Best Of MetaFilter

As humanity continues barreling forward with computers being further enmeshed in our lives, there's lots of good reasons to be concerned. Luckily, this post by mhoye is isn't one of them, as it explores the abstract beauty of the path taken by ships over a year.

If you squint, you can make out Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard. Data: NOAA; Map: Jon Keegan / Beautiful Public Data

smcdow writes software that connects to crypto exchange APIs, and speaks on the nuts and bolts of "the always-amateur-hour that is the crypto world" in the Bond villain compliance strategy thread

paduasoy has posted the London Medieval Murder Map to scratch your 14th-century murders-most-foul demographics itch

My Social Graph from facebook by paul_irish (cc by)

I'm aware that my saying all of this is like when Ollivander referred to Voldemort as "Terrible, but great." But I think it's important, on some level, to understand that Facebook wasn't a fluke: Metafilter member Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted on witnessing the rise of Facebook, its early underestimation by most tech folk, and why it "was a radically different beast than Livejournal, MySpace, and anything else remotely adjacent to the scene"

Transportations by AlexRamat

Travel demand modelling is an entire (small) field, I've been doing it for 20 years... Homeboy Trouble with some great suggestions for someone looking for data and info on how people travel

tree by Jon Bunting (cc by)

Some of the leading utilities with the highest risk of lines being encroached from vegetation simply can't physically maintain all the vegetation in proximity to their assets, even if they were to full-time employ every tree contractor in North America ...

In ambrosen's post about trimming trees from a helicopter, allkindsoftime has a fascinating comment on the amazing use of advanced tech like AI and LiDAR by utility companies to triage and manage the most at-risk lines and areas for vegetation control.

BEWARE of DOG by kennymatic (cc by)

You can mark houses visited/not-visited -- were they not visited because nobody was home? Scary dog? (literally has a spot for "scary dog, can't go to door") Do the same people still live there? Is the house on the market? Does the house have a foreclosure notice? It highlights if someone in the house has turned 18 since the last election -- do they still live there? Are they registered to vote?

Eyebrows McGee offers some first-hand insights on how the NGP VAN database works for candidates and and campaign workers.

WPA Land use survey map for the City of Los Angeles, book 3 (San Fernando Valley from Canoga Park District to Van Nuys District), sheet 12 (360) by Fæ

Inspired by xkcd's survey, Rock Steady took community input to create The Big MetaFilter Survey 2015. Today's the last day to participate -- the survey will close tonight. Data to be released shortly thereafter for your quantificational enjoyment.

IO Graph Art by nathanmac87 (cc by)

With the end of 2013 behind us, we've just launched a mini-site called MeFi Labs featuring a year-end summary of statistics, top mentions of Amazon items from 2013, recent Amazon mentions, and recent YouTube mentions in posts and comments. We're also discussing it on MetaTalk.

A Light in the Night by Zach Dischner (cc by)

MeFite Homeboy Trouble did some census data analysis of the American Community Survey to see what people were doing when they were working the afternoon/night shift.

Most of these are low paying jobs (19 of the top 20 are in the lowest quintile for wages). The top 10 occupations that are in the upper 60% for wages, by likelihood to arrive at work between 2-6 PM:
Athletes, coaches, umpires and related workers
Extruding and drawing machine setters, operators and tenders, metal and plastic
Dancers and choreographers
Gaming managers
Mail sorters, processors and processing machine operators
Gaming services workers
Entertainers and performers, sports and related workers, all other
Metal furnace and kiln operators and tenders
Other teachers and instructors
Tire builders

Green IT by OiMax (cc by)

As an incredibly opinionated geek who has worked in the datacenter industry, let me rant about the delightful details between datacenter types.

MeFite Skrubly talks about datacenters and what people do and don't know about them.

and eriko talks about why the problem is so hard.

social media, social networking, social computing tag cloud (#2) by daniel_iversen (cc by)

Tag clouds were all the rage in 2005, as a way to show items most often used. They were added to MetaFilter (and subsites) back then but have been mostly forgotten. MeFi member Homeboy Trouble stayed up late Saturday night, crunched some numbers with our infodump of data and weighted recent tags more heavily than older ones and got some interesting results:

The new hot tags have lots of current technology references as well; ios, ipad, android, ereader, tumblr, cloud, win7, kindle, droid, app, chrome, etsy, socialmedia, facebook, tablet, twitter. But there's a few new trends bespeaking a more diverse audience; lgbt, transgender, queer, polyamory, kink; trauma and ptsd; preschool, daycare and nanny; awkward and boundaries, psychiatrist and selfesteem, lowcarb, radiation, newjob, catfood, horse, bedbugs, istanbul, introvert, whiskey.