Best Of MetaFilter

Photo by Vijay Sridhar, via Flickr (https://www.flickr.com/photos/49217226@N06/)

[COMMUNITY] MeFi's developers, both staff and members, have been tinkering away on several projects, making changes here and there, both on the current site and the planned new site.

First up is Frimble, who has put together a simple moderation log to track official mod comments and post deletions, the link is here and discussion about has been going on in this MetaTalk post.

Klipspringer looked at that project, decided it could use a few tweaks, like an archive, tags, and RSS feed, check it out in MeFi Projects.

Rhaomi (you know, the President of MetaFilter Interim Board) has been working with past developers and MeFi's own developer frimble to adapt the userscript MeFiQuote, to make it amazingly easier quote other users. It's live now, read the announcement post about how to turn it on!

Meanwhile, over in the future, kirkaracha continues working on the new site. It's still in the alpha stage, so not ready for full use, but it's moving forward! Follow along via the 'rebuild' tag in MetaTalk!

Finally, there's a new General Site Info FAQ entry where we aim to keep common links and info about the site. The link to it will remain in the site navigation bar at the top of every page, for easy access.

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.