Big Big Question

The first question went live November 30th, 2007, and we’ve been getting search engine referrer hits about selling kidneys ever since.

229 questions and 2000+ answers later, I’m pleased that y’all have been around to make this place tick.

I’ve talked vaguely about doing some redesign work here in the past; now may be a good time to start thinking about that in earnest, so if you’ve got any brainstorms that have been knocking around (or old ideas that never got implemented), feel free to mention ‘em here.

(this is my first question on the BBQ so forgive me if this is more chatty than it’s supposed to be here)

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I went to my 20th high school reunion last year and caught up with people I hadn’t seen in, well, 20 years. Kids graduating today have their entire class available of Facebook and one would assume they will always be available on Facebook or whatever takes its place. Why have a reunion if you’ve always been in touch?

Every TV show, toy, movie, book, song will have a wikipedia page, IMDB entry, or some other website devoted to it and will always be available on-demand. No longer will our favorite episodes or song be a distant memory until one day we stumble across a VHS tape or record at a flea market. If you miss your favorite toy you buy one on eBay.

Those of us who grew up in the Golden Age of Video Games went years without seeing or playing some of the classic games. Now we have MAME; those games will always be available.

Not to get all get-off-my-lawnish but will The Kids Today ever feel the excitement of stumbling across a one-hit-wonder from the 1970s, or seeing that one episode of M*A*S*H that you remembered from when you were a kid? Will they have any need for a reunion? How will they ever have a sense of nostalgia? Does it matter?

Why are the colors of the leaves in New England considered more beautiful than the ones elsewhere?  It’s not like Massachusetts has a monopoly on deciduous trees.  Whence?

For some unknown, magical reason, you will be able to have one hour of alone time with President Elect Obama.

What conversation would you have with him? What would you ask for? What would be the most important thing that you’d want to convey to him?

Well?

In my ideal world, I would have portable phone, music player, GPS, with unlimited storage (stored securely and redundantly online somewhere) that would hold all of data and programs.

I would be able to approach any computer/terminal and that computer would auto-magically (blue tooth or wirelessly) access my data and programs for me so I could be running my desktop anywhere from the little device in my pocket.

Come on engineers, get to it.

When was the last time that you found yourself having to do the equivalent of flipping a coin? How did you get there, and what did it come down to?

How do you break out of a funk? What are your favorite anti-rut tactics? When you feel creatively/emotionally stranded at point A and you know you’ve got to get your ass over to point B, what kind of vehicle do you buckle into?

Bill and Ted have loaned you their phonebooth. You can bring one person from the past to the present to show them around. (Assuming no time-space continuum stuff is messed up,) Who to you grab?

Your (or your kid’s) weirdest Halloween costume?

(hat tip)

Not me, specifically. In fact, I’m not even interested in the answer, just the queries, to wit:

What are some of your favorite musical questions? Why?

Bring that I really only answer to my given name out of habit and not really because I find it terribly appealing or ‘attached’ me who I am, I wonder if others have the same feeling.

Further, if you could, what name would you choose that says ‘you’ in a better way?

Classic chatfilter: who (living or dead, fictional or non-, go crazy) would you like to have over for dinner? Why?

What song(s) are you embarrassed that you listen to (and love)? Could be junk, top 40, misogynistic - it’s the idea that you’re repulsed by the fact that you love it.

Sure, the US financial market is kind of collapsing, but let’s talk about more human debt. Who do you owe, and why? Did someone do you a solid? Is there any IOU in your life that you particularly value?

Language acquisition is an amazing, and amazingly complicated, process. We learn to speak essentially by accident, starting at an age when we’re not competent to feed ourselves or change our own clothes. Which is pretty awesome.

But it’s also a process prone to errors. We pick up phrases incompletely, or incorrectly, and then walk around for years saying this or that wrong. For all intensive purposes, it’s a doggy-dog world, and so on. Eggcorns, they’re called, and everybody’s had (and likely still has) some.

What’re yours? Any specific horrifying revelation memories?

Is there a movie you’ve seen recently that left you wanting? A movie that had you wishing you could put in disc 2 and continue to follow the characters?

If you were given a chance to go back in your life with your current knowledge intact, would you? If so, to what age?

(You can take as a given that your current timeline would heal gracefully, that the people you currently know but might not given changes in the past will instead meet other people who will fill similar roles, etc. You can also assume that history will generally follow a similar track, as far as markets, world events and such go, though it’s not an absolute given, depending on who you are and what you might be able to accomplish.)

Name your critter champion and back up your answer.

Bonus question: given you pick, what constraints would you put on the contest to fix it in your favor?

Even though we all know that the world is not going to end when CERN fires up the Large Hadron Collider on 9/10/08 at 700 GMT, what are your plans for your time between now and then? Is there anything you feel like you need to do before the world ends science begins?

(For the record, I read that they’ll just be accelerating some particles on 9/10- actual collisions will begin in the following weeks.)

Everybody’s got to eat, every day. If you’re an adult, you’ve had on the order of tens of thousands of meals. So what’s changed for you over time? What about your eating habits has evolved, and when, and why?

For those of you voting for John McCain, what are your reasons for voting for him? How do you feel about Palin, and are you affected by the news stories about her experience and affiliations?

I’m thinking of Yard Darts (aka Lawn Darts, aka Jarts?) personally — though I think we only got away with that because my grandma had an old set sitting around from when they were popular.

If you were in Oregon in the eighties, you’ve got a better than average chance of having seen Goonies and Stand By Me—both shot in our fine state, and extra-famous because of that.

Where are you from, and what movies do locals pretty much Have To See on account of the locale?

Always?  Never?  Depends on your mood?

Telephones are beyond ubiquitous, but some people spend a lot of time on them (by choice or by necessity) and some hardly use them at all. Which makes me wonder:

Do you remember when you first started using a phone regularly?
Did you like talking on the phone from an early age? Did you dislike it? Why?
Have you ever done phone-heavy work? Did you get into it on purpose? Did it change your non-work phone habits?

Because you oughta, by god. Mefi’s own Brandon Blatcher has rolled this thing up from scratch as place for folks to just have at mefi-style political discussion free from the generalist-driven constraints of the mefi front page.

In other words, PoliticalFilter : Mefisphere poli discussion :: Big Big Question : Mefisphere hypothetical chatfilter. I know SAT-style analogies get you excited, so go check it out already.

This message is an unpaid advertisement from The Committee to Promote Interesting New Spinoff Sites. I’m Josh Millard, and I couldn’t really think of a question this morning.

Two epic guys with lots of respective canon. Both interested in peace. Both vilified by their contemporary powers-that-be.

Somewhat different methods and personal philosophies.

So what would the Christ and the Vigilante be able to get together on? What are the irreconcilables?

Did you have any particular boogeyman as a kid? A specific monster in the closet at one point? Any particularly traumatic nightmares? What sort of things left clawed footprints on your young, imaginative psyche?

So everyone (who’s old enough) remembers the JFK shooting, and the Challenger disaster.

What other news events from your childhood really stuck with you?

At BBQ, Inc., we’re house-hunting. And while we’ve been reading the likely resources, I can’t help be feel curious about some of the more personal weirdities folks have encountered in their own housing adventures.

What most surprised/dismayed/thrilled about a new place (house, condo, apartment, hollowed-out tree in the woods, whatever)? What things caught you off-guard during or after you made the decision?

(And a quick shout out to It’s Lovely, I’ll Take It, a very fun terrible-real-estate-listing-photos blog run by a Seattlite Mefite.)

Adolescence + funny feelings + music = potent associations between certain songs and the singularly emotionally tumultuous period known as teenagerdom.

What song or songs kick you suddenly back to middle/high school, to that girl or that boy or that dance or that night?

What major or minor errors or faux pas did you make in your early days of using the Internet? Any embarrassing moments or behaviors?

I first got online in 1998. At one time I started noticing that a lot of search results I got were from some site called “wikipedia.” Being the naive little teenager I was, I assumed it was some kind of Wiccan encyclopedia.

Though unfamiliar with the term, I once created a sockpuppet at a major online forum (not Metafilter). I was called out in approximately 0.0001 milliseconds.

Hunter S. Thompson is done writing books, certainly, but if old Duke was still in the game and working on a book, what would he be writing about right now?

Fear and Loathing on/in/at/under x?

Does anyone really use the “high priority” flag on email other than spammers and jerks?

If you were moving out on your own for the first time, what is the most important (or top five, or top ten) household item(s) you would purchase for your new home?

I am assuming you already have the most basic supplies, such a some food, a first-aid kit, and anything you would pack for vacation or expect your hotel to have, so toiletries, clothes, towels, toilet paper, soap, toothpaste/toothbrush, etc.

The booger retrieval and storage company is on line one. They have been keeping all those boogers you’ve picked over all these years, and want to know what form you want the mass pressed into for delivery and drop off in your driveway later this afternoon. What shall I tell them?

Everyone always talks about meeting your past self…but what would you warn/remind your future self about, if you were able to travel forward in time a number of years?

To celebrate (and, well, apologize for) the fact that I’ll be out of town for a week on vacation and thus not updating the BBQ front page for a bit, here’s a sprawling thematic wish-fulfillment question:

What kind of vacation do you want?  Where, when, why?  What would you be doing, if anything?  What would you be taking a vacation from?

What recurring dreams do you have? Do you ever have lucid dreams?

If you could ask one question, big or small, of (your preferred, for this exercise, conception of) God, and get a straight, thorough answer, what would it be? Why that question?

Imagine, for the purposes of this question, that you have found yourself elected King (or Queen) of the World. Imagine, too, that power corrupts, at least to a sufficient degree that you are willing and able to declare some world-changing fiat, on whim, purely for your own satisfaction.

It can be big or small. It can be driven by good intentions or something more selfish. The key thing is, it shouldn’t be a mild and sensible policy declaration: you’re shooting the moon on this one.

So what would you wave your scepter and make so, just for the hell of it?

Taken from Lifehacker: What books have truly changed your life? I’m not talking about books that you thought were mind-blowingly excellent - I mean books that have changed the way you think or made you change your life.

What I wanna know…how will you help others? How widespread will that help be?

Let’s assume a substantial, after all applicable taxes, amount of $30 million. Who will you help and how (with a smattering of ‘why’)? Just family or a multitude of impoverished people?

Imagine some economic/ecological/othertypical disaster strikes before we’re properly able to get out of our current petroleum culture. What might the world look like carless? Who would be worst off? Who would manage best? What unexpected effects might we encounter?

note: other things which likewise run on gas may or may not continue operation in this hypothetical, depending entirely on the preference of the answerer. If you want to tell me about a world sans automobiles, but which still has functional air planes, knock yourself out. If you want to assume all modern petroleum fueled transportation is out, that’s awesome, too.

I’ve found myself in a few discussions about just how permanent web content is, and how permanent it should be, and what folks expectations on that front are. It’s a big question, and I’m curious what sort of take you folks have on it.

What do you expect to stay around? What do you not count on? Why? Is how you things see right now how you’d like to see them? Where do your feelings on this come from, historically?

Etc. Go crazy.

Philosophico-semantic cage match GO.

It is the year Eleventy-Billion CE. The last vestiges of humanity have boarded the spaceship that soon will take flight toward what we hope is a habitable star system (Glorb-32, if you’re curious) some 10000 light years away. The ship can only move at half the speed of light, so the journey will take approximately 20 thousand years. Given that we have aboard a library of all human knowledge to date and the means to continually update that knowledge base, what procedures and protocols would you set in place to assure that the future settlers of Planet Glorb have the necessary cultural and intellectual equipment in place to successfully colonize the planet? Remember, they’ve been on the ship for twice as long as recorded human history on Earth. They’ve never set foot on a planet, never tilled a field, never dug a mine, never swam in a river. What methods could be used to make sure that our colonists are ready to leave the womb of the ship and start anew on Planet Glorb?

Automotive paint jobs seem to come in two flavors: high-gloss shiny finish, and then even shinier.  But why?  Is it market momentum (cars are shiny, so a non-shiny car is weird, so manufacturers don’t want to try selling non-shiny cars, ergo cars are shiny)?  Is it just plain dazzle-and-flash?  Is shininess inherent in a sufficiently robust paintjob?

Take spammer Stephen Sanchez, iProfile shill, who (round of applause here) is the first person to try sockpuppet spam on the Big Big Question.

Steve-o posted a (bizarrely practical!) question about resumes and then thoughtfully answered it himself under a different account, couched in a fictional happy discovery of a great new resource blah blah blah etc.

So, here’s the dilemma: Stephen had to have (a) found the site, (b) discerned that it was, indeed, a question-and-answer resource of some sort, and (c) had the wherewithal to bother with a two-account sockpuppet show — all of which are arguments toward having some notion of what you’re on about, at least — and yet the end result was so baldly, embarrassingly obvious that any credit lent above is revoked with prejudice.

While this sort of spam may be new to the BBQ, it’s old hat at mefi and has been running wild on the net for a good long time. So there’s a culture for it to fester in — one of naivety or indifference or even encouragement in some places. In that case, rather than raw stupidity being to blame, is it that this unchallenging environment has made otherwise bright, attentitive stars of the die-in-a-fire spam-and-shill sector lazy?

I’m also willing to accept “all of the above” as an answer.

What life lessons, or even small things, have you found yourself learning the hard way? What were the outcomes?

What superstitions do you have? What little things do you do, or not do, even if you think/know it probably won’t hurt you?

As the world changes around us, we tend to get used to the “new”; this is especially true of those who are younger, and never really knew the “old”. Over time, this leads to a situation where it may be difficult to imagine having to live in a world without the things we today take for granted.

With that in mind, the question I pose is a simple one: what recent advancement has “spoiled” you, to the point where you simply cannot imagine having to live in a world where it did not exist?

This does not have to be limited to tech toys and gadgets; it could be social, political, or really anything you could imagine. If pressed for a definition of “recent”, I would say “within 10 years of your date of birth”; so, within your own lifetime, or close to it.

So what is it for you?

One of the unavoidable constants of growing older is looking back and realizing how wrong you were about some things when you were younger. Big things and little things; stances taken on ethics, aesthetics, and so on.

In that spirit, what are you doing now that your younger self was never going to do? Or what aren’t you doing that your younger self was never going to give up?

If you’re a newspaper reader, are the obits a part of the paper you read daily? Occassionally? Never?

If you read them, why?

If you don’t read them, why not? Does it simply not occur to you to bother, or do you actively avoid them?

And, given that Netcraft has confirmed the imminent death of the printed newspaper, will reading the obits go the way of the rest of print media? Will online obits have the same feel? How do you suppose the change in how people get their news will affect this niche issue in the years to come?

My friend’s couch is cursed, but only one side of it. The first time I laid with my head on the right side of the couch, a spider crawled along the back of the couch. The second time I laid there, a 2-inch-long moth was hanging out from behind the mirror above the couch (I’m severely lepidopterophobic.) The third time, I got a tick on my scalp. Three strikes and you’re out… I’m not laying on that side of the couch anymore until I know the curse is broken. I can lay on the other end of the couch or sit anywhere on it and nothing happens. How can we break the curse?

(Yes, this is meant to be in fun.)

If you’ll allow an overwrought metaphor, the gap between idealism and pragmatism is often wide and littered with the broken, sun-bleached bones of righteous convictions.

What are the things that you feel like you should be doing but which you just aren’t, for whatever reasons? What’s the thing that bugs you most? What’s the thing that bugs you less than you reckon it should?

Election-as-human-nature-barometer: Imagine a two-party system where, during the primaries, you had to vote for the party that you were NOT a registered member of. So, if you’re a republican, you get to pick the democratic candidate.

Assume that people are actually registered in the party that most closely aligns with their values. Now, would this cross-party system improve the whole affair (individuals would realize that they’re choosing the “enemy’s team,” would pick the person that they truly think would be the better choice), or would it make things worse (individuals would pick the person most likely to lose the election for the other side)?

If not, did you used to get enough sleep? What do you do instead of getting enough sleep?

Or are you getting too much sleep?

And where does your sense of what’s enough and whether you’re getting it come from? Your doctor? Folk wisdom? Self-assessment?

To answer this question, it shouldn’t matter if you actually believe in free will or not. This is a counter-factual (though, personally, I don’t believe in free will).

Let’s say an entire world of people didn’t believe in free will (and that they were right). What would such a world be like?

Let’s say the world is otherwise like our world. If you’re temped to say, “That’s impossible. A world in which people don’t feel like they have free will would never wind up being anything like our world,” imagine this:

Super-intelligent aliens visit present-day Earth and explain to us that free-will doesn’t exist. They actually (somehow) prove to us that it doesn’t. Of course, some people don’t (or can’t) accept the proof, even though it’s iron-clad. So the aliens put something in our water — some chemical that forces us to see the truth. Suddenly, we all KNOW that there’s no free will.

What happens?

You discover you have a disease which will eventually kill you if it is left untreated. It could take weeks or years. There are a few treatment options available.

The cost of the treatment is not a factor - you have great health insurance.

The treatments offered to you may have serious side effects, but they could alleviate your symptoms and make you feel a lot better.

While treating your disease is not a guarantee, there is a very good chance it could cure the disease, or significantly extend your lifespan. (This extension of your lifespan would not involve a decrease in the quality of your life.)

If you choose not to treat the disease (not for any moral or religious reasons - simply because you don’t care if you live or die) is it suicide? Please elaborate on your answer.

(I’m not sick, it’s just a discussion I was having with someone.)

Would you spend a year locked in Wal*Mart for $2 million? Condition: you are alone, with no contact with outside world (including news), but you do get electricity and full reign over all the goods in the store.

It occurred to me that if we do find some kind of life on another planet, our first instinct is probably going to be try and communicate with it.

What if it is an animal with the intelligence equivalent of a dolphin, horse, or a cat?

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?

Would it behoove us to make more of an effort on human to animal communication?

What’s the worst Earworm you’ve ever heard? Which one can’t you get out of your head? How long did it stick with you?

How do you handle panhandlers? Do you give cash? Do you feel guilty about it, either way? Are you actually helping, or just enabling, and is that a bad thing?

It’s a common ice-breaker question: what’s your earliest memory?

I was thinking about this today, and I realized that I don’t have one. The question stymies me. I mean, I have tons of memories going way back to early childhood, but I can’t even come close to pinpointing one as the earliest. I can’t even narrow them down to the ten earliest.

I have all these memories of nursery school, etc. I remember tons of events that would be impossible for me to put in chronological order. I think my earliest would have been from when I was three or so. But I have so many memories from that time, I can’t say which came first.

Am I being too literal? When most people get asked, “What’s your earliest memory?” do they just interpret that as, “Tell me a story from your early childhood”?

Or do most people actually have a memory that they know (or feel) came before all their other memories?

tabula rasa?

If you are aghast at or strongly dislike our current President, what fictional undisclosed set of facts would it take for you to completely and utterly reverse your stance on George W. Bush’s actions during his Presidency?

I was reading a rather scary Radar article and came across “Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20 (also known as NSPD-51), issued in May 2007, which reserves for the executive branch the sole authority to decide what constitutes a national emergency and to determine when the emergency is over” — and the fact that Congress’ own freakin’ Homeland Security Committee was denied a review of the Continuity of Government classified annexes.

And it made me think … what sort of reasoning could possibly justify that behavior from the Bush Administration?

And in reply, my fertile brain popped back: what if Congress had been infiltrated by terrorists?

Now, obviously, I think that’s highly unlikely if not impossible, and pretty much downright silly. A moment borne of action movies and thrillers.

But it got me thinking along those lines. What conspiracies, theories, unknown facts, etc. would have to be revealed in order for you to go from Dubya being the worst, most crooked, most insane President in U.S. history to him being Lincoln, Roosevelt, Washington, etc., the savior of the nation?

Broad-brush topic — this could spawn a dozen future (big big) questions:

What’s not fair? Locally or globally, personally or systemically, emotionally or economically: what are some big and small things in the world that are unfair?

Bonus questions: why isn’t it fair? And if it isn’t fair, why does it persist? And who might disagree about it not being fair, for that matter, and why?

OK, you’re a mad scientist…scorned by your peers, theories discredited, a disgrace to your field.

Time to take revenge! How do you destroy your enemies, threaten the world, and generally inflict terror in the masses?

What are some really short phrases that you find deeply meaningful, moving or powerful?

On a lighter note than “This too shall pass”, I’ve always thought this was a brilliantly funny entry into the Five-Word-Acceptance-Speech contest:

“Fools! Release the giant robot!”

Well?

If I offered you a million dollars (two million? three million? five thousand?) would you let me have sex with your wife? (Or husband?). Don’t answer that. That’s not my question. (Well, you can answer in email if you want, but I can actually only spare about sixty bucks right now.)

My question is the opposite. What acts would you refuse to do, no matter what I offered you?

To make this interesting, let’s set a few caveats: no acts that cause permanent physical damage. I hope you won’t let me cut off your leg, no matter how much I offer you. No selling children into slavery or anything like that. I’m mostly interested in emotional boundaries.

Would you strip in front of your friends for money? Would you spend two years in solitary confinement for money? Would you eat dirt for money?

What wouldn’t you do for money?

Yesterday and this morning, I’ve been involved in the zillionth argument of my life about words. I have these arguments (not generally the angry kind) all the time. They generally take this form:

Someone: Word X means Y.

Me: I guess it does to you. That’s not what it means to me. To me, it means Z.

Someone: Well, then you’re wrong. It doesn’t mean Z; it means Y.

Me: How can I be wrong? Do you mean my definition is non-standard? That most people mean Y and I’m going against the social default?

Someone: No, you’re just wrong. Word X MEANS Y.

At this point, if I question further, Someone either doesn’t want to talk about it any more, or he starts using mystical language that I can’t parse, e.g. “Words carry energy with them, you know.” Sometimes Someone brings up word origins. If you study linguistics, you learn that most origins are pretty murky. But even if they’re crystal clear, linking a word’s meaning with its origin is like linking a building’s purpose with its designer’s original intent: “You can’t move your car factory into there! In the 1930s, that building was built as a warehouse for storing cork!”

To me, it makes complete sense to use words in standard ways. But that’s just a matter of utility. It makes communicating easier. It says nothing about what words MEAN in some cosmic sense.

I guess it also might make sense to defer to some sort of authority, like a dictionary. But I don’t see how we — as a culture — can agree on a specific authority. I think that would be hard to do even within a small circle of friends. Imagine saying, “Whenever we argue about what a word means, let’s agree to go with whatever’s in the New Heritage Dictionary.”

Even if meaning just implies conventional meaning, why are people SO sure they know the consensus. “When most people say ‘Democracy,’ they mean blah blah blah…” How do you KNOW? Have you taken a survey? Based on my conversational experience, as a talker and as an observer, words are very fuzzy and meanings slip all the time from person-to-person. That’s one of the reasons we have so many conversational confusions.

Where does this idea come from, that words have fixed meanings? Why do so many people believe it?

If you believe it, why do you believe it? If you believe my “fuzzy” view is wrong, why is it wrong?