Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Wool But Were Afraid to Ask

Clara Parkes graduated with a liberal arts degree, had a stint teaching English and then found herself in the fast-paced Bay Area tech industry, putting her writing chops to work for start-ups. But she realized she had gone down the “wrong path.” Cutting her losses, she moved to Maine (which has “a heavy duty wool culture”) in 1998, where she took up knitting with a vengeance.

Now, 15 years later she runs an online magazine and newsletter, Knitters Review, and is the author of four books about knitting, including “The Knitters Book of Wool.” Parkes talks to Modern Farmer about her favorite fiber.

Modern Farmer: How do you tell a quality wool product from something that’s lower on the scale?

Clara Parkes: If you’re concerned about truly high-end, stick with merino [Named for the Merino sheep from which it is harvested]. Because that’s the finest grade of wool that’s on the commercial market and the finest in terms of softness. The thing is, the finer a sweater is, the faster it’s going to wear out on you. Give merino a chance. Our tendency is to look for super soft, soft, soft. So our hands will immediately go to the cashmere sweaters. You can actually get something that will last four times as long and is more likely better made in a lot of ways and costs half the price if you just put away the cashmere and look for the wool merino. (...)

MF: Do you have any favorite wool buys?

CP: My guilty secret shop would be Uniqlo. They make a really great, very inexpensive wool pullover, turtleneck and cardigan. They last forever. They’re very thin. I travel with them. They wear well, they don’t pill, they keep you warm. On the other end of the spectrum is someplace like Ibex in terms of beautiful garment design from a company that takes care in sourcing their fibers from good people.

MF: Do you always want a 100 percent wool garment, or are blends good, too?

CP: The only time a blend becomes useful is if it has to do with the function of a fabric. Like 10 percent nylon can be a good thing, but above 20 it begins to impact the way it feels against your skin. Some people say the very best blend is 50/50 cotton and wool because each has qualities that compliment the others shortcomings. I would be wary of what I call ‘why bother blends.’ It’s like 10 percent this, 10 percent that, kitchen sink. Let’s toss some angora in there; let’s toss some silk in there, some bamboo. It becomes more of a mad scientist than really giving you a fitting second skin against your body.

by Andy Wright, Modern Farmer |  Read more:

Image: Flickr/sand_and_sky

‘And How Does That Make You Feel?’ The Cost of Therapy

Opinions and descriptions of therapy vary as much as the individuals who engage it: It’s medical; it’s personal; it’s a luxury; it’s a necessity; it can be tremendously helpful and beneficial; it can be expensive.

Logan and Martha have discussed how depression affects them (and their money). There’s another money factor involved here: When you want or need to go to therapy, how much is it going to cost you?

Therapy involves trusting someone with your deeply personal thoughts, your secrets and your raw self. Yet therapy is bracketed by commerce—it is a service, and a source of revenue and expenses, with insurance adding another twist in the process. If I quantified the comfort and help I get from therapy, that number would be far higher than what I can afford to spend. Money and value play a tricky game here: I want excellent care and support; I also want to minimize my out-of-pocket costs.

When I decided to see a therapist in New York, I had three options:

• See a therapist who did not accept my insurance
• Pursue a low-cost alternative, like a student training program or referral center
• Find an in-network therapist.

I figured out these options after stumbling into the office of a pricey out-of-network therapist. I met with this therapist based on a recommendation from someone in the field, and I liked her right away. Scratch that, I loved her. She looked like she could be my aunt, she totally got me, and she was going to fix everything! I could feel my problems melting away—right up until she told me she charged $220 per 45-minute session, and did not accept insurance.

It was a rude awakening. I had assumed that insurance would cover my visits, and didn’t think to ask about fees until the end of our first session. I briefly considered if I could make this work, but the thought of spending $900 each month for these sessions practically had me breaking out in hives. For $900, I could buy 100 Chipotle burritos! (Though probably more like 85 burritos with guac—they really get you on the guac.) Still, the ups and downs of eating three burritos a day would be stressful, as would worrying every month about coming up with enough money to pay for therapy. It was hard to walk away from someone I felt could really help me, but practically, I needed a lower cost option.

by Deb Weiss, The Billfold |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Le Corbusier
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George Carlin

Let’s talk about your material. Do jokes and premises just come to you, or do you actively sit and try to think of funny things?

It comes to me. Part of my leaving the media on all day is a way of…my mind has trained itself to have a very sensitive system of radar about certain words, expressions, topics, and areas of discussion that come up. There are things that interest me more than others, and then there are things that jump out. There’s one thing I learned about the mind as a young man, when I quit school. I read a book – half of it, anyway – called Psycho-Cybernetics. The author said that the brain is a goal-seeking and problem-solving machine, and if you put into it the parameters of what it is you need or want or expect, and you feed it, it will do a lot of work without you even noticing. Because the brain does that. It forms neural networks. There are areas in your brain that communicate with one another because of a need they perceive that they have – if you have trained yourself passively or actively, which I have – to look for certain kinds of things to say, and certain kinds of things to compare. Because a lot of comedy is comparing – the things that are cultural or social or language-oriented, or just plain silly. My brain got used to the fact that that made it feel good – that I liked finding those things. So the brain does networking on its own where those connections get made, and pretty soon there’s an automatic process going on all the time that leaves out a lot of unimportant or less interesting areas, and concentrates on areas it has trained itself to passively look for. Because it knows that when it finds one of them, you’re going to feel good! Oh, boy, I found another one! Let’s go back to work and find some more of these for him. What I do is, I collect my notes. I have about 1,300 separate files in my computer – they change from week to week, because I combine or expand files – and they are 44 years worth of collecting thoughts, notions, ideas, pieces of data, and material. Anything I think might have promise for my writing sometime in the future goes on a piece of paper, and that becomes a stack of papers, and that gets a topic title. The scientist is at work with the little artist – he’s got a scientist buddy – and this guy’s indexing things and figuring out categories, and that stuff goes in the computer. And every time you see it, touch it, look at it, or think of it, it gets deeper in the brain, the network gets deeper, and at some point, it gets to be a telling mass that says to you, “OK. Take a look at this now. This is gonna be funny. You got enough data, take a look at this.” So I’m drawn to something and start writing about it, and then you really start writing, and that’s when the real ideas pounce out, and new ideas, and new thoughts and images, and then bing, ba-bam ba-boom, that’s the creative part.

by Larry Getlen, SplitSider |  Read more:

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Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887-1986), Clam and Mussel, 1926.
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Joe Pass

[ed. I once did a summer sound stage setup for Joe Pass. Incredibly nice guy, very humble... one of the truly great ones.]

Ask Polly: I Am Severely Chafed By My Gentle, Compassionate Boyfriend

In my opinion, great relationships between smart, complicated people are only possible when total honesty is in the mix. You won't accept this generous man in your life until you accept your own flaws enough to make them clear to him. You're judgmental and fault-finding. So am I. But you value generosity and gentleness. And you'll learn to tolerate neediness, even as it reminds you of yourself in ways that are uncomfortable. (...)

At the very end of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, this exact process begins: Two people who love and hate each other enter this crazy space of shoving it all in each other's faces. I'm sure lots of terrible couples have stayed together a little longer after seeing that movie. But to me, it's one of the most beautiful scenes, one of the truest and rarest expressions of real love that's ever been created. Because when you let someone into your life, there is ugliness and shock and fear and repulsion there. No one likes to admit that. You wonder if you'll be dragged down, dragged into someone else's flaws and messes. You wonder if their weaknesses will take over, if you'll spend the rest of your life tortured by their other-ness, their teensy tiny sounds and smells that fill up your space and sometimes seem to fuck with your good life. For a while, you hate the other person and you hate you and you hate the two of you, together. So inadequate, so insecure, so flinty and pushy and messy and wrong.

To me the moment of truth comes when you say it out loud: Look at me, hating you. Look at you, hating me. Look at us, how gorgeously our flaws match. How gorgeously we collide. Sometimes you have the strength to say these things, and the other person says (or, more often, implies): "No, I don't want you like this. I don't want the truth. I don't accept that I'm a mess. And I don't want to be with someone who is." And also: "Why are you crying? What did I do to deserve this shit?" And also: "If you loved me more, you wouldn't mention that I smell bad, or make weird noises, EVER." I've been there. There's this opportunity for connection, for acceptance, and the other person says FUCK THAT AND FUCK YOU.

Lots of people, LOTS AND LOTS OF FUCKING PEOPLE, really, truly don't want to connect. They just want to do what they do without being challenged or being forced to show up. They want to talk about the easy stuff, keep it light, ignore the trouble, keep the peace, don't look too hard at anything, and don't get too honest. There's another tier, above that: The people who want intimacy, but only on THEIR terms. They want access to an open person, sure, so they can turn that person on and off, like a faucet. Great when they happen to want you, not so great when you need something from them and they can't handle being needed.

But there are a few people who can show up. If they see that you want them to show up, they can show up. If you're present, they will find a way to be present, too. I think that's what you have in this man, even if you aren't quite there yet yourself. You're going to have to work to catch up with him. You should not see him as inferior. You're the one who needs to open your heart more. Because the moment that you look at another human being, and all of his flaws stand out so clearly, and you feel love, love, love? That's a moment of transcendence. That's real love. It's not chasing. It's not dickhead-fairy-dust-created magic. It's not swaggery sureness and photogenic sex. Real love is two flawed people, laughing together at all of their flaws, their gorgeously matched flaws.

by Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther), The Awl | Read more:
Image: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Two Cheers for the New Volker Rule

Three and half years have passed, and the so-called Volcker Rule—which embodies some of the restrictions on banks that its namesake sought—is finally becoming a reality. In 2010, a bare-bones version of Volcker’s proposal was included in the Dodd-Frank financial-reform act. There then followed a seemingly endless process, in which the regulatory agencies sought comments from interested parties, and haggled internally, about how the rule should work in practice. On Tuesday, finally, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Fed, and three other agencies voted to enact a seventy-one-page version of the regulation, which big banks like JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs will have to abide by. (...)

Having watched the saga unfold over the past four years—it was in late 2009 that Volcker first made his case to President Obama—I have mixed feelings about the outcome. On the one hand, it is encouraging to see the government reaffirming the basic principle that Volcker espoused. The trading desks of the big banks, in placing big bets on market movements, have been doing something that is far removed from the traditional role of commercial banks: lending to businesses and consumers, and helping clients manage risk. Even the most artful defenders of Wall Street have yet to come up with a convincing explanation for why these proprietary trading activities should benefit from a government safety net.

After such a prolonged delay, it is also reassuring that the political and regulatory system has, finally, reached a resolution. Once the financial lobby realized it couldn’t win the over-all intellectual argument, it settled on a policy of stalling and prevarication, hiring consultants and eminent professors to bombard the regulators with lengthy briefs defending the bank’s activities on an individual basis. At the same time, the banks pushed the regulators to spend several more years gathering information before they actually did anything. (...)

If you spend some time reading the new rule and the nine-hundred-page background paper that the regulators provided, you will find a number of weaknesses in the new regime that the banks will surely seek to exploit.

The ban on proprietary trading still contains a great number of exemptions. It doesn’t apply to government bonds, including those issued by the federal mortgage agencies and by municipalities. If Goldman or Morgan Stanley want to short Treasury securities, or the city of Chicago, they can go right ahead. Also excluded from the restrictions are physical commodities, such as oil and gold, and spot foreign-exchange contracts. (Cue loud cheers on the commodity trading and FX desks at places like Citi and JPMorgan.)

There are also exemptions for market-making, in which the banks build up sizable positions in all sorts of securities, supposedly with the sole intention of having enough on hand to meet the demands of clients and for hedging risks taken elsewhere in the firm. But how can any outsider know whether a given trading desk is buying tech stocks, for example, to anticipate customer demand or to wager on the Nasdaq going up? The new rule fudges the issue, saying banks can build up positions to meet “the reasonably expected near-term demands of clients, customers, or counterparties.” What does “reasonably expected” mean? Your guess is a good as mine.

by John Cassidy, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Joshua Roberts/Bloomberg/Getty

The Internet Mystery That Has the World Baffled

One evening in January last year, Joel Eriksson, a 34-year-old computer analyst from Uppsala in Sweden, was trawling the web, looking for distraction, when he came across a message on an internet forum. The message was in stark white type, against a black background.

“Hello,” it said. “We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test. There is a message hidden in this image. Find it, and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through. Good luck.”

The message was signed: "3301”.

A self-confessed IT security "freak” and a skilled cryptographer, Eriksson’s interest was immediately piqued. This was – he knew – an example of digital steganography: the concealment of secret information within a digital file. Most often seen in conjunction with image files, a recipient who can work out the code – for example, to alter the colour of every 100th pixel – can retrieve an entirely different image from the randomised background "noise”.

It’s a technique more commonly associated with nefarious ends, such as concealing child pornography. In 2002 it was suggested that al-Qaeda operatives had planned the September 11 attacks via the auction site eBay, by encrypting messages inside digital photographs.

Sleepily – it was late, and he had work in the morning – Eriksson thought he’d try his luck decoding the message from "3301”. After only a few minutes work he’d got somewhere: a reference to "Tiberius Claudius Caesar” and a line of meaningless letters. Joel deduced it might be an embedded "Caesar cipher” – an encryption technique named after Julius Caesar, who used it in private correspondence. It replaces characters by a letter a certain number of positions down the alphabet. As Claudius was the fourth emperor, it suggested "four” might be important – and lo, within minutes, Eriksson found another web address buried in the image’s code.

Feeling satisfied, he clicked the link.

It was a picture of a duck with the message: "Woops! Just decoys this way. Looks like you can’t guess how to get the message out.”

"If something is too easy or too routine, I quickly lose interest,” says Eriksson. "But it seemed like the challenge was a bit harder than a Caesar cipher after all. I was hooked.”

Eriksson didn’t realise it then, but he was embarking on one of the internet’s most enduring puzzles; a scavenger hunt that has led thousands of competitors across the web, down telephone lines, out to several physical locations around the globe, and into unchartered areas of the "darknet”. So far, the hunt has required a knowledge of number theory, philosophy and classical music. An interest in both cyberpunk literature and the Victorian occult has also come in handy as has an understanding of Mayan numerology.

It has also featured a poem, a tuneless guitar ditty, a femme fatale called "Wind” who may, or may not, exist in real life, and a clue on a lamp post in Hawaii. Only one thing is certain: as it stands, no one is entirely sure what the challenge – known as Cicada 3301 – is all about or who is behind it. Depending on who you listen to, it’s either a mysterious secret society, a statement by a new political think tank, or an arcane recruitment drive by some quasi-military body. Which means, of course, everyone thinks it’s the CIA.

by Chris Bell, The Telegraph |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Cihangir
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Millions of Americans Are Strange

Millions of Americans do strange or extreme things without quite being able to articulate why. Gary can’t quite articulate why he does a lot of things. When George ties Gary to the chair, he promises Gary he won’t get bored. On the phone, George reassures his former lover Allen that their breakup had nothing to do with Allen never wanting to go anywhere or do anything. Allen is an agoraphobic. Agoraphobia is a condition that can be debilitating and affects millions of Americans. Sometimes people from all walks of life can be afraid that if they go out into the throng they might somehow vanish. Millions of Americans disappear every year and are never found and after long periods are presumed dead. Hannah has a suitcase with some clothes and documents and her passport in it under her bed but always decides to wait. Hannah always waits to disappear because she wants to take care of Hank. Hank is a functional alcoholic.

Millions of Americans die each year from complications from alcoholism. Derek is an alcoholic whose favorite cover song is Jeff Buckley’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” and when he gets drunk he sometimes asks Kelly to tie him to a kitchen chair and break his phone and cut his hair. Ramon and Walter are stiff from being tied to chairs for so long. When you are tied to a chair, your arms can be tied in front of you, down at your sides, or behind the chair back, which is the most uncomfortable for the person being tied, but is the most common technique because it is the most difficult to escape from. Frank is a heating and cooling sales rep with an unknowing wife and daughter. Frank pays John to meet him at a hotel when Frank is in town so John can tie him up and leave him alone like that for eight to ten hours. Frank knows John from bumping into him a few times at sales strategies seminars and then talking a little bit over drinks. John lives with his boyfriend, Frederick. Frederick is strikingly handsome. Men who are strikingly handsome have been found to be more financially successful at work than plain or ugly men. Harold is a plain man who invests a lot of money in clothing, including tailored suits, shirts, ties, pocket squares, tie bars and cuff links, as well as shoes and socks. After a period during which formal business wear was on the wane, millions of Americans are returning to suits and ties in an effort to look more polished and confident. James makes an effort to look polished and confident, though he isn’t very successful at it. James lives alone. Millions of Americans live alone. Sometimes this is by choice and sometimes it is because a loved one has died or children have moved out, for example. Sandra lives just with her cats Whiskers and Riley. Both of her children moved out when they went to college out of state, but Jane leaves their bedrooms as they were when her daughters Ella and Ava left because she knows in the current economic climate they may have to return. In the current economic climate, millions of Americans are without jobs. Lisa doesn’t have a job. Lisa went to school for marketing but lost her job when the corporation told its workers it had to make cuts because of the current economic climate. Millions of Americans are suffering due to the current economic climate. Sometimes persons without jobs receive unemployment insurance while they look for new jobs. Jason receives unemployment insurance because he was laid off when the plant closed.

by Nicholas Grider, Guernica |  Read more:

Image: from Flickr via James Cridland

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Digital Factory

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Why "Love Actually" Matters

Once upon a time a bunch of Brits got together to make a little film that Americans would bicker about for more than a decade.

Love Actually was released on November 7, 2003 and we have been arguing about it ever since. Some hate it, some love it; some love it when they're in love but hate it when they're out of love.

The traditional critique of the film goes something like this: "It is a saccharine soulless picture that relies on an emotionally manipulative soundtrack and has nothing to say but somehow takes 136-minutes to say it." Variations of this critique may or may not include, "It is an evil film that tells people who are alone that they will never be happy."

Yawn.

The Atlantic's Chris Orr is more bold: His latest entry into the anti-Love canon requires us to once again, verily and merrily, and with the full weight of history on our shoulders, rise in its defense.

Orr makes a lot of very good points, but his central contention that "Love Actually is the least romantic film ever" is simply insane. I know insane and that's insane. (My insanity credentials? I have seen this movie probably 40 times.)

Orr writes, "Love Actually is exceptional in that it is not merely, like so many other entries in the [romantic comedy] genre, unromantic. Rather, it is emphatically, almost shockingly, anti-romantic."

"Anti-romantic!" Here's the thing: Love Actually is at its most basic level a call to romance. Not to love, necessarily, but to romance.

Also, all of you, everybody, stop comparing Love Actually to most other romantic comedies.Love Actually is only a traditional romantic comedy insofar as it is a film about romance that has humor. It does not have the structure required of the genre. To be honest, if you're going to compare it to any one film you should probably compare it to Crash, the working title of which I'd like to think was Racism, Actually.

If the theme of Crash is "We're all at least a little bit racist deep inside" the theme of Love Actually is "We're all a little crazily romantic deep inside."

Love Actually is, in fact, less a film about love as it is a film about people who think they are in love. Almost all of the stories center around people who either early on, or before the film even begins, figure out they're nuts about someone and then spend the five weeks before Christmas wondering, "What do I do now?" It's a bit like Hamlet but with romantic gestures instead of, you know, death.

Orr thinks it contains "at least three disturbing lessons about love":

"First, that love is overwhelmingly a product of physical attraction and requires virtually no verbal communication or intellectual/emotional affinity of any kind. Second, that the principal barrier to consummating a relationship is mustering the nerve to say "I love you"–preferably with some grand gesture–and that once you manage that, you're basically on the fast track to nuptial bliss. And third, that any actual obstacle to romantic fulfillment, however surmountable, is not worth the effort it would require to overcome."

Let's knock these out quick.

by Ben Dreyfuss, Mother Jones |  Read more:

Image: Universal Pictures 

How Texas Can Save the Endangered Species Act

[ed. If you want a good primer on the nuts and bolts of the Endangered Species Act this is an excellent place to start. That said, the concept of mitigation/conservation banking has been around for a long time, and the problems associated with its use are well known: complexity, uneven administration, subjective valuation, inconsistent application, political manipulation, etc. - along with a good dose of uncertainty: vis-a-vis measuring actual threat to, and recovery of (or lack thereof), the species being targeted (all of which are described in this article). In my experience, these banks are frequently an option of first resort (pay money, extend credits, move on...) when other mitigation approaches might work better. That's because they don't constrain what a developer/landowner actually does with their property, and regulatory battles are defused. There are five approaches to mitigation: avoid, ameliorate, rehabilitate, restore and replace. Mitigation banking typically focuses on only the last - replacing what is lost rather than, say, avoiding an impact to begin with, or rehabitilitating habitat that has inadvertantly been injured. This new system, or crediting exchange, attempts to develop a standardized process for mitigation credits that incorporate all of those components. Should be interesting (academically, at least) to see how the metrics of such a system are developed.]

In 1990, a northern subspecies of the spotted owl was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), restricting the modification of its habitat across large swathes of the northwestern United States. For the area’s logging communities the results were devastating. In just a few years, perhaps 30,000 logging jobs were lost as a direct result, with whole communities abandoned, mills shuttered, and a way of life gone extinct.

The decision caused a lot of pain and suffering for how much good it did, which turned out to be none at all. The northern spotted owl’s population continued dwindling because, as it turned out, the principal threat to its survival was apparently not habitat loss, but the spread of an invasive species: its cousin, the larger eastern barred owl. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS) is now considering a plan to start killing the invader in order to protect the northern spotted owl from natural selection. Given the ESA’s own spotty history, one has to wonder whether the pain about to be inflicted on the barred owl is really such a good idea.

The Federal scheme for protecting endangered species suffers from a fatal deficit of good science. The ESA requires USFWS to use the “best available” science, not the best possiblescience—and the meager USFWS budget does not allow it to pursue qualitatively better science in the areas over which it has jurisdiction. As a result of this science deficit, the ESA’s sweeping “takings” of private property without just compensation produce few conservation benefits. Of the 2,000 or so species that have been listed as threatened or endangered over the past forty years, only 28 have been taken off the list as a result of “recovery”, and many of those 28 weren’t really endangered to begin with. The law also creates perverse incentives for landowners and other private parties to destroy high-quality habitat lest one of its species be listed as endangered or threatened and hence constrain uses of the land or cause it to be sequestered by the government. Thus, as in so many other areas, heavy-handed Federal regulation often achieves the very opposite of its intended purpose.

Among the ESA’s many stakeholders, a consensus is developing that the law cannot accomplish its goals of species conservation and economic development without greater reliance on markets. In Texas, a succession of three major species conservation plans over the past decade has shown the potential that a market-based approach could have for species conservation. The foundation of each of these conservation plans is a habitat “exchange” in which the impact to a listed species’ habitat is offset by mitigation measures in another part of its habitat. The logic is similar to that of emissions “credits,” such as the 1990s-era sulfur dioxide trading scheme, or to arrangements in which vertical space for urban construction is traded off among sites (though in the habitat exchange model there is not necessarily a “cap”). The correlation of impact and mitigation is accomplished through a “crediting” system based on a fuller scientific understanding of species requirements than is normally available to USFWS in its determinations, made possible because of greater investment in research by private participants.

For environmental stakeholders, the new approach helps solve several major problems of the current ESA. It removes the unfortunate incentive to hedge against ESA obligations that might arise in the future. It allows for unified conservation management at ecosystem-scale, rather than scattered across patches of habitat, thus increasing the possible conservation benefits. By giving the market a key role in gathering information about endangered species, it creates the prospect of listings and recovery/conservation plans based on much better science than is currently the case. And with “adaptive management” the science continues to improve during the conservation effort. For these reasons, the new approach has been supported by important environmental stakeholders, such as the Environmental Defense Fund.

For economic stakeholders, the new approach also solves major problems. For landowners, it helps turn a potentiality devastating liability into a source of profit that advances conservation goals. If offers the prospect of increased economic opportunities and greater protection for property rights within a more predictable regulatory framework. It allows mitigation efforts to be dynamically tailored to the impact they’re designed to offset, across a range of mitigation options, thereby laying the foundation for an economically rational balancing of costs and benefits.

Some of the ESA’s flaws—such as its heavy-handed impact on property rights—can only be addressed through legislation, and through a much-needed revision in the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on regulatory takings. And given the complexity of factors that can threaten a species, it may be doubted in many cases whether any conservation scheme would have much effect. For these reasons and others, the ESA should be extensively revised. But in the meantime, habitat crediting exchanges offer a market-based approach that could significantly improve species conservation and economic development within the framework of the existing ESA—provided regulators can resist the temptation to manipulate the system and distort its delicate economics.

by Mario Loyola, American Interest |  Read more:

Image: Larry 1732 on Flickr

Kurt Solmssen, Irmela, 2004
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"Your Amazon Drone delivery was unable to be completed because…"
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Remembering Computing Pioneer Grace Hopper

Monday’s Google Doodle honors computing genius Grace Hopper on what would have been her 107th birthday, doodling her right where she spent much of her time – at the helm of one of the world’s first computers.

Dr. Hopper, remembered as a great pioneer in computing, as well as in women’s achievements in science and engineering, was born as Grace Brewster Murray on Dec. 9, 1906, in New York City. She married Vincent Foster Hopper in 1930 (he died in World War II, in 1945), and took his name.

Hopper received her PhD in mathematics from Yale in 1934, as one of four woman in a doctoral class of 10, and later taught math at Vassar College, where she had taken her bachelor’s degree.

In 1943, during World War II, she left the college to join the war effort and enlist in the United States Naval Reserve’s Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard University. There, she joined a team of programmers working on the Mark I, an electro-mechanical computer 51 feet long, eight feet high, and two feet wide. Its some 756,000 parts weighed more than 10,000 pounds.

At Harvard, Hopper would go on to work with the subsequent Mark II and Mark III computers. She is often credited with coining the term “bug” for a computer malfunction: In 1947, she is said to have tweezed from the Mark II computer an actual moth that had been bugging up the machine, caught between Relay #70 and Panel F. She was also at the forefront of designing computers that would communicate to the user in a language similar to English, not in numbers. The language that she and her colleagues produced, Common Business-Oriented Language (COBOL), is still in use in 2013.

When, in 1982, David Letterman asked her how she knew so much about computers, in order to work with Mark I, her reply was: “I didn’t. It was the first one.”

by Elizabeth Barber, CS Monitor |  Read more:

Image: Google, Inc.