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Adam Engst, publisher of the venerable TidBITS newsletter and website, offered up a four-part series today on using Gmail. He covers a lot of ground. Even long-time Gmail users are sure to learn something new from this thorough treatment. 

I finally broke down and bought an Apple Magic Mouse a couple of weeks back to replace an aging Logitech MX Revolution. I'm happy with my new input device, but I suspect it will be the last Apple mouse I ever buy. That's because I'm convinced that this is Apple's final mouse.

When I first started using it, I thought of the mouse as a hybrid device that cleverly combines old and new input ideas. After using it for a while, I've started to think about it as a transitional device. The Magic Mouse isn't about the mouse at all. It's all about the Multi-Touch surface. 

My guess is that Apple will soon proclaim the mouse dead and drop it from their product line. Only the Magic Trackpad will remain for desktop computers. 

Is the Magic Trackpad a superior input device? Based on my experience using the Trackpad on my Macbook Pro, I'd say it's better for most tasks but not as good for tasks that require fine control. The Multi-Touch, finger-driven interface is great, but it would be even better to have a large Trackpad that could transform into a Wacom-style pen tablet device. Perhaps a gesture could toggle modes.  

Of course, even touch surfaces may someday be obviated by eye- and voice-controlled desktop computing. I can see how such future tech might work well for routine tasks, but I wager we'd still need some sort of physical input device for precision work (e.g., detailed selections, drawing). I bet that device will look a lot more like a Trackpad than a mouse. It could also look like an iPad running a Trackpad app.

Author Charles J. Shields has started a blog about writing 'And So it Goes,' a Kurt Vonnegut biography due out this November. What better name could a Vonnegut biography have, really? I look forward to reading it. I'm always struck by how Vonnegut talked in the same fashion as he wrote. From Shields' post about his first meeting with the author:

He walks rather slowly, loping along, and stoop-shouldered too from writing for nearly sixty years. During the walk, we made small talk. Nothing memorable. I had a strange feeling of not being able to get much of a purchase on the conversation. Vonnegut doesn’t converse with you as much as make pronouncements. Apropos of nothing, he mentioned that only one-third of New York City public school students graduate. “Most of them who drop out are black,” he said. “Slavery was not such a good idea. My hero, Voltaire,” he went on, “speculated in the slave trade.”

When we reached the restaurant, the owner, a tall, slim blonde man in his late thirties opened the door and beamed. No one else was there.

“Welcome on a cold and rainy day,” he said, in a Dutch-accented voice.

“This is my biographer,” Vonnegut said, indicating me.

“Well, it’s about time,” said the restaurateur happily.

“No, it isn’t,” Kurt replied with a shrug. “It’s too late.”

Vonnegut died months after they met. Shields plans to post a new entry each Saturday chronicling his five-year journey to write the biography. 

I've read and own nearly all of Vonnegut's books. Slaughterhouse Five is certainly great, but my all-time favorite is surely Cat's Cradle. If you're a fan, do yourself a favor and get a copy of 'Kurt Vonnegut's Audio Collection.' It includes Slaughterhouse, Cat's Cradle, Breakfast of Champions , and short stories from Welcome to the Monkey House, all read by Kurt Vonnegut. Even if you don't like audio, you owe it to yourself to hear Vonnegut reading his own works.

Orvis for $15 (for iPhone, iPad, Android). It includes videos on casting; a great fly database (with useful info such as where and when to use a fly, how to fish it, descriptions, and images), knot-tying instructions (with animations, videos, and written instructions; with knots filed by name or categorized by knots for particular tasks), fishing reports for popular areas by state, podcasts, and a glossary. And you can also shop the Orvis online store, if you're so inclined. I was a bit hesitant to put my faith in a relatively expensive app from a retailer, but it's solid.

Before you write this app off as too costly, consider this: Orvis is now offering a $10 coupon for those who buy the app to use in their online and retail stores. And right now, they're offering a special promotion for 20 of their most popular flies for $9.95 with free shipping (limit one per household). After applying the coupon code (accounting for taxes), you can get this solid set of flies, nymphs, and streamers for .60 cents. It's a steal, even if you already have a lot of flies. And they accept PayPal. 

I'm sensitive to the fact that this may sound like I'm a pitch man for Orvis, but this really is a good deal. And the app is a handy reference and teaching aid.

Caveat: I shouldn't get too excited about this offer yet. I'm still awaiting my $10 coupon code. According to Orvis, I should receive it by e-mail within 48 hours. In the off-chance that the fly bundle deal expires before then, I'm not too concerned. I need some tippet and a few other odds and ends.

You could make the argument that Orvis should give the app away in hopes of selling their wares through mobile devices. For my part, I really don't think I'll be buying anything from Orvis via my iPhone. As I've said, I'm planning to use this app as a mobile reference and instructional tool. I hesitated before I hit the 'purchase' button in iTunes, but then I considered the fact that I've plunked down far more than $15 for various fly fishing books. I've never been inclined to bring books with me when I go fishing, but I always have my iPhone. And unlike a book, this app includes videos, animations, and podcasts. And Orvis says the app will continue to be updated.* 

As for price of admission, I think it's also worth noting that the audience for such a specialized app is sure to be small, so I don't think it's unreasonable to charge $15 to get access to all of this content at one's fingertips.  I'll update this post once (if) I successfully land the fly bundle.

* Orvis also says that they're going to deliver in-app purchase modules in the future. It'll be interesting to see how may free updates are delivered, compared to paid upgrades. Would I pay for new training modules? Maybe. It would certainly be a lot cheaper than attending a fly fishing class or school.

Wellcome Image Award. This small collection led me on a small tour-de-link this evening that began with the offerings of The Wellcome Library, turned to the ever-absorbing Tree of Life Web project, and ended with thoughts about IBM's Watson.

How did I get there? I'm not sure. I do know, though, that I found myself looking up the James Burke Knowledge Web somewhere along the way—a project that aims to serve as a counterpoint to specialized, stove-piped knowledge by connecting overlapping bits of history, technology, science, and culture. I used to read Burke's 'Connections' column in Scientific American and recall, long ago, watching episodes of the TV series. I've loosely followed Burke's web project for many years, hoping it would take off. Unfortunately, the site looks much the same now as it did when I last checked several years ago. I think it's long been surpassed (or, rather, bypassed) by other collaborative projects, namely Wikipedia.

Yet I don't think today's offerings on the Web come anywhere close to meeting the intent of the Burke project. The nearest example I can think of that emphasizes discovery across disciplines and through history is the Wikipedia Game, although it's only a shadow of the bigger idea. 

While searching for the rules of the Wikipedia Game, I inadvertently came across a reference to something altogether new to me, called The Game:

The objective is to avoid thinking about The Game itself. Thinking about The Game constitutes a loss, which, according to the rules of The Game, must be announced each time it occurs. It is impossible to win The Game; players can only attempt to avoid losing for as long as they possibly can.

Funny stuff. This obscurity reminded me of one of the first philosophy books I ever read: Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse. It's an abstract book that I find myself revisiting over the years, as I've found that it means different things to me as I grow older. It's what you might call a long-term reading experience, in much the same way that Sun Tzu's Art of War isn't something you really read. The content is best sampled, sparingly.

Of course I had to look up the Carse book in Wikipedia, too. I was delighted to find a reference there to the Clock of the Long Now, which is a project to create a 10,000 year clock. This interesting idea comes from the Long Now Foundation—another site which I frequent—dedicated to long-term thinking. If there's one thing we humans need to do more often, it's surely long-term thinking. 

What do finite and infinite games have to do with long-term thought? I'll quote what seems to be the most-often quoted part of Carse's slim book (from the first chapter):

There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.

The Long Now is about playing the infinite game. What could help us become better players? At least one answer is to improve our ability to connect the dots between our history, technology, science, and culture.

I wound up my evening Web surf with a really interesting post about IBM's Watson performance on the Jeopardy! game show. Watson certainly put in an impressive performance, demonstrating how computing power is starting to make inroads into the realm of knowledge and language.  Certainly, it showed great promise at answering questions based on ambiguous, misleading, and subtle clues (with notable exceptions). Perhaps we should introduce Watson to the Wikipedia Game. Then we could see how it does at assembling Burke's Knowledge Web. I bet Watson could turn up some interesting connections.

 open public Beta of Adobe Audition for Mac. While Audition for Mac remains in Beta, anyone can download it for free to take it for a spin. It's worth a look if you're interested in advanced audio editing.

I'm planning to use it to produce the next episode of my podcast to see how it stacks up to Apple's Soundtrack Pro. In preliminary tests editing some audio files and piecing together a multitrack project, it seems to offer all of the tools and capabilities of the Apple audio editing program (at least for my needs).

I'm interested in Audition as an eventual replacement for Soundtrack Pro. As much as I like Soundtrack Pro, I don't like the fact that I can only get it as part of the Final Cut Studio suite. I don't really use the other Final Cut tools*, so I'm loathe to upgrade to the most-recent version of the Apple suite just to use the audio editing application. A bit of backstory: I own the first version of Final Cut Studio, which I purchased at a steep discount thanks to an Apple promotion for people who previously owned one of the stand-alone apps that make up the Suite.

This is not to say that I want to purchase the stand-alone version of Adobe Audition. That would likely cost more than the upgrade price for Final Cut Studio. Rather, I'm anticipating that I might pick it up as part of a suite when Adobe comes out with CS6, as I'm still using CS3. 

Here's the thing, though. Both Audition and Soundtrack Pro offer much more power than I really need.

However, these pro-level tools allow me to do things with audio that I just can't do with other tools. I've tried to make GarageBand work, but it's just too limited. I've tried Audacity, too, but it's just too hard to use when juggling six or seven tracks and scores of clips.  I keep going back to Soundtrack Pro. 

What I'd really love to see is an audio application from Apple that's akin to Final Cut Express. I want Soundtrack Express. It would offer less than Soundtrack Pro, but more than GarageBand. What do you say, Apple?

* I would gladly upgrade my copy of Final Cut Studio if the next version rolls in new capabilities to publish content for iOS devices.

IBM's Watson and the top two all-time Jeopardy! contestants. Tomorrow, the final episode will air. Since I don't have a television, I'm forced to see the results after-the-fact by browsing through news stories on the Internet.

Apparently, Watson won the round today. However, the machine missed the final question in what was seemingly an obvious answer. Therein lies the rub. What is obvious to the human brain is oblique to a machine dumbly crunching data, searching for patterns.

I wasn't very interested in this project until I watched the PBS NOVA episode, 'The Smartest Machine on Earth.' Watch it. What you'll see is how far the programmers behind this effort have come—by painstakingly tweaking and refining algorithms—in teaching a machine to rapidly interpret complex clues. The machine learns from its mistakes.

I could go on and on, speculating about what this portends for the future of Artificial Intelligence. But I won't. You can find that elsewhere. Suffice it to say that this is an impressive demonstration of where we are heading. I think Watson will win the contest.

I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking that this effort (and like-minded endeavors) will soon transform our lives. We're heading towards a revolution in computer-based analysis and diagnosis. Soon, computers will capably answer complex, layered questions with unmatched speed and accuracy. Machines will be able to sift through vast pools of data to match, say, our singular health symptoms with a short list of likely causes and potential treatments—taking into account all of the most-recently published literature on the planet. Can your doctor do that?

Once machines master answering complex questions, what's the next step? I suppose we'll have to start teaching machines how to ask questions.

New York Times. It's much more practical to visually peruse the proposed national budget, although it's hard to find some of the smaller monetary allotments by sight. You'll need to search for them. It took me a few minutes to find my employer, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. Relatively, it's miniscule. 

Back at the end of December, I was happily surfing through a few of the 'Best of 2010' and '2011 predictions' articles put forth by pundits, bloggers, etc., when a post on data prediction by Josh Jones-Dilworth caught my attention. The author outlines five data-driven trends to look for this year. His last point struck me as particularly prescient: "You'll be sick of hearing about data (if you're not already)."

Right on. It's only February, and I'm already feeling it. I can't seem to escape the deluge of articles about data. How we acquire it. How we store it. How we separate the wheat from the chaff. This week in particular sticks out.

Science special: Dealing With Data

The Feb. 11 issue of the journal Science includes a special issue devoted to the challenges and opportunities of data collection, curation, and access. The entire collection of perspective articles are available online for free (registration required). From the introduction:

"We have recently passed the point where more data is being collected than we can physically store. This storage gap will widen rapidly in data-intensive fields. Thus, decisions will be needed on which data to archive and which to discard. A separate problem is how to access and use these data. Many data sets are becoming too large to download. Even fields with well-established data archives, such as genomics, are facing new and growing challenges in data volume and management. And even where accessible, much data in many fields is too poorly organized to enable it to be efficiently used."

here and here. You can also search for it. It's receiving a lot of attention in the news and in the blogosphere.

Here are a few of the gee-whiz points culled from this paper, written up by Suzanne Wu on Physorg.com:

Looking at both digital memory and analog devices, the researchers calculate that humankind is able to store at least 295 exabytes of information. Put another way, if a single star is a bit of information, that's a galaxy of information for every person in the world. That's 315 times the number of grains of sand in the world. But it's still less than one percent of the information that is stored in all the DNA molecules of a human being.

In 2007, humankind successfully sent 1.9 zettabytes of information through broadcast technology such as televisions and GPS. That's equivalent to every person in the world reading 174 newspapers every day.

On two-way communications technology, such as cell phones, humankind shared 65 exabytes of information through telecommunications in 2007, the equivalent of every person in the world communicating the contents of six newspapers every day.

Simulating Twitter, The Locker Project

But this wasn't the only fascinating data-centric news this week. MIT's Technology Review reports that researchers in Spain have constructed a simulated network called SONG (Social Network Write Generator) that can forecast Tweet behavior. Why would one want to do this?

Many groups are likely to be interested in using a virtual Twitterverse. Erramilli and co say it can be used to analyse the capacity of parts of a network and to benchmark its performance. But it's the ability to forecast tweeting activity and the effect of things like flash mobbing that is likely to generate the most interest.

Meanwhile, the O'Reilly Radar blog reports this week of a new company called Singly that aims to popularize the open source Locker Project, which will employ a new protocol called TeleHash. It took me a while to wrap my head around this. Essentially, it's about harnessing and sharing data in new, more personalized ways. Here's an excerpt from a recent post on ReadWriteWeb that helped:

The open source service will capture what's called exhaust data from users' activities around the web and offline via sensors, put it firmly in their own possession and then allow them to run local apps that are built to leverage their data.

Many prognosticators suggest that this will be the Next Big Thing for apps and online services. Web 3.0, in other words, will be all about me. It's about delivering a highly-personalized data set that will draw together my online and (increasingly) offline activity. It'll be sort of like a data journal (or a locker). And by combining my data with other data sets, I'll presumably be able to find hidden patterns, correlations, and context that relate to my life in a very personal way.

As I understand it, the TeleHash protocol will permit the decentralized P2P sharing and searching for data across the network. It's about me connecting with you—just as we do in today's social enivironment— but in a much more targeted and sophisticated way. While I'm sure I haven't grasped all of the nuances of this project, it sounds promising.

IBM's Watson on Jeopardy!

Smartest Machine on Earth. Apt to my theme, it's about the big three-day contest next week on Jeopardy that pits two of the show's best-ever human contestants against IBM's Watson. If you're unable to watch Jeopardy next week, Ph.D. students who worked on the Watson project are going to live-blog the contest as it airs.

Will the machine win? It's going to be fun to watch. Even if Watson doesn't win, it's amazing that a machine exists that can (quickly) answer obtuse Jeopardyesque questions. Talk about harnessing data. By the way, be sure to check out IBM's Watson website. They've done a good job with it. 

Sending Data Offworld

So ... there are many interesting efforts going on to better process, use and understand the data we're collectively generating on planet Earth. But what about transmitting data off the planet? Yes, I'm talking about the search for extraterrestrial life. There's a preprint of a new study out this week about this pursuit, too.

It's a fascinating—and refreshingly readable—paper about METI. That's Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The paper sums of the debate encircling how, and if, we should try to send transmissions into the void. It suggests that current attempts at transmissions are probably too feeble to matter, and suggests future laser and microwave systems may be more viable. The authors also advocate a moratorium on future METI transmissions until an international body addresses the risks associated with attempts to contact ET life.

Here's one excerpt that struck me:

In 2000, the International Academy of Astronautics sent a proposal to the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space entitled "Declaration of Principles for Activities Following the Detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence”, also known as the First Protocol (Billingham and Heyns 1999). The proposal was received without objection. Principle 8 reads, in part "No response to a signal or other evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence should be sent until appropriate international consultations have taken place". No one seems opposed to having international consultations about transmitting after we detect them by standard SETI. Assuming this to be the case, it is surely even more important to have the consultations about transmitting before we detect them when we don't even have their signal in hand.

Good point.