Amazingly Delicious Veggie Pot Pie

Recipe submitted by bulletshapedkiss

Ingredients (use vegan versions):

    6 tablespoons vegan margarine + extra for puff pastry (I use Earth Balance)
    1 large onion, diced
    3 medium carrots, sliced
    3 celery stalks, diced
    1 large zucchini, sliced
    1 (8 ounce) carton cremini mushrooms, sliced wide
    1 russet potato, diced
    1/2 to 3/4 cup flour, as needed
    2 1/2 cups vegetable stock
    1 1/2 cups nondairy milk or 1 cup plain vegan creamer
    3/4 cup peas
    1/4 cup sherry or apple cider or apple juice
    3 tablespoons fresh parsley
    2 teaspoons fresh thyme
    1 1/2 to 2 teaspoons salt
    1/2 to 1 teaspoon pepper
    1 (17 ounce) package frozen puff pastry, thawed

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. In a large pot, melt vegan margarine. Add the onions. Cook for 2 minutes. Add carrots, celery, zucchini, mushrooms, and potato. Cook 10 minutes.

2. Add flour and cook for 1 minute. Stir in stock and nondairy milk. Simmer for 10 minutes. Stir in peas, sherry, parsley, thyme, salt, and pepper.

3. Put it all into either a 9x13" pan or large ramekins for individual servings. Place the puff pastry on top, brush on some melted vegan margarine, and cut a few 1" slits to vent.

4. Cover a baking sheet in foil and place under the pot pie to catch bubbling stuff. Place in oven for approximately 40 minutes. Check the puff pastry every once in a while to see if it is browning too fast. If so, cover in foil.

Source of recipe: This recipe was inspired/modified from Simply Recipes "chicken pot pie" recipe (www.elise.com) and made vegan and easier by me. I have to say it turned out perfect, decadent and delish!

Makes: 6, Preparation time: 30 to 45 minutes, Cooking time: 40 minutes

http://vegweb.com/index.php

Rapidly Inflating Volcano Creates Growing Mystery

Oct 19, 2011 2:13 PM ET
By Andrea Mustain, OurAmazingPlanet Staff Writer

How long has this been going on? Uturuncu, a Bolivian volcano that is inflating at an incredible rate. Credit: Noah Finnegan.

Should anyone ever decide to make a show called "CSI: Geology," a group of scientists studying a mysterious and rapidly inflating South American volcano have got the perfect storyline.

Researchers from several universities are essentially working as geological detectives, using a suite of tools to piece together the restive peak's past in order to understand what it is doing now, and better diagnose what may lie ahead. It's a mystery they've yet to solve.

Uturuncu is a nearly 20,000-foot-high (6,000 meters) volcano in southwest Bolivia. Scientists recently discovered the volcano is inflating with astonishing speed.

"I call this 'volcano forensics,' because we're using so many different techniques to understand this phenomenon," said Oregon State University professor Shan de Silva, a volcanologist on the research team.

Researchers realized about five years ago that the area below and around Uturuncu is steadily rising — blowing up like a giant balloon under a wide disc of land some 43 miles (70 kilometers) across. Satellite data revealed the region was inflating by 1 to 2 centimeters (less than an inch) per year and had been doing so for at least 20 years, when satellite observations began.

"It's one of the fastest uplifting volcanic areas on Earth," de Silva told OurAmazingPlanet."What we're trying to do is understand why there is this rapid inflation, and from there we'll try to understand what it's going to lead to."

The  peak is perched like a party hat at the center of the inflating area. "It's very circular. It's like a big bull's-eye," said Jonathan Perkins, a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who recently presented work on the mountain at this year's Geological Society of America meeting  in Minneapolis.

Scientists figured out from the inflation rate that the pocket of magma beneath the volcano was growing by about 27 cubic feet (1 cubic meter) per second."That's about 10 times faster than the standard rate of magma chamber growth you see for large volcanic systems," Perkins told OurAmazingPlanet.

However, no need to flee just yet, the scientists said. "It's not a volcano that we think is going to erupt at any moment, but it certainly is interesting, because the area was thought to be essentially dead," de Silva said.

Sunset at Uturuncu. Credit: Jonathan Perkins.

Uber-Uturuncu? Uturuncu is surrounded by one of the most dense concentrations of supervolcanoes on the planet, all of which fell silent some 1 million years ago. Super volcanoes get their name because they erupt with such power that they typically spew out 1,000 times more material, in sheer volume, than a volcano like Mount St. Helens.

Modern human civilization has never witnessed such an event. The planet's most recent super-volcanic eruption happened about 74,000 years ago in Indonesia. [Related: The 10 Biggest Volcanic Eruptions in History]

"These eruptions are thought to have not only a local and regional impact, but potentially a global impact," de Silva said.Uturuncu itself is in the same class as Mount St. Helens in Washington state, but its aggressive rise could indicate that a new supervolcano is on the way. Or not. De Silva said it appears that local volcanoes hoard magma for about 300,000 years before they blow — and Uturuncu last erupted about 300,000 years ago.

"So that's why it's important to know how long this has been going on," he said. To find an answer, scientists needed data that stretch back thousands of years — but they had only 20 years of satellite data.

Jonathan Perkins, along with his advisor, Noah Finnegan (he's behind the camera), conduct field work in the barren landscape surrounding the volcano. Credit: Noah Finnegan.Volcano rap sheet

"So that's where we come in as geomorphologists — to look for clues in the landscape to learn about the long-term topographic evolution of the volcano," Perkins said. Perkins and colleagues used ancient lakes, now largely dry, along the volcano's flanks to hunt for signs of rising action.

"Lakes are great, because waves from lakes will carve shorelines into bedrock, which make lines," Perkins said.

If the angle of those lines shifted over thousands of years  — if the summit of the mountain rose, it would gradually lift one side of the lake — it would indicate the peak had been rising for quite some time, or at least provide a better idea of when the movement began.

The local conditions, largely untouched by erosion or the reach of lush plant and animal life, lend themselves to geological detective work, Perkins noted.

"It's a really sparse, otherworldly landscape," Perkins said. "Everything is so well preserved. There's no biology to get in the way of your observations."Perkins said that surveys conducted on the lakes last autumn didn't indicate long-term inflation. However, tilting lakes are only one indicator of volcano growth, he said.

De Silva said the geological detective team is working to combine data from a number of sources — seismic data, GPS data, even minute variations in gravity — to pin down when and why the mountain awoke from its 300,000-year-long slumber, and better predict its next big move.

More photos: http://www.ouramazingplanet.com/inflating-volcano-uturuncu-images-photos-2127/6/

The Topographic Earth

This is pretty nifty: a new elevation map of the Earth has just been released by NASA and Japan. It’s a "significantly improved" version of one that came out in 2009.

It uses Japan’s ASTER, the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer, an instrument on board NASA’s Terra satellite. Terra is an Earth-observer, with detectors on board used to study various properties of our planet. ASTER looks both straight both and slightly behind the satellite’s track on the Earth is it passes. Over time stereo image pairs are created, and these can be used to create very high-resolution elevation maps (called topographic maps) of the surface of the Earth.

The new images are higher-res than before, and cover the Earth better to the tune of 260,000 more images. As an example of what can be done, they used it to make this map of the Grand Canyon:

 One thing that struck me as funny when I read it: the coverage of ASTER’s observations goes from the Equator to as far north and south as 83° latitude… and they say that this is 99% of the Earth! That sounds odd, doesn’t it? You’d think the north and south poles of the Earth from 90° to 83° would be more than that, but in fact it’s true.

The portion of a sphere above a certain latitude line is called a cap, and the area of that cap depends on the latitude in question, and the radius of the sphere. I drew myself a diagram, fiddled with the numbers a bit, and found that the area of the Earth north of 83° compared to the surface area of the northern hemisphere is about 0.75%! So in fact, ASTER covered a bit more than 99% of the Earth’s surface, even if it never got past that 83°latitude.

Math! Surprising people since the time of Pythagoras.

Anyway, if you want to download the ASTER data yourself, you can: it’s public. Japan has a copy, and so does the USGS. I imagine it won’t be long before it’s integrated into Google Earth and all that too. Living in the future is pretty cool.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/10/18/how-high-are-you/
Image credit: NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team

Egypt’s Top ‘Facebook Revolutionary’ Now Advising Occupy Wall Street

By Spencer Ackerman Email Author
    October 18, 2011   4:34 pm     
One of the key activists behind Egypt’s “Facebook Revolution” is now giving advice to a new group of protesters: the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The protesters in New York’s Zuccotti Park — and their offshoots around the country — often cite the mass demonstrations earlier this year in Cairo’s Tahrir Square as their inspiration. So maybe it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that Ahmed Maher, one of the leading figures in those Egyptian protests, has been corresponding for weeks with the Occupy Wall Streeters, whom he calls “our brothers.”

Maher is one of the founders of the April 6 Youth, which used Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to galvanize Egyptians against President Hosni Mubarak. Recently, however, his attention has turned toward America, where he’s been chatting online with Occupy activists. Those conversations center around practical advice from a successful Egyptian revolutionary. Usually, they occur through Facebook. On Tuesday, for the first time, they happened face to face.

“We talk on the internet about what happened in Egypt, about our structure, about our organization, how to organize a flash mob, how to organize a sit-in,” Maher tells Danger Room, and “how to be non-violent with police.”

That’s the message he brings to D.C.’s McPherson Square, home of the local Occupy offshoot, for an impromptu Tuesday afternoon visit. The denizens of the downtown park flock to an excited Maher when they learn an Egyptian revolutionary is there to support them. “We kept peaceful, because we wanted to attract people to us,” Maher explains. “If we used nonviolence, without killing any soldiers, then the people would help us.”

The Egyptian revolution hasn’t exactly panned out in the way that young democrats like Maher hoped: Cairo’s military has been brutally cracking down on what it sees as enemies of the state. And the Occupy movement is still maddeningly vague about its goals. Nevertheless, to Maher, helping the U.S. protesters is only natural. For one thing, April 6 Youth took its own inspiration from “many revolutions in Eastern Europe and non-violence strategy, from Gandhi and Martin Luther King,” says Maher, who’s in Washington D.C. for a few days thanks to an American University professor.

 For another, Egypt’s democracy movement is also a movement for economic justice — one with personal resonance for Maher. “We want to improve the labor laws, the relationship between the owner and employees, because I was fired from my job several times and they were calling for security,” he says. You could almost imagine Maher, a civil engineer, on the We Are The 99 Percent Tumblr.

Maher is a controversial figure within the Egyptian democracy movement, as some consider him dictatorial and polarizing. But he was a pioneer in showing Egyptians that social networks could be powerful political organization tools. For that, Mubarak’s goons jailed him for three months before this year’s #Jan25 Revolution, and targeted his comrades in April 6 during it.

Now the Occupy activists are essentially paying Maher and his allies forward. On Sunday, the Occupy Wall Street website cheered the movement’s expansion to 1,500 cities around the world with an article headlined, “From Tahrir Square to Times Square.” The movement says it is “inspired by popular uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, Spain, Greece, Italy and the U.K.”

D.C. is no different. When Marc Smith, a 20something manning Occupy D.C.’s tech tent — mostly Dell and Toshiba for Tweeting, Facebooking and running the live feed from the park — learns that Maher is on his way to McPherson Square, his eyes go wide and asks if Maher was the “dude from Google.” Actually, that was Wael Ghonim, the Google exec whom Mubarak detained.

“They’ve got paintings up here of Gandhi and MLK,” Smith says. “Someone should paint [Ghonim]. He did a lot over there.”

One of the biggest pieces of advice Maher says he tells the Occupy groups: Don’t sweat the details. “Stay focused on the main issues,” he says. “For 18 days in Tahrir Square, we were united to take Mubarak down.” For a movement often criticized for incoherent messaging, it may be a resonant piece of advice.

So when Maher arrives in McPherson Square — occupied by about 75 people and nearly as many tents — he asks Metcalf: what’s the “one big idea” that the Occupy movement can rally around? Metcalf says they’re “still searching” for it.

Maher, who started snapping pictures on his phone as soon as he got to the park, has more questions. “Are you guys on Facebook, on Twitter? How are you attracting people?”

That’s more in Metcalf’s comfort zone. “We are tweeting, we are Facebooking,” he tells Maher. “There’s a tech tent over there, and there are reporters everywhere. We’re gonna be here as long as it takes.”

Maher ultimately gives Occupy D.C. the thumbs-up. “It’s very good,” he says, “I feel very happy here.”

Maher is only in Washington until the end of the week. After that, he’s headed for New York — where, he says, he’ll go to Occupy Wall Street, the movement he helped inspire, to show his support.

Photos: courtesy Ahmed Maher, Spencer Ackerman
readmore:http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/egypt-occupy-wall-street/

Japan 'Offers 10,000 Free Trips to Foreigners'

Japan will offer 10,000 foreigners free airfares to visit the country next year, in an attempt to boost the tourism industry which has been hit by the ongoing nuclear disaster, a report said on Monday.
Japan will offer 10,000 foreigners free airfares to visit the country next year, in an attempt to boost the tourism industry which has been hit by the ongoing nuclear disaster, a report said on Monday.
The agency will select the successful entrants and ask them to write a report about their trip.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/8818400/Japan-offers-10000-free-trips-to-foreigners.html

Children, Architects Build Sand Castles and Dreams

Matthai Kuruvila, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, October 9, 2011

Engineers, architects and builders help children from Bay Area schools build sand castles at San Francisco's Ocean Beach during a fundraiser for Leap, a nonprofit that helps bring visual and performing art into schools.
Images
Engineers, architects and builders help children from Bay...Volunteers help Bay Area schoolchildren build sand castle...A girl helps build a sand castle during the Ocean Beach

These weren't your ordinary sand castles.

Engineers, architects and builders - along with hordes of small children - descended on Ocean Beach in San Francisco on Saturday for the Bay Area's largest and most intense sand-castle-building contest.

The theme was "sand blast," a term vague enough to allow just about anything to be built. They weren't "castles" as much as they were ideas.

One team built the bird and slingshot from the popular smart-phone game "Angry Birds." Another built a UFO blasting off. There was a giant boom box with a break dancer's shoe in front.

Rooftop School's project was perhaps the most ambitious: Wile E. Coyote riding a rocket to chase down a decoy Road Runner, who, unbeknownst to his pursuer, was strapped with dynamite.

"It's the one time of year that I get to come out and play in the sand," said Jatin Chopra, 29, of San Francisco, whose wife's architecture firm - Bohlin Cywinski Jackson - helped design the Wile E. Coyote scene.

The rules are fairly straightforward. Everything had to come from the beach. No powered machinery. You have four hours to build.

But imaginations and a year of planning can do a lot.

Because the key to a good castle is the water, almost every team dug large ditches, lined them with tarps, and formed bucket brigades to bring water from the ocean. Some dug lined canals that led to the troughs. Last year, one team jury-rigged a bicycle and pumped water from the ocean with pedal power.

"You have to keep drenching it and drenching it," said Kevin Firenze, an estimator with Dome Construction, who with tongue firmly in cheek called himself the "sand master" of the boom box structure. "If you don't pack it in, when you start carving, it falls apart."

"It's all very technical stuff," Firenze said with a smile. "I took a lot of classes."

The 28-year-old contest is a fundraiser for Leap, a nonprofit formed in the wake of Proposition 13 to bring visual and performing art into schools. Various companies, typically in the construction industry, join with elementary schools to build the structures. The sand castle contest raised about $220,000 last year, a large portion of the organization's $550,000 annual budget.

Children participated as much as the adults in the early stages: the packing of sand and the carrying of water. But by noon, two hours in, many had petered out. Adults increasingly take over details as it reaches the end.

Several children said they loved it, but for varied reasons.

Castle builders can only use what they find on the beach. So Shakram Gafurov, 11, scavenged the sand for anything to add detail to George Peabody Elementary School's volcanoes and roller coaster. He found leis, whose petals became part of the lava flow.

"It was hard work," he said. "I like that people are working together."

Matthew Lee, 10, who also attends Peabody, said this was the one time of year he made it out to the beach.

"It was fun," he said, "because I got to get together with all my friends on the weekend."

E-mail Matthai Kuruvila at mkuruvila@sfchronicle.com.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/10/08/BAL71LF8V6.DTL#ixzz1aLyoe1ov

Jerry Brown signs Dream Act for Illegal Immigrants

Nanette Asimov,Wyatt Buchanan, Chronicle Staff Writers
Sunday, October 9, 2011

Sacramento -- Thousands of California students in the country illegally will be eligible to receive state financial aid to attend public colleges, as Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation Saturday known as the California Dream Act.

But Brown ducked a costly legal battle over affirmative action by vetoing a bill that would have let California's public universities consider an applicant's race and sex in admission decisions.

"I wholeheartedly agree with the goal of this legislation," Brown said in his veto message of SB185. But because of Prop. 209 - the 1996 constitutional amendment approved by California voters that outlaws "preferential treatment" on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in public employment, education or contracting - Brown said the courts, not the Legislature, should decide if changes can be made.

The decisions came as the governor continued to work through the hundreds of bills passed by the Legislature at the end of the session last month, including vetoing other measures dealing with charter schools and measurements of student performance. He has until midnight tonight to complete his work on 142 remaining bills.

The California Dream Act - AB131 - has been one of the most-watched bills on the governor's desk. The law, which takes effect in 2013, still must be approved by the UC regents, but they are expected to support the measure.

Opponents favoring stricter immigration laws are warning that they will try to block the measure through a referendum on next year's ballot.
Students excited

But undocumented students themselves cheered the news that they will be eligible to get financial help to attend the state's public colleges and universities.

"Yeah!" exclaimed UC Berkeley student Gabriela Monico, who came from El Salvador at 15 in 2005. "I'm really excited - not just for me, but knowing that so many other students will be able to qualify for state aid."

Monico, who joined her father in the United States and overstayed her visa, has paid for Berkeley with private donations and a job where she is paid through a third party. She's been homeless and has sneaked into campus buildings to sleep.

The California Student Aid Commission, which administers Cal Grants, calculates that 5,462 undocumented students will be eligible for state aid in the 2013-14 school year, at a cost of slightly more than $13 million.

The cost to taxpayers will actually be higher than $13 million in any given year because many undocumented students also will be eligible for a fee waiver at community colleges for very low-income students, and others will qualify for institutional aid provided by CSU and UC.

At UC, that could amount to $4 million or $5 million a year, according to the university's legislative director, Nadia Leal-Carrillo.

Opponents say the Dream Act will be a nightmare for taxpayers.

"Tuition rates have been going up, the universities have budget cuts of $1.2 billion and there are lotteries for classes - but if someone is here illegally, we roll out the red carpet," said Tim Donnelly, R-Twin Peaks (San Bernardino County), who serves as vice chairman of the Assembly's Higher Education Committee.
Out of the shadows

Despite their lack of legal paperwork, the students won't be hiding in the shadows. Already, such students are required to sign an affidavit saying they are in the process of requesting legal status if they want to pay the lower in-state tuition rate at public universities.

The heads of California's three public university systems and many campus leaders have expressed strong support for the law authored by Assemblyman Gil Cedillo, D-Los Angeles.

About 100 undocumented students are enrolled at Berkeley, and about 800 across the UC system, UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau said, adding that many such students are brought to this country as children "and didn't do anything illegal themselves."

Typically, such students have the hardest time paying for college because they cannot legally be employed, they qualify for no financial aid, and their parents often are not wealthy enough to help.

"It's incredibly stressful," undocumented student Alejandro Jimenez told The Chronicle last year as part of story showing how students from various backgrounds pay rising tuition.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/10/08/BAD11LEDG1.DTL#ixzz1aLvNDcMT