Best Of MetaFilter

Pont en Royans by FrenchHope (cc by)

Recently on Mefi, people and places around the world, enchanting, mysterious and magnetic:

Good luck finding parking: "The Precarious Architecture of 7 European Cliff Cities"

The REMAINS of Greenland project is attempting to locate and preserve archaeological sites in Greenland before they are lost to the destructive effects of climate change

Italians Compare the Arrival of Starbucks to the Apocalypse: pjsky's roundup of the unthinkable

Grace's Guide to British Industrial History is a project publishing the history of industry in the UK and elsewhere

"Being Iceland, it gets complicated": Saga Thing is a podcast about the Sagas of the Icelanders

Roadtrip like it's 1966: 1966 video photolog trips of selected highways via BC Ministry of Transportation

No vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end: A short video from the British Geological Survey about Siccar Point

'They made me wear my bathrobe' [screen capture from video via hlntv.com]

Now is the time when I am typing. I am typing on my computer doing internet things. Isn't this interesting? Cool internet things. I solved a puzzle and now people are taking pictures of me pretending to solve a puzzle. – harperpitt

JannaK reports that the HLN network has produced a short video episode featuring the Ask Metafilter post requesting help with her late grandmother's coded messages, and "the true hero of this story: Metafilter's own harperpitt, her code-breaking skills, and the power of the hive mind in tackling web mysteries."

(Post title text grabbed from littlesq!)

vinyl by suzy_yes (cc by-nc-nd)

Thanks to the work of everyone in this thread, I was able to make a positive identification of the song, order the vinyl, and have it professionally converted to digital.

The OP has updated an old thread about a 30-year-old mystery tune in Ask Me with a YouTube video of the song. Yay, team!

Looking for more musical mysteries to solve?

What's the Baby Elephant song I heard at Burning Man?

I'm trying to identify a sample from the first few minutes of this album

Loving you is . . . easy to forget? What was that song from 2008 - 2009?

Finding a song based on a music video: "a woman riding a horse and she had dramatically long hair that floated through the sky"

3-eyed Bear by Brandon James Scott (cc by-nc-nd)

Please Don't Ursinate in Pool! – Atom Eyes

Shibori's first post about a video of a home pool invasion by bears is a fun thread with some great anecdotes from nevercalm and Nerd of the North.:

a bear that is not much larger than a traditional stuffed teddy bear is quite strong enough to do whatever it wants, fuck you very much

After several months of eating nothing but salmon, you'd be pretty desperate for a Breath Saver, too.

"I don't know," I said. "What do you think it is? I have an idea but it's kind of disgusting."

know when to stop by ** RCB ** (cc by)

Eriko advises on what to do if your vehicle is ever stranded on a train crossing in the recent "It'll buff out" post featuring video of an amazing Train-Limo collision. (no deaths or injury)

Chocolat de Bonnat. Côte d'Ivoire by EverJean (cc by)

I work in southwestern Cote d'Ivoire, just on the border of Cote d'Ivoire and Liberia. The men I employ are largely cocoa farmers, when they're not in the forest taking complex observational data on primate behavior and ecology.

ChuraChura responds to, and takes some issue with, a video of Ivorian cacao farmers tasting chocolate for the first time, plus gives a larger picture of the day-to-day reality of the tough economics of farming in the region.

Dancers on The Judy Garland Show (1964) A few illuminating answers to a question about why some old Twilight Zone episodes can look especially creepy. Meet the term, and the MeFite, orthicon halo.

Tetris by Gryphus R (cc by-nc-nd)

In a thread about competitive Tetris, tournament ref Chris Higgins drops in to answer some questions about the whole experience, in this and later comments:

So, yeah — being a ref in this case did not involve the kind of ref action you'd see in boxing or other physical sports. The players were well-behaved (no cheating that I saw, no pausing, etc.). But it's a real tournament, and the players are serious. They're also using thrift store equipment that could die at any time, so I was keeping track of scores in realtime in case we lost a console, TV, etc. and I had to call whoever was ahead. Keeping track of the two scores is actually pretty hard.

Famous fantasy author Neil Gaiman recently did a great commencement address at the University of the Arts (embedded above) and it is currently making the rounds. MeFi member Rory Marinich was in the audience and recounts the experience:

As great as I'm sure this speech is as standalone inspiration, for our graduating class everything Neil said really struck home. Art school is a weirdly draining and exhausting place, and I think that caught a lot of us off guard – definitely me; I'm just getting over a panic attack that hit in waves over the course of a very rough last week. The weirdness isn't that it's exhausting (I'm sure all colleges are like that), but that it comes from the same thing that also makes art school exhilarating: the freedom you have to pursue your own creative path, to be as strange and as personal as you can bear being.

You might have seen this video of Mad Men complete with lots of blocky video glitches, dubbed the "bittorrent edition" since you often find downloaded rips of shows and movies carry these sorts of problems. MeFi member Rhomboid breaks down in painstaking detail how bittorrent works, how video encoding works, and what really causes those weird blocks to appear:

Often you'll see a frame suddenly "jump" into full view with a background, which happens when the encoder gets a complete I-frame. This also explains why you'll sometimes see the foreground of the next scene overlaid on the background of the last scene, because again the I-frame that described the scene change was missing but some of the P-frames were recovered