Less carbon, fewer reporters, great books

Three unrelated things:

• My previous post was about carbon dispensations. The conference I am attending is cooperating with CarbonFund.org and for only $25 I can assuage my guilt, and get a button to wear at the conference.
  
• Back in my UCSB days I was an apologist of the local newspaper, the Santa Barbara News-Press. The paper is in the news with seven editors and reporters resigning in the last two days. A quote from the LA Times article about the News-Press' local zillionaire owner Wendy McCaw:
  

  
  McCaw, 55, bought the paper in 2000 for an estimated $100 million or more, using a fortune she built from a divorce settlement she won from cellphone magnate Craig McCaw.
  
  She immediately gained a reputation as an iconoclastic newspaperwoman, favoring strong environmental protections in many instances but also demonstrating a libertarian's distrust of government. An early editorial during her tenure called for an end to the Thanksgiving tradition of eating turkey because of the suffering of the "unwilling participant."
  

  
  
• The British Library digitized 15 amazing old books, from da Vinci, to Mozart, to Blackwell's botanical illustrations. There default interface is really annoying (Shockwave) but you can click on "alternative versions" for a more normal web interface.