Best Of MetaFilter

Cows cows cows by aWorldTourer (cc by)

Peemster--the author of a piece linked on MeFi--shares with us additional information from his source farmer Nate Wilson.

I would open by telling you quite frankly to be highly suspect of anyone that tells you they have accomplished a successful "cow-tipping" as they will almost certainly lie to you about more important things, as well. I am most comfortable stating unequivocally that "cow-tipping" is naught but a classic urban legend, promoted largely by juvenile minded, immature, inebriated young adult males attempting to embellish resumes otherwise lacking in noteworthy personal accomplishment. Kindly allow me to make my case...

"Wow, I love a lot of these. But as I was going through the reddit thread, I came across this picture. It isn't the most stunning example of colorization, but it was striking to me nonetheless. The person in the photo is my great uncle, Raymond Bowman..."

milkcrateman recognizes a relative.

But now I have to eat the damn things. I've eaten squid in about every form known to man, but this one is new to me. And I sure as hell am not going to embarrass myself in front of all the locals. Of course I know how to eat this, don't I? But do I just wolf it down? They're only about 3 or 4 inches long. And what's all this other stuff on the plate? I know it's not just for decoration.

charlie don't surf shares a story of how he learned to eat hotaru ika.

Ajinomoto by stu_wp (cc by-nc)

It is impossible to be allergic to either sodium or glutamic acid. Allergies are an autoimmune disorder where white blood cells attack substances that are generally not supposed to be attacked; if this was the case for either sodium or glutamic acid, the effects would be immediately fatal given the omni-presence of sodium and glutamic acid, their essential roles in the human body, and given how glutamic acid is naturally produced by the human body.

MeFite Conspire helps to dispel some misinformation in an MSG thread with SCIENCE.

Lois Lane image by JD Hancock

robocop is bleeding envisions a Lois Lane centered superhero movie.

They each try to patch things up with Lois, but she tells them each off, pretty much inspiring their methodologies ("You need to think about the little people, Bruce. How many more kids in Gotham became orphans while you were palling around with Luthor?" - "Read this issue of Spider-Man, Superman, and look closely at the Power/Responsibility line."). The dudes take her message to heart and try to act the parts they should. She keeps telling them "nice start, but you need to do X, Y, and Z. And also you two should try to play nice with each other. Go have a meal together and meet me back here in the hotel bar afterwards."

2013-06-01 15.50.14 by ℤoḁsterboy (cc by)

Eyebrows McGee talks about listening to her great-grandmother's piano rolls.

My great-grandmother, under a false name, recorded several piano rolls during the Depression to help feed her family. This is one that she played, Never Again, that has been rereleased as a historically important recording and they're making new copies of the roll.

It makes me a little teary to be listening to my great-grandmother playing piano via the magic of the internet. The gentleman who collects, curates, and re-releases this got in touch with my family several years ago because he'd managed to track down my great-grandmother's real name, and wanted information to add to her biography, as she recorded a LOT of rolls and was fairly well-known for it. The curator was able to send us audio files of a bunch of her rolls playing on the roll piano, and my grandfather, who was quite elderly at the time, was able to hear his mother play piano again before he died last year. It meant an awful lot to him, and to us, and it makes me teary to be able to listen to this one on YouTube.

TV series "Breaking Bad" filming locations in Albuquerque New Mexico by Boortz47 (cc by-nc-sa)

Vince Gilligan didn't originally envision the locale as any specific place, certainly not ABQ. He saw this as a story taking place in vanilla suburban USA. So while the show has very much developed a strong sense of place, it's a carefully limited one — emphasizing the quotidian suburban life and bleakly semi-urban neglect and in contrast to the austere desert surrounding it. Missing is the mountain and national forest to the east, the more picturesque and lovely examples of Albuquerque life and architecture. BB's Albuquerque is a city of uninteresting middle-class, suburban homes. The despair of ubiquitous and shabby strip-malls is accurate, though.

Back when I read about where each of the depicted homes really were, I was pleased to find that I'd correctly identified all the neighborhoods by sight.

Ivan Fyodorovich talks about Breaking Bad's sense of place.

Silly putty is a copying tool. by PugnoM (cc by)

Somebody at Xerox had PDF as a checkbox and put it into the scanner, and since Xerox is part of the JBIG committee, you can bet that they have free access to that and embedded that too....

Smaller files that are delivered in standard formats is a marketing/sales point. It's in a blurb from Xerox right here. The problem is that in implementing this feature, they don't have a particularly good way to turn it off. Maybe there is - I read through the user manual and system admin manual and I don't see anything that would appear to do that, although while it seems like there is templating system under the hood that could be manipulated into changing those settings, they didn't really go out of their way to document it.

It comes down to complicated choices that were informed by a marketing decision and hidden behind friendly menus that hide the complication.

plinth breaks down what you need to know about PDF compression, and what probably went wrong at Xerox.

MeFi member blahblahblah is an academic researcher that has studied Kickstarter and shares a bunch of really interesting tidbits and statistics about successful campaigns.

Your chances go down 13% if you make a spelling error. [...] 21% of successful projects have female cofounders. Being a woman has no statistical bearing on outcomes...

(you can download the paper this data was based on as well)

Fair Food by MEFI's OWN Waldo Jaquith (cc by-sa)

The machine also had a lot of blinking lights and complex looking buttons, which I thought were important features I didn't know how to operate for the first few days, and then learned they were just for appearance and to make the machine look more futuristic or such. I poked fun at their brochure and logo at the time, laid out entirely in comic-sans, a sin for a wanna-be graphic designer like myself. I still remember one of the guys impassioned response, borne of having to defend it multiple times. "Why do people hate comic-sans? It's happy, it's FUN."

Pandalicious's first comment is a memory of working at the Tulsa State Fair back when Nitro Ice Cream was getting started.

Funnel Web with venom by dnatheist (cc by)

It turns out that there IS actually enough vascular tissue in your eye to carry funnel web venom to your heart. Not enough to need anti-venom, but enough to make your heart do very strange things and enough to make you go a very strange colour. A trip to the emergency room ensued.

The next day a trip to the opthomologist revealed that the venom had acted like a strong acid/ alkaline and burned a hole in the iris, just missing the pupil (no glass cuts thankfully!). Long-term, the sight in my left eye is a bit worse than it should be. I also get "spider eye": if I'm tired or stressed or jetlagged, my spider eye goes incredibly red, hot and bloodshot for about 24 hours. It's not the most spectacular spidey-super-power of them all, but I'm happy enough to have it :)

Alice Russel-Wallace discusses why Shaun of the Dead is THE definitive opthamological treatment for spider envenomation incidents.

Peaches by La Grande Farmers' Market (cc by)

Former fruit agency and Whole Foods employee jocelmeow offers amazing detailed advice on how to find and treat yourself to the best peaches possible.

Ethylene (the fruit's natural ripening gas) output rises for a while but then levels off. The level of sugar the fruit contains and its red color stay exactly the same. The effect of all these changes is that the fruit goes from hard and sour to soft and sweet.

Cat scan by zircon3035 (cc by)

MetaFilter is 14 years old today, and tradition dictates a reposting of the first thing ever posted to the site.

Hazards of Riding Bears by CarbonNYC (cc by)

As these things do, this scene began a bit underground and then started to gain momentum and then really EXPLODED. Suddenly the bears weren't a movement, they were a marketing niche. And the energy of the scene began to change. Big meetups became more, for lack of a better term, corporate. Suddenly you could buy "bear" merchandise easily rather than having to seek it out. Bear clubs were springing up all over the country, and then breaking up into smaller groups as the fights between the "we want to fuck" and the "we want to socialize" groups surfaced.

hippybear talks about the changes that have happened in a different sort of bear movement.

Bear cub by travelinknu (cc by-sa)

Me in my head: Okay Momma I'm just going to go sideways and climb up as high as I can get on this big pile of logs. I'm sending you vibes that I mean no harm. I climb. Mamma rejoins her cubs. None of them even act like I'm there. I then spend the next two hours sitting on that pile of logs as Momma and cubs wander around foraging. I swear they were laughing at me.

MeFite Jalliah discusses some of their bear encounters.