What’s Wrong with This Picture?

The Oregonian celebrates the conversion of a dumpy 1950s ranch home into a beautiful craftsman-style home. To the owners, the home’s big advantage was that it was on a half-acre lot.

Making this out of that. Photo from the Oregonian.

The reconstructed home has twice the floor space, a river-rock fireplace, and an island kitchen with a gas stove surrounded by tile and marble. (Go to the article to see more photos.)

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Planning Fish to Extinction

Soon after (and possibly even before) Columbus sailed to the New World, Portuguese and Basque fishing boats were catching cod in the Grand Banks, the shallow seas around Newfoundland. By the 1960s, fishers were removing as many as 800,000 tons of cod from the Grand Banks each year. But in 1992, this seemingly inexhaustable fishery collapsed, forcing Canada to declare a moratorium to allow the fish to recover. No such recovery has taken place, and cod remain nearly non-existent in the area.

Part of the problem was that the Canadian government allowed the use of bottom trawlers that scraped the sea floor and destroyed the habitat vital for young cod. But a new book, Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can’t Predict the Future, places even more of the blame on the goverment planners in the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

The Atlantic Dawn, the world’s largest fishing trawler, can catch enough fish on one voyage to produce 18 million meals.

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