Email is fine. It's great for some things.
IMs are fine. They're great for some things.

But for a real conversation, give me a telephone. There's the immediate back and forth. There's the extreme intimacy of another person's voice in your ear ~ at its best, inside your head. If I want to get to know someone better, if I want to start laughing with him about situations we both think are ridiculous, if I want to say the honest word and know that the sound of affection will be in my voice... I want a telephone. I want to be able to hear breath quicken, or a slight pause of hesitation, the lowered tone of embarassment, and the swift brightness of enthusiasm. I want to be able to make the "ummm-hmm"s and "yeah"s and "wow"s that express my continuing attention. And on the telephone I know that I'm being heard, right now.

Being on the phone is like reading a book in that a thin data stream takes over your sensorium and, in this case, you enter the world of the voice. It no longer matters what I'm looking at or whether I'm standing up or lying down. It doesn't matter what clothes I'm wearing. The voice becomes my landscape, and I'm surrounded and enveloped by it: the environment of conversation, profoundly interactive, time-based, and totally personal.

B- called me from his conference in Florida, and we spoke for an hour and a half. He has a wonderful voice and he uses words shamelessly. I'm glad he likes the telephone too.

11:36:16 PM    please comment []

Don't look now. The future is charging up on us in the most alarming ~ the most exciting ~ way.

One of the major obstacles to building molecular-sized biomachines looks like it's been overcome, at least for some applications. Scientist Chad Mirkin and his colleagues have turned an atomic-force microscope into a 21st century quill pen, which "dips" into DNA ink and can write onto a variety of substrates.

This Wired article has more.

4:05:36 PM    please comment []