Information that wants to be free

E Magazine covers the environmental challanges faced by big cities in the Third World, using Mexico City and Lagos as examples: "It’s worth looking at some of these emerging mega-cities in detail, because daily life there is likely to be the pattern for a majority of the world’s population."

WorldChanging notes the debut of an online database of biomimickry projects, meant to eventually serve as a sort of encyclopedia of design ideas adopted from life forms.

When planning the tool, we went through the process of trying to design something biomimetic, and discovered it wasn't just a bucket of ideas we needed--we needed a way of finding the right people, something that was a "matchmaking" tool as well as a knowledge source. We wanted to make something with the best aspects of Wikipedia, a relational database, and ThinkCycle. We may or may not have succeeded, but we've at least created a new kind of tool.

This should be fun to contribute to...

On an older-fashioned note, Megan Prelinger writes in Bad Subjects about starting her own public library in San Francisco. It's a charming story, and the subjects include "landscape, land use history, the built environment, natural history, ornithology, media, philosophy, history, political science, radical studies, and American cultural history".