William Langewiesche, in Vanity Fair:

There were so many opportunities for the accident not to happen—the collision between a Legacy 600 private jet and a Boeing 737 carrying 154 people. But on September 29, 2006, high above the Amazon, a long, thin thread of acts and omissions brought the two airplanes together. From the vantage point of the pilots, the Brazilian air-traffic controllers, and the Caiapó Indians, whose rain forest became a charnel house, the author reconstructs a fatal intersection between high-performance technology and human fallibility.

From the archive, an eyewitness account:

"We’ve been hit," said Henry.

"Hit? By what?" I wondered.

And so began the most harrowing 30 minutes of my life.

And something completely different:

Woody Norris aims the silvery plate at his quarry. A burly brunette 200 feet away stops dead in her tracks and peers around, befuddled. She has walked straight into the noise of a Brazilian rain forest -- then out again. Even in her shopping reverie, here among the haircutters and storefront tax-preparers and dubious Middle Eastern bistros, her senses inform her that she has just stepped through a discrete column of sound, a sharply demarcated beam of unexpected sound. "Look at that," Norris mutters, chuckling as the lady turns around. "She doesn't know what hit her."

The Devil at 37,000 Feet

INRIA:

Peer-to-peer locality has recently raised a lot of interest in the community.

Indeed, whereas peer-to-peer content distribution enables financial saving for the content providers who do not have to maintain a dedicated infrastructure, it dramatically increases the traffic on inter-ISP links. To solve this issue, the idea to keep a fraction of the peer-to-peer traffic local to each ISP was introduced a few years ago. Since then, peer-to-peer solutions exploiting locality have been introduced. However, several fundamental issues on locality still need to be explored. For instance, how far can we push locality for a peer-to-peer distribution without impacting its robustness?

In this paper, we perform extensive experiments on a controlled environment with up to 10,000 peers to evaluate the impact of locality on inter-ISP links traffic and peers download completion time.

In particular, we show that high locality values enable up to two orders of magnitude saving on inter-ISP links without any significant impact on peers download completion time.

Pushing BitTorrent Locality to the Limit

Be Like Virgil.

To help overcome differences in terminology used by researchers in various fields, plenary "tutorials" will be given by experts before the conference. Each expert provided an overview of his or her field in language that other researchers -- scientists, engineers, or medical researchers -- not familiar with the discipline can understand.

Recently:

The founder of a data-mining tool called WikiScanner, Griffith is also a visiting researcher at the mysterious Santa Fe Institute, where “complex systems” are studied.

From the archive:

If you haven't been personally denounced by Steven Colbert, you just aren't that important ...

Keck Futures: Complex Systems Webcasts

The perfect way to collaborate on a text document and keep everyone literally on the same page.

From the archive:

SubEthaEdit kicks ass, so pick it up if you can.

See also:

Jottit makes getting a website as easy as filling out a textbox.

EtherPad: Realtime Collaborative Text Editing

New work from Jon Kleinberg:

MemeTracker builds maps of the daily news cycle by analyzing around 900,000 news stories and blog posts per day from 1 million online sources, ranging from mass media to personal blogs.

We track the quotes and phrases that appear most frequently over time across this entire spectrum. This makes it possible to see how different stories compete for news and blog coverage each day, and how certain stories persist while others fade quickly.

MemeTracker: tracking news phrases over the web

1. Godel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas Hofstadter
2. The Art of Computer Programming, by Donald Knuth
3. The Elements of Programming Style by Brian W. Kernighan and P. J. Plauger
4. Theory of Parsing, Translation and Compiling, by Alfred V. Aho, and Jeffrey D. Ullman
5. The Computer and the Brain, by John von Neumann
6. A Programming Language, by Kenneth E. Iverson
7. Writing Efficient Programs, by Jon Louis Bentley
8. Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines, by Marvin L. Minsky
9. Operating System Principles, by Per Brinch Hansen
10. Artificial Intelligence, by Elaine Rich

10 Books that will Substitute A Computer Science Degree

So, without further ado, here are the five regular expressions that I have found the most useful for day-to-day web programming tasks.

5 Regular Expressions Every Web Programmer Should Know

What we've learned in software so far is that you can build things out of junk, but that finding out what to build and how to best design it takes creativity - that is, lots of tries, working with the folks who will use the stuff in the end, and perfecting the best attempt. It's too bad building software isn't like building bridges. It's more like writing novels - maybe like writing science fiction.

Lessons From the Science of Nothing At All

Only a few years after the invention of the first programming languages, the subject flourished and a whole flurry of languages appeared. Soon programmers had to make their choices among available languages. How were they selected; were there any criteria of selection, of language quality? What is truly essential in a programming language? In spite of the convergence to a few, wide-spread, popular languages in recent years, these questions remain relevant, and the search for a "better" language continues among programmers.

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The Essence of Programming Languages

Clojure is a dynamic programming language that targets the Java Virtual Machine. It is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Every feature supported by Clojure is supported at runtime. Clojure provides easy access to the Java frameworks, with optional type hints and type inference, to ensure that calls to Java can avoid reflection.

Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system. Clojure is predominantly a functional programming language, and features a rich set of immutable, persistent data structures. When mutable state is needed, Clojure offers a software transactional memory system and reactive Agent system that ensure clean, correct, multithreaded designs.

Clojure