So remember, when John McCain and his surrogates call me a "celebrity," they're not insulting me; they're insulting you.

The phrase "celebrity culture" is an indictment of the culture, not the celebrity.

The Anonymous Liberal: How Obama Should Respond to the 'Celebrity' Charge

Fascination with what lies beneath the earth seems to have been shared by many different cultures. In the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth centuries, however, the emergence of new technologies made it possible for the first time to dig into the earth on a scale that had been previously unimaginable. Whether undertaken in the service of science or in the name of public works, these colossal excavations dispelled many longstanding myths. Nevertheless, the subterranean imagination did not simply disappear. Instead, it reconfigured itself around a new set of ideas, fantasies, and fears.

In Notes on the Underground, Rosalind Williams, Bern Dibner Professor of the History of Science and Technology at MIT, examines how actual and imaginary underworlds shaped our attitudes toward the manufactured environments that we inhabit. Sina Najafi spoke to Williams by phone.

From the archive:

Edward Burtynsky is internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of nature transformed by industry. Manufactured Landscapes – a stunning documentary by award winning director Jennifer Baichwal – follows Burtynsky to China, as he captures the effects of the country’s massive industrial revolution. This remarkable film leads us to meditate on human endeavour and its impact on the planet.

Underworld: An Interview with Rosalind Williams

Compulsively readable ...

He compared what he did to being a spy: you changed superficial details while keeping your core intact. This approach not only made it easier to convince people; it allowed him to protect a part of his self, to hold on to some moral center. “I know I can be cruel, but I don’t want to become a monster,” he said.

Once he had imagined a character, he fashioned a commensurate appearance—meticulously shaving his face, plucking his eyebrows, using hair-removal creams. He often put on baggy pants and a shirt with long sleeves that swallowed his wrists, emphasizing his smallness. Peering in a mirror, he asked himself if others would see what he wanted them to see. “The worst thing you can do is deceive yourself,” he said.

See also, from earlier this year, The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar:

In 1912 a four year-old boy named Bobby Dunbar went missing in a swamp in Louisiana. Eight months later, he was found in the hands of a wandering handyman in Mississippi. (The picture at left was taken just days later.) In 2004, his granddaughter discovered a secret beneath the legend of her grandfather's kidnapping, a secret whose revelation would divide her own family, bring redemption to another, and become the answer to a third family's century-old prayer. We devote our entire episode to the story.

Annals of Crime: The Chameleon

Is **** down for everyone or just me?

Try it with recursion!

Down for everyone or just me?

However deep or long this year-old credit crunch proves to be, the financial system looks doomed to repeat the crisis in some form unless regulators look seriously at preventing banks and investors herding into booms and busts.

From the archive:

That the Internet and housing hyperinflations transpired within a period of ten years, each creating trillions of dollars in fake wealth, is, I believe, only the beginning. There will and must be many more such booms, for without them the economy of the United States can no longer function. The bubble cycle has replaced the business cycle.

Scatter the herd or financial crises doomed to recur

Existing distributed hash tables provide efficient mechanisms for storing and retrieving a data item based on an exact key, but are unsuitable when the search key is similar, but not identical, to the key used to store the data item. In this paper, we present a scalable and efficient peer-to-peer system with a new search primitive that can efficiently find the k data items with keys closest to the search key. The system works via a novel assignment of virtual coordinates to each object in a high-dimensional, synthetic space such that the proximity between two points in the coordinate space is correlated with the similarity between the strings that the points represent. We examine the feasibility of this approach for efficient, peer-to-peer search on inexact string keys, and show that the system provides a robust method to handle key perturbations that naturally occur in applications, such as file-sharing networks, where the query strings are provided by users.

Hyperspaces for Object Clustering and Approximate Matching in Peer-to-Peer Overlays

WaveScope is a system for developing distributed, high-rate applications that need to process streams of data from various sources (e.g., sensors) using a combination of signal processing and database (event stream processing) operations. The execution environment for these applications ranges from embedded sensor nodes to multicore/multiprocessor servers.

WaveScope

OpenGL is powerful, but it can also be more complicated than actually necessary. For applications involving 2D graphics, a low amount of interactivity, and a smaller amount of data, it would be simpler not to bother with the video card and the rendering pipeline. Additionally, some visualizations are meant for print form. The Gnome Foundation’s Cairo 2D graphics toolkit is perfect for these applications. As luck would have it, Haskell also has an excellent binding to Cairo.

Three other things make Haskell ideally suited to information visualization and visual analytics: a well-thought out and extensible library of generic data structures, lazy evaluation, and the separation of data transformation code from input/output inherent in a pure functional programming language. Visualizations written in Haskell tend naturally to break up into portions of reusable and visualization specific code. Thus, programs for visualization written in Haskell maintain readability and reusability as well or better than Python, but do not suffer the performance problems of an interpreted language.

For much the same reason as Simon Peyton-Jones put together Tackling the Awkward Squad, I have put together these lecture notes. I hope these will bring a programmer interested in visualization and open to the aesthetic advantages of functional programming up to speed on both topics.

Beautiful Code, Compelling Evidence: Functional Programming for Information Visualization and Visual Analytics

Once when I needed to entertain my daughter while we were driving somewhere, I said, "Let's pretend that, rolling along outside the window, there was a little ball that would pick up trash and boxes and trash cans, and that as it collected items it got bigger and bigger, until it was picking up houses and buildings, and that there was happy music playing that sounded like this (I hummed a bit), while hundreds of citizens called out for help that would never come."

Her little eyes got really wide.

She was very quiet for the rest of the ride.

From the archive:

Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

"As a friend of mine said, it takes half a second for a baby to throw up all over your sweater. It takes hours to get it clean."

Parenting Tip #234: Katamari Damacy

Open Salon is a publishing platform with a built-in audience. It was developed for writers, photographers and artists of any stripe in need of a smart home for their work (and not one of those giant, anonymous blog networks), and who are hoping to be rewarded for it. After a quick, free registration, you can immediately begin posting your words, images or videos to your blog, start building an audience and even earning money.

Open Salon is also a place where passionate media lovers can find a new generation of creative voices, and help them discover a wider audience.

What, precisely, can you do here? After a quick registration, you can start blogging immediately -- and rating and commenting on other posts, messaging other members, and more. You can also invite other members into Open Salon from your own blog page.

The Open Salon home page functions like a real-time magazine cover. We spotlight the best content, but you can also see what other members are reading, rating and commenting on. A new issue goes up every evening; we update the cover every morning. In the near future, we'll begin featuring the best Open Salon content on the cover of Salon.com. We'll also be unveiling ways for you to earn money for your great work on Open Salon, which includes a built-in peer-to-peer payment system called Tippem.

Open Salon