Do you know when curry came to the United Kingdom, or what was the first product to be sold with the aid of a bar-code scanner in a supermarket? How sugar beets were traditionally harvested, why Chinese restaurants took off in Britain, or which famous historical figure spurred the invention of canned goods? Or are you wondering why you should care about such trivia at all? To all these questions, the British Library has answers.

This great data visualisation from the NY Times comes to us via a really fascinating website called Information is Beautiful. It represents the sales in billions of today’s dollars of the various music formats over time.

Urban society may seem a modern phenomenon but cities have been around for a lot longer than one might think. Indeed, once nomadic tribes began to settle in one location, they saw that it was good, became fruitful, and multiplied. Decades, centuries and millennia passed while war, climate change and human migration all took their toll. Relatively few ancient cities have managed to survive the test of time. Here are 10 that have not only survived, but continue to thrive.

Smarthistory.org is a free multi-media web-book designed as a dynamic enhancement (or even substitute) for the traditional art history textbook.

Documenting Internet phenomena: viral videos, image macros, catchphrases, web celebs and more.

In the late 1800s, the Brooklyn Bridge was built with no power tools, no heavy machinery, and only a basic, evolving understanding of how to make steel. It’s not these facts, but the stories surrounding the facts that inspire me when I take a good, long stare at a suspension bridge. But first…

The fact that the speculative economy for cash and commodities accounts for over 95% of economic transactions, while people actually using money and consuming commodities constitute less than 5% tells us something important. Real supply and demand have almost nothing to do with prices. We do not live in an economy, we live in a Ponzi scheme.

Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion

2008 has been an eventful year to say the least - it is difficult to sum up the thousands of stories in just a handful of photographs. That said, I will try to do what I've done with other photo narratives here, and tell a story of 2008 in photographs. It's not the story of 2008, it's certainly not all stories, but as a collection it does show a good portion of what life has been like over the past 12 months. This is a multi-entry story, 120 photographs over three days. Watch for part 2 and part 3 tomorrow and the next day.

Did Apple steal the idea from Kodak? Not at all. Was Apple aware of the Vanity Kodak, and the what and the how of Teague’s contribution? Without a doubt: Jonathan Ive is an outstanding designer, and the Vanity Kodak is one of the classic examples in the history of industrial design. What Apple did was learn from history, and adopt, adapt, and assimilate past success to current context. That is simply good, intelligent design in action. It is also a very good lesson: an obsession with the new and original, without a deep literacy and appreciation for the past, leads to a path of missed opportunities.

The Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time is a partnership between the Palace Museum and IBM. The goal of the project is to provide the means for a world-wide audience to celebrate and explore aspects of Chinese culture and history.

"So what I did is I modified the SocialHistory JS so that it polled the browser to find out which of the Quantcast top 10k sites were visited. I then apply the ratio of male to female users for each site and with some basic math determine a guestimate of your gender." - Social web engineering, wtf!

Why do we capitalize the word “I”? There’s no grammatical reason for doing so, and oddly enough, the majuscule “I” appears only in English.

Managing and keeping track of all the digital information relevant to your lifestyle is becoming an increasingly important issue. Whether it be for business or pleasure, family or health, internal or external use, we all have the need to categorize, store

There are many reasons why cities are abandoned; some, like the ghost towns of the American West, have become tourist destinations while others have been condemned or simply forgotten. These 20 abandoned cities of the world share an eerie, haunted quality

Yesterday I came across a slightly mysterious website — a collection of Polaroids, one per day, from March 31, 1979 through October 25, 1997. There’s no author listed, no contact info, and no other indication as to where these came from. So, naturally

"It was this latter concern that led Charles Kettering, director of General Motors Research, to write a 1929 magazine article called “Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied.” He wasn’t suggesting that manufacturers produce shoddy products. Along with many o

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened--ri

Photography was probably an inevitable invention - the surprise was that it took so long for it to develop, especially given that the scientific principles that are responsible for it - physical principles such as our understanding of lens and optics and

Tussen 2007 en 2009 zendt de VPRO de serie 'In Europa' uit op tv. Alle uitzendingen zijn achteraf terug te zien op deze website. Hieronder een overzicht van het uitzendschema.

Intelligent websites should tune-in to the content preferences of their visitors, tailoring a specific experience based on each visitor's favorite sites and services across the social web. In this post I will teach you how to mine the rich treasure trove

Any picture can speak 1,000 words, but only a select few say something poignant enough to galvanize an entire society. The following photographs screamed so loudly that the entire world stopped to take notice.

The media attributed the quote "invented the Internet" to Al Gore. That was completely incorrect, and this page lists the history of this historical misattribution (or even foul political play).

Darwin exchanged letters with nearly 2000 people during his lifetime. These range from well known naturalists, thinkers, and public figures, to men and women who would be unknown today were it not for the letters they exchanged with Darwin.

"If piracy means using the creative property of others without their permission, then the history of the content industry is a history of piracy. Every important sector of big media today - film, music, radio, and cable TV - was born of a kind of piracy."

an amazing collection of postcards from the dawn of the twentieth century that depict what life would be like in the year 2000.

"The idea that we could better understand ourselves by looking at how we employ technology was and remains the driving force of my work as a journalist."

BibliOdyssey Books~~Illustrations~~Science~~History~~Visual Materia Obscura~~Eclectic Bookart.