markschulz.com

You can click this link to test access to a particular web site from within China. If you get an error message on a valid site name, then it is pretty safe to assume the site is being blocked (presumably by the Chinese government).

Here is the result for twitter.com: couldn't connect to host

Here is the result for markschulz.com: OK

Evidently, Hu Jintao has deemed the Stream Pool safe for the Chinese people (for now). 

* Thanks to Dave Winer for the link

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Working with automated computer processing systems over the years, I've struggled with the natural and limiting way we tend to conceptualize real time. In short, we count time with only one clock. It is a curious human habit that unconsciously inhibits our ability to see real time in its full potential. Here's a simple exercise to illustrate what I'm talking about:

You have one computer that can render (process) six images in one hour. What is the average time to render one image?

That's easy, right? 60 minutes divided by six images is an average of ten minutes per image.

Now, what if you have two computers and each one can still render an image in ten minutes. With both working, how many images can you render in one hour? And what is the average time to render an image?

Puhleeze, make it harder. Six images per hour multiplied by two computers equals twelve images per hour. And the average time to render an image is obviously still ten minutes per image, right?

Well, this is where things get interesting. From the viewpoint of one of the computers, only one image is rendered every ten minutes of clock time, so its average rendering time is still ten minutes. But from your point of view, you have two computers working at the same time, thus the average rendering time per image as you experience it is only five minutes (60 minutes divided by twelve images rendered). In real-time, you and the computers experience one hour of clock time, but because the computers are processing concurrently, you actually compress two hours worth of total work into one real time hour. So for the sake of discussion, true time can be defined as real time multiplied by the number of entities (human or computer) simultaneously experiencing it.

As a human being, I instinctively measure the period between now and the same time tomorrow as 24 hours because that's how I experience it. But consider this question: How much total human time truly exists in any 24 hour period? Twenty-four hours multiplied by six billion human beings gives us 144 billion total hours! That works out to roughly 16.4 million years worth of total human true time in every full rotation of the Earth. Imagine even a tiny proportion of that applied in just the right way.

Without a doubt, the way our individual brains experience the passing of real time makes thinking in true time awkward. But that does not change the fact that as a global human community with a long list of seemingly intractable problems, we have at our disposal an extraordinary and mind-boggling storehouse of actual time -- a resource that doesn't need to be bought, borrowed or bailed out.  It does require that we recognize the exponential power of synchronizing some of our activities in mutually beneficial shared tasks, and that we learn to count time with more than one clock.

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If you are interested in catching trout in a rapidly flowing river or stream, a common strategy is to seek out a pocket of slower moving water where the fish congregate to feed and conserve energy. Stream pools are often deeper than the main part of the river offering the fish additional cover from predators such as eagles. Of no particular benefit to the fish, the slower water also makes it easier for the angler to stand in the river for extended periods, tying flies and casting repeatedly without the threat of being swept away by the more powerful flow in the middle of the river.

This shot was taken on the Gros Vente River in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Although the picture creates the impression that I know how to catch a fish, we actually went away empty-handed from this particular spot (and many others). Even though we could see large cutthroats gorging on aquatic insects only a few feet in front of us, we spent an hour unsuccessfully tying and re-tying different flies frantically trying to match whatever unlucky critter the cutts were finding so scrumptious. Entomological ignorance proved to be our undoing.

Surprisingly, one of the pleasures of flyfishing is discovering and puzzling over a stream pool even if it doesn't result in catching a trout -- which, if caught, should be released anyway. Departing from a stream pool, you are always empty-handed, retaining only the memory of a shared sacred space and an intimate encounter with life's ingenious way of coping with a powerful and fast-moving flow of water.

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The title of this post is a direct quote from me a year ago after one of the first people I followed announced that he was tweeting while sitting on ... ahem ... the toilet. Did I or anybody other than possibly his internist need to know that?

A year later, it is pretty safe to say that the first part of my quote is dead wrong. Twitter is not dumb. In fact, it is smart in ways that many very intelligent people are struggling to understand or explain. I'm not just saying that there are smart people on Twitter -- there are many -- but rather Twitter itself manifests a form of collective intelligence that you and I can both contribute to and draw from as well.

That leads to the second part of my quote which unfortunately has turned out to be true. The tools for accessing and participating in the Twitterverse are immature. If you are not an alpha geek, you might struggle just to get past the setup on some. The screen shot above is exaggerated, but not by much -- and I haven't even shown the half-dozen Twitter apps currently running on my iPhone.

Bottom line: If you really want to get Twitter, no one can really explain it, you just have to invest time and wrestle with the tools. You have to learn how to create and manage multiple streams of non-stop information. More importantly, you have to learn how to quickly scan your timelines for things that matter and ignore those that do not. Easier said than done, but the reward is a possible taste of the future of cooperative human-machine intelligence.

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