Wikipedia defines realtime as “when things respond to events as they occur“.  Well, I respond to events as they occur to me, but sometimes hours or days late…   Dictionary.com defines it as “of or pertaining to applications in which the computer must respond as rapidly as required by the user or necessitated by the process being controlled.”  Hm.  Well – if the user required a response only the next day, would that still be realtime?  Selecting “shutdown” on my PC shuts the PC down in about 5 minutes, which when I’ve walked away from the PC is as rapidly as required, but is hardly realtime.

It seems like the realtime I thought I knew is actually some concept which spans almost any sort of delay.  My definition would be something much closer to “simultaneous” or “directly after”. In other words, within a short enough time-period that an average observer would say that the result/response happened right after the cause. 

So if I click a mouse button to select something on screen, I expect that something to respond immediately.

And what is immediate?  Well, as an example in tests of human reaction time (often by catching a falling ruler between finger tips), the average human reaction time tends to be in the range of 0.2 seconds, or 200 milliseconds.  So it might be fair to say that anything that happens within that time period would be pretty immediate, or without perceptible delay.

So given that definition of realtime, what is ACTUALLY realtime?

- Twitter is mainly not as most updates are actually read out-of-sync
- SMS and email are mosty not, for the same reason
- Communicating by talking IS generally realtime
- Google’s search is barely realtime, if at all – it’s just very recent
- The feedback we get from machines can be realtime – from clicking on things, to turning the steering wheel, to turning on a light….

Actually, thinking through the options – there’s not much in life that is actually realtime…

Who cares???

I wrote a while ago about the Palm Pre (now available in the UK) unifying messaging.   It makes sense – all your messages to me are as one.   

The thing is, I don’t care how your message arrives.  If I’m at my work PC, sure a Skype message is handy, it’s right there.  In a meeting?  Email is pretty good.  On a train with just my Blackberry – well, any mobile message works.   But really, whether to message me in LinkedIn, Twitter, email - it doesn’t matter, it just makes your and my life harder working out which one to use.  We’re supposed to be in a new bright era of unparalleled communications - but, it’s actually a mess. 

Twitter?  Handy when I have Tweetdeck open.  And crazy when I get alerted to new messages by email (talk about duplication).  Can I be bothered to install twitter clients on my Blackberry so I have yet another format of message to read?  Is a tweet any more useful than a Skype IM?  Do I remember whether you told me about some new great thing via MSN rather than email?  No, no and no!

Sure, there are different ways you might want to message – just to me, just to our group of friends/interest group, or to the world including me.   But that doesn’t need 10 different platforms, 10 different interfaces, 10 apps on my iPhone (disclaimer: I don’t  have an iPhone, this guy outlines the reasons why pretty well).   It just needs a simple setting connected to the message: like a “purpose” or “audience” label.

We’re running a real risk of losing out on the benefits of realtime communication by getting caught up in new brands that merely provide a way of sending messages (I’m looking at you, Twitter), rather than ways of getting that message to me in the most appropriate, useful, immediate way. 

It’s a little bit like providing gas to my house in pipes that are colourful, light up, have cute names, and make their journey via London’s top landmarks.  I don’t care – I just want the gas that comes out of the end, and feeds my boiler and oven.  Even more than that, I just want the heating it enables, and the food that comes out of the oven.  So, even if the gas itself is replaced by some new energy source, I’d be just as happy.

It’s the message that counts, not the medium.

That’s changing.  In fact, Pfizer’s DX Division Head says that personalized programs are “happening in the development and commercial stages right now”.  And that’s from the world’s largest pharmaceutical company.  There’s $110bn of company valuation they have to protect in the future, so you can bet they’re spending some good money in this area.

In the UK, the government last month released a note on personalised medicine, covering the current movement away from the “One size fits all” approach.  This note suggests that genetic differences between us can account for up to 95% of the variation in how we each respond to drugs. 

Really what we’re talking about here is a more granular approach.  Your medical, family and life history is combined with an ever greater number of lab test to build up a picture of you as different from another person with the same condition.  Strictly speaking, this isn’t “personal”.  It doesn’t mean that as an individual, you are unique, and will get a treatment no-one else will get. As the UK government report says, “Personalised medicine tailors treatment to patient subgroups“.

Of course it just isn’t possible to test new or existing drugs against every single person who could take them.  So the best that can be expected right now is to know that a drug works for “someone like you“.  One day, computer modelling of the effects of a drug on me as an individual (which would be my DNA plus my current health state, and changes that the environment and life have made – in fact a digital capture of the biology of me right now) will of course be possible – delivering truly personalised medicine. I’ll then pop a pill that would work for no-one else, and bingo – cured.  Until then, I plan to avoid all germs, and eat only aloe vera.

Craig Venter, one of the guys behind the Human Genome breakthrough, has just claimed that after a decade-long effort, his instituate is that close to creating artificial life.  Here’s how you can do it at home:

Step 1:Build the entire genetic code for a single bacteria
Step 2: Insert this code into a “host” cell
Step 3: “Reboot” host cell

Until 2007, Step 3 is where the process got stuck, the resulting bacterium just wasn’t viable.   Just recently, Craig and his Institute think they’ve cracked it using “methylation”, a way of protecting this new DNA from the cell’s defence systems. 

This breakthrough could give biology and medicine some great tools – in fact Venter is working on bacteria that transform coal into cleaner natural gas.  Pretty good for a guy who’s already helped us understand our own DNA, and is on a quest to “put everything Darwin missed into context” through his oceanographic surveys.

A group of scientists in Missouri and North Carolina have used bacteria to find solutions to an (essentially mathematical) problem: navigating a group of dots so that each dot is only crossed through once, and then returning the first dot – as in the image on the right.  It’s called the Hamiltonian Path Problem, if you’re interested.

So, it’s not quite Windows 8 yet.   In fact, the importance of the study has been questioned variously, but the reason I love it is that it’s using living organisms to find correct answers to mathematical problems, by simply chucking a designed molecule at them.  We’re starting simple (and slow), but then so did computers.   Anyone remember the ZX81?

Some other developments in this space over recent years include:

• DNA computers that can diagnose cancer
• Leech neurons that can do sums
• Molecular devices that only treat cells that need it

So why is this all important? Solving hugely difficult computational problems like predicting the weather or curing complex diseases has two approaches now.  The first is “synthetic”: computers, silicon, small machines with cogs and motors, and the like.

The second is “organic”: recognising millions of years of evolution, and saying – how can we use that?  Given that a lump of biological material can create something as fantastically capable as a human brain, why not harness the same systems to do other things?

And that’s where the genius is: short-cutting innovation by harnessing what’s already out there.