Philosophy of History is what the page is called; it's by a philosophy professor, Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D., who's a libertarian and obsessed with Leonard Nelson and the Friesian School, whatever the hell that is. Never mind all that. If you scroll down past the essays and the Military History section and the calendars and the book reviews, you get to the Reference Resources. As he says, "Not all of history may be covered here, but a very extensive fragment of it certainly is." Take, as one tiny example, Margraves & Counts of Flanders. There's a longish introduction and a colored map, then there are lists of rulers and detailed genealogies accompanied by more text, then similarly for the Counts of Artois, the Kings & Dukes of Brittany, the Counts of Anjou, the Dukes of Normandy, the Counts of Blois & Champagne, the Counts of Toulouse, the Dukes of Aquitaine and Dukes of Gascony, the Lords & Counts of Foix, the Kings and Lords of Man, the Dukes of Marlborough and Earls of Spencer (including a detailed list of the Vanderbilts), the Dukes of Buccleuch, Grafton, & St. Albans, and the Dukes of Berwick & Fitzjames. That's one page. There are dozens and dozens of them. The Prime Ministers of the Dominions, the Kings of Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland, the Islâmic Rulers of North Africa, the Emperors of India, China, & Japan, all the way down to the Mangïts of Bukhara, 1747-1920. If you have any interest in history, This Site's For You.
posted to MetaFilter by languagehat at 3:31 PM on June 23, 2007 (48 comments)

Bloxors. (Game, flash.)
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 12:27 PM on June 23, 2007 (53 comments)

A Month of Sundays. Seattle's The Stranger sends 31 writers to 31 houses of worship.
posted to MetaFilter by monju_bosatsu at 9:03 AM on June 22, 2007 (97 comments)

The Times reports: Lily-livered milquetoasts trying to suffocate the British insult. In case you illiterate turkey-buggering colonials have comprehension troubles, consult this handy glossary and usage guide.
posted to MetaFilter by nasreddin at 9:49 AM on June 22, 2007 (41 comments)

Scans from Jack Kirby's comic book adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Here are some scans of his sketches as well. You can read more about the adaptation here and here. (via)
posted to MetaFilter by fallenposters at 8:31 AM on June 22, 2007 (51 comments)

The concept of alphabetization was invented at the Great Library of Alexandria in the third century BC, with words grouped by first letter. It wasn't until 1053, in the Elementarium doctrinae erudimentum that recursive alphabetization (where "Aab" comes before "Aac" and after "Aaa") appeared in rudimentary form. You'd think that by now we'd have the process down, but controversies still rage. Does "sea foam" come before "seaborne"? Does "Michael Jackson" come before "Nick Cave"? Throw in international characters and an occasional foray into ASCIIbetical order and it's no wonder the alphabet can be so frustrating.
posted to MetaFilter by L. Fitzgerald Sjoberg at 6:50 PM on June 21, 2007 (62 comments)

The American Film Institute decided the need for more money an update to their 1998 list of the 100 Greatest Movies was so pressing that they made a new list. Ebert (and friends) ask where's Fargo?. The IHT wonders why the past decade has only spawned four new, worthy movies. And, generally, no one seems super excited about it. (some links go to wikipedia to avoid registration on AFI's site).
posted to MetaFilter by ztdavis at 9:30 PM on June 21, 2007 (86 comments)

A games and economic theory argument against intellectual property. Watt's on first in academic paper.
posted to MetaFilter by klangklangston at 10:09 PM on June 21, 2007 (42 comments)

The Science of Gaydar. "That’s what we mean by gaydar—not the skill of the viewer so much as the telltale signs most gay people project, the set of traits that make us unmistakably one....A small constellation of researchers is specifically analyzing the traits and characteristics that, though more pronounced in some than in others, not only make us gay but also make us appear gay."
posted to MetaFilter by jtajta at 10:27 AM on June 20, 2007 (133 comments)

Ten years ago, video editing (especially nonlinear editing) was the realm of professionals [youtube]. An Avid System cost close to a $100k or you could rent an editing suite by the hour. i-Movie, and mini-dv camcorders lowered the price barrier quite considerably. Times have changed. By 2007, all you need to cut video is flash. Will Youtube's new video editing application stir things up? Maybe Walter Murch ought to have a look.
posted to MetaFilter by sswiller at 9:26 PM on June 20, 2007 (30 comments)

A Field Guide to Chess Tactics. Chess tactics explained in plain English, with hundreds of examples. A great site for beginning to mid-level players. Includes a large library of positional problems, organized thematically, with the solutions explained and discussed. For example, learn about knight forks, then quiz yourself on the same topic.
posted to MetaFilter by Rumple at 9:53 PM on June 19, 2007 (76 comments)

VDoubleOrapsreallyquickly. Geezah!
posted to MetaFilter by nthdegx at 11:17 AM on June 19, 2007 (18 comments)

Bane of My Existence is a very observant and well done record of idiocy for future historians by illustrator Rod Filbrandt. You of course, are nothing like these drawings. The rest of his blog is pretty good to poke around too. (via Drawn)
posted to MetaFilter by Stan Chin at 8:06 PM on June 19, 2007 (48 comments)

In the Fall of 1991, MTV's 120 Minutes released two compilations (Amazon: one, two) of songs from the show. (Youtube: one, two)
posted to MetaFilter by nervousfritz at 6:05 PM on June 18, 2007 (45 comments)

Kelly returns. Ward Sutton (aka "Kelly") and his wonderfully sublime editorial cartoons are back in the Onion. Sutton's website. Sutton is so dead-on that his Kelly cartoons leave many confused. Interview of Mark and Ward Sutton at Mother Jones.
posted to MetaFilter by KokuRyu at 2:14 PM on June 18, 2007 (52 comments)

Looking Backward: From 2000 to 1887, a Utopian novel by Edward Bellamy. A classic 19th century socialist vision of the future.
posted to MetaFilter by nasreddin at 7:24 PM on June 17, 2007 (12 comments)

Michael Moore's Sicko on Google Video
posted to MetaFilter by petsounds at 5:56 PM on June 17, 2007 (278 comments)

1, 2, 3,4, 5,6,7, 8, 9,10, 11,12! Classic Sesame Street taught us Counting and other important stuff.
posted to MetaFilter by louche mustachio at 11:17 PM on June 15, 2007 (50 comments)

The great-grandfather could walk six miles to go fishing; the grandfather could walk a mile to go to the woods; the son can't go more than 300 yards from his house. How children lost the right to roam, including a map illustrating the point.
posted to MetaFilter by JDHarper at 6:28 AM on June 15, 2007 (95 comments)

McDonald's UK goes Web 2.0 with a site answering user's questions. Apparently, all of them.
posted to MetaFilter by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 8:31 AM on June 15, 2007 (136 comments)

Chime.TV -- it's a new video hyper-aggregator (like VodPod) by MeFite chime that I've been using since it was in development. It's Wii-compatible and tested and can turn your fave sites into channels (including but not limited to MeFi,Boing Boing, Digg, or Fark). You can automatically watch any YouTube channel as well, or just watch your favorites. I'm personally going to suggest you try out the Net100 channel, which is an aggregate of everbody's top 10 videos. Flash player required
posted to MetaFilter by taumeson at 1:46 PM on June 12, 2007 (26 comments)

The most awesomest jambox ever. It has to be seen to be understood, so I won't try to explain it for you. Best to let it's creator do that. And don't forget to check out the making-of feature as well.
posted to MetaFilter by ninjew at 10:36 AM on June 12, 2007 (41 comments)

Mars and Beyond - 50 years ago, this animated episode of Tomorrowland aired on Disneyland a few months after the launch of Sputnik - an entertaining melange of astronomy, sci-fi, pop culture, science, speculation, and surreality. Walt himself and Wernher von Braun make guest appearances and clip 5 is particularly trippy. (Parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
posted to MetaFilter by madamjujujive at 10:22 PM on June 10, 2007 (9 comments)

Weird Tales: The Strange Life of HP Lovecraft is a 45-minute BBC radio documentary: "Geoff Ward examines the strange life and terrifying world of the man hailed as America's greatest horror writer since Poe. During his life, Lovecraft's work was confined to lurid pulp magazines and he died in penury in 1937. Today, however, his writings are considered modern classics and published in prestigious editions. How did such a weird, wild and ungodly writer get canonised? Among the writers considering his legacy are Neil Gaiman, ST Joshi, Kelly Link, Peter Straub and China Mieville." ST Joshi, a biographer of Lovecraft, has an essay up on The Scriptorium. Wikisource has an extensive collection of his writings, including not only his most famous novels and short stories, but also essays, letters, poetry and legal documents. He is buried in the city of his birth, Providence, Rhode Island, where he does eternal lie, even though someone made an unsuccessful attempt to exhume him in 1997.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:33 PM on June 11, 2007 (43 comments)

Rome Reborn is a digital model of ancient Rome as it might have appeared on June 21, 320 AD, including the Colosseum and the Roman Forum. More info.
posted to MetaFilter by kirkaracha at 1:34 PM on June 11, 2007 (22 comments)

Explore a thousand years of classical music in 30 fifteen-minute programmes on BBC Radio 4.
posted to MetaFilter by Aloysius Bear at 12:50 AM on June 11, 2007 (20 comments)

TV actress and hotel heiress Paris Hilton, infamous for her inadvertent comedic stylings on reality show "The Simple Life", was ordered to return to serve her incarceration sentence today. The order comes fast on the heels of an evacuation from her correctional facility in Lynwood due to supposed health problems(nsfw).
posted to MetaFilter by Stynxno at 12:43 PM on June 8, 2007 (284 comments)

Where the South Really Begins [Flash] Forget the Mason-Dixon Line. The South really starts at the Sweet Tea Line. [more inside]
posted to MetaFilter by kirkaracha at 4:03 PM on June 8, 2007 (98 comments)

Librarians as Enemies of Books
via the delightfully uptight Steve Mauer at BookMine.
posted to MetaFilter by carsonb at 1:27 PM on June 7, 2007 (66 comments)

If you could kiss yourself, would you? These photos make it happen, and the results are ... disturbing. Site is in French.
posted to MetaFilter by bwg at 9:02 PM on June 6, 2007 (79 comments)

There are many picture blogs, but there is only one SidewaysPony. As one regular user so aptly put it, this ingeneously simple site is "the most repulsively, exquisitely, disastrously, wonderfully addictive little corner of the internet." [poss. nsfw]
posted to MetaFilter by castironskillet at 2:16 PM on June 6, 2007 (23 comments)

"I wasn't worried about freedom, I was worried about people turning into morons by TV." Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451, recently interviewed by LA Weekly , says that the famed story of Guy Montag is not a forewarning of government censorship, but rather it is an inditement of television which is creating a society that focuses on memorizing facts and dates rather than studying literature . In interviews at his home (grainy quicktime video goodness) , especially (1), and (2) , Mr. Bradbury discusses his intentions, amongst other things, of Fahrenheit 451 and "laments the moronic influence of popular culture through local TV news." All Of Our teachers Were Wrong .
posted to MetaFilter by fizzix at 1:03 PM on June 5, 2007 (117 comments)

WIREDfilter: After a thousand years stuck on a dusty library shelf, the oldest copy of Homer's Iliad is about to go into digital circulation.

"Sing, goddess, the rage of Achilles the son of Peleus, the destructive rage that sent countless pains on the Achaeans..."

posted to MetaFilter by chuckdarwin at 5:15 PM on June 5, 2007 (54 comments)

Hundreds of 'new' words in the new edition of the Collins English Dictionary (Reuters story), also via BBC, AP and the Fox Television Stations (headline with no story, surprising since its publisher is another Rupert Murdoch subsidiary... but I digress). Some are obvious: hoodie, wiki, POTUS, plasma screen; some reflect our times: Gitmo, Londonistan, extraordinary rendition, carbon footprint; some are absolutely slangy: celebutante, McMansion, muffin top, man bag, disemvowel, barbecue stopper, girlfriend experience... Also in the book: ho. And not the version Santa Claus says. The new dictionary is available "online, on mobiles, as a desktop application or integrated with Microsoft Word" - when you buy the deadtree edition.
posted to MetaFilter by wendell at 1:04 PM on June 4, 2007 (22 comments)

The Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) test is a continuation of the standardized testing Texas has been doing for the past 15 years, a good bit of which George W. Bush pushed as a way to measure teacher aptitude and school performance. The company that administers the test claims that cheating is "extraordinarily rare" but the Dallas Morning news found about 50,000 cheating students in 1/3 of all Texas schools. The most prevalent was the 11th grade science exam, also known as the one you must pass to get a diploma. The article even has cool coverflow-like visualizations of what a cheating school exam looks like. [via the journalist's blog, which promises parts 2 and 3 in the next couple days]
posted to MetaFilter by mathowie at 8:56 PM on June 3, 2007 (65 comments)

Renegade physicists! have published the book Endless Universe and talked to NPR's Tom Ashbrook about their alternative theories of the beginning of the universe: 'The Big Bang' is an unfortunate misnomer and was not the beginning of time, but rather the formation of a singularity in the universe. "And what we're seeing is that the Big Bang doesn't have to be the beginning of time. It's perfectly possible that the Big Bang was just a violent event in a pre-existing universe..."
posted to MetaFilter by frobozz at 2:41 PM on June 2, 2007 (18 comments)

The first 17 minute 'webisode' of the new science-fiction web-series Sanctuary, starring Stargate SG-1's Amanda Tapping (along with several other Stargate actors) can now be viewed online, for free, at Youtube. And although you can buy them here for US $1.99, uploading the video to Youtube or sharing it with your friends is all completely legit, as the producers have taken a very liberal approach to DRM; specifically, there is none. To quote creator Damian Kindler "These files are YOURS. You can do with them what you want. Drop them into iTunes. Convert them to DVD formats. Burn, rip, whatever. You bought 'em, you decide how to enjoy 'em." Nice.
posted to MetaFilter by Effigy2000 at 9:19 PM on June 2, 2007 (29 comments)

FunnyWhileItLastedFilter: Dave Chappelle, Mitch Hedberg, Jim Gaffigan, Dave Attell and Jon Stewart were just a few of the comedians who tried the patience of Dr Katz: Professional Therapist between 1995-1999. His secretary Laura and son Ben also got the best of him at times.
posted to MetaFilter by pruner at 12:06 AM on June 2, 2007 (35 comments)

The Internet Library of Early Journals :: A digital library of 18th and 19th Century journals
posted to MetaFilter by anastasiav at 7:08 PM on May 31, 2007 (23 comments)

The Western Tradition, an outstanding 52-part instructional video series about the history of western civilization, is available as free streaming video.
posted to MetaFilter by Chinese Jet Pilot at 3:13 PM on May 31, 2007 (13 comments)

The Unofficial Web Application List has a lot of neat applications. Some favorites include an amazing Ajax newsletter generator, a tool that lets you convert between any file formats, Rogue in Java, a free browser-based VoIP system that can call landlines, a music search engine that accepts humming as an input, and the lovely Flash Earth. You can also generate your own warning signs and use a page that makes browser content seem to be a MS Word document - you know, for work.
posted to MetaFilter by blahblahblah at 10:41 PM on May 30, 2007 (13 comments)

The most amazing Google thing in awhile launched today. Walk the streets of New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Denver, and Miami using Google's new Street View. You can look and move in any direction, and the detail is good enough to read license plates. It is getting lots of attention, though it makes some people a little afraid and has others scrambling. [Requires Flash. Click on the city names, really, it is worth it.]
posted to MetaFilter by blahblahblah at 8:13 PM on May 29, 2007 (97 comments)

Bisexual, but Only on the Internet : Could this be a new 21st century version of LUGs and hasbians?
posted to MetaFilter by grapefruitmoon at 7:12 PM on May 27, 2007 (72 comments)

Someone puts a video camera on a Japanese sushi bar conveyor belt. You can tell it's in Japan because it doesn't get stolen as it travels around the bar. Via b3ta.
posted to MetaFilter by Mwongozi at 12:37 PM on May 25, 2007 (103 comments)

An informative, gossipy and surprisingly engaging 6-page exploration of the life of Charles Dickens, including his up-and-down relationship with the U.S. press, his inexcusable behavior during his messy and very public separation from his wife, the "histrionic flair" of his performance career, and, of course, his works, including the one George Bernard Shaw called "a more seditious book than Das Kapital." Lots of interesting images, too.
posted to MetaFilter by mediareport at 9:47 PM on May 24, 2007 (17 comments)

A grand allegorical account of the past four decades of human history - or something, is of interest mostly to those of us over forty, but anybody can use the help of The Amazing Dostoevsky machine (new and improved!), to get through Crime and Punishment. Great literature not your thing? Try one woman's elusive search for a marketable, filthy domain name, or check how long you've been on this planet. I'm up to 20284, and counting ...

It's all part of the quirky (insane?) Bonkworld. There's bound to be something here to "feast your sense organs"
posted to MetaFilter by woodblock100 at 9:06 PM on May 23, 2007 (5 comments)

Things you can do with empty Altoids tins. People are spending a lot of time coming up with uses for Altoids tins. You don't have to buy the mints. Pinhole camera. Photos taken with that camera. Key for practicing Morse Code. Another one. Religious shrines. Postage assistant. Miniature luggage and furniture. Quilted. Etched and plated. Ipod speakers. Ipod case. Previously mentioned on MeFi: Ipod battery pack; survival kit. Of course, you could stash your drugs in one - but maybe you shouldn't.
posted to MetaFilter by Kirth Gerson at 7:10 AM on May 23, 2007 (31 comments)

Passive-aggressive notes from roommates, neighbors, coworkers and strangers.
posted to MetaFilter by chunking express at 8:32 AM on May 23, 2007 (47 comments)

According to this guy, you’re not ultimately morally responsible for choosing whether to snark or not to snark in response to this FPP. A discussion of the philosophical problems surrounding freewill from British Analytic philosopher Galen Strawson. (Oh, and while we’re at it, let’s throw in this unrelated review of Strawson’s latest work on consciousness, just for an extra splash of color.)
posted to MetaFilter by saulgoodman at 11:30 AM on May 23, 2007 (115 comments)

Do you like to read spoilers? If so, then you might be interested in one of these t-shirts.
posted to MetaFilter by bove at 10:37 AM on May 22, 2007 (72 comments)