Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with metafilterhistory

Sandwichs!

TwelveTwo — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 10:28:20 -0800

Who loves sandwiches? I do! But I'm tired of sandwichs designed in the vacuum of my mind. My question is thus: What are some great sandwichs? I'm also curious about sandwich tips and techniques that make any sandwich, or most sandwichs all the better. Bestow unto me your sandwichy wisdoms, Metafilter!

Articles about Neandertals?

Greg Nog — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 09:57:29 -0800

I've always been interested in early hominids, specifically Neandertals. I'm currently working in a research institution with access to PubMed and a huge array of scientific journals -- a perfect opportunity to get my caveman-learnin' on! Can anyone recommend some good scientific articles about Neandertals? Is there a paleoanthropologist in the house?

A years-old Hotmail problem

reklaw — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 10:53:15 -0800

Back when it was free for Hotmail to check your POP mail for you (Google says 2002, wow), I set it up to check my ISP email account. Not so long after, the option went paid-for -- meaning that I could no longer turn it off. It has long puzzled me as to what exactly Hotmail did to my email, as the POP emails have continued coming to my Hotmail account for years -- even after I changed the password on the Hotmail account. But it never really bothered me enough to figure it out.

Then, today, I found that I'd not checked my Hotmail account for a month, and so it'd been deactivated, and everyone who sent me email to my ISP POP account was getting bounce messages. But the bounce messages weren't coming from Hotmail -- they were coming from my ISP.

Recipient:
Reason: Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable
Please reply to
if you feel this message to be in error.

"Aha!" I say to myself. It seems obvious that all those years ago, Hotmail changed some kind of setting on my ISP's mail server, telling it to forward emails to the Hotmail account ("and they have the audacity to charge people for that now?", I ask myself).

And so we finally come on to the question:

How on earth do I turn this off? I assume there's some special code I have to somehow send to my ISP's mail server, but what is it?

Woz? More like Was, am I rite?!

basicchannel — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 15:44:46 -0800

What's the appeal of Steve Wozniak? He's everywhere these days and many nerds love him. To me, he seems like manboy who has managed to ride his Segway Polo-playing well beyond his 15 minutes of fame. He preoccupies himself with toys, is an awkward conversationalist (see here) and generally resembles a larger, mouth-breathing version of The 40 Year Old Virgin.

Seriously... what's the deal?

is an ebay fraud seller free?

airnxtz — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 12:11:29 -0800

can i EVER get revenge on a fraudulent ebay seller? ok i bought a $3,000 item on ebay a laptop, i never recieved it, i paypaled him the money, and he transfered those funds to his bank account, and then withrdrew it. He then informed me that on the day he was going to ship it out, his car was robbed, and everything (including the laptop and $3,000 cash) was stolen. he lives clear across the country from me, and i know i can get a charge back to my credit card, but is this guy going to get away with it? i mean its not like paypal or ebay can charge his account, as he withdrew the funds. im sure the feds wont do anything for only 3 grand, and the local police on both ends what could they do?

Tracking Down An Address In 1939 Vienna

yankeefog — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 07:22:24 -0800

How can I get my hands on a Vienna phonebook from circa 1938? I will be spending a weekend in Vienna next month, and I would love to see the apartment where my late grandfather lived before fleeing the Nazis. Unfortunately, nobody in the family knows the address, and there aren't any letters or other documents to provide it. Things are also complicated by the fact that I won't be visiting on a weekday, so any archives that might have this information will presumably be closed. Plus, I don't speak German. Am I out of luck, or is there any way to track this information down in the next few weeks?

Dead grasshopper

Homeskillet Freshy Fresh — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 10:22:21 -0800

My fingers are stuck in a chinese finger trap at the office, and my coworkers refuse to help. Googling 'chinese finger trap solution' isn't working. FIX ME

Porn in the woods.

mr.marx — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 13:01:38 -0800

Porn in the woods. Did you, as a kid, find porn in the woods? I did, and I have noticed this is a worldwide phenomena. Why the porn in the woods? Where does the porn in the woods come from? Yes, this is a serious question.

What experience most shaped who you are?

jeremias — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 04:41:03 -0800

Life-altering experiences. Can you point to a single experience in your life, as a child, which you can define as having contributed to the person you are today? (+) I guess I'm looking for an experience which you can look back on and say " That shaped my personality as an adult." An example might be: I went to a slaughterhouse and decided to become a vegetarian.

Why do I associate Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree with great tragedy?

cillit bang — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 08:18:28 -0800

Why do I associate Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree with great tragedy?

Lost Poem

robbie01 — Mon, 29 Nov 2004 09:55:42 -0800

Lost Poem: This one is a toughie. Several years ago (12+) I saw a poem in a magazine, but it wasn't really "printed" in the magazine -- it appeared on a computer screenshot as a companion graphic to the main article. The magazine was an old Amiga rag (AmigaWorld or one of the other popular ones) and the poem accompanied (or more like was tangential to) an article that was probably about 3D rendering, and I THINK was written by one of the prolific Amiga 3D artists of the day, Brad W. Schenk or someone similar. What I can remember about the poem was this:

It was called "The Skull, the Dream and the Dancer" and was about the view (or dream) a skull had as it saw a dancer dancing. One of the lines was "...and fairer was the dance than any seen waking..", and the last line of the poem was, "It is something to know that the music is there."

My Google-fu is fairly strong, but this has been one occasion where the intarnets have failed me. I've tried searches, researching BWS's web presence, even tried emailing him a couple of years ago to see if it was something of his, or whether I'm thinking of someone else.

Help me ObiFilter, you're my only hope.

zombie chatfilter

noisia — Sat, 27 Nov 2004 09:19:42 -0800

The dead are rising. What do you do? given a romero situation, not fulci or return. i just recently started reading through the zombie survival guide after receiving it as a christmas present and while it's a clever and sometimes funny book, there are issues with some of the finer points
but what's your plan? i'd want a houseboat but know it wouldn't be possible so around here it might be worth it to drive up into the wilderness and rough it.

Does alcohol abuse equate to alcohol dependence?

LimePi — Tue, 12 Oct 2004 14:50:12 -0800

From the brand new AxMe Anonymizer

"Is my friend an alcoholic?" [MI] "He only drinks maybe four times a year, but when he does, he gets REALLY REALLY drunk, does (and says)horrible things, blacks out, etc. He's incredibly touchy when it comes to talking about it. Immediately goes into denial, gets defensive, etc. (When he's not drunk, he's a sweetheart.)

Because when he DOES drink, he acts like an alcoholic, many people (who meet him for the first time when he's on one of these benders) assume that he *is* an alcoholic.

If it makes any difference, he's not a college student. He's in his 40s.

But can one really be an alcoholic when one drinks so infrequently? Don't alcoholics drink all the time?

Is "alcoholic" a fuzzy term, or is there a clear medical definition. Can a brain scan be done that determines whether or not someone is an alcoholic, or is it purely about behavior?"

(once again, this is not my [LimePi's] question, but a question from an anonymous MeFite)

Elitest sites

leotrotsky — Tue, 29 Jun 2004 18:52:55 -0800

Are there any sites more elitist than Mefi? By that I mean either more limited in membership, or more sought after and/or influential. The whole gmail / mefi swap, plus the periodic "expand the membership" pleas got me thinking about it, along with the occasional mentions of the site that is not to be named aw crud

Classic MetaFilter Posts

snarfodox — Fri, 25 Jun 2004 06:47:45 -0800

There are some amazing old posts in the MetaFilter archives, but the sheer volume of material makes it a needle/haystack exercise to find them. Jimbob made an excellent comment in this thread where he suggested that the community could put together a collection of favourite old MetaFilter discussions. So how about it, what classic MetaFilter post do you think qualifies as a must-read thread?

If you killed somebody, how would you dispose of the body without getting caught?

ashbury — Sun, 13 Jun 2004 17:48:37 -0800

Suppose you killed somebody...

How would you dispose of the body without getting caught? Would you dump it somewhere? Bury it in the backyard or basement? Dissolve it in lime? What? What would your master plan be that would allow you to get away with it?

And no, I haven't killed anybody and I'm not planning to - I was just curious.

Can a young man with a knife defeat a grizzly bear?

Kwantsar — Wed, 05 May 2004 14:41:36 -0800

Could a typical young man, armed only with a knife, (say, six or eight inches long) be trained to consistently "win" fights with a grizzly bear? Assume no element of surprise.

Where Can I, Languagehat, and Davehat Publish Bizarre Triptych?

troutfishing — Wed, 24 Dec 2003 11:15:37 -0800

Recently, on the "Mary Celeste" Metafilter thread, Languagehat, Davehat, and I spontaneously coauthored (with no prior discussion) a bizarre, surrealist triptych I've dubbed "Food-Based Psychic Spying defense technology in the Cold War - A retrospective". I think we may polish it up a bit, add some bits here and there, and try to have it published - in hardcopy - somewhere. But where? Any suggestions for venues or submission protocol? Thanks. Hmmm. Slow day.

Communities

Quartermass — Wed, 10 Dec 2003 10:34:58 -0800

I am writing a term paper right now on Virtual Community (surprise - I am using MeFi as my case study!). Can I ask people here if they consider MeFi to be a 'real' community? Why or why not? (Interpret 'real' as you will). Also, any links to prior MeTa discussion on this topic would be grrreat. Thanks!

What is Ask MetaFilter?

y6y6y6 — Tue, 09 Dec 2003 07:50:35 -0800

MetaFilter 2.0 - Ask MetaFilter is born. What is Ask MetaFilter? [more inside] So in a fun experiment with recursion I'm going to ask the AskMe forum what groundrules/guidelines should be for Ask MetaFilter. And yes, obviously I realize that it's not up to me (or anyone else here other than Matt), and that this really isn't mature enough to generate final conclusions, and that the plan is to let it run unrestrained for a while to see what falls out. But questions about what this is and how it should work still seem legitimate, and are going to be asked anyway. So why not.

Should we have categories? What types of questions are allowed? Is this available only to MeFi members? Will there be moderation? Will we have real hard rules (which MeFi lacks on purpose)? How will we avoid having ideological arguments drown out good advice? Will we everything? That is - Will users who constantly provide good answers be flagged as such? Will great questions filter to the top? How will avoid the AskMe version of the double post? Will "pancake" type in-jokes be allowed? Will thread-ends and chat be allowed? if someone is banned from Ask MetaFilter are they banned from MetaFilter as well? Is there such a thing as a dumb question? How will we prevent dumb questions?

I see a lot of parallels with the distributed journalism app we started a while ago. Should one of the end goals of each thread be a white paper document with a distillation of the threads conclusions?

It's only been up for about 18 hours, but it's already obvious to me that Ask MetaFilter (AskMe? AxMe?) will be huge. This is something MeFis have been chafing to be able to do for years. You spend all your time chatting with people about geek stuff, and politics, and movies, but there's this huge ocean of questions that we've agreed can not ever be asked. Well now the Pandora's box is opened and we can put all those hanging "help desk" questions to the MeFi Scooby crowd.

One thing I wonder about is how much this could be extended. So Matt has finally broken down and implemented the help desk forum we've been asking for for years. What else might he kick loose? Maybe we could have a selflink.metafilter.com. Or a local.europe.metafilter.com.

The mind reels at the possibilities. I'm also wondering how far we can draw Matt out before he rebels. New memberships *and* a whole new section added at the same time? Someone tell Matt's boss he has too much time on his hands.