text:
Basil Russo
Basil M. Russo is an American attorney, politician of the Democratic Party, judge. He was majority leader of Cleveland City Council during the time when the city went into default. Russo unsuccessfully ran in 1979 Cleveland mayoral election. Later he served as a judge of the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas and judge of the Ohio's Eighth District Court of Appeals. Russo served as managing partner of the law firm of Russo, Rosalina & Co, LPA from the firm's founding in 1978 until his retirement in 2014. In 2014, national president of the Order Italian Sons and Daughters of America. His is the father of Anthony and Joe Russo, directors of the Captain America movies.
Early and personal life
Russo is the son of the late State Rep. and Cleveland ward boss Anthony J. and Domenica "Donnie" Russo. His brothers are of Probate Court Presiding Judge Anthony J. Russo and disgraced former Cuyahoga County Auditor Frank Russo, who resigned in 2010 after pleading guilty in the well-known county corruption scandal.
Russo received an undergraduate degree from John Carroll University and the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law.
Russo's two sons, Anthony and Joe, are Hollywood filmmakers, who are known for Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), Captain America: Civil War (2016) and You, Me and Dupree (2006).
Russo served as majority leader of Cleveland City Council during the time when the city went into default in 1979.
1980 Mayoral campaign
In July 1979, Russo announced that he would enter the 1979 Cleveland mayoral election, challenging fellow Democrat, the beleaguered incumbent Dennis Kucinich. Kuicinich was considered vulnerable, having narrowly survived a recall election the year before by just over 200 votes out of more than 120,000 votes. The field already included Ohio State Senator Charlie Butts and quickly grew in July with addition Republican George Voinovich, who was Lieutenant Governor of Ohio. Also, Thabo L. Ntweng of the socialist worker's party would also join the race. Russo would finish third in the nonpartisan primary in the crowded field, garnering a respectable 21,962, or 17.27%, behind eventual winner Voinovich and the incumbent Kuicinich.
American heavy metal singer
Wendell Pierce
American actor and businessman
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text:
Air Force Academy issues explicit training on unacceptable gender words, 'mom' and 'dad' on list to go
September 22, 2022 | Terresa Monroe-Hamilton | Print Article
The United States Air Force Academy in Colorado has gone fully woke in its diversity and inclusion training, instructing cadets to drop the use of "mom" and "dad' while using words that "include all genders."
(Video Credit: AirForceTV)
A slide presentation titled, "Diversity & Inclusion: What it is, why we care, & what we can do," instructs cadets to use "person-centered" and gender-neutral language when describing individuals according to Fox News.
"Some families are headed by single parents, grandparents, foster parents, two moms, two dads, etc.: consider 'parent or caregiver' instead of 'mom and dad,'" the presentation explains to cadets. "Use words that include all genders: 'Folks' or 'Y'all' instead of 'guys'; 'partner' vs. 'boyfriend or girlfriend.'"
Green Beret and Afghan War veteran, Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) told Fox News that "it's been a tradition in the military to get letters from mom and dad or your boyfriend and girlfriend for as long as there's been a military."
"Now we're instructing every cadet entering the Air Force to not say mom and dad, to not say boyfriend or girlfriend, and this kind of drive towards gender neutrality," he contended. "I think the Air Force should be worried about the macro aggressions against America that are happening all over the world."
Pathetic just pathetic, old Putin must be rubbing his hands at the prospect of coming up against a woke armed force!
— BarmyG (@garrybluenose) September 22, 2022
Waltz, who is a ranking member of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Readiness, told Fox News Digital that the program's structure is deeply concerning because it appears to create a "separate, parallel chain of command."
"To those of us who are a little bit older, it reminds us of what the Soviets used to do or what the Chinese do today, where they literally have political commissars inserted at every level end of the chain of command, but they have a separate reporting chain to ensure that the military is abiding by their ideology and their political doctrine," he asserted.
"Not only do they have diversity and equity officers in the cadet chain of command, they wear a special insignia, which is exactly what the political commissars — they would wear an armband in both the Soviet army and now in the Chinese Communist military. I just think there are some really alarming parallels," Waltz warned.
"When we are in the majority, we are going to legislate this, and we are going to cut it out of the U.S. military," he vowed.
Wokeness in our military is out of control. We WILL ban this nonsense when we take back the House.
THANK YOU to the brave cadets & fellow veterans for bringing this to my attention. https://t.co/NLjt1Z6Naj
— Rep. Mike Waltz (@michaelgwaltz) September 22, 2022
pic.twitter.com/MvXED7A5uh
— mickel moralas (@HughGReaction4) September 22, 2022
An exercise is included in the training that tells cadets to form small groups and write down as many "G-Animals," or animals that start with the letter "G," that they can think of in one minute's time.
"What does this activity show us about the power of combining our diverse perspectives?" the activity asks the cadets. "If this were an operational USAF/USSF [United States Space Force] challenge (think COA [course of action] development) what risks might be present if we did not fully leverage the diversity of our group?"
One slide actually claims that the diversity and inclusion training is critical for "developing warfighters" to be "prepared to lead the USAF/USSF with character."
"How can we Lift Others (motivate our teams) if we don't know our people?" the presentation asks. "How can we Elevate Performance if we don't include people during planning and execution?"
"Today we are preparing to face challenges that may not exist today," the exercise contends. "For example, Information Warfare only became a career field 7 years ago, and we stood up the Space Force in 2019. This makes our need to innovate critical. Thus, our leaders have deemed D&I a warfighting imperative."
So now the words "mom" and "dad" are somehow offensive? Can someone tell me why sane people have never been willing to stand up to the #freaksandlunatics to put an end to this nonsense? WTAF
— Attorney at Law (@Patriot_ATX) September 22, 2022
As the training kicked off, cadets were told that "what's said here, stays in the room (let's have each other's backs)," and cadets were instructed not to "share people's stories with their name/identifiers)."
In the training, cadets were asked to finish prompts such as, "What I think about me in terms of who I am," "What others think about me," "What might be misunderstood about me" and "How squad/classmates can help me feel valued." They were also informed of a "D&I Reading Room" and "Affinity groups."
In 2021, a professor was quoted in a press release by the academy who described the reading room as a "safe space" meant "to broaden and deepen [cadets'] exploration of the issues involved in diversity, inclusion, and justice."
Fox News obtained a memo in August 2021 that asserted the D&I program would create "champions of dignity and respect to foster an inclusive climate in the Cadet Wing."
"Recommended trainings include, but are not limited to, inclusive leadership, conversation facilitation, unconscious bias, and cultural sensitivity," the memo outlined. "The structure for D&I Staff will resemble [Air Force Academy Cadet Wing] Character and Honor staffs to reflect that D&I is also an institutional priority."
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Terresa Monroe-Hamilton
Staff Writer at BizPac Review
Terresa Monroe-Hamilton is a Constitutional Conservative who researches and writes extensively on politics and current events.
Latest posts by Terresa Monroe-Hamilton (see all)
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
use rustc_serialize::{Decodable, Decoder, Encodable, Encoder};
use std::io::net::ip::{SocketAddr, ToSocketAddr};
use std::io::net::udp::UdpSocket;
use std::io::IoErrorKind;
use std::io::MemWriter;
use std::io::{IoResult, IoError, BufReader};
use bincode::{self, decode_from, encode, DecodingError, EncodingError};
use bincode::DecoderReader;
use bincode::EncoderWriter;
use std::mem;
use std::error::FromError;

pub const MAX_PACKET_SIZE: usize = 1024;
const SOCKET_TIMEOUT: Option<u64> = Some(1000);

#[derive(RustcDecodable, RustcEncodable, Show)]
struct Packet<B> {
    body: B
}

impl<B> Packet<B> {
    pub fn inner(self) -> B {
        self.body
    }
}

pub struct SwarmSocket {
    recv_buf: [u8; MAX_PACKET_SIZE],
    socket: UdpSocket
}

pub type SwarmResult<R> = Result<R, SwarmError>;

fn io_to_swarm_result<R>(res: IoResult<R>) -> SwarmResult<R> {
    match res {
        Ok(r) => Ok(r),
        Err(err) => Err(SwarmError::IoError(err))
    }
}

#[derive(Show)]
pub enum SwarmError {
    IoError(IoError),
}

impl FromError<DecodingError> for SwarmError {
    fn from_error(err: DecodingError) -> SwarmError {
        match err {
            DecodingError::IoError(err) => SwarmError::IoError(err),
            _ => panic!("{:?}", err)
        }
    }
}

impl FromError<EncodingError> for SwarmError {
    fn from_error(err: EncodingError) -> SwarmError {
        match err {
            EncodingError::IoError(err) => SwarmError::IoError(err),
            _ => panic!("{:?}", err)
        }
    }
}

impl FromError<IoError> for SwarmError {
    fn from_error(err: IoError) -> SwarmError {
        SwarmError::IoError(err)
    }
}

impl SwarmSocket {
    pub fn new<A: ToSocketAddr>(address: A) -> SwarmSocket {
        let mut socket = match UdpSocket::bind(address) {
            Ok(s) => s,
            Err(e) => panic!("Could not bind socket: {}", e)
        };
        SwarmSocket {
            recv_buf: [0u8; MAX_PACKET_SIZE],
            socket: socket,
        }
    }

    pub fn socket_name(&mut self) -> SocketAddr {
        match self.socket.socket_name() {
            Ok(a) => a,
            Err(e) => panic!("Could not get socket name: {}", e)
        }
    }
}

// Implement receiving of packets through the UDP socket.
impl SwarmSocket {
    pub fn recv_msg<'a, B>(&mut self) -> SwarmResult<B>
    where B: Decodable {
        self.socket.set_timeout(SOCKET_TIMEOUT);
        match self.socket.recv_from(&mut self.recv_buf) {
            Ok((amt, _)) => {
                //XXX: transmuting the buffer in order to get appropriate lifetime.
                let transmuted_buf = unsafe {
                    mem::transmute(self.recv_buf.slice_to(amt))
                };
                let limit = bincode::SizeLimit::UpperBound(MAX_PACKET_SIZE as u64);
                let pkt: Packet<B> = try!(decode_from(
                        &mut BufReader::new(transmuted_buf),
                        limit));
                Ok(pkt.inner())
            }
            Err(e) => Err(SwarmError::IoError(e))
        }
    }
}

// Implement sending of IronSwarmRPC through the UDP socket.
impl SwarmSocket {
    pub fn send_packet<B:Encodable, A: ToSocketAddr>(&mut self, body: B, dest: A) -> SwarmResult<()> {
        let packet = Packet { body: body };
        let limit = bincode::SizeLimit::UpperBound(MAX_PACKET_SIZE as u64);
        let encoded = try!(encode(&packet, limit));
        if encoded.len() > MAX_PACKET_SIZE {
            Err(SwarmError::IoError(IoError {
                kind: IoErrorKind::OtherIoError,
                desc: "Packet exceed maximum size",
                detail: Some(format!("Maximum size is {} bytes", MAX_PACKET_SIZE)),
            }))
        } else {
            self.socket.set_timeout(SOCKET_TIMEOUT);
            io_to_swarm_result(self.socket.send_to(encoded.as_slice(), dest))
        }
    }
}

#[cfg(test)]
mod test {
    use std::io::net::ip::{SocketAddr, Ipv4Addr};
    use std::io::net::udp::UdpSocket;
    use std::io::test::next_test_port;
    use std::vec::Vec;
    use super::{SwarmSocket, SwarmResult};

    fn local_socket() -> SocketAddr {
        SocketAddr { ip: Ipv4Addr(127, 0, 0, 1), port: next_test_port() }
    }

    fn construct_swarm_socket_with_local_socket() -> SwarmSocket {
        SwarmSocket::new(local_socket())
    }

    #[derive(Show, RustcDecodable, RustcEncodable)]
    struct Test<T> {
        body: T
    }

    #[test]
    fn socket_test() {
        let mut from_socket = construct_swarm_socket_with_local_socket();
        let mut to_socket = construct_swarm_socket_with_local_socket();
        let socket_addr = to_socket.socket_name();
        let body = Test { body: 27u8 };

        let res = from_socket.send_packet(body, socket_addr);
        assert!(res.is_ok());
        let res: SwarmResult<Test<u8>> = to_socket.recv_msg();
        assert!(res.is_ok());
    }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


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text:
Elizabeth Pisani is an epidemiologist who was fired from her primary school nativity play for singing so badly out of tune that it put the other kids off key. Though music is clearly not her thing, she does know that when it comes to communication of complex concepts in health, PowerPoint is not the only fruit…. Read more about Elizabeth or contact her…
Tony Haynes, originally self-taught, is an accomplished highly-experienced all-round practical musician who welcomes the challenge of breathing life into statistics! One of four co-founders of Grand Union in 1982, he now acts as the Company's artistic director, and writes and arranges most of its music…. Read more about Tony or contact him…
Rupert Burley – PR
M: +44 (0)7769 554 247
www.dynamicmusicagency.com/
@DynamicLondon
Dynamic Agency, 12 Moor St, Soho, London W1D 5NG
Sam Johnson has been navigating a path through the choppy waters of the music industry for the last 25 years. As an artist signed to Sunday Best he still records and tours but is now increasingly involved with his work at CM (Community Music), where he is Head of New Projects. CM is a music education charity and Sam works across a number of programmes, from youth-based band workshops through to running the Advanced Music Production module of CM's foundation degree in Creative Music Production & Business. Using technology to help express a creative idea is one of his more preferred pastimes!


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An increase in prices for financial services was a desired outcome for the RBA following tighter regulations in the sector.
Stamp duty tax can be a significant deterrent for first home buyers - but should it be done away with entirely?
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Find out which suburbs have the highest mortgage repayments in the country - and which are growing fast.


Sherry is coming back for another fun paint night! We will be doing this one a little bit differently, as there will be two paintings to choose from. One is the owl, and the other is a woman's face with mittens. Sherry will not be guiding us step by step as a group, but will be helping individually as needed.
Cost is $35/pp All supplies included.


So this last weekend, I once again got to escape the cold weather by flying out to the West Coast for camp. As the norm has become, I generally try to book the earliest flight, which is usually right around 10:30 a.m. Since not many people feel the need to be in town that early, I will take the cab instead of waiting a couple hours for the bus to show up. I found out this time that at the January camp, me and another Joe were taken by a cab driver. He charged us about $35 when it should have been closer to $15, but what can you do? So after I found that out, I wondered around the hall until I found an open door to sit everything down. As the ambition and craving rose in my body, I felt a need to find a Jamba Juice.
Vannatta that I shouldn't worry if I hear noises. All in all I had a wonderful weekend and I can't wait to do it all again on the March 4.


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The next wave of the Internet's evolution is happening now. You'll learn best practices for supporting IPv6, restricting cellular usage, and using Quality of Service to create a fast lane for your iOS apps. Discover how to support a multilingual Internet by using UTF-8, and how new internationalized domain names and email addresses affect you.
[ Music ] Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
It's great to see so many people here. How many of you are here for the first time at WWDC? Wow! That's incredible.
Well, welcome. I hope WWDC is going well for you. Now we're going to talk about some networking topics.
I've got five things to cover today. We're going to give you an update on Explicit Congestion Notification that we talked about last year. We're going to give you an update in the progress on IPv6. We're going to talk a little bit about international text, which is becoming increasingly important. We're going to explore how you control access to network interfaces to avoid running up big data bills for your customers. And we're going to finish off with some discussion of network quality of service.
You may have heard about the Apple Cisco Fastlane announcement. We're going to talk a little bit about how that might apply to your applications. So let's start with ECN. To recap from last year, we showed how Smart Queue Management and marking packets instead of dropping them can lower latency, reduce delays due to retransmission, and improve the user experience for all applications, and especially for things like streaming video. In iOS 9, we did not enable ECN for TCP connections, but in an unrelated change, the VPN software would pay attention to ECN markings. We found one ISP in Germany that marked all packets "congestion experienced," which was bad for VPN. The good news is they fixed their network within a couple of weeks.
We had no reports of any problems anywhere else in the world, and what that tells us now is we rolled out iOS all around the world, found one problem, fixed it; the Internet is now safe for ECN. And because of that, in iOS 9.3 and OS X El Capitan, five percent of TCP connections at random are using ECN, and we're using this to gather performance data and check that the Internet continues to be safe for ECN. In the Developer Seed that you have already, 100 percent of Wi-Fi connections and 100 percent of connections on these three carriers are now using ECN. So last year, I reported that 56 percent of the Alexa top million websites supported ECN, which is a pretty impressive support number for a technology no one was using.
I talked to my good friends at ETH Zurich, and Brian, Brian Trammell and Mira Coolwind, and their colleagues reran the experiment for us.
This year the percentage is up to 70 percent. And if you only look at IPv6 sites, it's up to 83 percent. So this is a call to action to ISPs and carriers and their vendors who sell equipment to them. The clients are now doing ECN. The services are supporting ECN.
It's time for the network in the middle to start marking packets instead of dropping them. It gives you a better user experience, it reduces delays due to retransmission, and it makes more efficient use of your network because you are avoiding wasted bandwidth retransmitting packets. Our next topic is IPv6. World IPv6 launch was four years ago last week, and it continues to grow. I looked at a variety of statistics, and I'm going to show you just a small sampling here.
I looked at accesses to Apple's home page but coming over IPv6. In Belgium, it's now up to 39 percent. On T-Mobile USA, we're up to 54 percent.
On Verizon, we're up to 74 percent. So it's pretty clear now on these carriers that IPv6 traffic is the majority.
And the reason is clear. IPv6 is simpler, it's more reliable, it's less expensive to operate.
So it's very clear why the carriers want to move to IPv6. But at what cost to developers and customers? Is IPv6 less mature? Is it slower? Is there less capacity allocated to IPv6? These are important questions, and content providers and developers pay close attention to this. They use statistics gathering in the web browsers to measure things like page load times for every single one of their users viewing the web page and report that back, so they can tell how well their product is working in different countries around the world, different ISPs, different carrier networks. LinkedIn reports that now 10 percent of their traffic is over IPv6, and they find the page load time on average is 10 to 40 percent faster than over IPv4. They theorize that that is due to less overhead, setting up connections through overloaded large scale NATs.
Facebook found similar results. 45 percent of their traffic is now over IPv6, and they reported recently that on average ATP GET requests are 15 percent faster over IPv6. If you only look at the iPhone data in that collection, it turns out to be 30 percent over IPv6.
So IPv6 is better for network operators. It's better for users and content providers. And that's why Apple is 100 percent backing the move to IPv6. And you will have all seen this announcement last month. We announced last year we were going to be requiring all apps to be compatible with IPv6 networks, and we said we would be testing all apps on our own IPv6 network with the NAT64 Gateway.
Starting this month we started enforcing that requirement, and we looked very closely for any evidence that this was causing an increase in the rate of application rejection, because if that were the case, we would have to look into it and work out what to do. But the good news is, look as hard as we can, we don't find any change in application rejection, so what that really tell us is that 99 percent of you have apps that are working just fine with IPv6 support, which is what we expected, but it's still really good to have that confirmed. Now, if you've had an app rejected and you think it might be to do with IPv6, then come on down to the labs today or tomorrow. You can test your app here at WWDC on the NAT64 network, and we can help you troubleshoot what might be going wrong. Our advice continues to be, as it always has been, use the high level APIs that are address-family agnostic.
If you have to use the low level BSD APIs, then there is extra work that you are going to have to do, which is why we really advise using the high level APIs that do that for you. Another key piece of advice is use hostnames, not literal IPv4 addresses.
Because IPv4 addresses are inherently tied to IPv4. And let me give you a little picture showing why. This is a typical situation from a few years ago.
You have a client on IPv4. You have a server on IPv4. The packets make their little detour via the NAT Gateway, and that's how you connect to the server. Nowadays, many more carriers are rolling out IPv6 networks with a NAT64 Gateway, and the packets still make their little detour through the NAT Gateway and connect to that old legacy IPv4 service on the Internet. Now, if your data center guys bring up dual-stack services but you're still using v4 literals in your apps, then the packets are going to make that same detour through the NAT to get to the v4 interface at the service.
But if you look up by hostname and they put the IPv6 quota records into the DNS, that's how you get the straight through data path without going through the NAT Gateway. I talked about literal addresses. We now support using IPv4 literal addresses in selected APIs. And if you use one of those addresses, we will actually do the DNS64 synthesis for you locally on the device, create a temporary IPv6 address corresponding with your v4 service on the Internet, and then connect through the NAT64 Gateway.
Now, remember, using literal v4 addresses will prevent your app from ever connecting to an ATV6 server. But that said, if that's what you need to do for your app, here is an example of how you do it. If you're writing code using Swift and the high layer Cocoa APIs, this happens for you automatically. But if you're writing UDP code today and you're using BSD sockets, the API you need to use is getaddrinfo. You pass in the address you want to connect to as a literal string.
You pass in the port you want. Here https is a synonym for port 443. You loop through all the addresses you get.
Remember, don't just take the first one. You'll get back an array of multiple addresses to try, and, of course, free the memory when you're finished.
Another question we get from developers is about the Internet of things. There are developers writing apps that interact with the device that they don't make, and some of those devices are not very modern. Now, we'd like those devices to support IPv6.
And if they don't support IPv6, we recommend that they at least support IPv4 link-local addressing. So even on a v6 only network, devices can use v4 amongst themselves to communicate with link-local addressing. Now, if the device can't do either of those things, that's okay. Inform app review, when you submit your app, that is not grounds for rejection of your app.
It probably is grounds for putting one of these stickers on the device. [Laughter] And remember, all off link communication still have to be compatible with IPv6 and NAT64. So to summarize, we recommend you support both IPv4 and IPv6 at both ends, in the clients and the servers.
We recommend you use hostnames. That way you can get a v4 address on a v4 network and a v6 address on a v6 network.
If you do need to use literal addresses, those are now supported in select APIs, as long as you do it properly.
But remember, imbedding v4 literals will block communication to v6 servers in the future. So that brings us to our next session, international text.
You may have started to see things like this, and if you're a native English speaker, this can look pretty daunting and scary.
And what I want to talk about today is how simple this really is. International support in your application doesn't need to be a big task. In fact, it really is no harder than supporting ASCII. So even though the title of this session is International Text and Networking, really we can scratch the networking. For now I just want to talk about how you support international text in general.
I'm going to start with some background. Not because many of you will need to encounter this day to day, but I want to de-mystify some of this and make it less scary, because it really isn't any more complicated than ASCII. So the first concept we have is Unicode.
Unicode is a big list of numbers, and corresponding to each number a human visible character, and it's like a big phone directory.
In fact, it is available in book form. It's a big, thick book with page after page of number and character.
And that's an abstract concept. You have integers and you have the characters they represent. Now, to use those integers in our computers, we need some way of representing those numbers, in memory, on disk, over the network. One way of representing them is UTF-32, which is just a 32-bit number. And like any 32-bit number, you have to be concerned whether it's big endian or little endian. And it takes up four times as much space as ASCII. UTF-16 is more compact.
It uses 16-bit numbers. It still has the same problem of little endian versus big endian, and because it's only 16-bits, it can only represent 65,000 values. So you have to use the surrogate pairs to represent the values outside that range.
So that's a bit cumbersome. UTF-8 is an 8-bit byte-oriented encoding. Because of that, there are no byte order issues, and this is really what makes it the ideal encoding to use. So let's dive in a bit deeper into UTF-8. It was invented late night in New Jersey 1992, and it's one of those rare pieces of computer science genius. And when I first heard about that, I immediately saw, this is the answer.
This solves the problem for international text. So I want to tell you guys a little bit about how it works so you can understand how simple it is.
The Codepoints in Unicode from 0 to 7F are exactly the same as the ASCII values. And UTF represents them using the exact same bytes in memory.
So what that means is if you've got a disk full of plain ASCII files, I can wave my magic wand over it and say, I declare you to be UTF-8.
Not a single byte on disk changes. The meaning of the files doesn't change. You have automatic backwards compatibility with all that legacy of ASCII, so that is a wonderful thing. UTF-16, UTF-32, other encodings don't have that property. For the values that are outside the ASCII range, they are represented as multi-byte sequences. But all those multi-byte sequences only use byte values above 128.
So there was no overlap between the ASCII characters and the multi-byte encodings of the higher value Unicode Codepoints.
That property is not true of other encodings that re-use the high code bytes to mean something else. UTF-8 has three flavors of bytes.
It has the plain ASCII bytes. If a byte starts with the most significant bit being 0, that tells you it's plain ASCII.
If the top two, three, or four bits are 1s, that tells you it's a two, three, or four byte sequence. And if the top bits are 1 0, that tells you it's a continuation of a multi-byte sequence. So I'll show that in context.
The ASCII characters stand alone. The bytes with two leading 1s signify two byte sequence. Three leading 1s is a three byte sequence.
Four leading 1s is a four byte sequence. And this gives it a wonderful property that you can jump into the middle of a UTF-8 file anywhere, and by just looking at any old byte, you can tell what you've got. Does this stand alone as ASCII? Is this the start of a multi-byte sequence? Did I land in the middle of a multi-byte sequence and I have to skip forward or back to find the character boundary? So it's very, very robust to insertion and deletion errors.
It's an encoding that is efficient enough to be compact but has just enough redundancy to be very reliable. Another useful property it has is in an UTF encoding of a string, there are no 0 bytes. And C treats 0 as the string terminator, so that's a very useful property.
UTF-16 strings have zeros all over the place. And another nice property is if you do a naive simple byte-wise string sort on UTF strings, they sort in the same order as if you sorted the Unicode Codepoints directly. So a whole bunch of really wonderful properties, and this is why just six years after Ken Thompson invented it, the IETF issued a document saying that from then on, all new Internet standard protocols had to work with UTF-8. And that philosophy has been embraced on the web. Four years ago, Google did a survey and found that 80 percent of web pages were UTF-8, and that includes a small percentage that were old fashioned, plain ASCII, which is of course a compatible subset of UTF-8.
Last month that number is now up to 87 percent. And because of that, the W3C, just like the IETF, also recommends that we only use UTF-8 for everything.
And this is wonderful. There is, however, one catch. For some reason, lost in history, the DNS community decided not to do that, and they invented a different encoding that they call Punycode.
And Punycode re-uses existing ASCII byte values to mean different things. So those are the byte values that correspond to letters, digits, and hyphens. A result of this is that if we have a block of bytes, I can interpret those bytes as ASCII values and get something like that, or I can interpret them as being Punycode encoding and get what they're meant to be. And that dual interpretation of the same bytes can be very problematic, because it becomes unclear what you want to display to the user or what the user meant.
If we contrast that with UTF-8, the first thing you notice is the encoding is more compact. It takes fewer bytes, and there's also only one valid interpretation. So there was no ambiguity there. The good news for you guys is you don't need to care about this, because we handle it for you. In iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan, if you tried to ping a UTF-8 hostname on the command line, it would fail.
You type in UTF-8, those characters pass through the tool to the APIs on to the network, but that name was not put into the DNS as UTF-8 and it fails.
Starting now in iOS 10 and macOS Sierra, the same ping command on the command line with the same UTF-8 input, we will now translate that automatically to Punycode, do the query, and it will be successful. Now, here the ping command is taking that Punycode and displaying it as if it were ASCII so you get this gibberish on the screen instead of the actual name that you meant, and that's part of the problem of having dual interpretations of the same string.
But the good news is all the Bonjour and DSA APIs will now accept international text input in UTF-8 format, because -- Thank you. Because the Punycode format is quite restrictive, it doesn't support even simple things like spaces in names, and we use DNS for Bonjour search discovery, we don't want to be that restrictive.
So the way the algorithm works, which is what's documented in RFC 6763, we will first try UTF-8 as is, and if the DNS administrator put UTF-8 into their zone file, which is very easy to do, and people were doing that back in the '90s, we do the query, we are successful, we get the result, everything is fine.
What's new now is that if we fail, instead of giving up, we will do one more try with Punycode and see if that works. So we support both in the same API.
Email addresses are also becoming internationalized today. And this is also not hard to do, but users face problems for a silly, trivial reason. Many apps, when you sign up for an account or you go onto the website to sign up for an account, they try to validate if the email address is valid and they check whether it ends in .com or things of that form. And users with perfectly valid email addresses are not allowed to sign up for accounts because their email address is rejected. So we need to remove those ill-advised validators. Really the only thing you can check for in an email address is it has to have an @ sign. And if it's got that, it could be a valid email address. If you want to know if it's valid, send a validation email and have the user respond to confirm that it's live. If you're writing an email client or an email server, there are a bunch of RFCs you are going to need to look at.
But for the rest of you, you don't need to worry about that. Let the user enter their email address as UTF-8, stick it in your customer database, and have the mail server send that out correctly encoding with the email standards. So to wrap up this section, we recommend UTF-8 for everything.
Makes everything so much simpler. Don't worry about Punycode. We handle it for you.
And be liberal about accepting user input in this new international multi-lingual world. That brings us to interface selection.
Now, Wi-Fi Assist is something that we introduced last year. Really, this is not new. This is the way things have worked since the very first iPhone. If I have Wi-Fi, I want my phone to use it. If I don't have Wi-Fi, that's why I pay for cellular data, so I have network access outside the home as well. And the first iPhone did this. What we changed last year is we did it better.
We were smarter about making that determination, because there's always this gray area right on the edge of a Wi-Fi network.
And mobility factors into this as well. We have a situation that we call the parking lot problem, and it happens at the end of the day when you leave work.
You leave the office, you get your phone out, you have Wi-Fi, you're walking out to the car and you want to check maps or weather forecasts or look for movies or something and your phone thought it had Wi-Fi. It had Wi-Fi a moment ago, but you just walked out of range and it hasn't realized yet.
With Wi-Fi Assist, we will detect that. We'll try to use Wi-Fi. If it doesn't work, we'll use cellular instead.
But like any new feature, there's sometimes a tendency for the new thing to be the whipping boy that gets blamed for people's problems.
Everybody hates it when some app uses a ton of data and they get a big bill they weren't expecting, and it's human nature to blame the new feature.
But if you actually look at your Wi-Fi Assist data, you will probably find they are very small. Wi-Fi Assist is normally not the problem here.
Now, apps have the switch. If you don't want that app using lots of data, you can turn it off.
But that's very crude. That's kind of an all or nothing switch. And a lot of apps want to do something a bit more subtle.
Say you have a video streaming app. You may want the user to be able to browse the catalog, see little thumbnail pictures, read the descriptions over mobile data. Doesn't cost very much. But you may want the setting in your app that says don't stream videos over mobile because users may not want to spend that much money on mobile data.
And if you have that, you're going to want to be able to differentiate between getting the thumbnail, which is allowed over cellular, and streaming the video, which is not.
A lot of developers have done things like this. They use the reachability API to say, am I on cell? Yes or no? If I'm not on cell, go ahead and do that download. Well, things don't stay the same in networking. Things change from second to second.
And between you checking whether you're on cell and actually doing the connection, the user may be walking across the parking lot.
So this is not the right way to do it. The right way to do it is to express your intent to the networking layers, and we will honor what you tell us.
The first step here is don't bother with preflight checks. If you want to do a network transaction, just try it. If that's a transaction that you don't want to use cellular data, then you can express that to the networking layers. Using the CoreMedia APIs, you set the allow cellular access key using NSURLSession.
If you set allows cellular access to false, then we won't use cellular data connection. Nice and simple.
If that connection fails, you can ask the user, do you want to stream this video over mobile data, or you can just wait, subscribe for better route notifications, and when the phone comes back on Wi-Fi, you'll be told about it and then you can retry your connection once Wi-Fi is available again. So to summarize, don't assume that because you're on Wi-Fi now, you will still be on Wi-Fi one second from now, or even half a second from now. Conditions change. Express what you want to the networking layers and we will respect that. Our last topic is networking quality of service. Last summer, we announced a partnership between Cisco and Apple, and I'm going to tell you a little bit about one of the new APIs that you can use to express your needs to the networking layers.
There are different kinds of networking traffic. 99 percent of what we do is good, standard Internet best effort traffic.
We want the best throughput we can get, and ideally we'd like low delay. But we definitely want as much throughput as we can get.
This supplies browsing the web, sending an email. Another thing that we do is online backup, uploading photos to iCloud.
And that also wants to have good throughput, but not as good as the priority stuff. We'd like to be able to upload all of our photos to iCloud in the background without disrupting our Netflix TV binge. The photo upload should take place when we're sleeping. It is what we call scavenger-class traffic.
It uses the otherwise idle capacity of the network that would otherwise have been wasted, but it is second class to sending emails, browsing the web, anything that the human is actively involved with. The third class of traffic is telephony, interactive voice and video.
And I say interactive, because that's the key thing. When we're having a conversation, I speak, you hear me, you respond, you speak back, I hear you.
If that round-trip is more than a couple hundred milliseconds, human communication breaks down. When people talk about voice and video, it's important to realize that watching a YouTube video may be video, but it's not interactive. It doesn't need that sub 200 millisecond round-trip time.
Listening to a podcast may be voice; that doesn't mean a podcast is voice traffic. It's not interactive.
So that's why I labeled this part of the chart telephony, because this is interactive voice and video. For that traffic you want the lowest round-trip time possible, and it's very small throughput. It's a few kilobits per second. You don't need 50 megabits of voice.
So marking your traffic as telephony tells the network keep the latency low, but you also don't have a big queue.
If you try to do any kind of bulk transfer as voice class, you're going to lose most of your packets, because a very small amount of the network capacity is allocated for that traffic. So one of our FAQ questions people ask us, will Fastlane make my app faster? And the answer is no, it doesn't make it faster. It will lower the latency for voice traffic. You may be wondering, how does this relate to the Smart Queue Management and Explicit Congestion Notification that we were talking about earlier? And the answer is those technologies improve the delay for all traffic across the board, but telephony will probably still be an extreme case that wants the very, very lowest latency and doesn't mind sacrificing throughput to get that. Starting in iOS 5 we had the network service type API, and that lets you express some of these needs to the network. But many of the developers writing apps like Skype and Facetime that are doing this kind of voice telephony are using UDP. And to use UDP today on iOS, you need to be using BSD sockets. So we now have a socket option that exposes the same functionality so your UDP clients can benefit from this. We know some developers had been previously setting the IP type of service bits in an attempt to get the same effect. The problem is those type of service bits are not well defined.
They are not specified anywhere. Some Wi-Fi chip vendors will look at the type of service bits and use that as a hint to set the Wi-Fi traffic class to voice, video, background. But the problem is with no standard definition of the bits, that interpretation is not consistent.
So you may test it in your office and think it works fine, but for a customer, it does something different. And that's why we have the new socket option that gives you reliable, consistent behavior across all devices. If you're writing Swift code, you can set the network service type property to voice, video, or background. Or if you don't set it at all, then that is traditional best effort. If you are using the socket option, we have the same options.
We have about another seven more than this, which is more than most of you will need. These are the four interesting ones.
When you set these options, a couple of things happen. On the device itself, there are multiple outband queues, and the type of service you set for your traffic controls which queue it uses. On Wi-Fi interfaces, it will also set the wireless multi-media access category.
This is supported on all devices, iOS and OS X, and the outband queue selection also applies for Ethernet as well as Wi-Fi.
Now, if your device is on one of these new Cisco Fastlane networks, we will recognize that and we will also set the IP layer differentiating services Code Point so that you get that handling that you want, not just on the first hop leaving the device but in subsequent hops through the enterprise network.
I want to stress this is not something that you all need to feel obliged to go away and change your code. If you're writing an online backup app, definitely set background traffic class. If you're writing the next Skype, then set the voice class. But for the rest of you, standard best effort is almost certainly what you want. Some other things you ought to remember: The outband queue selection and Wi-Fi layer, quality of service marking is supported on all devices, but remember it only applies to outband packets. The packets coming in have to be marked by the thing at the other end sending them. And the IP layer marking is also only for outbound packets. It's today only supported on Cisco networks with compatible hardware. It's only on iOS. It's not supported on Macs or Apple TV or anything else.
And for now it's only supported on Wi-Fi. I know most people don't use Ethernet with your iPads, but if you do plug in an Ethernet adaptor, the quality of service is not supported on Ethernet. And finally if the administrator chooses to install a management profile on the device, then that management profile can restrict which apps are allowed to use this type of service option, and only apps that are listed in the profile will be able to set type of service. It will be a no op for all other apps. So to summarize this section, most of your traffic should continue to be best effort. If you are doing large, bulk transfers that are not time critical, background traffic is a way for you to be less disruptive and be a better citizen on the network. Remember, it's not a priority level.
There isn't a ranked ordering here of high priority to low priority. It's a web expressing whether you want low throughput and low latency or high throughput and moderate latency. So that ends our session. Thank you for coming.
We've talked about Smart Queue Management, and this is a call to action to all the ISPs and carriers and network vendors. The clients are supporting ECN.
The servers are supporting ECN. If you start marking the packets in your network instead of dropping them, you will make your users much happier.
The message for developers in the room is IPv6 is now the majority of traffic for many carriers on many networks.
Support IPv6 in your applications. Support IPv6 and IPv4 in your servers. For your text, UTF-8 is the new ASCII.
It's no harder than ASCII. It's really very simple to use it. All of our devices now have good support for all the Unicode characters in the fonts, so you should have no worries about supporting UTF-8 without hesitation.
And finally, we have new ways for you to express intent to the networking layers. You can control when you don't want to use cellular data, and you now also have finer control of the throughput latency characteristics of your data. So with that, there's a link where you can find more information. We have other sessions that you can watch on video that you may find interesting.
We have sessions about networking and security, which is important. We have a couple of other sessions about internationalization. We have some sessions about higher layer networking applications, like HomeKit.
So with that, thank you for coming to WWDC.


You all know how much I love my essential oils. I have talked about them for a couple years on the blog. We have used essential oils in our home for the last four years now, and it has been life changing. While I do have one brand I have used and loved for years, I will be honest and say that sometimes…those other essential oils are just out of our budget for the month. However, because we really do rely on using essential oils in our home, those months we can't order for whatever reason make it hard to know what oils we need to stretch and which we can do without.
Thankfully, I found an alternative that I am in love with. ENTER…. Simply Earth essential oils.
You probably haven't heard of Simply Earth, as they are a relatively new company, but let me tell you why you need to be excited about them. I have a feeling you will be just as in love with them as I am!
Simply Earth also gives 13% of their profits to fight human trafficking! What an important mission to fight!
I absolutely love that Simply Earth offers such a simple way to get started using essential oils – a monthly Essential Oil Recipe Box. This is the easiest way to have a natural home, right there, in a box that comes to you.
What's In The Simply Earth Recipe Box?
The Simply Earth Subscription Recipe Box is amazing, whether you are new to essential oils, or have been living a nontoxic life for years. It truly takes the overwhelm out of which oils to purchase, and the best ways to use them.
The first time you order your Simply Earth Recipe Box, you will also get the big blue Bonus Box! I was shocked at the amount of bonuses in this box! The Bonus Box really accompanies the Recipe Box so well, and makes creating the recipes even easier.
Would you believe it if I told you that you can get ALL this…the Recipe Box and the Bonus Box…for only $39.00??!! That is a crazy value!
Use code "JSHFREE" to receive a $20 eGift card with your first monthly Recipe Box! You also get the big blue Bonus Box when you subscribe today. Your subscription can be canceled at any time, don't worry!
I am so excited to make the Laundry Stain Remover, Hand Soap, and Dishwashing Detergent! Those are natural home recipes I haven't attempted yet, and Simply Earth has now made it so simple for me!
In case you can't tell, I am so thrilled to discover Simply Earth Essential Oils. While you are browsing, keep in mind that not only do they have the monthly Recipe Box, but also sooooo much more! I also have a few roller bottle blends, diffuser bracelets, and their bug spray and have been so pleased with everything. You will very likely be seeing a lot more about Simply Earth around here!
Use code "JSHFREE" to receive a $20 eGift card with your first monthly Recipe Box! You also get the big blue Bonus Box when you subscribe today!
Tell us, do you think you'll try Simply Earth Essential Oils?
This post is sponsored by Simply Earth, but all opinions are my own.
I will be needing some new oils so this was very helpful. I do want 100% per oils for sure.
Nice! I too have my go-to brand but it is very expensive. (American Youngevity ) I will have to check these out because I make a lot of DIYs with them and I'd love an affordable, but clean, brand.
I will definitely be checking these out! It's so hard to find affordable, pure essential oils. Plus, those recipe cards look super helpful!
From The April 2019 Recipe Box, my favorite is a lemon essential oil. Lemon essential oil benefits your skin by reducing acne, nourishing damaged skin and hydrating the skin.


It was the afternoon of Monday, two days before Passover celebration on Wednesday that week. The Lord Jesus, for the fourth and last time, foretold to His disciples that He would be betrayed to be crucified on the Passover (the previous times were in chapters 16:21, 17:23 and 20:18).
Soon after, the religious, judicial and civilian leaders (priests, Levites, elders) met to plan a way to arrest and kill Jesus Christ. It was easy to find Him openly, but they feared the crowds and concluded they would only do it after the feast, subtly, not to cause uproar among the people.
But the Lord had already determined that it would be at Passover as indeed it was, once again demonstrating His sovereignty over all.
Matthew then turns to an episode that occurred four days earlier in Bethany in the house of Simon the leper (a leper could not live with healthy people, so either he was away and they were using his home or he had been cured). We have more details in the Gospel of John 12:2-8, where we learn that Lazarus and his sisters Mary and Martha who served at the table were also present.
John identifies the woman with the alabaster flask containing very costly fragrant oil as Mary. She broke it and poured the expensive perfume on the Lord's head as He reclined at the table, and also on His feet, which she wiped with her hair. It was an act of great devotion, showing the high regard she had for Him and preparing Him for the death that He would suffer.
But there was criticism of the disciples (coming from Judas Iscariot according to John, but others probably agreed), stating that it was a waste because the perfume could have been sold for much money to give to the poor (John notes that the motive of Judas was selfish: he was not thinking of the poor, but to fill his own pocket with the proceeds of the sale).
The Lord readily rebuked the disciples and defended the woman, saying that she had practiced a good deed to Him, and that the time had been well suited for this. He accepted the anointing as a preparation for His burial (the women who, days later, went to His grave on Sunday to anoint His body arrived too late - Mark 16:1-6).
From this we can learn that to glorify the Lord Jesus is more important than the practice of charity. Christians should abstain from contributing to anything that prevents them from exalting the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.
There are numerous campaigns in the world for raising funds, supposedly to alleviate hunger and contribute to the welfare of the needy, and later we find they were pocketed by intermediaries and influential politicians, little or nothing being done for the benefit of those on behalf of whom the campaigns were made. But when assistance is made in the name of the Lord Jesus, by His people in all sincerity, He has declared that it is a good work. We will always have the poor with us to give us the opportunity to do this good work.
The Lord also made a remarkable prophecy: that the action of this woman would be remembered by the entire world where His gospel was announced. He knew beforehand that the good news of salvation by grace through faith in His name would be proclaimed throughout the world, and so He could add this prophecy concerning an action that, at the time, might seem of minor importance compared with the extraordinary events that would follow in the coming days. The narration of this event was made in three Gospels, and no one can read them without being aware of the fact. It is being remembered again right now…!
It seems that among all the disciples only Mary, the sister of Lazarus, heard, understood and believed in all that the Lord had spoken to the point of making Him this last tribute, costly for her, before His death. It was a scene of love and praise to the Lord Jesus that preceded and contrasted with the bitter days in Jerusalem where He confronted the leaders of the people, culminating with His betrayal by one of his disciples, His rejection by the highest authorities of His people, His unjust condemnation by the representative of the largest imperial power on earth, and His death as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29), the very day of the Passover sacrifice.
All twelve apostles had been handpicked by the Lord Jesus to witness and later give testimony about His ministry to Israel, His teachings and the signs that were given in abundance to prove that he was indeed the Son of the living God.
But, according to what John tells us in his Gospel (12:6), Judas "was a thief, and had the money box; and he used to take what was put in it." Evidently he had never been converted, and followed the others just to take financial advantage for himself. The question then arises: why did the Lord allow him to do that? Nothing could be hidden from Him, so He knew the heart and thoughts of Judas, and his dishonesty. He has not revealed to us the reason, but there we can see His longsuffering, teaching Judas like the others and giving him the opportunity to repent and submit to Christ as the others. However, he never got round to doing it and finally it became too late as we will see below.
The previous episode, in the house of Simon the leper, was possibly inserted between that of the conspiracy of leaders of the Jews and that of the departure of Judas to them because that was what finally made Judas decide to betray his Master. Having expressed "pious" indignation at the act of Mary, Judas and the other disciples with him had been openly rebuked by the Lord. Judas, with a guilty conscience, knowing he had been caught in his hypocrisy, was filled with hatred and with that Satan entered into him (Luke 22: 3) and urged him on this opportunity to go and speak to the chief priests and captains of temple to negotiate the surrender of Jesus Christ to them. It is a warning to those who, assembling with brethren in the church yet reluctant to convert, may one day be taken by the enemy of our souls and lose forever the opportunity they had to save themselves.
There is another suggestion in vogue these days: perhaps Judas did not think that the Lord Jesus would die, but that, when arrested, He would exert His divine power to overcome His enemies and finally establish His kingdom. When this did not happen, he killed himself. But this suggestion omits that it was Satan who had impelled him to betray the Lord. God had already known beforehand what Judas would do, so that we find prophecies of this in Psalm 41:9, Zechariah 11:13. The Lord Jesus knew everything, which He showed later (verses 25,26).
Judas therefore went over to the chief priests and asked "What are you willing to give me if I deliver Him to you?", and accepted their offer of thirty pieces of silver, which they counted out to him. It was a mediocre sum, ten times less than the value at which he had rated the oil that Mary had used to anoint the Lord. The priests were glad because he had solved their problem, and they delayed the capture for after the feast. But Judas sought opportunity to betray Him from that time.
2 "You know that after two days is the Passover, and the Son of Man will be delivered up to be crucified."
4 and plotted to take Jesus by trickery and kill Him.
5 But they said, "Not during the feast, lest there be an uproar among the people."
7 a woman came to Him having an alabaster flask of very costly fragrant oil, and she poured it on His head as He sat at the table.
8 But when His disciples saw it, they were indignant, saying, "Why this waste?
9 For this fragrant oil might have been sold for much and given to the poor."
10 But when Jesus was aware of it, He said to them, "Why do you trouble the woman? For she has done a good work for Me.
13 Assuredly, I say to you, wherever this gospel is preached in the whole world, what this woman has done will also be told as a memorial to her."
15 and said, "What are you willing to give me if I deliver Him to you?" And they counted out to him thirty pieces of silver.
16 So from that time he sought opportunity to betray Him.


text:
Do Voters Really Want to Spend More on Roads?
Following in the footsteps of Massachusetts voters last fall, Michigan voters recently rejected a gas tax increase. This reaction from Gov. Rick Snyder (R-MI), who pushed the tax hike referendum, caught my eye:
"While voters didn't support this particular proposal, we know they want action taken to maintain and improve our roads and bridges," Snyder said.
We hear that from politicians and political commentators all the time, but is that really true? And what if it's not?
Raising the gas tax is a very good idea, yet it's also extremely unpopular. This is always interpreted as anti-tax fervor, or that there's something unique about the gas tax that voters don't want that raised but they'd be more tolerant of some other tax hike to fund roads, because voters are dumb, I guess?
As Gov. Snyder said, it's always taken on faith that voters want to spend more on roads and bridges, but don't want to have to pay for it. Most polling isn't helpful in that it just asks if voters want to raise the gas tax to fund transportation projects, but doesn't ask whether funding more transportation projects is itself a worthy goal.
Here's what some polling can tell us:
A 2014 YouGov/Huffington Post poll found fewer voters wanted to spend more (45%) on roads and bridges than wanted to spend the same (31%) or less (15%). That's not exactly a mandate for saying "we know they want action taken," is it?
A Smart Growth America poll back in 2007 found voters supportive of spending more on road repair, but strongly opposed to spending more on new roads. This is a key point because states spend most of their transportation money on building new roads.
A poll ahead of the Michigan referendum showed the biggest chunk of voters didn't want their taxes raised and others didn't like the complex referendum proposal. But at least 1 in 5 voters didn't want to spend the money spent at all, calling it wasteful government spending.
What would it look like if we stopped increasing spending on roads and bridges? In the short term, we'd build fewer brand new or expansion projects, and focus on repairing existing ones. If those polls are right, that's actually much more in line with public sentiment than our Big New Project status quo.
Would it be a traffic nightmare if we stopped expanding roads? Transportation researchers say no:
The Surface Transportation Policy Project and other researchers have found that for every increase in our highway network, half of the new capacity is taken up by "induced demand" -that is, traffic drawn to the road because it's there. Building new roads and adding more lanes draws people who otherwise would not have driven onto the roads. Combined with the delays created by construction and the time it takes to complete a major project, roadbuilding provides almost no relief from traffic delays. And it's incredibly expensive.
Maybe instead of spending more money on roads and bridges whether voters like it or not, politicians and pundits should try listening to them instead?
UPDATE 5/31/15: I joined the BradCast to discuss this topic, you can listen here.
Posted by TheGreenMiles at Monday, May 18, 2015
Tags: gas tax, roads, transportation


text:
Marine Park Review
25 Years of Marine Parks
Other Species (Coral, Dolphins, Stingrays, Sharks, Whales)
Taxonomy and Range
Shark Identification
Conch Fact Sheet
Conch Survey
Turtle Friendly Lighting
Turtle Inwater Research
Turtle Encounters
Darwin Plus Cayman Turtle Socioeconomics
Concern about overfishing of culturally important species such as conch and lobster arose in the early 1980's. In 1988 the DOE began monitoring the status of shallow water populations of queen conch both inside and outside of the Marine Park Replenishment Zones. This is done annually in selected sounds around Grand Cayman and Little Cayman.
Results to date indicate that the mean density of conch is decreasing throughout the Cayman Islands, most likely due to increasing human populations and tourism; in addition poaching continues. Marine park and replenishment zones do appear to function as refugia for reproductively mature adults, and during 1997-1998 the DOE conducted plankton tows to investigate levels of larval abundance at 3 locations in North Sound. Laboratory analyses of the plankton samples to date have shown that certain areas in North Sound are important sources of conch larvae. Thus the continued protection of breeding stocks in these areas, as well as of the immature conchs which will be potential future breeders, should remain in effect as an integral component of the management strategy for this important marine resource.
Based on recommendations from the DoE, the legal catch limit for conchs has recently been reduced and a closed season established (Insert link to Marine cons laws). It is hoped that this increased protection will lead to a stabilization and eventual increase in conch populations around the Cayman Islands. The Department will continue to monitor shallow water conch populations so that any changes can be factored into future management plans.
Abundance of Veligers of the Queen Conch in North
Sound: An Executive Summary
By Gene Parsons, Bradley Johnson, and John Bothwell. Research and Assessment Section, Department of Environment, Cayman Islands Government. April 2001.
To determine the abundance of queen conch (Strombus gigas) veligers at 3 locations in the North Sound, an 18-month sampling program that collected 76 plankton samples on an average frequency of about once every 2 to 3 weeks was conducted from July 1997 through December 1998. Near-surface, horizontal plankton tows of 20-minutes duration were undertaken at each location using a bongo-net frame equipped with 2 conical nets of 0.5-meter diameter and 202-micron mesh. Of the 2,077 queen conch veligers collected through tow 36, 10 had broken shells that could not be measured; therefore, 2,067 were analysed for maximum shell length (SL). Of these 1,992 (96.4%) corresponded to Stage 1 (< 500 microns SL), 75 (3.64%) to presumptive Stage 2 (500-900 microns SL), and none to Stage 3 (settlement stage). In the 6 samples containing veligers, density varied from 0.06 to 34.86 per 10m³. The preliminary results indicate that the back-reef areas of the replenishment zones of Barkers and North Sound might be larval source areas owing to these zones partially functioning as refugia for queen-conch breeders.


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Conference Panel on Reception of the Byzantine Heritage in the Christian East
The conference was attended by scholars from STOUH, the Higher School of Economics, the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Asian and African Countries of Moscow State University, Moscow Theological Academy, and St. Petersburg State University, and also featured talks from an independent researcher from Ekaterinburg and a foreign scholar from Canada.
Priest Alexander Treiger of Dalhousie University, Canada, gave a presentation on "The Spiritual Paradise: Issues of Contextualization of the Greek Original and Arabic Translation". The "Spiritual Paradise" (Arabic al-Firdaws al-ʿaqlī) is an anonymous Christian treatise on spiritual life, originally written in Greek and then, in the 11th century, translated into Arabic somewhere around Antioch. The paper analyzed the sources of the "Spiritual Paradise" (which include the writings of Greek Church Fathers – Macarius, Gregory the Theologian, Dorotheos of Gaza, John Climacus, and Maximus the Confessor – as well as spiritually edifying stories from the Paterikon) and considered the contextualization of the Greek original and the Arabic translation.
28.11.2022 First Meeting of STOUH Spanish Club
18.11.2022 Greetings on the 30th Anniversary of Saint Tikhon's Orthodox University of the Humanities from Monsignor Francesco Braschi
10.11.2022 Afterword by Students of the Faculty of History and Philology at STOUH on the "Serbian Solace for the Russian Heart" Festival
07.11.2022 Serbia, 20th Century: Word and Image
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They invited their families to join them for the church ceremony with Greek stefana, sweets, cold water of fresh lemon flavor.
The whole evening next to the church ended with wishes written on the paper boats sailing on the calm waters of nearby harbour. When it got darker, paper lampions flew to the Cretan sky.
It all opened guests' appetite for the traditional Cretan dinner served in a cozy Chania Old Harbour Taverna.
Everybody danced, enjoyed slideshow about the couple's love story and then they made their special wishes on the canvas with a hand-made bike prepared by Maria!
Very special day and evening for all, guests and Crete for Love!


A max of all trades, but master of none?
I'm going to miss his reporting for the Saturday Evening Post.
Sigh. More Dodgers front office wishful thinking.
Its called a minor leauge deal. Sure seemed to work for turner and toles. Justin masterson is looking promising at the moment.
Love your perspectives and optimism dodgerfan! This one just strikes me as we have a need for a guy who can play anywhere in OKC, given the injuries and need for a revolving door with the big club. Undoubtedly, Farhan has history with Max and believes he'll be a good utility fit. I doubt this guy ever sees the big club though.
Love your perspectives and optimism dodgerfan! This one strikes me as we have a need for a guy who can play anywhere in OKC — given the injuries and need for a revolving door with the big club. Undoubtedly, Farhan has history with Max and believes he'll be a good utility fit. I doubt this guy ever sees the big club though.
Great to see Kenta step up last night.
What do you think of the signing now Norcalblue?


I have always felt really called to homeschooling, and brushed it off with- *Im* not patient, *Im* not smart enough, etc.
Good job mama! Just read your post on DS and yes your room looks great! Mine are 23m and 7m and I KNOW we will be homeschooling because it is just right for our family. You rock!
Because he is being teased is not a reason to take your child out of school. He needs that social experience so he can learn how to be around all different kinds of people. Your just going to make things harder for him in the long run by avoiding reality.
While I appreciate your concern for our reasons as to why we want to homeschool, upon much more soul searching it has developed into much deeper reasons. He isn't enjoying school, he isn't learning as much as he can/wants and its the right choice for our family right now. That all being said socially the kids will be attending a full day of school one day a week, a nature group one morning a week, a general homeschool group another day a week and a gym program one day a week. Not to mention gymnastics, t-ball, football and soccer. We will only be homeschooling through 3rd grade or so. I didn't get into the teasing aspect too much in the post because its more than teasing, more like physical violence that was not properly addressed. I am sorry if you dont agree with our parenting choices, over the summer (already started) we will homeschool and we will continue, if it goes well, into the school year. PS I graduated from High School homeschooling- socially I am more scarred from elementary bullying than my homeschooling time.


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Local News Round-up
by Eesha Williams
In Springfield on February 26, there will be a rally calling on a local congressman to do more to fight climate change. As of February 25, more than 30 people had RSVP'd. The rally will be at 300 State Street at 4 p.m. Details are at:
www.facebook.com/events/2540018672738551
In other news from the Valley, Native Americans in Greenfield are asking the public to attend a government hearing in Greenfield on March 12 at 6 p.m. at the high school cafeteria. "We oppose the zoning change," David Brule told the Valley Post in a phone interview on February 19. "We don't want a Walmart, a gas station or a fast food restaurant on land that Native Americans have lived on for thousands of years. There are archaeological sites on that area."
The zoning change would affect 158 acres. The most vulnerable part is 19 acres of open space. The rest is a mix of houses, a 40 acre wilderness park, a tire store, and a car repair business. More information about Brule is at:
www.montague-ma.gov/files/Battle_of_Great_Falls_Phase_I_Final_Adminstrat...
and at the web site of a group he runs: www.NolumbekaProject.org.
Helping the Native Americans is Al Norman. He told the Valley Post in a phone interview on February 23, "The town council did not allow any of the 60 or so people at its February 14 meeting to speak. Many of the people at the meeting were holding signs opposed to the zoning change." Norman has a web site at www.sprawl-busters.com.
In other news from the Valley, on February 23 in Brattleboro there was a rally against Trump's war on Venezuela. The organizers have a web page at:
www.facebook.com/BrattleboroSolidarity
More information is at www.NoWarOnVenezuela.org.
In other news from the Valley, eight people who were arrested last summer for non-violent civil disobedience are reacting to a recent decision by the judge in their case. Five of the people are from the Brattleboro area. They were arrested outside Trump's ICE office in Burlington. "I feel extremely upset that the judge won't let us talk about ICE in court," Rachel Siegel told the Valley Post in a phone interview on February 24. She runs a group that has a web site at www.pjcVT.org.
_           _        ____         _
(_)  _   _  | |__    / ___|  ____ | |_
| | | | | | | '_ \  | |  _  |_  / | __|
| | | |_| | | | | | | |_| |  / /  | |_
_/ |  \__, | |_| |_|  \____| /___|  \__|
|__/   |___/


text:
Q: Is there an XML Web Service that can get posts, categories and other data from the site? I know that there is a JSON API Plugin and I think that is what I want with the major exception being that it only outputs JSON and there is no configuration that I can see for outputting XML. Is there an equivalent for an XML webservice or can I output it myself through some built-in WP functionality?
I'd like to output XML because I am looking to feed the data into a third party search engine tool that can integrate with XML web services.

A: WordPress ships with an XML-RPC interface that's enabled by default. It gives you the ability to both retrieve and edit/create content on the site via XML.
There's quite a bit of detail about the API available on the Codex.

Updated
There aren't (to my knowledge) any existing systems in place that do XML over GET for WordPress. Webpages tend to be some form of (X)HTML already and, if following the XHTML spec closely, your theme alone might produce something parse-able.
However, that's not the only option in place.
If you take a look at some of the newer AMP work being done with WordPress, you'll see how developers are leveraging custom URL rewrite endpoints to serve different content for the same resource. For example:

*

*http://yoursite.com/2016/09/cool-post-bro - Delivers standard HTML

*http://yoursite.com/2016/09/cool-post-bro/amp - Delivers AMP markup

You could use the same pattern to code an /xml rewrite endpoint that presents your post in whatever arbitrary markup as you need.
To get you started ...
Enable an endpoint
function xml_init() {
    add_rewrite_endpoint( 'xml', EP_PERMALINK );
}
add_action( 'init', 'xml_init' );

Intercept requests so you can prepare XML
function xml_maybe_change_markup() {
    if ( ! is_singular() || is_feed() ) return;

    // Only intercept the right requests
    if ( false === get_query_var( 'xml', false ) ) return;

    add_action( 'template_redirect', 'xml_render' );
}
add_action( 'wp', 'xml_maybe_change_markup' );

Actually render XML
function xml_render() {
    $post_id = get_queried_object_id();

    // Get the post, build your XML document, print it to the page

    exit;
}

As I don't know what exact output you need, I leave building the XML document as an exercise for you :-)

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Conventional & Autonomous Weapons
IDN-Archive 2011-2016
Newsletter Archive 2018-2021
Kofi Annan
OACPS
Planet Earth Suffers as Politics Rearranges the Deck Chairs on the Titanic
Viewpoint by Roberto Savio
The writer is publisher of Other News, an eminent proponent of "information that markets eliminate" and founder of IPS-Inter Press Service News Agency. This article is being reproduced courtesy of Other News with the writer's permission. He can be contacted at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and his articles and comments can be read on Facebook @robertosavioutopia. He warns that while the world is heading for catastrophe, the governments are not taking their responsibility seriously.
ROME (IDN) – The European Union (EU) appears to have decided to scale down its commitment to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change which was adopted by consensus by all the 195 member states of the UN Climate Convention and the EU, and has been ratified by 172.
When Europe's 28 Environment Ministers met in Brussels on December 20, to discuss the Commission's plan for reducing emissions, to comply with the Paris Agreement, they decided, with some resistance from Denmark and Portugal, to follow the direction taken by President Donald Trump who has meanwhile withdrawn from the Paris Agreement to privilege American interests – and this without any attention to the planet.
This is one example of narrow national interests taking the upper hand over values and vision. Of course, those alive today will not have to pay the price. Coming generations will be the victims of the emerging and an increasingly inhospitable world.
Few from among those who made solemn pledges in Paris in 2015 on behalf of the entire humankind to save the planet, will be alive 30 years from now, when the consequences will become irreversible – underlining that humans are the only animals who neither defend nor protect their habitat.
Let us analyse the cause of the situation in which our planet finds itself. Firstly, the Paris climate treaty is just a collection of good wishes, without any concrete commitment. Every country sets its own targets, and is responsible for implementation. It's like asking all citizens of a country to decide how much tax they would like to pay, and leave it to them to comply, without any sanctions whatsoever.
In the run-up to the Paris Agreement, scientists took two decades to conclude with certitude that climate change is caused by human activities, and this despite a strong and well-financed campaign by the fossil fuel industry to contradict them.
The International Panel on Climate Change, an organization under the auspices of the UN – with members are 194 countries and support from more than 2,000 scientists from 154 countries who work together on climate – took them long years since its establishment in 1988 to 2013, to reach a definitive conclusion: the only way to stop the planet deteriorating more rapidly, is to ensure that emissions do not exceed 1.5 centigrade over what was the Earth temperature in 1850.
We started to register temperatures in 1850 with thermometers during the industrial revolution particularly in the second half of the 19th century. So, we could see how coal and other fossil fuels started to interact with the atmosphere. The scientists concluded that if we exceeded the 1850 temperature by 1,5 centigrade, we would irreversibly cross a red line: we will not be able to influence the trend, and climate will be out of control, with very dramatic consequences for the planet.
As far as the 2015 Paris conference is concerned, it was the final act of a process, which started in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, with the UN Conference on Environment and Development. Two of its leaders have meanwhile passed away: Boutros Boutros Ghali and Maurice Strong, who managed the first ever summit of heads of state on the issue of environment.
It is worth remembering that Strong, a man who spent all his life to make environment a central issue, opened up the conference for the first time to representatives of the civil society, beyond governmental delegations. Over 20,000 organizations, academicians, activists came to Rio, laying the foundation stone for the creation of a global civil society recognized by the international community.
In 1997, as a result of the Rio Earth Summit, the Kyoto Treaty was adopted, with the aim to reduce emissions. Nearly two decades since then to Paris, the results were rather modest. Paris was left with an urgent task. According to the World Bank, in 2014 there were 1.017 billion people without electricity; in Africa only 20% of had access to electricity. Experts felt that we should provide them renewable energy, to avoid a dramatic increase of emissions,
Unlike the Kyoto Treaty, Paris was supposed to be really a global agreement. So, to bring as many countries as possible on board – and it's a little known dirty secret – the UN decided to put as a goal not the strict 1,5 centigrade target, but a more palatable 2 centigrade.
But, unfortunately, the consensus is that we have already crossed 1.5 centigrade. The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) has estimated that if the Paris commitments are revised, we will be hitting 6 centigrade, an increase that according to the scientific community would make a large part of the earth inhabitable.
In fact, in the last four years we had the hottest summers since 1850. And in 2017 we have had the highest record of emissions in history, because these have reached 41.5 gigatons. Of these, 90% come from activities related to human actions, while renewables (cost for which has now become competitive with fossil fuels), still cover only 18% of the energy consumed in the world.
Another dirty secret is that though we talk about how to reduce the use of fossil fuels, we are doing just the opposite. At this very moment, we spend 10 million dollars per minute, to subsidize the fossil industry.
Direct subsidies range between 775 billion U.S. dollars to 1 trillion, according to the UN. The official figure for just the G20 countries is 444 billion. But this is not the total figure: the International Monetary Fund has accepted the economists' view that subsidies are not only cash: it is the use of the earth and society, like destruction of soil, use of water, political tariffs (the so-called externalities, costs external to the budget of the companies). If we include these costs, we reach the staggering amount of 5.3 trillion U.S. dollars: they were 4.9 trillion in 2013. The use of fossil fuel costs governments, society and planet earth 6.5% of the global Gross National Product.
The news media have not reported this. Only a few know the strength of the fossil fuel industry. President Trump wants to reopen the mines, not only because that brings him votes by those who lost an obsolete job, but also because the fossil fuel industry is a strong backer of the Republican Party. The billionaire Koch brothers, the largest owners of coalmines in the U.S., have declared that they spent 800 million dollars in the last electoral campaign.
Some might say: these things happen in the U.S. but according to the highly respected Transparency International, there are over 40,000 lobbyists in Europe, working to exercise political influence. The Corporate Europe Observatory, which monitors the financial sector, found out that in Brussels alone it spends 120 million dollars year, and employs 1,700 lobbyists. It also found out that they violated regulations, lobbying more than 700 organizations, which outnumbered trade unions and civil society organizations, by a factor of seven.
The power of the fossil fuel industry explains why in 2009 governments helped the sector with 557 billion dollars, and only with 43 to 46 billion dollars to all renewable industry, according to the International Energy Agency estimates.
Obviously, citizens have no idea that a part of their money is going to keep alive, with good profits, a sector which is well aware that it plays a key role in the destruction of our planet – a sector that knows well that they are now emitting 400 particles of CO2 per million, when the red line was considered 350 particles PM. A spectacular feast of hypocrisy is going on.
The UN, in 2015, conducted an extensive poll, with the participation of 9.7 million people. They were asked to choose as their priorities six themes out of 16. Climate change was on top. The first preference of 6.5 million respondents was "a good education", the second and third of over 5 million were "a better health system" and "better opportunities for work".
The last of the 16 themes, attracting less than 2 million, was "climate change". This order of preferences was also chosen by the least developed countries, which are going to be the major victims of climate change. From among 4.3 million participants from the least developed countries, 3 million preferred chose education as a priority; climate change ranked last, with 561,000 votes. Not even in Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia, islands that could disappear, was climate change the first priority. This is ample proof that people do not realize where things stand, namely at the threshold of the survival of our planet, as we have known it for several thousand years.
So, if citizens are not aware, and therefore not concerned, why should the politicians be? The answer is because they are elected by citizens to represent their interests, and they can make more informed decisions. How does this ring in your ears? With lobbyists all over fighting for interests, what can be better sold as jobs and stability?
Let us come to the last dirty secret, to show how far we are from really addressing climate change. A very important issue that has even been discussed in Paris is that the agreements are entirely about the reduction of emissions by the fossil fuel industry. Other emissions have been left out entirely.
A new documentary, Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret, produced by Leonardo di Caprio, has analysed data gathered by vegans on the impact of animals on climate change. Though the data is considered somehow exaggerated, its dimensions are so huge that these add anyhow another nail in our coffin.
Animals emit not CO2, but methane which is at least 25% more damaging than C02. There is recognition by the UN, that while all means of transportation, from cars to planes, contribute 13% of emissions, cows' share is 18%.
The real problem is the use of water, a key theme that we have no way to address in this article. Water is considered even by military strategists to be soon the cause of conflicts, as petrol has been for a long time.
One pound of beef uses 2,500 gallons of water. That means that a hamburger is the equivalent of two months of showers! And to have 1 gallon of milk, you need 100 gallons of water. People worldwide, use one-tenth of what cows need. Cattle use 33% of all water, 45% of the earth, and are the cause of 91% of the Amazon deforestation. They also produce waste – 130 times more than human beings. Pig farming in the Netherlands is creating serious problems because their waste acidity is reducing usable land. The consumption of meat is increasing very fast in Asia and Africa; it is considered a sign of reaching the level of rich societies.
Beside this serious impact on the planet, there is also a strong paradox of sustainability for our human population. We are now 7.5 billion people, and we will reach soon 9 billion. The total food production worldwide could feed 13 to 14 billion people. A considerable part goes wasted, and does not reach people. But the food for animals could feed 6 billion people. And we have one billion people starving. This is a proof of how far we are from using resources rationally for the people living on earth. We have enough resources for everybody, but we cannot administer them rationally. The number of obese has reached the number of those starving.
The logical solution in this situation would be to reach an agreement on global governance, in the interest of the planet of humankind. But in practice we are going in the opposite direction. The international system is besieged by nationalism, which makes it increasingly impossible to reach meaningful solutions.
Let us conclude with a last example: overfishing. It is now two decades that the World Trade Organization (which is not part of the UN, and was built in contrast to the UN) tries to reach an agreement on overfishing with mega nets that scoop up an enormous quantity of fish: 2.7 trillion, of which they keep only one fifth, and they throw back four-fifth.
At the last WTO conference on December 13 in Buenos Aires, governments were again not able to reach an agreement on how to limit illicit fishing. Big fishing is now down at 10% of 1970. And we are exploiting one-third of all stocks. It is estimated that illegal fishing puts between 10 billion and 23 billion on the black market, according to a study by 17 specialized agencies, with a full list of names. And again, governments spend 20 billion dollars per year to finance the increase of their fishing industry – another example of how vested interest takes an upper hand over common good.
I think now we have enough evidence, to realize the inability of governments to take their responsibilities seriously, though they have the necessary information that we are on way to disaster.
In a normal world, Trump's declaration that Climate control is a Chinese hoax, and it is invented against the interest of the United States, should have caused a greater global reaction. Also, because while Trump's domestic policies are an American issue, climate change is affecting all the 7.5 billion on the planet. Trump was elected by less than a quarter of eligible voters: nearly 63 million. It's too small a number authorising Trump to take decisions which affect the entire humankind.
European ministers are following the maxim, as a proverb says, Money speaks while Ideas Murmur. There are indeed many who are preparing to speculate on climate change. Now that we have lost 70% of the ice of the North Pole, the maritime industry is gearing to use the Northern Route, which will cut cost and time by a 17%.
And the British wine industry, since the warming of the planet, is increasing production by 5% each year. The UK is already producing 5 million bottles of wine and sparkling wines, which are all sold.
We have all seen, to no avail, the rising number of hurricanes and storms, in Europe too, and a record spread of wildfires. The UN estimates that at least 800 million people will be displaced by climate change making several parts of the world uninhabitable. Where will they go? Not to the United States or Europe, where they are seen as invaders.
We forget that the Syrian crisis came after four years of drought (1996-2000), which forced over a million peasants to flee to the towns. The ensuing discontent fuelled the war, with 400,000 dead and six million refugees meanwhile. It will be too late when citizens awake to the damages under way. Scientists expect this to become a reality in thirty years from now.
So why worry now about what is a problem for the next generation, while corporations continue to make money until the last minute, with the complicity of governments and their support? Why not ride the climate change tide, buy a good bottle of British champagne, drink it on a luxury Polar cruise, and let the orchestra play – as they did on the Titanic until the last minute? [IDN-InDepthNews – 28 December 2017]
Photo Credit: climate.nasa.gov
IDN is flagship agency of the International Press Syndicate.
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IDN-InDepthNews offers news analyses, features, reports and viewpoints that impact the world and its peoples. It has been online since 2009. Its network spans countries around the world.
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When it comes to buying Christmas gifts for book lovers, you might think that you can simply buy a book and be done with it. However, books are a lot like clothes for many book lovers- they are way pickier than most people realize. A book lover who is really into books may already have the book you think they might like. They might also really hate the genre of book that you select. So, buying a book for a book lover can get quite complicated.
Luckily, there are other ways to page homage to a book lover's favorite thing (books obviously). A couple of weeks ago, I selected a bunch of gift ideas for book lovers, but today, I sharing some of my favorite jewelry for book lovers.
One lucky reader will even get to win a gift certificate to Femmecraft- which is an amazing shop that sells both book and geek-related jewelry. Scroll to the bottom of the post to enter the giveaway!
Most book lovers have other things to do than read books all day (although we would much prefer to do that), but we still want to show our support of books. These book jewelry pieces all do that in a fun and exciting way! These jewelry gifts for book lovers will not only make a book lover smile, but they also make amazing Christmas gifts!
How awesome are these cufflinks? I don't usually wear cufflinks, but I might start if I could add these to my collection.
Know an Alice lover? Then you won't want to miss getting them this adorable bracelet . I love the blue ribbon threaded through the links.
Speaking of charm bracelets, this amazing handmade bracelet features general book love. It's so delicate and pretty!
These earrings showcase a woman with her nose in a book. A reading woman is a happier woman, I say!
This fun necklace tells you everything you need to do in life: eat, sleep, and read.
This phrase is quite popular right now and is on everything from shirts to this necklace! Declare your love for big books with this fun necklace.
Although not jewelry itself, this jewelry box is made from classic books and can be used to store all the awesome book jewelry that a book lover is sure to accumulate. The best thing about this box is that you can choose the book yourself!
Winnie the Pooh is one of my favorite children's books. The coolest thing about this cover pendant is that it actually unfolds into the 100 Acre Wood map!
Pride and Prejudice is one of the most-loved books of all time. If you have an Austen lover in your life, then they will be super-delighted to get this piece of book jewelry .
If you know someone who hearts books, then you will want to get them this bracelet.
Do you know someone in a book club? This book club necklace will be sure to tickle their funny bone and delight them for many years to come.
Your book loving gift recipient can declare their love of books with these fun pins !
This beautiful flower is made from the pages of a book. It is so elegant and delicate.
This pendant from Femmecraft rhymes and declares a love of books and words. I was sent one of these care of Femmecraft, and I absolutely adore it. It's well made and so quirky and fun! I love it so much; you can enter to win one of your own items from Femmecraft below.
In addition to Word Nerd, I also like the pendants for the Gamer Geek and this lovely shiny blue pendant.
What bookish item would you love to see under the tree this year?