Best Of MetaFilter

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"

Computer Chip by JD Hancock (cc by)

In case you missed it earlier, the very excellent Joy of Computing, featuring code snippets, computer-generated art, games, tools, crafts, libraries, and more from the Recurse Center community.

Jumping-Spider,on-fish-hook-eyes_2012-08-02-16.13.51-ZS-PMax by Sam Droege (cc by)

The tough question of what it would be like to have animal eyes as a human got a great answer from member (and brain researcher) wyzewoman:

First, we have to consider the type of animal whose eye we're using. Mice, for instance, have remarkably poor acuity -- the world is a pretty big blur to them -- and I think a lot of that comes from the physical structure of their eyes, so the child would inherit this. However, there are predators with very good acuity, so let's assume we're using eyes from one of those. And of course there's the issue of color; most mammals can sense 2 rather than 3. Our hypothetical child wouldn't be able to get around this limitation.