After a long reprieve, we’ve scoured our bookmarks folder to bring you the second installment of Internet Archeology! Without further ado:

• A story about Microsoft and AOL’s fierce competition for share of an emerging instant messaging market that ultimately came to a battle of wits between two programmers.

• A beautifully illustrated diagram detailing the inception of post-modernism, beat poetry, and avant-garde jazz.

• Touted as a new global ideal, going green has also become part of the marketing strategy canon, rendering sustainable consumption as an issue of socioeconomic class.

• Markov Chains are a common modeling technique used in everything from macro-economics to molecular behavior. This interactive tutorial uses meteorology to make a challenging concept as simple as looking at the weather forecast.

• What exactly is the divide between analytic and continental philosophy? Can they ever be reconciled? A short history of the discipline that was cleaved in two.

• At the turn of the century, industrialization was hailed as the path to a shortened work day. Instead, our leisure time seems to have gotten more and more scarce. How did we get so busy?

• What is consciousness without words? One of our favorite Radiolab episodes investigates how our understanding of the world hinges on our ability to give something a name.

• Wooden pallets account for 12-15% of all lumber use in the US. How a simple object helped to usher in the globalized marketplace and moves the world to this day.

• Three theories considered tenets of fundamental physics: relativity, quantum mechanics, and locality, are currently at odds with one another when considering what happens to a person upon falling into a black hole, a problem that has the physics community scrambling.

• Illustrating the operation of a Turing Machine creates wonderful generative art.