Felix Salmon has a post up lamenting the fact that of those websites which do provide RSS content syndication, only a few provide the entire post’s contents; most provide just the headline and a short summary.

As usual, it is a pleasure to point out why Felix is wrong when he carps about matters technological. Today, he is wrong on two counts:

1. As an alternative to the “traditional” method of scanning news and blogs — manually visiting every site on your bookmarks list to see if anything’s been updated — an RSS newsfeed reader offers a double advantage: It can alert you to updated content by regularly downloading feeds and checking them for new material, and it can do so using little bandwidth, since RSS feeds are short and sweet — at least until Felix has his way with the poor things. Turn your RSS feed into a full-content behemoth and you lose one of the two reasons for using it, because a feed with 15 supersized items surely outweighs a typical 10-post blog index pageThe only reason MemeFirst has the full content of posts in its RSS feed is because of Felix’s badgering.. NetNewsWire for the Mac checks every feed every half-hour by default; If these are of the obese variety, you might as well be downloading the index page of every website in your shortcut list instead.

But Felix has an all-you-can-eat broadband account, so why not give him the option, like 456 Berea Street does, to pile up plate after plate if he’s already paid for it? For popular websites, the answer is simple: It would cost too much to have hundreds of thousands of newsfeed readers demanding the entire recent contents of the site every half hour. But there is an additional reason…

2. Why try to read a newsfeed item inside a newsreader at all, where you cannot reference the cascading style sheet that goes with it? Unless the content is limited to pure text, it will always look worse, possibly even unintelligibleTake, for example, the marginalia on my blog. It is text inside <span> tags within the body of a regular post, and it is shifted left using CSS style attributes. Lose the instructions implicit in the style sheet, and this text is just squashed in between what I write here to the right.. The one compelling reason is that it saves bandwidth. But we’ve already shown Felix to be a gleeful guzzler of that commodity. It’s as if he wants to downgrade his blogreading experience.

Actually, my suspicion is that Felix is just annoyed at having to go through the extra step of clicking on a permalink and switching to a browser whenever the summary proves intriguing or just plain mystifying. The solution to this problem is not to demand full-content RSS feeds, but to switch to a newsreader that automatically fetches and renders inline the permalinked post, HTML/CSS and all, with comments, and on demand. In the case of OS X, that’s easy — you just appropriate the Safari engine, and this is exactly what Shrook has done. The current version, 1.33, does it very nicely, but the preview for 2.0 (which expires March 9) takes newsreading to a whole new level.

For me, Shrook 2 will finally wean me off hunting and pecking through my bookmarks for new content. And it will free Felix from the Sisyphean task of getting people to change their RSS feeds to please his quirky palate; instead, he will now be able to focus on the far more noble cause of getting people to provide RSS feeds in the first place — preferably dainty ones.

Delayed access to such manna as The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and Scientific American means that by the time I get to hold their pages in my hands, the most obviously interesting topics have already been flagged, debated and annotated to death on the web. There is a silver lining, though: Sometimes I find subtler matters of interest to blog, and these can turn out to be quite rewarding.

I think this is one such post. But you’ll have to bear with me.

Remember Rule 30? I blogged it once (OK, twice), and made a little Flash application to illustrate what it can do: Create complexity by applying a simple fixed rule (algorithm) over and over again to the individual components of an ordered system. It’s a shocking result, because it’s so unexpected and powerful: There are no shortcuts to finding out what the system will look like after n applications of the rule — there is no formula or equation we can use to describe the state of the system using just n as the input. We really do have to run the program from scratch if we want to know what it will looks like at time n.

In other words, equations are useless for predicting the state of a system if a process like Rule 30 holds sway over it. This is the big idea in Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science, and it is why Rule 30 is the poster child for that bookI blogged NKS here when it first came out.
 
This past week, Wolfram put the entire brick of a book online, in a free, searchable edition. Now you have absolutely no excuse anymore not to check it out.. Wolfram argues that the complexity we see in nature is best explained not by equations, but by looking for very simple processes that operate locally, using local inputs and simple transformational rules. This is the “new kind of science” he proposes.

Bear with me.

Remember Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara? I blogged her here, when Scientific American did this profile on her a year agoMarkopoulou has a audio lecture of hers online that is actually on the verge of understandable, with hand-drawn slides. In it she gives us a taste of how a very simple algebra of spacetime can translate into notions of cause and effect, using set theory. It takes about an hour of your time, not including pauses to figure out WTF she just said.. She had been working on an emerging theory called Quantum Loop Gravity (QLG), which competes with string theory to recast the general theory of relativity (which does a great job describing gravity) in terms of quantum theory (which until now had nothing to say about gravity). This is the holy grail of physics.

What I found remarkable at the time is that in building this framework, she and her colleagues had been working from the perspective of the smallest possible units of space, looking for very simple processes that operate locally. In other words, they had been practicing what Wolfram was now calling a “new kind of science”, and the results looked encouraging.

Where am I going with this?

Quantum Loop Gravity went mainstream with the January 2004 issue of Scientific American, where it got the cover
 
Unfortunately, the accompanying article is only abstracted free online, but here in Stockholm, at least, the issue is still at the newstand. Alternatively, you could read this article on QLG by Smolin, or else be blown away by the accompanying video mini-interview.. The article is well worth the read — it is written by Lee Smolin, who together with Carlo Rovelli and others pretty much fathered QLG. The conceptual leap they made was to stop assuming, as the general theory of relativity does, that spacetime is smooth and continuous. Instead, they proposed that it is composed simply of nodes connected by lines, and they calculated that these nodes occupy a smallest possible unit of volume, a cubed Planck length, about 10^-99 cm^3, and that changes to this network of nodes happens in increments of a fixed smallest possible unit of time, Planck time, about 10^-43 seconds. Particles, by the way, are nothing more than patterns of these nodes “travelling” in tandem, bumping into each other, much like a gigantic game of Life. And, importantly, this network of nodes is not in anything; it is the universe.

So the universe is a giant distributed computer, running at 10^34 Gigahertz, if you will. It took a while to figure out the implications of this, but now QLGers have a bona fide soon-to-be-testable prediction: the speed of light should vary ever so slightly depending on its energy, and this satellite, scheduled for a 2006 launch, should be able to tease out the slight difference in arrival time for photons that have travelled for billions of years.

So three years from now, we may have some instant Nobel winners on our hands. Meanwhile, string theory is looking tired and unelegant, requiring the existence of many extra dimensions and particles nobody manages to find.

But the fact that time may be discrete at a fundamental level — massive though this conceptual shift would be — is only half my point. The other half point is contained in the Jan 15, 2004 edition of The New York Review of BooksThis issue also contains a wonderful short by J.M. Coetzee., in an article written by Oliver Sacks.

Sacks exhibits his usual freak show of patients with bizarre neurological disorders (Where does he get them?). This time, his patients had a problem with their visual perception, in that it sometimes slowed down enormously, so that they no longer perceived their surroundings continuously, but instead as a series of disjointed images, much like a flickering film or even a slideshow.

Their experiences were the starting point for research that is now converging on the conclusion that for all of us, visual perception is not continuous, but occurs in discrete successive states, or “snapshots”. Usually, these are updated fast enough, and fade slowly enough, for the effect to be an illusion of continuous motion, unless the brain is damaged in specific ways. For good measure, it now also appears that consciousness occurs in discrete successive states, called “perceptual moments,” that last a tenth of a second. And, here too, the mechanism by which all this happens is via a network, this time of neurons, all acting by applying rules to local stimuli, such as surrounding neurons. It’s a “new kind of science” yet again.

That’s my other half point, then: I quite simply find it remarkable that the mind “samples” its sensory inputs, and derives conscious states based on them, at discrete time intervals.

Taken together, it would appear that both fundamental physics and neuroscience are going to nearly simultaneously jettison the notion of a continuous flow of time in favor of discrete increments. Soon, it may be the new received wisdom that not only does the universe update itself at discrete intervals, we update our perception of the universe at discrete intervals.

There’s been some groping for superlatives in the Mac community of late.

Seasoned Apple evangelist Bob LeVitus reviews Apple’s new iLife app GarageBand and calls it “one of the best computing experiences I’ve had in the 17+ years I’ve been having computing experiences on my Mac.”

Inside Mac Games unashamedly lauds Bungie’s Halo as “the most advanced, the best produced, the most amazing first-person shooter to have ever graced my Mac’s screen.I would agree, though my tricked-out PowerBook is proving barely able to keep up at minimal settings.”

Meanwhile, Apple’s free beta of Xgrid, reviewed here, now allows any network of Macs to work together as a grid supercomputer to solve complex problems such as number factoring or gene sequencing. Installation is simple, and it comes with a few sample applications, such as a beautiful Mandelbrot set renderer.

Even if you have only one Mac in the house, this is worth giving a run, because it hints at how very differently we will perceive computers in the future. I would not be surprised, for example, if eventually you will be able to buy Gigahertz-hours from Apple server farms when it’s time to render your latest creation using the next iApp, iAnimate“Pixar for the rest of us.” Warning: Although I am speculating, Apple has a knack for never leaving my creative urges unsated for long: Would I love to make my own short film populated with predefined characters from Finding Nemo? Oh yes, and so would everyone with my mental age and below. Soon, 8-year olds will be demanding Terahertz-hours for Christmas.. Or perhaps future Final Cut Pros will let you speed up your rendering when a deadline looms, using the Macs of the advertising department, who have already left for the day. “Grid supercomputing for the rest of us” is perhaps too obvious a slogan, but that won’t stop Steve Jobs from using it when this goes mainstream.

But I reserve my own superlatives for Maestro, software that will forever change how we approach space exploration. You will have heard of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission; Maestro is the software that allows scientists to interact with either of the two rovers, Spirit (already in operation on the Martian surface) and Opportunity (almost there). It takes a rover’s raw data and displays it in a variety of ways, the most impressive of which is an accurate three-dimensional world of its surroundings rendered from stereoscopic cameras at human height. Scientists can then “walk” through this virtual world to decide what the rover should explore next, and then build a task list of simple commands that are sent back to the rover, which executes these autonomously (there is a 10 minute delay at present, because lightspeed is not infinite).

All this amounts to a revolution in remote imaging, command and control. But that’s just the beginning. The software is a free download for the general public, and so is the data the rovers beam back to EarthYes, it works especially well on OS X 10.3. Here is Apple touting it.. Anyone with a late-model computer and broadband now has pretty much the same tools at their disposition as the scientists running the mission. We too can now walk around Spirit’s surroundings, notice items of interest, name them, measure distances between them, then tell the rover to take a closer look. The one piece missing is the actual ability to beam intructions back to the roverThat would be the ultimate hack, though: Taking control of the rover and defacing Martian soil with tyre tracks in the shape of your tagline. M3M3#1!. But that’s a privilege NASA paid $850 million for.

You really need to try this. It’s not optional. If schoolkids in middle-income countries can master this, you better as well or else watch your job leave for Mexico even sooner than you thought. Yes, there is a 80-page manual, but the casual user needn’t read it at all. The application, and each subsequent data module, comes with its own built-in automated tour conductor. Your involvement can be as little as clicking “Next” whenever the fancy hits you and you will get 80% of the wow-factor.

In all likelihood, curiosity will eventually get the better of you and you will want to venture out for a spin on Mars, as I did. I went and found myself two interesting rocks and named them Blog@StefanGeens.com and MemeFirst, respectively:

When they are named, Maestro gives them coordinates, so it now knows where they are in relation to the rover, and to each other. I then built a task list, instructing Spirit to first drive up to MemeFirst, inspect it, and then to drive up to my blog. Once there, I took this snapshot:

And this just with the first data set. Data will be rolling in for at least 3 more months, as Spirit wends its way to a nearby crater and then to the top of some hills. And Opportunity hasn’t even started yet.

The high level of user experience that Maestro provides should influence the debate over whether we should send men to Mars. We get 2 such rovers for $850 million. We’d be able to seed mars with over 600 rovers now for the price of a few fragile men on Mars 20 years from now. Or a smaller number of far larger, speedier and more robust rovers — mobile labs atop vehicles resembling remote-controlled moon buggies, perhaps. Or teams of such vehicles triangulating a region in tandem.

I have always been for manned planetary exploration. It is our destiny, and I wish we could do it again in my lifetime. With our present technology, however, it may just cost far too much for the scientific knowledge we’d gain in return. Ironically, robotics was not far enough advanced when men were put on the moon in 1969. Men were needed to do the kind of science they did then. Today, you cannot make that argument — humans are far too valuable and fragile, and are being replaced on Earthly battlefields with remote systems for precisely this reason. In other words, do spend the money on Mars, but leave that planet to the robots for now. Humans will get there in due time.

Companies tend to lose the plot whenever their greed outpaces my need.

I’ve used Macromedia Dreamweaver for WYSIWYG site design since version 2; nothing could build tables like version 4. Then, last year, Macromedia introduced a rebranded Dreamweaver MX, the first native Mac OS X version. It was such a disappointment: Cascading stylesheet (CSS) support was incomplete and rendered haphazardly, the windows and palettes didn’t play nice with the finder, and it was painfully slow on my tricked-out PowerBook G4. Insultingly, the Windows version showed a lot more polish. I waited for patches, but instead was tossed Dreamweaver MX 2004, their new paid upgrade ($199, $400 new), released last month.

Meanwhile, the web has moved on. The wide acceptance of CSS has made site design much simpler, and fancy table skills are now a bit passé. Plenty of code libraries on the web offer plug and play Javascript, just like Dreamweaver does.

A migration from Dreamweaver was in order. By last week, all the required pieces had fallen into place:

Barebones released a point update for BBEdit 7, the Rolls Royce of text editors. Version 7.1 does live previewing in Safari, as you type. This is even better than WYSIWIG, which in Dreamweaver’s case was more WYSIsomething-similar-toWYG. And it was made possible by a deft application of Apple’s own Safari Web Kit. In any case, I’ve always had several browsers open in OS X and a few open in Virtual PC, to make sure the different rendering engines produced something palatable. I will still do that, but now with Safari giving me instant feedback. (Free demo, $179 new, $49 upgrade, or get BBEdit Lite free, but minus the bells and whistles.)

Macrabbit released CSSEdit 1.5 last month. It’s a shareware application that works perfectly as an adjunct to BBEdit, giving pixel-level control over CSS websites. Every CSS property is editable using palettes. It’s what Dreamweaver promised me but didn’t deliver in MX. Maybe MX 2004 approaches the thoroughness of CSSEdit, but definitely not at this price: $24.99 (free demo). Did I mention it’s written by a one-person outfit in Belgium? Those plucky Europeans!

For getting files to and from my server, I rely on Fetch 4.0.3, by Fetchworks. This shareware has built-in support for BBEdit, allowing me to edit files directly from the server. There are other FTP clients that do the job, some perhaps even better, but I’m also conditioned to listen for the dog bark when Fetch is done. Fetch is due for an update, and I expect it to incorporate the latest sFTP security enhancements. If it doesn’t, I’ll be eyeing other FTP clients. ($25, free demo).

This medley of tools means MX 2004 is an expensive redundancy. Most of its new features are aimed at corporate environments, so Dreamweaver becomes less of a pure design tool and more of a front-end builder for server-based applications. In the process, Macromedia tries to upsell to other products from its stable, like Flash and ColdFusion, their proprietary server application.

MX 2004 is bloatware, and I’m not the only one who’s noticed. Macromedia had to issue an earnings warning on Oct 23, a few weeks after MX 2004 launched, that sent the stock plunging by a third. As the CEO put it, “The uptake rate for MX 2004 has been a lot slower in the first few weeks than we expected and certainly than we’ve experienced in the past.” They blamed the economy. I blame the product.

My apartment building complex is wired like a university dorm; every single one of the 100 odd apartments is on a 10 Mbit LAN network, connected to a Bredbandsbolaget backboneThat’s 10Mb downloading and uploading. On this network, iTunes applications find each other effortlessly. I share my entire music library by default and have set the application to look for shared music, and I regularly have several other people’s music pop up in my application. Sometimes people use my music. With this kind of bandwidth, it’s a seamless background transactionBy “sharing” I really mean streaming music off somebody’s harddrive, without copying it..

For a few glorious weeks in May, a new version of iTunes allowed music sharing across the public internet, though doing so usually usurped the available bandwidth. Braying by music companies quickly put an end to that, though sharing is still allowed within the local network, the intention being that home computers can share music amongst themselves.

Intention or no, college dorm networks (and my apartment building) behave in exactly the same way, except that the sharing is done between people who likely have never met. All this is done legally. It’s why Stanford University students seem to be taking a shine to iTunes. Napster 2 can’t share. MusicMatch can’t either. And sharing benefits from the network effect, making iTunes a more and more compelling choice for each new user.

How does Apple get away with it? The iTunes music store’s digital rights management scheme allows those songs it sells to be used by up to three computers simultaneously, but these computers need to be authorized, a non-trivial process. Other music is sharable without restriction, however. This way Apple gets to protect its business, as well as that of the record companies.

Campus dorms and techsavvy Stockholmers are exactly the kind of trendsetters who will tip the balance in favor of iTunes.