 years ago.

No one knows what happened before the Big Bang or God, although a case is made that He has always been here.  Scientist just don't know.  That's the best they can do.  I could end here, but let me start with the prodigious and move on to the teensy-weensy.




It is said that our observable Universe has a diameter of 93 billion light years.  This number keeps changing, but there are 10 billion galaxies in that space, each averaging 100 billion stars, or one billion trillion stars in the observable universe.  Just with those numbers, you know this is all a big guess.  Oh, and there could be other universes.

You would think that if you calculate the distance light travels for 13.8 billion years, you could determine the size of the ball that should be our Universe.  Ah, but not necessarily so, for here are some "theories":

There still are various flat earth societies.  Incredibly enough, there are some serious astrophysicists who believe that our Universe is flat.



So let's get a lot smaller by only considering our Milky Way Galaxy.  Even in this tiny portion of space, light takes 100,000 years to pass from one end to the other (from left to right in the bottom diagram):

How long is 100,000 years?  At this point in our history, Homo sapiens that left Africa just made it to the Middle East.  The first cities began forming 8,800 years ago.  The wheel and writing came 5,500 years ago.  100,000 years is a long time, and light travels very quickly--186,000 miles/second--so you can only barely imagine how vast is just our little ole Milky Way.

How small do things get?  In 1897 Sir J.J. Thomson discovered the electron, something 2 trillion times smaller than a grain of sand.  The photo to the right is an electron!  Scientists from Sweden's Lund University used intense attosecond light pulses to accomplish this feat.

In 1911, Ernest  Rutherford determined that the atom is mostly empty space.  Using the size of an atom and that of the sun, an electron is almost twice the distance from the nucleus than former planet Pluto is from the Sun.

The Sun and atom's nucleus are proportioned in such a manner so you can appreciate how empty empty is.  Actually, that graphic is not quite correct, for neutrons and protons in the nucleus are the same size, but 2000 times the mass of an electron.  By the way, see that purple dot in the middle?  This photo of this single strontium atom was taken by an Oxford PhD candidate, David Nadlinger, using an ordinary camera.

Here is a hydrogen atom to the right.  But Protons and Neutrons are not elementary particles, for bombardment of them in a super collider indicated that they are made of something called Quarks, which are about the same size as an Electron.  But Q's and E's actually have no dimension and are more like an imaginary dot in space. Plus, there are different kinds of Quarks:

I won't even try to explain the above.  But what exactly is the Higg's Boson, also called the God Particle?  To the left, Peter Higgs, not God.  Good luck on determining what a boson is:

Examples of bosons include fundamental particles such as photons, gluons, and W and Z bosons (the four force-carrying gauge bosons of the Standard Model), the recently discovered Higgs boson, and the hypothetical graviton of quantum gravity. Some composite particles are also bosons, such as mesons and stable nuclei of even mass number such as deuterium (with one proton and one neutron, atomic mass number = 2), helium-4, or lead-208;^[a] as well as some quasiparticles (e.g. Cooper pairs, plasmons, and phonons).^[9]:130

So there is matter...but what is light?  Photons make up light, but there is no mass.

Here is what The Bible says about light.  Note, of course, that whoever created original writings was not a physicist, but something like a humanist or philosopher or shepherd.  Yet the field of physics certainly began before the birth of Christ.  However, recent advancements are such that you can expect all religions to be less physical and more spiritual when it comes to light and gravity, which is one of the four known fundamental forces of nature, the others being weak nuclear, electromagnetic and strong nuclear forces.  Amazingly enough, scientists still can't explain gravity, and are confused by dark energy and dark matter.   Religion  ignores or obfuscates these matters.

Let's see now, what else have I not covered?  What about life on other worlds?  Like Hawking, my three more recent books only included one equation:


or

Details you can better understand?  Go to the Drake Equation.

What does religion say about extraterrestrial intelligence?  Billy Graham commented that The Bible says nothing about life on other planets.  Other Christians mostly feel the same.  But Moslems believe that God created several planets like Earth throughout the Universe.  Buddhism seems to leave the window ajar to this possibility, but the language is so abstruse, that you can read almost anything to Buddha's sayings, including the sensibility of evolution.  Hindus believe life is everywhere.

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