Stephen Downes

This distracted me for a good half hour, so how could I not pass it along? "The tech tree is an interactive visualization of technological history from 3 million years ago to today. A work in progress, it currently contains 1919 technologies and 2239 connections between them." In my youth I created a similar (but now long lost) map of philosophers and their ideas. I also had (and probably still have) the venerable Timeline of World History fold-out book (that seems to have disappeared entirely from the internet) mapping all the important people, events and empires from Creation to modern times. Via Kottke.