Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with World

House for sale

nicolin — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 08:11:24 -0800

How to advertise a small French property in the classifieds ? As a follow-up to some of my previous questions, I'd like to ask where to advertise a house for sale in the UK / Irish / any English-speaking place media and Internet. I'm looking for cheap classifieds, of course, but would consider other options, if not too expensive.

The background : my mother has inherited from her father, she has done some refurbishing and now she's just crushed under her loans and debts. So, we want to sell my late grandfather's house. It's now completely refurbished and I think it might appeal to someone who wants to retire in a real quiet and rural place, or someone who wants to live in a very quiet, nice, pretty and secure neighbourhood.

The state of the economy here (south of France) doesn't leave much hope to find investors soon. So I want to broaden our prospects by reaching UK, Ireland and maybe people who want to change gears, wherever they are.

So, in a nutshell : could you give us the right place to put our ads, on the Internet or the press ?

Thanks !

All the world's a book, and all the men and women merely characters

therumsgone — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 16:14:57 -0800

Recommend novels to help me learn more about the world! Recently, I've read some (fictional) books that told a good story while simultaneously teaching me something about how people outside the U.S. live(d). The ones I'm thinking of are The Kite Runner (Afghan Revolution/ the Taliban), War & Peace (Napoleonic Wars), and A Suitable Boy (post-independence, post-partition India). I'd like to read more books like these!

What books would you recommend that are fictional, yet still cover important events in a country's history? Books written by people from the country in which the book is set are ideal, but I'm open to all suggestions. I'm mainly looking for fiction, but non-fiction books that look at history or current events through the lives of a country's people are fine too (think Behind the Beautiful Forevers).

VERY BRIEF 1940's German/English Translation Help Requested

ProfLinusPauling — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 17:09:34 -0800

Hello, Hive. I'm working on a historical graphic novel and a portion of it involves four sentences in German. I've made an effort to hammer something out by testing Google Translate's gibberish against some German language textbooks and grammar sites. I'm sorta confident about them, but would love for any bilingual native German speakers to give them a once over. Particularly, if you have any insights into generational differences in the German language, as this piece is supposed to take place during WWII. Posting them after the jump. • Warten Sie bei Childs Restaurant auf 34th Street
[Wait at Child’s Restaurant on 34th Street.]

• Suchen Sie nach einem Mann mit einem "New York Times" in seiner linken Hand.
[Look for a man carrying a "New York Times" in his left hand.]

• Folgen Sie ihm zu einem Tisch und tauschen Passwörter.
[Follow him to a table and exchange passwords.]

• Der Mann wird Ihnen die Mittel, die Sie angefordert.
[The man will give you the funds you requested.]

Thanks in advance!!!!

Vectoring from Cairo to Kinshasa.

mykescipark — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 11:12:00 -0800

I'd like to produce an offset-print-quality map, modeled after airline flight path maps, which graphically reproduces hundreds of point-to-point connections: in this specific case, between radio transmitters and reception locations. What software is capable of producing some variation on this, perhaps by putting in GPS coordinates? (OS X please.)

Memento Vita

davidjmcgee — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 08:25:40 -0800

In the past few weeks, MetaFilter has introduced me to Beate Sirota Gordon and Aaron Swartz, each of whom made the world a better place to live. I'm so happy to know of them and their work, but sad that I'm only learning of them via obituary; I celebrate them, and I want to celebrate the living, too. So help me out: who are the people I may not have heard of who, still here and still fighting, have worked or are working to make the world a better place?

Soccer, partying and the beach!

xicana63 — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 10:22:15 -0800

We want to go to the World Cup 2014 in Brazil. How do we make that happen? So the SO and I have decided we are definitely going to the World Cup in 2014. We want to see the US and Mexico matches for sure. Of course since this is the biggest event on the planet we want to be quick to plan and start making reservations. So Hive, have any of you gone to past World Cups? Are any of you going? We'd appreciate any tips as to how to plan this type of trip since we have no idea when our teams will be playing and how in advance we should book our hotels and where we should book our hotels since the games are all over the country?

Any and all suggestions welcome! THANKS!

Please recommend movies, books and tv to do with the First World War (1914 to 1918)

h00py — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 03:33:10 -0800

I'd like some recommendations for high quality movies, books, memoirs, tv shows, etc that cover the First World War (1914 to 1918) and the immediate years before and after. I've become a bit obsesessed with tales and experiences from the First World War, most probably because it is an entire generation that I have experienced the loss of during my lifetime. I've seen Anzacs, Duchess of Duke Street, Downton Abbey (series 2), All Quiet on the Western Front, Gallipoli, Black Adder 3 and I've read Birdsong.

All recommendations gratefully received!

What am I doing wrong?

CollectiveMind — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 21:14:59 -0800

I've just launched a Indiegogo campaign, but after six days, nobody has shown interest. I'm creating some lists to contact civic and philanthropy groups. I've already contacted all of my friends, family and other contacts (as they suggest). I've opened a Twitter account, and linked all of my other sites to the campaign. So far, I've done everything that was suggested by Indiegogo; video, short and long description, gallery. A couple editors and a publisher willing to work with me say it is a project that needs to be done and they're interested. But what am I doing wrong?

Podcasts about world events?

exceptinsects — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 14:42:07 -0800

I would like to be more informed about world events. Can you recommend some podcasts that I can listen to? I'd like to have a variety of perspectives (both politically and geographically) but the main thing is that they are BOTH entertaining and informative. Some podcasts I already listen to and enjoy:

NPR Planet Money
Radiolab
99% Invisible
Studio 360
Slate Culture Gabfest
To the Best of Our Knowledge

...so anything in that sort of style, but not only from the US.
I don't like listening to people arguing, and ideally there would be both male and female voices, but I'm pretty open to whatever you suggest.

How to get paid to work in disaster relief with a BA in English (or programs teaching abroad)

Nighthawk3729 — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 11:47:30 -0800

I would like to find would in disaster relief so I may travel and begin to pay off my student loans for my new BA in English. I'm also interested in teaching English abroad and have been trying to find programs in both of these fields, so if anyone has information on anything where one can travel, doesn't matter how terrible the pay just as long as there is one, again, I'm in debt. I want to work in disaster relief for a spell. I'm currently applying to join the Americorp program and have been recommended to check out the red cross and FEMA. Unfortunately, those organizations are searching for indivuduals with experience in the medical field, and I just received my BA in English with a concentration with Rhetoric and global studies.

I have looked into the peacecore, fullbright scholarship as well as several programs that teach abroad such as the JET program, the TALK program, the CIFE program, however the odds are very much against anyone's favor of getting a position. If anyone has any information on similar programs, I would highly appreciate any information.

I'd like to travel around a bit and would love the oppurtunity to help people for a while as well while paying off some student loans, however the posibilities are less then wide and plenty.

If anyone has any information, I would HIGHLY appreciate it.

It's hard to Google infographics

glass origami robot — Sun, 27 May 2012 21:07:47 -0800

I'm looking for an infographic (?) about how lucky it is to have been born in the developed world. I remember a format similar to "If you are also literate, then you are already in the top x% of the world," with various characteristics substituted in for "literate." I'm not sure where I saw this; possibly MetaFilter. I'm also not sure if it was actually an infographic or just a series of statistics.

Places to find "this will knock your socks off" type of projects

raghuram — Sun, 20 May 2012 14:56:51 -0800

Where do I find information about cutting edge, uber creative "this will blow your mind" kind of projects? I am not just talking about scientific research - but projects that are so creative, that they'll blow our minds. Some examples

Kiva & Microfinance
SpaceX
Google's self driving car
Reddit was planning to buy an island, and convert it into an "art zone" (can't remember the name now)

etc. I follow the standard startup blogs and news and Kickstarter has some interesting projects. But I'd like to learn more about these projects, and the people working on these types of projects.

Are there any websites that track these?

Who are we in the U.S., really?

metajc — Wed, 16 May 2012 11:22:06 -0800

Besides Central Americans, what are other countries that have major first-generation diaspora communities in the United States? India? Armenia? Cambodia? Other Asian countries? Just wild guesses here. I live in an area where there are many communities of people from other countries. Nationwide, I'm wondering what other countries are supplying our diaspora communities.

I'm not interested in Central Americans although I would like to know if there's a table buried in Wikipedia or US Census data that compares these populations.

Working around the world, how to plan for retirement?

TrinsicWS — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 08:43:46 -0800

My job is contract based, and tends to lead me around the world. How does one plan for retirement with such a job? The kind of work I do is quite specialized, and I basically work in the country that requires my skills. Shortest job length I've had has been Down Under for half a year, longest period of time is 2 years plus in London, and it may be up soon. Been to USA as well, and stints in Asia.

Currently thinking of ways to switch to a more stable footing (I enjoy my current job), but in the meantime I'd like to know if there are people also work around the world, and how they save/plan/prepare for retirement.

Thanks!

Healing, cleaning, happy bath houses!

xicana63 — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 07:27:41 -0800

Bath houses and traditions around the world? So I have a trip coming up to Budapest and was told that I should go "bathing". I have heard of Korean bath houses, Swedish saunas, Russian baths, Japanese hot springs and such and I've always been intrigued by them. I am dying to go to one (as I never have been to one before) but I'm super nervous and don't know if I actually have the nerve. So a few questions :

- What are different bath houses and traditions around the world?
- Have you been to these different type of bath houses? How was your experience? What was the proper etiquette? Do you have any bath house recommendations (any part/city in the world)
- How did you work up the nerve? (for nude and not nude bath houses?)
- Budapest specific, any recommendations, warnings, advice?

Sorry lots of questions. Thanks!

Recommend cheap (or cheapish), high-quality colognes from around the world.

GlassHeart — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 08:08:52 -0800

Recommend cheap (or cheapish), high-quality colognes from around the world. I've recently discovered that high-quality cologne can be bought very cheaply.

I just bought a few 150 ml spray bottles of Eyüp Sabri Tuncer (a highly-regarded Turkish cologne company) lavender cologne from Turkey, for just $3.25 USD per bottle(!). I also recently discovered a cologne from Germany called Tabac that comes in a huge 300 ml bottle that can often be bought for as little as $20 or less.

While I know that cologne is a rather YMMV type of thing, most people consider Tabac and most colognes made by Eyüp Sabri Tuncer to be worthy classics.

So . . . does anyone have great colognes to recommend? I've heard that there are great, cheap colognes to be found in India, but I've no idea where to even begin looking for colognes from there.

If you have anything to recommend, please supply links to sites that sell the products. Not everything can be found on Amazon, ya know?

Thanks.

20th Anniversary and Walt Disney World

KneeDeep — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 11:25:36 -0800

Preparing and planning for 20th Wedding Anniversary in Walt Disney World, recommendations? We'll be celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary in the spring of 2015. As in 1995's honeymoon we're off to Walt Disney World. We are agile, flexible, and are used to walking. We have taken a Disney Cruise and some combination of cruise/WDW would work too. We've stayed in New Orleans and Boardwalk and very much enjoyed the canal transportation system esp. to and from Pleasure Island. Just the two of us. The timing is likely April or October 2015.

As the planner what should I be doing, arranging, or considering now to make this a great bookend to 20 years of marriage? Guide books?

Thanks for your assistance.

Food oil prices as raw materials

vogel — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 08:15:40 -0800

Where can I find a simple like-for-like publicly available price comparison between palm, sunflower, corn and olive oils as raw materials? A British Medical Journal paper, Nutritional change is not a simple answer to non-communicable diseases, Yach, BMJ 2011;343:d5097 has a table of food oil prices shown as an offset from palm oil. Unfortunately it only shows the offset, not the base price, and in quoting it I'd like the latter too. We are talking about their commodity market prices as raw materials, not their retail price at the supermarket.

The source Yach quotes is (of course) behind a paywall and many of the prices one might find seem to be on subscription services. Is there not some public source where you can just see the prices side by side - more or less how the table in Yach would it be if only it was quoting prices and not the offset?

I've had a look at sites like Dow Jones, Bloomberg and Reuter. I'm getting nowhere fast with it on my own - I don't even speak the language.

I only really need the for prices: sunflower, corn and olive as healthier oils to compare with palm. I don't need to replicate Yach's figures, though that would be fine too - all I want to do is compare the four prices, whether it's this week or last year and whichever market it is, so that it's a fair comparison and you can basically just say "look how much more expensive A is than B".

I hope this is clear - if I can try to improve it as a query please indicate. Thanks!

You have 28 days and $15k. Go!

drstein — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 19:52:32 -0800

You have 28 days (in one chunk of time) and $15,000 in cash. You can go anywhere in the world, as long as it's not in the United States (for more than 24 hours while in transit) or a US territory. This is going to be a fairly open ended question, and there are no right or wrong answers. Answers can be from your own experience, of course, or just fun things that you have thought about or heard about.
I may be in this very situation in mid 2012 and while i have a few ideas (like visiting Japan again) nothing is set in stone and I'm always interested in hearing what others think.

You aren't really a huge tourist type that wants to see the 7 wonders of the world, but want to go somewhere interesting and reasonably safe. You don't have to spend the entire $15,000. You're single, have no kids, and aren't bringing anybody with you.

Multiple destinations are OK. Where would you go and why? What would you do?

Going straight in curved space

monocultured — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 11:31:59 -0800

Trying to identify a sci-fi short story where I only remember the ending… The story is set in a distant future, and is told as an account after the fact, by a young person who sets of to discover the end of the world. At the end of the story she's back where she started, and we as readers realise that the whole planet must be build over, with no (easy) access to the surface.

One detail which might come from this story is that you were not allowed to heat anything hotter than a certain temperature, and open flames were outlawed because of the fire hazard.

The bells, are they ringing?

Replacement for WoW for a long-distance pair

rachaelfaith — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 08:06:20 -0800

Help me find a substitute for World of Warcraft to serve as common ground and entertainment for myself and my long-distance boyfriend. My boyfriend and I met on World of Warcraft several years ago. We played happily for 2 years until we both sort of gradually stopped playing for a few reasons- guild drama, friends stopped playing, job and home obligations, et cetera. Now we have differing schedules and I need to spend less time hanging around waiting for him to text me, and we'd both like something new to explore as we've had our fill of just watching TV shows and movies. We haven't found an alternate activity that we can both do that fulfills the following criteria:

1. Can interact in realtime
2. Can do alone and then talk about it later on
3. Can be done via internet, on non-gaming laptops (one Mac, one PC), sometimes with crappy hotel internet
4. Involves other people to expand our social circle: we spend too much time with just us two
5. Doesn't require a console

These are the things we really enjoyed about WoW: lots of new friends and people to chat with, theorycrafting and thinking about new ways to approach boss fights, occasional mindless farming, PVPing in arenas, raiding, customization within game (personal stats and gear choice, messing with the UI).

We've tried the following:

League of Legends - doesn't play well with Macs, and I didn't enjoy it much; he used to enjoy but has unplayable framerates now
Minecraft - doesn't have a real social aspect (except maybe on private servers?), but I like the idea of creating things together and also working solo
Ascension - we play the boardgame version via an online module; awesome, but isn't something we can do solo

We aren't dead-set on a video game, but it seems to offer the most options. We are both willing to make a few concessions - maybe a new computer, maybe he could try to bring a console into the hotel, et cetera. We are open to all options and will give most anything a shot. We'd like to avoid going back to WoW but it might end up happening if we can't find an alternative.

Save us from boredom!

I'd like to be in on the obscure jokes about Sri Lanka

showbiz_liz — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 11:30:14 -0800

I need to start following international news for my job. I also just bought a Nook. I'm betting the latter can help with the former... I work for a nonprofit that does a lot of work in Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and South America. Basically, almost any country which has recently experienced or is currently experiencing unrest/upheaval is fair game. It would be useful for my job if I had at least a general working knowledge of news/politics/cultural contexts in such places. (Which is a pretty tall order, as I'm essentially starting from zero- I haven't followed the news with any care in years.)

The most informed I've ever felt re: world news was when I had a subscription to the Economist a few years ago, but 1. I no longer agree with some of its basic political assumptions (ie neoliberalism) and 2. it's expensive.

So, that's the problem. A solution may have presented itself in the form of this Nook, which I impulsively bought from a friend a couple days ago. I've never had an e-reader before, so I don't even really know what sorts of things can be put on it, but I assume that you can subscribe to magazines and newspapers, and possibly blogs, with it?

Of course, even if you can put magazines and blogs on it, I still have no idea WHAT magazines and blogs I should be reading!

In short: I have an hour-long commute twice a day, a need for broad international news coverage, and a Nook. Tell me what to put on it!

How do you support NPR from outside the US?

sien — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 21:25:56 -0800

How do I support NPR from outside the US? I listen to a number of NPR podcasts and would like to do my bit. I've tried emailing them but have yet to get a response. I've thought of just supporting the stations in DC I used to listen to when I was there but I'd really prefer to support the system as a whole. Any ideas?

Around the world budget?

grak88 — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 20:09:51 -0800

How much money should a couple budget for one year's worth of travel? How much would it cost for one couple to travel the world for a year with the following countries in mind:

vietnam
cambodia
thailand
laos
china
hong kong
india
nepal
hungary
romania
greece
croatia
egypt
morocco
africa - unsure where else to go in Africa.

Would like to get to S. America but we can appreciate that may be unlikely given time and money.

We're Canadian 30 year old flashpackers. I don't want to break the bank but I also don't want to break out in hives due to bed bugs. We're thinking private room hostels or cheap hotels. 12 months for the entire trip. Any comments on whether you think we're cramming too much into a year would also be appreciated. Any one else who has done a trip like this and has a budget they would like to share would also be greatly appreciated. Any costs that you didn't budget for and then were surprised with later?

I know the answers to these budget questions is usually "depends on what type of traveller you are or what you want to do while you're there", but any info would be helpful. Thanks!

Disney Before Thanksgiving?

tmharris65 — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 15:39:45 -0800

Two questions about a potential trip to Disney World: 1) Is it crazy to plan a trip to Disney World for the Saturday-Tuesday BEFORE Thanksgiving? 2) Is it vital to stay at a Disney property? Thanks!