Best Of MetaFilter

Excavating for a New York foundation, 1903

I feel like the lead character on a Hollywood Forensics show, able to produce amazing results from the other characters by saying "...Enhance." In Ask Metafilter theatro asks "Manhattan history detectives: what church is (was?) this?" and gets a great investigative analysis.

Frame by seyed mostafa zamani (cc by)

RichardP posted Inside the Mind-Boggling World of the Antiquities Theft Task Force

building in a glass of water by Jeanne Menjoulet (cc by)

Water in my NYC apartment tastes funny. How to test it? I'm a drinking water scientist and this is what we suggest to customers having water quality issues...

Pride by Michael Kazarnowicz (cc by-nc-sa)

Maybe you can help Goofyy find a photo of himself at the front of the 1973 Gay Pride Parade at Washington Square Park!

The Letter Carrier short film

Furnished: Film and Furniture furnishes you with fascinating facts about the décor in your favourite films

Unfurnished: This Is The Most Filmed In Alley In NYC

Selling the sizzle: This Is Why You Can't Stop Watching Movie Trailers

Selling the steak: Why Dwayne Johnson is the new Schwarzenegger

Crossed: "A Report Of Connected Events," short film blurs the lines between reality and our favourite stories

Double-crossed: Wild Things ... 12 double-crosses in a movie with a runtime of 108 minutes

Defining: Polish Radio Experimental Studio influenced animation soundtracks for generations to come

Redefining: a three-part essay series on costume design for heroic female characters

Time and space: This May Be Stanley Kubrick Explaining the End of 2001

Time and place: "The Letter Carrier," exquisite, chilling fable in a short film

I went to the Families Belong Together march today in NYC. It seemed to us that it was a sizable and diverse crowd ... I set up a backdrop in the craziness and crowd and took a bunch of portraits of the protestors

chris24 talks about the recent march and mentions his wonderful "Portraits of Protest - Families Belong Together" photos.

WC [toilet facilities] by State Records NSW

History pals!

Enjoy some newly-animated historical city photos, plus barnacles on the history of Australian public bathrooms "in case you're the sort of person that wants to see 115-year old survey sketches of toilets and urinal blocks".

Or listen to the meticulously recreated ambient sounds of 1700s Paris.

How about Marie Duval, 19th century woman cartoonist called 'one of the forgotten wonders of nineteenth-century art .. the bizarre dreamlike distortions of her comic world look like some steampunk 21st-century version of Victorian London."

Or the re-discovered ancient Chinese texts that rewrite the early history of Taoism and Confucianism.

Speaking of, what are some examples of historical events that are commonly misunderstood?

Did you catch teponaztli transcribing some diary pages from 1799-1804 New York City? "The most I've seen her write about anything was how much she hates games, which I love for its being an angry rant from 200+ years ago."

Or enjoy the brief video on the baseball fan Wild Bill Hagy, which is a time capsule of 1979 Baltimore.

Harking back to 1979, share some sense-memories in what was it like when everybody smoked?

Or looking further back - what was sugar like in 1631?

Finally, what are the best history nerds on Youtube?

Mail Chute by Teknorat (cc by-sa)

Anyway the seams between the plastic sheets sometimes intercepted the corner of an envelope. In a building as tall as the WTC mail would hit impressive speeds. So one jammed letter would quickly gather many letters, traveling near the speed of sound, into a densely packed arterial blockage ... Guess who found them?

Splunge recounts his adventures as an "ex-officio mail plumber" valiantly clearing clogs in the WTC mail chutes in Ragini's fun post, The mail chutes of New York City

Wedding in the courthouse - Daniel and Kate by Russ Benfield (cc by)

Sometimes when you ask a question it turns out the perfect person to answer it works across the street from where you are getting married and can solve your problem.

IMG_3477 by Micah Sittig (cc by)

In the wake of the NYC subway tragedy, MetaFilter members wondered why we couldn't have sealed subway platforms with trains stopping only at doors (like those pictured above, called platform edge doors - PEDs). Users sevenyearlurk breaks down the immense cost of retrofitting lines and garius explains the difficulties of getting them to work correctly:

Just to provide some kind of summary on the whole "platform doors" thing, it's always worth remembering that, when it comes to Metro systems, it's generally pretty easy (and cost effective) to do stuff as long as its done or planned for when the system is built. After that though you're pretty screwed.

One World Trade Center by Shiny Things (cc by)

How do they get cranes down from the top of skyscrapers when they've finished with them?

An astute observation from MeFi member JimmyJames:

Next time people ask why sociology is important, I'm going to show them this video.

On its own, when you see one person slip, you automatically assume that person slipped, was clumsy or not playing attention. But when you look at the aggregate, you realize that the failure isn't on the individual at all, rather the structures that cause certain people to fail with almost no fault of their own. And yet, without this data, they will very quickly ascribe the mistake to themselves.

subway break by Runs With Scissors (cc by-nc-nd)

In a thread about fights on the NYC subway, davidjmcgee explains how he once broke up a fight. BY DANCING.