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serves three to four hungry souls

It's rare enough that I make the same dish twice in a month, but if I do so three times, it's probably worth writing down.

1lb green split peas
8 cups water or vegetable stock
2 medium onions, diced
4 cloves garlic, minced
3 carrots, chopped in to small bits
3 celery stalks, chopped into equally small bits

olive oil
dry sack (sherry)
arbitrarily large quantity of cilantro, minced
not quite so large quantity of mint, minced
1 to 2 limes (to taste) [bottled lime juice is also fine]
splash of Tabasco sauce
salt and pepper (to taste)

Sweat the onions and garlic in the olive oil for several minutes. Deglaze with sherry.
Add the carrots and celery and sauté for about five minutes. Add the split peas and stock and bring to a rolling boil.
Add the cilantro, mint, lime, and Tabasco sauce. You should start light on the lime, as more can easily be added.
Simmer covered until the peas are soft, about an hour.

Now would be a good time to make biscuits to go with the soup.

When the peas are of an edible consistency, you should purée part of the soup. Either put half of it in a blender, use an immersion blender or go at it with a potato masher. Add salt and pepper and adjust seasonings as needed.

When suitably delicious serve with biscuits.

Love,
Herbert.

A meticulous intrusion

into

All Matters of Scientific Interest

exactingly designed to

Engage and Cultivate Pre-collegiate Inquiry

by methods of

Empathetical Presentation

to be introduced in

a Serial and Photonovelic Manner

under the guidance of

Dr. William Nye,

a

professed and accredited

Academic Gentleman

in the field of

Phyiscal and Natural

Observation and Conjecture

Staring at a blank website is worse than the first page of a new journal. My goals for this website are not yet specific enough to entitle it to a mission statement or a manifesto. So, instead, I present you with the one thing I want everyone to know.

If a fairy came down and told me that I could instill one thought into the minds of all humanity, it would be this:

We live in a closed system.

We live in a closed system, a would of feedback loops. The Earth isn't that big. In fact, it's tiny. Every choice you make has externalities. We might not understand how any one thing we do affects the larger environment, but we need to acknowledge that everything we do will.

Nature is good at dealing with the closed loop. The beauty of the natural world is the lack of true waste: everything is reused. Excretion becomes fertilizer, death becomes life, erosion becomes mountains. Every destruction is creative, every creation destructive.

The system must balance. Nature will do this on her own, but no on a timescale or manner that helps human survival. We can help ourselves, and need to faster than politics well.

It's not just that natural world, but our social and cultural worlds are just as full of chain reactions. The world is not linear; it's circular. There's nowhere for anything, be it carbon emissions, bad puns, or the human race to go. Moving our garbage, or our lives, to outer space is infeasible in the time span necessary to avoid the mounting troubles our of times. We, and all our problems, stay here, on Earth.

So what are we to do? Be mindful. Everything we do has impact beyond our reach. But neither can we let ourselves be paralyzed by fear and indecision. We have to move forward, we can only do what we think is best. But remember, always remember: the loop is closed, and nothing escapes. We have to live with ourselves.

Love,
Herbert.