magid

A very cool idea: Ample Harvest is a clearinghouse site where people with extra produce (from their garden, farm share, whatever) can find local food pantries to give it to, rather than letting it go to waste. It's like a national version of Food For Free, which collects food (from farmer's markets, supermarkets, farm share distributions, etc.) to give to food pantries, shelters, and afterschool programs for low-income kids. I know that Red Fire Farm distributions give their leftovers to them, also When Pigs Fly (at least, the Somerville location; I assume the Maine ones don't...), and when I talked with the coordinator, he said he'd be happy to get any excess people grow.

Land use patterns affect cloud formation, and Bldgblog takes that in an interesting direction: what if architecture had to be designed to encourage particular kinds of clouds? It seems like there are a lot of possible story seeds in the idea. (And I wonder how that would work with the Municipal Darwinism of Mortal Engines, with cities always on the move; would they bring their weather with them, essentially?)

Is 25 the only base-10 number that can be written a second way using the same digits, no operators (i.e. 25 and 5²)?

LibraryThing keeps on increasing their databases in interesting ways. I'd known about the local feature, with bookish venues and events, and about the book series feature, but now I can see my library through a list of characters or places, which is oddly fascinating. I'm picturing an atlas of places one can visit through my books, ranging through actual history, and into lands of imagination, the Six-Hundred Acre Wood next to the Realms Beyond, away to the islands of the Abarat or the subtle differences of a post-plague San Francisco.

For locals: HEET (Home Energy Efficiency Team) is a new group in Cambridge working to help people weatherize their homes in a barn-raising style of community gathering, training people how to do the home improvements as they go.

I should've gone out for a ride earlier; it looks like there's a bunch of rain headed this way in the next couple of hours, if not sooner. *sigh*

eta On the plus side, the Red Fire Farm share starts next week! Pock! (And they've even got a group on GoLoco for ride shares out to the farm, so us Boston shareholders can pick strawberries and peas :-).