Weekend Linkages: AI, That Damn Metaverse, Living Pantries and Compressed Air

...Image from the deep internets. The stupidity of AI Who Is Still Inside the Metaverse? Searching for friends in Mark Zuckerberg’s deserted fantasyland. No, Cities Aren’t Doomed Because of Remote Work Los Angeles’s Metro Is Using Classical Music as a Weapon ‘A living pantry’: how an urban food forest in Arizona became a model for climate action History and Future of the Compressed Air Economy...

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Little Library Walks

...relative in San Francisco, or pet sitting in Pomona I like to punctuate my urban dérives with visits to these little cast-off book sites. To navigate, I have a Little Free Library mobile app on my phone. With the app you can check in and note if you left or took a book. There’s also a web based version. The app and map have only the Little Free Libraries that someone has decided to list, so you can, of course, find many more unofficial libraries o...

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The Gathering Storm

...amage I’d be saddened but not surprised. But the fire reached deep into an urban area at a great distance from the wilderness, much further than I ever would have expected. That this fire hit a place where so many people are aware of and working to counter the dangers of climate change shows, as Peter says, that no place is safe. As an Altadena resident said on Reddit, “Losing everything is an abstract notion until you lose everything”. Here’s a h...

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Saturday Tweets: Screens, Model Villages and Walkable Cities

...nterested in the @ucce_la Master Gardener Program? Come out to @OpenSilo‘s Urban Ag Happy Hour next Tuesday, 10/30, from 6-9 to talk gardening and learn about the program! Join us at the Highland Park Brewery, 1220 North Spring Street, Chinatown. pic.twitter.com/HcFwyn8J2F — Rachel Surls (@RachelSurls) October 22, 2018 In the walkable city, people gather in a piazza, square, or plaza. In the automobile city, it’s called an intersection. (And nobod...

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Garden Amendments as Placebos

I just finished writing an article for Urban Farm Magazine on the subject of aerated compost tea (ACT for short). It proved to be one of the most contentious subjects on which I’ve ever tried to, as Mark Twain liked to say, “corral the truth.” It got me thinking about other controversial soil additives popular in organic gardening and farming circles right now such as rock dust, mycorrhizae additives, and biochar. Now I prefer not to touch these...

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