I'm a musician and computer geek (and a whatever-else-holds-my-attention-that-day geek) from Portland, OR. I help moderate Metafilter, where I go by cortex.
2008-11-17 10:08:30: I'm not sure it's possible to ask a too-chatty question here, bondcliff. Welcome to the fold.
My gut reactions to a couple things:
- Reunions will get weirded up some, yeah. I would guess part of the charm and excitement of a reunion came from the gamble of seeing/re-upping with ...
2008-11-14 15:16:40: So Quebec is the deciduous New England of Cananda?
Foolish of me not to break out the internationalizing addendum, I guess. Feel free to extrapolate as necessary.
2008-10-13 07:12:42: Turing. Alan Turing deserves a good goddam tour of the technological marvels he helped create, and a good look at the difference in sexual politics between his day and ours. Either, I think, might have kept him around for a good deal longer once he landed back in ...
2008-09-29 10:53:45: I know surprisingly little about lard-milling.
I'm pretty okay with being a Josh. There were a lot of us being born back in the late seventies and early eighties, which is a little vexing, but still.
2008-09-12 13:55:50: Given the no-risk premise (I'm pretty happy about where -- and with whom -- I am these days), sure. I'd want to start with reasonably solid motor skills and interesting social company, so probably no earlier than eight or nine.
I'd take a lot of notes. I would probably ...
2008-09-11 15:49:02: I'd enter a chimpanzee. The only catch is that the food would be served from a high branch of a tall tree. Good luck getting there, whale and sponge!
(This is a very silly kind of question.)
2008-08-18 15:15:14: Batman is known for getting along with other superheroes who stay the hell out of his way.
The temptation to reframe this as a classic crossover issue -- where, if both characters are good guys, it's almost certain they will clash for the first half or even two thirds of the ...
2008-08-07 07:24:34: The previous owners were, it turns out, complete incompetents
That's an awesome photo set. I have all kinds of complicated feelings about that whiteboard.
This is only a working theory, but if I had to do it again, any house I fell hard for, I'd step outside and then enter it ...
2008-07-05 08:18:27: Between something weird on the filter eating your "$30" and Akismet mistaking your followups for spam, I think you just got some terrible luck there, Kickstart. Amended now, sorry for the headache.
2008-06-26 13:50:15: 20,000 years is a long shelf-life for technical documentation, that's for sure. If they're going to need to know how to handle a variety of civil engineering tasks, it might be a good idea to make sure that the documentation is handled symbolically: pictograms, video, maybe a formal symbolic ...
2008-06-25 07:33:38: On the aerodynamics front (smooth = shiny), here's what I'm wondering: is there a significantly less expensive way to put a nice smooth durable surface on a car without going for the glossy shiny happy fun time effect?
I associate car-paint-job with "expensive to do, expensive to repair", but that's all ...
2008-06-19 07:17:11: This is bordering on You've Got to be Kidding territory, but finally getting a cellphone last year has made me lazy about phone numbers.
I used to be able to rattle off probably thirty to fifty phone numbers from memory. Everybody I called more than two or three times a ...
2008-05-29 13:55:06: Can I have heavily embargoed internet access? Can I bring instruments and supplies? Can I pretend for the purposes of this question that I'm not married?
Because being paid $2 million dollars to spend a year trying to write a novel and record music sounds like a better deal ...
2008-06-02 10:34:33: Okay, I'll take the alterna-universe single loner me provision and forget about the internet access and bringing my own instruments.
Wal*Mart sells computers, and shitty keyboards, and shitty guitars, and shitty microphones, and if there's one thing that's true about recording an album it is that if having shitty ...
2008-06-02 10:36:47: It seems to me we have an extremely long way to go with “communicating” with cats and the like, how in the world can we expect to converse with an equivalent alien being?
That's a big question (heh), but I think it implies something interesting besides: how much more effort would ...
2008-05-29 05:59:30: I've had "Yankee Doodle" stuck in my head as sort of a default idle-loop song for I think literally a decade at this point. It's not always there, it's not usually very present, but I'll be goddamned if it doesn't just pop up way, way more often than you'd ...
2008-05-29 07:24:53: I generally don't, on the mix of principle (I don't think it's the best route to actually improving the homeless situation in Portland) and practicality (I rarely have change on me, since I use my debit card for pretty much all my purchases).
And then every once in a while I ...
2008-05-29 07:27:34: My memory doesn't really kick into gear until I was four or five (and even then it's rather scattered and incidental stuff, and keeps fading over time), but I've got a hazy visual memory of a rocking horse that according to my mom's timeline would have to have dated back ...
2008-05-13 12:34:11: Ah, I hear you. For concepts that are fuzzier or more open to contextual interpretation, yeah, I think folks can very much fall into the trap of assuming a common definition and thus arguing past one another in the confusion that follows.
Whether and how to show that "common meanings" ...
2008-05-13 07:03:40: I don't believe that words carry absolute or fixed meanings, no. Crazy talk. Right there with you in your arguments with Someone.
On the other hand, the lack of some unambigious single authority on standard usage (a lack that I agree with you exists) doesn't really much undercut the ...
2008-05-09 06:42:37: For my part, I do not particularly strong feelings one way or the other regarding the Mets.
2008-05-09 09:56:39: Hiya, bondcliff! Congrats on the house.
Condolences, Kat. And likewise but differently, grumblebee.
Of the Mets, et al:
Despite not really caring about it either in general, I've actually lately been taking a bit of a shine to baseball, or at least to baseball metacommentary. I check Fire Joe ...
2008-05-09 11:05:37: But I’d be happier if I didn’t have to re-log in to this site all the time. What’s that about?
Huh. I don't know! I stay logged-in without issue, but I've heard scattered reports of other folks having the same thing happen. Cookies? Something?
2008-05-09 13:42:52: The fun thing is that if you already know that everybody knows (and knows you know) that "how about them Mets" is a cliched awkward-filler-question, you can then ironically pose it as an earnest query (and folks can then vamp thereon) secure in the knowledge that the meta is thick ...
2008-05-02 07:12:21: How about throwing a copy of Exorcist into your DVD player and then just laughing through the whole thing? Maybe mix in some Poltergeist as well, keep things mixed up in case your spirits aren't theistically inclined.
2008-04-22 07:59:15: What would it mean for insurance companies?
Readjusted actuarial data; lower base premiums for older members to reflect the decreased mortality/morbidity rate. Insurance companies would be more likely to just adapt than to be severely unsettled by the development—market forces pretty much keep the major players competitive based on current ...
2008-04-21 07:19:12: I try to turn out lights I don't need, and we recycle pretty faithfully. No car -- I walk everywhere that I don't bus, and Portland's bus system itself is making some small strides toward green vehicles with some hybrids in the current fleet.
Being a middle-class pedestrian in an ...
2008-04-22 15:01:00: I've come to the reasonable satisfied conclusion that I'm an okay looking guy. I don't think of myself as either particularly attractive or as at all ugly; I'm just, you know, an aesthetically unremarkable guy, with a little bit of the Jesus/hippie thing going on what with the facial ...
2008-04-18 10:17:04: Oh, I think the assumption is silly too, in a general sense; I just keep encountering it nonetheless, so I figure that framing it in that sense might draw out some reactions in either direction.
For my part, video games didn't supplanted my pursuit of other activities as a kid -- ...
2008-04-22 05:34:59: Here's the Internet's vote, by proxy:
According to someone who got here via a google search, "gaylord is an awesome name".
There is no such referrer log search string for Adolf.
2008-04-10 09:19:55: I have to admit (and I acknowledge that this is not a useful response, but I'm pretty sure I'll get away with it on account of being in good with the guy that runs the place) that ever since I saw this question posted, all I can think of to ...
2008-04-08 10:19:34: We use both; plastic gets used as secondary-trashcan liners (we use some Hefty bags for the main kitchen trash, which makes it easier to empty the smaller bins into it when its time to take it down), and paper gets used for storing up recyclables before we take those down.
2008-03-13 07:35:44: Well, it's intended not as a childlike perspective per se, so much as a broad topic-broacher: I suspect people have, collectively, a wealth of differing experiences in approaching the question.
That experience exists both practically -- those who have some sort of spiritual/metaphysical belief system having to find a way ...
2008-03-06 08:01:27: I don't really have any personal bent for space travel -- certainly not a monomaniacal to-the-death desire to see Mars, let alone a desire to do so while jabbering incessently to myself.
So, short answer is "no". Extenuating, extraordinary circumstances notwithstanding, of course, and even then I doubt I'd be ...
2008-03-06 08:04:19: I honestly can't remember. I wasn't being very musically adventurous around that time, so I'm not sure I have an answer beyond "the usual", as dull as that is.
To be honest, I was more shell-shocked and feeling a generic dread about what would go on in the USm, in ...
2008-02-29 16:48:16: synaesthetichaze, I admire and applaud your sense of restraint, but if you can't let your hair down at the BBQ, where can you? Save the type-and-delete for Metafilter; this is the place to opt for type-and-hit-submit-and-cackle.
2008-02-26 13:38:06: A Wii. They're just really great. If we could somehow get everybody to own one of those things, it'd do freakin' wonders for the next five or ten years of the video game industry.
2008-02-22 13:56:18: Sure, but how about some concrete examples?
I remember Upton Sinclaire's The Jungle coming up in US History back in high school as an example of an accidental fire-starter -- meat packing suddenly something American's were concerned about in a way that hadn't been before the novel became a sort of ...
2008-02-21 06:56:55: Aka a gedanken experiment! Thanks, German!
(And is it any mistake that gedanken is an anagram from 'Gen Naked'?)
Anyway, the question! One thing struck me as a bit sticky:
Developmentally, I think mankind would never have settled in parts of the world that, here, require clothing for protection from the ...
2008-02-19 06:21:57: I disagree with you a little, Tube. I think "typing" is definitely the go-to word for describing the mechanical act of poking at either a typewriter or a computer keyboard; and that "data entry" is solid for the semantic notion of "typing (on a computer keyboard, generally) information into ...
2008-02-14 11:11:30: I'd guess certain bits would be poisonous, but we don't just sink our teeth into food animals without some cleaning and prep either, so I don't reckon that's the limiting factor.
2008-02-13 08:15:55: A tremendous welling up of justified cynicism, at the very least. I suppose it would depend in part on how he was living, upon discovery: as a fat cat down in South America? Or as a monk? Or as a nutso crazy late-stage Howard Hughes trainwreck?
2008-02-12 08:15:58: A-Team contract cancelled! Deleted question rewritten and resurrected! I believe this is our first BBQ Lazarus Schism, which I'm celebrating by making up the phrase "Lazarus Schism".
I still like the original question, though; it followed me home, and I want to keep it. So have at!
2008-02-08 16:06:00: Has anyone considered that neither the chicken nor the road have moved, only the viewer?
2008-02-08 08:03:00: Note that "to get to the other side" is just a theory, and a painfully terse one at that. Elaboration or alternate views encouraged.
2008-02-04 07:47:29: (A caveat on vocabulary; "handwriting" here is meant to convey the broad activity of writing things down by hand, as with a pen or pencil. That includes block printing, cursive, caligraphy, and all points in between. References to specific subsets is totally kosher, it may be helpful to ...
2008-02-04 08:15:34: When I was in elementary school -- this was the mid-to-late 1980s -- we never even did cursive. The program we did was "Italic", which I remember thinking of at the time mostly as "this is stupid, why do we have to learn to write slanty?". (Bizarre now ...
2008-02-04 08:36:21: And it’s hard to imagine emailing or texting a sympathy note.
Ah, but are we just the old farts, the get-off-my-lawn geezers of tomorrow? Taking it as a given that folks who have grown up valuing handwriting (print or script) aren't likely to give it up, what about the next ...
2008-02-02 07:01:28: A lot of followup tangents present themselves, too. Biggies:
- Are you there now?
- Are you you trying to get there (aggressive saving/investing, 80hr workweek now to finance 0hr workweek in ten years)?
2008-02-01 13:15:08: I've encountered a spectrum of "talking to yourself" behaviors from people out and about in Portland over the years. I could code what I've encountered into a few general categories along a general continuum of self-absorption vs. engaging others:
1. Unconscious, wholly self-absorbed self-talk -- no reaction to passersby, no ...
2008-02-01 13:31:15: No conversational element, as far as I can tell. I'll sometimes react to my realization that I'm Doing That Again by ironically addressing, to myself, the fact that I'm talking/singing to myself, but that's so hopelessly meta that I don't think it counts.
But it's not like I'm thinking out ...
2008-02-01 13:35:47: Oh, the possibilities:
- Fly. Fly like crazy. Whether the out-of-body experience would significantly change the experience (what of the wind in your face, if you can't feel wind? The sense of gravity and momentum pulling at your mass as you zip around, if you're incorporeal?) is ...
2008-01-29 07:23:57: Well, yes, but do you drink yourself into oblivion while standing over a mat that reads "option 1" on one half and "option 2" on the other, and go with wherever the drool ends up puddled in the morning?
2008-04-16 09:06:23: I'd love to have more people over here, but I'm hesitant to push it hard over on mefi; we mention it now and then and I see a couple more people sign up, but without Matt deciding to really push BBQ (and there's no particular reason for him to do ...
2008-01-18 18:04:29: There are several common openings:
- Goldblum Auto-Immune Compromise: disable your attackers with a computer virus. Requires programming skills, macbook.
- Kirk/Spock Paradoxia: provide contradicting truth-value statements, overloading attacker's logic gates. Best against quaint stereotypes.
- The Darkstar Solipsism Gambit: undermine attacker's belief in the meaningfulness of your existence. Dangerous: ...
2008-01-19 09:08:50: Following on kuujjuarapik's answer:
I can't believe I forgot to mention the Whosian Altitude Hack, excellent for nonconfrontational resolution of encounters with robots that're bad with stairs.
2008-01-18 14:35:24: So not a haunted house in the sense that it's verifiably, dangerously haunted -- just a haunted house in the sense that some people who are willing to declare houses haunted have in this case done so? No sweat.
Would you do it on a dare or would it take ...
2008-01-21 09:25:29: [I keep seeing “4 Answers!” at the top of the comments, but only 3 answers below. Is the fourth one the ghost’s answer?]
Oh ho! It's counting, but not displaying, trackback comments. I should fix that!
2008-01-18 09:47:00: I'm pretty sure your second scenario is the cutting-room-floor prologue from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
2008-01-18 09:12:54: I'm inclined to say yes to giant out-sized slingshots that embrace not just the principle but the form-factor. So an industrial-strength rubber belt affixed between the branching Y of a twisted oak's limbs? boy howdy, you know it.
Some sort of explanation of the construction of any posited unusual ...
2008-01-18 15:11:20: One thing we haven't really touched on, so far:
What about plants? A tulip, sure, if your aim is decent -- but could you take out a rhodie bush? A jungle fern? A doug fir?
Flora seem pretty resiliant vs. slingshot attacks, to my mind.
2008-01-18 14:12:20: whir, let's not get crazy here. The question is slingshots.
Meatbomb, I think "none" is an acceptable answer, depending on the definition of "can".
2008-01-16 09:27:26: Is it possible to systematically educate someone based on a series of internet discussions with both amateurs and professionals in the field who genuinely hold an interest in the subject?
Is it possible? Absolutely! But you need a student who is willing and able to learn in that fashion; ...
2008-01-11 15:53:40: Let’s have a happy question tomorrow, plzkthxbai.
Tommorrow, on BBQ:
"The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping. Why is that, user?"
2008-01-14 07:59:18: Well, let's get creative, though. Was the oral tradition ever really pushed to the limits by modern industrialists? Let's scale things up, not story-telling but highly specialized store-and-retrieve agents? A cadre in every city, a whole complex toolset of semantic and semiotic tricks for memorizing (and in ...
2008-01-14 08:01:41: (And to turn it on its head: if we were to assume a society capable of producing complex, modern-ish infrustructure in the absence of formal written language, would they end up inventing one anyway?)
2008-01-10 06:51:57: Being blind would be a huge pain in the ass, but I think that being deaf deaf would hit me harder as a creative person. Music (Beethoven notwithstanding) pretty much goes right out the window -- making or listening.
It's a good big question, but for me personally it's damned ...
2008-01-10 09:50:57: On taste vs. smell:
I'm not qualified to say to what degree catastrophic loss of smell (let's say, nuking every olfactory nerve in my nose) would ruin my sense of taste. I'm presuming it would significantly mute and probably also alter my ability to taste, but not eliminate it entirely.
So ...
2008-01-10 10:37:16: Also, my pet care capabilities would remain intact whereas losing my sight would be a nightmare and probably mean having to rehome my dogs if not the cats.
Interestingly, my reaction is pretty much the opposite here: I have no pets, currently (though a dog or a cat down the road ...
2008-01-10 14:23:02: "Big Big Argument, featuring Stevie Wonder and Marlee Matlin"
2008-01-13 18:13:35: ricardo, the site's still rather badly in beta; I've been "promoting" posts, once daily, to the front page as the Big Big Question of the day, from a pool of questions posted independently by registered users.
Right now, it's a bad hack that involves putting the promoted post a the head ...
2008-01-21 10:20:05: (So glad this isn’t AskMe. This answer sucks. :P)
Heh. Big Big Question is all about the rampant speculation and the things you don't remember and the friend of a friend.
2007-12-31 12:13:51: To twist the question somewhat away from the enticing premise, there's a practical reformulation that occurs to me:
Would you get married in part because it's a financially sound decision?
It's not even a huge twist from the question as literally presented here by dbl: you're marrying someone you like and find ...
2007-12-24 08:52:35: It seems like the secret is to take something with short-term sparkle and no real shelf life -- something that should die out inside of a few years on lack of merit -- and then find a way to embed it in the substrate of life such that it doesn't ...
2007-12-26 09:19:54: probably as a result of the misleading way our country has been talking about this issue
Yeah; although there's clearly a contemporary US policy angle to the question, this doesn't need to be considered solely in that context. The question of torture certainly predates (and will undoubtedly post-date) current events.
2007-12-21 08:45:13: I'm not sure I agree about respect being implied by love, but I'll grant you it's a point worth considering. In fact, that's part of the implication of the question -- bearing with the presumption that there can exist a state of being loved but not respected, would it ...
2007-12-22 08:21:09: Maybe there's an order of operations thing, here: love and respect are both things that can be once had and then lost. If the idea of developing a love for someone you don't respect is unrealistic to you, what about the idea of losing your respect for someone you ...
2007-12-20 07:58:54: Two things:
1. No outside contact? As in, no internet? Recipe for madness. Or I'd get some writing done, I suppose.
2. Actually, this'd have to be a pretty extraordinary offer before I'd seriously consider it. Making stacks of money isn't at the top of my priority list—I ...
2007-12-19 06:37:11: Full disclosure: I got the series box set of The X-Files for (early) xmas, and we've been plowing merrily through the first season the last week and a half. I'm in a Mulder state of mind.
2007-12-19 09:51:10: solotoro, that makes me wonder:
What if there is intelligent life, it knows about us, it could get here if it liked, but it's just a bit bashful? Or just likes to keep to itself—oh, Earth, I'm sure you're perfectly nice and I don't mean it as a personal affront, ...
2007-12-18 06:45:12: I've always liked the wizened zen monk/wizard aesthetic. Gandalf with no hair, a quiet smile, lightning reflexes, and a sense of subtlety about the whole thing. Just taking what comes along.
2007-12-18 09:38:53: Well, without the getting-tortured-and-killed bit, presumably.
There's always the Kurzweilian route: just hang out and wait for the inevitable. Live forever by living for the next few decades. That does take a little sparkle out of it, though: sure, you're immortal, but so is that asshole down the block.
2007-12-16 08:40:27: There's a lot of question there. Assumed by whom? By fellow sexists, presuming solidarity and norm-ness? By those who've grappled with the negative effects of sexism?
And disavowed by whom, for that matter, and disavowed to whom.
2007-12-14 07:04:00: I've played it, own it, and love it. It sits on our shelf next to Carcassone, which with it has literally nothing in common.
It's not a boardgame, it's just a game that comes in a box. And bugbread is right that having the cards preprinted for you is ...
2007-12-13 07:59:43: Testing the waters. Kinda quiet on the econ question the other day too.
For my part, I don't even follow football enough to know that Shaq-alikes aren't plausible/ideal candidates for some field positions. I guess a low center of gravity is pretty useful in a crunch-and-shove sort of sport, ...
2007-12-12 09:40:35: Flatworms!
Flatworms (also commonly called Planaria) are seriously weird little things. They disturbed the heck out of me when I first learned about them. They still do, actually.
Here's some diagrams showing some flatworm internals. They're amazingly simple creatures compared to large animals, but still not that ...
2007-12-11 06:18:19: [Note: this is a user-posted question from yesterday; I'm experimenting with the promotion of user questions to the front page, and this is trial run number one. Let's see what happens!]
2007-12-09 09:44:14: A reminding-myself detail: thread views of posts should really include author byline in the post info.
2007-12-09 12:42:12: Are there going to be any guidelines for posting questions or open-ended right now?
For the moment, open-ended; I hope people will kind of continue to stake out and explore the stuff within the spirit of the Big Question, What If ethos that I've seen in the submissions so far (which ...
2007-12-10 07:35:50: I’d really like to see the question queue so we can vote up/down suggested questions.
Yeah, that's kind of what I'm hoping to do with the Kitchen (or Backyard or whatever I end up calling it). Let folks post their own questions (go on! Try it!) and polish the ...
2007-12-11 13:39:19: Then, said questions can be voted on, with the best ones being selected for the front page? Wouldn’t we have beaten that question to death already?
It's possible; I'm kind of curious to see how things will proceed once I've got everything in place and there's (hopefully) a little more ...
2007-12-07 09:28:14: You have totally found a secret space. I guess I should consider this also to be a "who is using RSS" test, and a reminder that I should clean up RSS stuff while I'm at it. Heh.
The gmail problem seems to be mostly better -- I think it's ...
2007-12-08 08:08:40: I suppose this would be the gentle space to point out to Author 1 that insects are animals too.
Uh. Oops. I'll tell you a hilarious story sometime about me being badly misinformed about the crossover between various Kingdoms and Phylums by a presumably well-meaning and definitely well-liked elementary ...
2007-12-11 13:42:52: Hmm, the tombstone question links here instead of the animal taking over the world question. Not so much an RSS feed test as a glitch, perhaps?
Separate glitches. I need to fix the navigation (or just rework it), AND I need to (consider) breaking out an Everything vs. Front Page ...
2007-12-07 06:24:11: That brings up a good point: the question says "animal", but is there any reason we should discount insects and arachnids and so on? I'd be interested in argument re: plausible brain capacity and the limitations of (and solutions to) said angle.
2007-12-07 09:47:16: Here's the question, though, iamkimiam: what would motivate them to band together and kill all humans, rather than coming into it as a many-sided interspecies melee? What have sparrows ever done for bears, after all?
Some loose alliances, sure. Probably some major predator groups would organize to try to ...
2007-12-06 08:14:54: Don't everyone talk at once. I think maybe we've discovered the danger zone of Wonk, here.
There's of course some big grey area in terms, here: what's a reasonable standard of living, exactly, for one thing? Do we define things in terms of distance from the poverty line? ...
2007-12-06 11:42:23: I think this question would have been acceptable at Ask Metafilter. Which makes it a not-so-good question for BBQ?
Heh. I'm not sure I'm going to run it as a strict either/or, though this'd honestly be at least boundry-pushing on AskMe for the open-endedness of it.
I'm actually curious to see ...
2007-12-05 08:12:24: [Not to make a fuss or anything, but the Preview button now appears to actually function. As you were!]
2007-12-05 11:11:50: While Saffron is right on about Kevin being, well, Kevin Bacon of Music, I'm curious how Kevin Bacony he is, for all that. The Bacon Brothers (Wikipedia, band's site) have put out four albums, but I don't know who in the grand musician/production network they've encountered in the process ...
2007-12-05 15:38:59: Meta question (with shades of Show Your Work): are there any great resources for tracking these connections? Is there even anything approaching, say, IMDB's level of acting/filmography/production history for the music production world?
2007-12-12 15:30:23: It strikes me that, in some theoretical undirected graph of these connections, things like We Are The World and Live Aid and so forth might make for some pretty busy nodes.
2007-12-05 08:29:21: Heh. I'm totally replacing them with an up-only text look. Denied!
2007-12-05 08:37:23: The slicky-slicky ajax refreshery doesn't seem to work so well with my modifications. Hrm.
2007-12-05 09:28:56: This AJAX stuff is interesting. Kind of shockingly simple, once you get the hood up. Making a bit of a mess of the +vote stuff figuring it out, but hey!
2007-12-04 08:43:56: One obvious way to slice up the question: do you measure the goodness of life internally or externally?
If I am happy in my life, my needs satisfied and my mind kept busy, that's a good life, for me, and damn the consequences: whether I'm a saint or a drunk or ...
2007-12-04 12:26:42: Oh, god help me. I can't believe I just conflated Blues Brothers with Fear and Loathing.
And no copping out, Mike: finish that formula.
2007-12-02 10:39:08: Keep it coming, folks.
So I'm hearing a few big things, for sure:
- Either a visible question queue or (more desirable?) a non-front-page place for folks to freely post their own questions for others to answer and thumbs-up, with promotion-to-the-front page as a bonus for the best ones.
This seems like the ...
2007-12-02 10:45:08: A couple more:
Is membership restricted in some way, or is it totally open door?
Totally open door, for the foreseeable future. A couple things on that, though:
1. As mdn says, we've got me eyeing everything pretty attentively, so there's not a big worry about the Yahoo! Answers crowd storming the ...
2007-12-02 11:18:23: Should we ban Meatbomb on general principle?
You make a compelling argument.
2007-12-02 11:30:08: I'm experimenting with a Recent Comments plugin that seems like an improvement over the stock WP widget; right now it's displaying the most recent single comment from each thread, which seems like it'll be a decent way to keep visibility on late answers to older threads, since the current thread ...
2007-12-02 13:06:26: Wow, the default blockquote css was horrid. Font-size: 1.6em? Yow. Fixed.
2007-12-02 19:17:43: Aye, experimentally, hacky fluid layout now in place. Seems a bit more spacious, though I think it's begging for a lot of spit and polish at the moment.
2007-12-03 08:18:08: Hey, look! A preview function! Celebrate!
That last line shows up even if you’re logged in, which confused me, because I thought it meant it had logged me out. Is there a way to get it to say “Register or log in” only when you’re not logged in, and ...
2007-12-03 12:06:17: Per-thread RSS feeds are now linked just after the post title, for easy subscribin'.
I'm not finding a dirt-simple per-author comment rss solution in WordPress, but I'd like to get that going eventually too.
2007-12-03 13:22:20: Hey, that works.
Rudimentary profiles are a go; comments left by logged-in users will now link to profile pages instead of the optional user-website field (which is itself listed on the profile page). Users who are not logged in get no link—I think I may nix guest-poster username links on ...
2007-12-05 07:18:17: Expanded the Recent Posts box to a week, smackfu -- it's exciting getting to the point where there's enough content to cause problems.
Tagging an archives link into the box itself is a good idea, but for now I just butted the archives widget up below.
The preview button seems to not ...
2007-12-05 09:50:47: At the moment, they're good for approximately squat. I'm not sold on the particular implementation I'm playing with—it doesn't associate votes with the voting user, so there's no in-built way to have a "my favorites" sort of view; and it checks for have-voted status against IP rather than username, ...
2007-12-05 17:21:32: Heh. I'm a real menu-driven person, so I tend to rely overly on the Things At The Top Of The Page view of site layout. Bit of a design blindspot, so, yeah, thanks for suggesting the addition.
2007-12-08 09:12:01: Webstats fun:
So pretty much nothing on the internet except for metatalk and metachat and google knows about the site yet—which makes sense, given the mefi-centric crowd and that metatalk posts don't really catch wind, memetically—so there's very little to see in the referrer logs. Metatalk, metachat, a couple of ...
2007-12-01 10:48:48: delmoi's argument brings up a really compelling followup-exercise: accepting that the best folks can hope for is a short, ~300mph flight, what's that mess going to look like? And how could you engineer a safe landing?
seriously, I wish there were favorites here.
In time, in time.
2007-12-01 15:36:09: I think I'm missing what's making you think you're missing something. Elaborate?
2007-11-30 11:18:15: Things like pancreases and intestines would probably be in the middle, as they are not exactly essential for life
Help me out here, because I don't know much of anything about intestines, but: we're talking about a lot of tubage in the large and small intestines, right? Feet, maybe yards ...
2007-11-30 15:01:07: The problem is not just in being a seller - you have to have a buyer who’s compatible.
Which raises the question of what the body-part brokerage industry would look like, if widespread buying and selling was legal and common. Brick-and-morter vs. internet parts sales?
2007-12-01 06:09:47: (A big parenthetical congratulations to nickyskye for managing to write an excellent comment that nonetheless fooled the spamfilter into thinking it was junk. I imagine it was the combination of multiple links and discussion of body parts. Oops!
Sorry for the whiplash, nicky!)
2007-12-01 15:44:02: You're, uh. Hmm. You're gonna want to avoid the soylent green. Just trust me on this, Fuzzy Monster.
2007-12-04 11:44:15: Imagine the accounting there, ersatz: you take advance payment (be it a tax break, or cash, or an annuity of some sort as suggested upthread) on guarantee of delivery of body parts—and then Something Bad Happens.
Maybe you smoke your lungs out, or lose a hand to a shirt-folding ...
2007-12-27 09:38:00: I think a more interesting question (which looms on the horizon) is what happens to Pepsi and Coke’s bottom line when corn syrup subsidies are removed from the next farm bill.
That reminds me of this Freakonomics post from the beginning of the year, speculating about a return to sugar with ...
2007-12-03 06:26:12: Intentionally left ambiguous. Pick one and run with it; personally, I'm curious about both angles.
My first-blush thought was that with a crushing landslide win for a viable candidate, no one would pin it on the candidate's party because it'd be such an inept attempt to "cheat" that no one ...
2007-11-27 12:35:36: That's a good point. All my interactions with WP tend to be administrative, but I'd be a little bit surprised to find myself staring at backpage stuff if I signed up for a discussion-oriented site—especially since I'd probably be mostly wanting to make with the discussing, at that point.
2007-11-27 13:42:31: Okay, redirect to the front page on login and logout, and clearer "log in or register" bit of linkage above the box for non-logged users. Thanks, pb.
I'd love to do better redirects -- taking the user back to the page they logged in/out from -- but that's the last ...
2007-11-24 06:11:57: That's a hell of a question to ask a person. I don't know who you think you are, buddy, but you'd better watch your step.
2007-11-27 10:49:56: I've decided to go with next/prev nav under the current question, with pretty much bog-standard sidebar and archives links to cover extra question-hopping.
2007-11-20 21:04:32: I'm not sure what a question would look like. Agreed on the issue of the terminal marker, though: ? is a classic for a reason, with it's pleasing simple-but-not-too-simple curves.
Not to change the subject, but I would venture that this is what a sample comment would look like.
2007-11-21 14:14:55: I'm loathe to pursue further this 'nature of comments' tangent, but I'm concerned that the focus on brevity is a mistake: what about the converse?
For example, a lengthy comment full of Latin gibberish bears a very different profile than those pithy specimens above, viz:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing ...
2007-11-21 14:15:46: Oof. That's more like six comments, sir.
But point taken.