"According to a survey in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, we misunderstand the tone of emails 50% of the time--and for good reason: there is no face on the other end to stop us in midsentence, to indicate that what we are in the process of saying is rude, not comprehended, or cruel.... Psychologists call it disinhibition, and its pervasive effect--as can be witnessed every day in nasty comments appended to newspaper articles online, in the aggrieved tone and intent of some blog postings, in email inboxes scorched by flame wars--has turned many parts of the internet into a nasty place."

"According to Marco Iacoboni, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at UCLA, this has bolstered the notion that "our mental processes are shaped by our bodies and by the types of perceptual and motor experiences that are the product of our movement through and interaction with the surrounding world." Consider then, the ramifications of an era of communication in which we are disembodied as never before...."

"A 2006 Cisco research paper concluded that failing to respond to a (email) sender can lead to a swift breakdown in trust. Lose an email forever, and you are sitting on an unexploded land mine."

"Email is addictive, it has been shown, in the same way that slot machines are addictive. You press the send/receive button just as a gambler pulls down a slot machine lever, because you know that you will receive a reward some of the time."

"Thirty years ago, in The Society of the Spectacle, the French philosopher Guy Debord predicted we would be spending more time apart. 'The reigning economic system is founded on isolation,' he wrote. 'At the same time it is a circular process designed to produce isolation. Isolation underpins technology, and technology isolates in its turn; all goods proposed by the spectacular system, from cars to televisions, also serve as weapons for that system, as it strives to reinforce the isolation of "lonely crowd.'" To this list of machines we can now also add the internet and email.

Ironically, tools meant to connect us are enabling us to spend even more time apart."

" By depriving ourselves of facial expressions and the tangible frisson of physical contact, we are facing a terrible loss of meaning in individual life. The difference between a smiley face and an actual smile is too large to calculate. Nothing-especially-'lol'-can quite convey the sound of a friend's laughter."

The Tyranny of Email-John Freeman

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Better sounding 19tet than I did with my awful 'Homegrown Piano.' Maybe I'll have to purchase something from h pi. Not a lot else out there really...

Of tet versus just intonation, for 12 tone each key will have different sound in just intonation, not just if it's major or minor. Except for a few trifles each key is exactly the same in 12tet. That's a positive for 12JI.
Then there's this fellow:
http://music.case.edu/duffin/Norton/Letter.html
Unfortunately the damm song files aren't working. I guess I could figure it out on my own further...

But I must say for very large scales there is something nice about a relatively even step up. In Partch's pure tone 43 I don't like the jumps.

Another issue 43 notes means only two octaves for an 88 key keyboard. Needs to be a bit less. I think 31 will still be too much. May have to stay at 19. But will experiment further up into the 20's. Or should I be limited by the keyboard I happen to own anyway? I hate to be a dabbler (into too many things) but I see myself trying to build a microtonal instrument eventually.

But for now I want a conventional virtual orchestra, yet microtonal. Something that can just be played on a keyboard.

It sort of matters to put down this half thought out stuff. Otherwise I forget. I forget whole projects not to mention possible directions. Granted this is somewhat ignorant musing.

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Read Perfume by Suskind. Good but will leave no trace at all on me.

The Handmaid's Tale by Atwood. Excellent. Like 1984 but darker. I guess a little too dark. 1984 has the hope of a love affair smacked in the middle. Handmaid just has a small one near the end. But it brings up the question again of how women are treated especially in the ME. Though many of the women claim they want to be treated that way and will scream religious intolerance if anyone says there's something wrong with the inequality there, still it ought to ultimately be handled like slavery was. It should not be tolerated. No matter the panglossianism.

Kushiel's Dart, the first 100 pages were pure fluff and I gave it up.

These three mentioned by Robin Hobb, possibly to just hopefully get me to go away for a while. In response to the concept of 'preachy' books. She ignored my mentioning 1984, CS Lewis and Ayn Rand and instead responded with these three. As books that bothered her. Awfully fluffy reply it was. But then it's an awful medium to interact by so who cares? How she can stand being so open and out there and yet exposed to endless anonymous hidden people is completely beyond me.

I recall Chomsky promptly used to answer emails. What did I feel when finding this out? Sad that he wasn't sufficiently famous. That his email address was right on the internet and he could so quickly respond to people. And then I felt him to be such an angel. The guy must get incredible hate mail. And yet there he sits dutifully opening up new anonymous email messages. What an incredible saint.

In other news Lamarckian evolution might be right after all.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1951968,00.html