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The Rise of Technology / The Fall of Trees?
cetan asks "Why is it that the further we get into this technological revolution, these incredible advances in communication, and begin to unfold the power of the internet that people (in general) insist on printing EVERYTHING out?? Everyday, I see more and more junk being sent to the print queues. Web pages, PDF files, auto-responder emails, the list goes on and on. And, this trend seems to have no end in sight. The further we advance, the more people seem to want to print. Why is this? What is driving this phenomenon? I, of course have my own hypotheses on this matter, but I'm curious as to what others think about it." Interesting thought. I have some thoughts on this matter. Click below to read them.
Although I agree that, technology has come far, we haven't come far enough to replace the simplicity found in holding information on paper. PDAs just don't have the display area to handle the density of information one can scratch out on a nearby notebook pad. Fact is, paper is still the primary medium of information transfer, although the internet is catching up. I think advances in wearable technology (display googles) plastics and LCD displays (think: roll up monitors) will be the things that may reverse this trend and make paper a thing of the past. What do you all think?
Most people don't realize what the "color temperature" and brightness/contrast controls are really for. Most people have these adjusted at their highest (or default) values and never think to change them.
The general idea is to adjust the brightness and contrast controls so that the whitest white on your screen is no brighter than a piece of paper held up beside it, and the darkest black is the lightest black that appears "black" (i.e. as low as it'll go to the point where you can't tell the difference anymore). That gives you a full, rich contrast of brightness on par with everything else in the room.
In addition, most people will discover that the color "white" on their monitor is quite a lot bluer than a "white" piece of paper. This is due to lighting in the room and SHOULD be compensated for by taking advantage of the monitor's color temperature setting or through the use of software such as Adobe's gamma/color correction utility.
So basically, the white on your screen should match the color and brightness of a white piece of paper held up beside it.
If you change the lighting near your PC, at the very least adjust the brightness/contrast to match (that's why these controls are so accessible).
You'll find it's a LOT easier to stare at a monitor all day if it's properly configured.
You can read it in the bath, in bed, on the train, upside down, on the loo, anywhere there's enough light and a comfy seat. (While you can read a palm pilot in the bath and all those other places, a chunk of paper is easier to replace if you drop it in)
:)). While electronic annotations are available, they're not nearly as good as being able to just draw an arrow up to another part of the text.
:)
:)
,hacker Perl another Just)'
You can write on it. Don't underestimate the value of scratching notes onto things - the number of notes I've made on my printouts of important RFC's is uncountable (well, I'm not going to count them
It's quicker to write on paper than fire up some application - even on a palm pilot. (NB: This requires the availability of pens - something most households and offices seem to have a vast shortage of - in fact I'm convinced of the existance of a pen demon somewhere that hordes pens).
You can bend paper. Paper aeroplanes are very theraputic - especially when made of some of the RFC's
You can eat paper. OK - it's not exactly a Whopper - but it's a "fun snack between meals" (TM).
It's healthier to read than a CRT. (and probably healthier to eat...)
It makes you look important and busy. Try looking busy with a cluttered WindowMaker. Now try it with a cluttered desk - much better
It keeps the office alive - think what a boring place it would be if no-one had to bash the printer or swear at the NT box doing print serving.
Paper is here for good. Let's hear it for paper!
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
I honestly doubt that even close to 'all' of the paper used in the US is from tree farms. I know that the pulp & paper industry in canada (especially on the west coast, where i'm from) does, indeed, cut down large swaths of untouched forest to make newsprint (and other fine products). At least they did when I was still watching.
:)
as many other people have commented, hemp would make wonderful paper. You get (i think) 4x as much product out of an acre of hemp as out of an acre of forest. And for some reason, hemp grows like a weed
It's interesting to see the desire to have a hardcopy of otherwise electronic documents. I posit that it is because of an innate human desire to have tactile input.
;-)
Tactile input is very important in our lives. It's no coincidence that, differences among languages aside, all of them refer to emotional contact in primarily tactile terms. ("He has a thick skin, I feel a certain way, she rubs me the wrong way," etc.) Studies show that babies who don't receive enough tactile input literally wither away.
This is why point-and-click-and-drag-and-drop is such a powerful concept in computing. When Alan Kaye (I hope I got that name right) at PARC designed Smalltalk, he was on to something. Language can be three things: kinesthetic (literal, seeing, doing, action), iconic (the sound "kat" means this meowy purry thing here), and symbolic (abstract concepts; icons of icons). Most higher language is symbolic, this includes computer languages 2GL and higher. The Drag and Drop computing paradigm made what I like to call 'symbolic kinesthetism' -- the little icons and menus were symbols, but they were accessed in a very 'touchy feely' sort of way, and that's why a Mac (for instance) can appeal to all ages.
Granted, it may not be as powerful, and granted, confusing the simplicity with inconsistency (a Start Menu to shut down??) can offset it, but on the whole, the desire for tactile -- or pseudo-tactile input -- makes such computing paradigms advance. Hence, the Apple and NeXT user interfaces.
But back to paper. The fact is, the human desire to FEEL the paper is very strong. Electronic pads, although just as portable as a notepad, just don't have the same feel. We, as animals, have lived our lives with the notion that to see the rest of something, we either move it or move our eyes or move ourselves. With a computer, scrolling, you don't move; the screen doesn't move; yet somehow the image changes. That's downright unsettling if you let your gut instincts think about it.
Here's a demonstration. Please don't hurt yourself doing it, and I take no responsibility for any injuries caused by this. Put your finger to the corner of your eye and VERY VERY GENTLY nudge the eye. You'll see a very weird thing happen. You haven't moved, the world hasn't moved, and your brain didn't TELL your eyes to move -- but because your eye has unwillingly been pushed out of the way, the image skews. Now you know what the reptile within you thinks when its sees words scroll but the monitor -- and you -- stay still.
In many ways, such desire to move things around as if we were kids or apes or whatever is a limitation, but it's also part of what makes us human. Call it a charming quirk, if you will. And although I can always sit and read at a terminal, the "Paperless Society" is not kinesthetically comfortable enough for me.
Three Step Plan:
1. Take over the world.
2. Get a lot of cookies.
3. Eat the cookies.
Lately I've been working as an editor rather than as a Unix sysadmin
(editing books on LaTeX, as it happens), and I can tell you that it is
infinitely easier to edit textual material using paper and pen than on
screen.
Why?
1. Screen resolution is still very low.
Macs have 72 dpi; Windows 96 dpi. X seems to use either 75 or
100 dpi, depending on what fonts you have installed. None of
these are very high quality for long-term reading, especially if
you consider flicker, sunlight (or room lights) bouncing off the
screen, and other related factors. Compare that with the output
of a modern laser printer. Mine does 1200 dpi, and it's fast.
Most printers these days produce output with at least 600 dpi
resolution. Even 300 dpi (from the bad old days) is better on
your eyes than staring at a screen.
2. Word processors and text editors encourage sloppy writing.
It's very easy to copy and paste, and equally easy to fail to
adjust the pasted text properly. Verbs and articles don't match
(``these objects was''), words are repeated (``the the''), words
are left out (``when Charlie he wanted''). Because you can't
see the whole text (see #3), it's also easy to repeat yourself,
or leave something important out.
Spell checkers don't catch most of these errors (some will catch
the repeated words). They also won't stop you from using a
properly spelled word in the wrong way (``It's over their!'').
3. You can never see the whole text at once.
When you're trying to remember what you wrote five pages back,
it's far easier to flip back five pages and compare them side by
side than to search out the phrase in an editor. Sure you can
open a new window and compare them, but you're still looking at
them on screen, and how much screen real estate do you really
have?
4. It's easier to reorganize physical objects than virtual ones.
While reading through a text, it's easy to spot how two things
in different sections relate, and recombine them, even using
scissors and tape, glue, or staples (the original cut and
paste!).
5. Reading material on paper encourages rewriting and rethinking,
which are almost always a good thing.
Sentences and phrases that seemed great when you wrote them
often pale when you read them again. Because a paper copy is
detached from the electronic version, you're forced to look at
the rewrite holistically, rather than concentrating on one or
two words.
Not only that, but reviewing what you've written may give you
some new insights into the material, allowing you to see how
some ideas fit together or complement one another.
6a. Printed material is cleaner than electronic material.
Assuming you're not using a WYSIWYG editor, it's much easier to
concentrate on the *content* of your writing when you don't have
all the markup instructions cluttering your view. This goes for
LaTeX, HTML, XML, SGML, and any other similar system.
6b. Printed material lets you see how things really look.
Even if you're using a tool that allows you to concentrate on
the content rather than the appearance of your document, you
often can't really see (WYSIWYG or no) what your document looks
like until you have it in front of you in its final form. This
comment doesn't really apply to HTML, of course, since you can
never really know what a page will look like on every user's
browser.
As for code, today's editors certainly make it easier to see what
various parts of your code are (through keyword coloring, changes in
typeface, etc.). Ultimately, however, extremely subtle problems can
often only be found after a detailed code review -- away from the
machine where you can be distracted by an endless number of tiny
changes you could try, where your code has to stand on its own. Such
code review encourages clear writing and the extensive use of comments
to explain what's going on. A really clever trick that saves you a
few milliseconds may, after examination, turn out to be completely
incomprehensible, even to you, and a nightmare to maintain. Having
your code spread out in front of you is also apt to give you more
insight into ways in which you can combine functions to reduce the
overall complexity of your program.
I have serious doubts that computers (in whatever form, even as
paper-sized screens with incredible resolution) will ever truly
replace pen and paper as the ultimate writing tool. Computers are
useful tools, especially for keeping track of citations and
references, and for producing high-quality (i.e., typeset) output, but
high-quality output depends on high-quality input, and in some very
important ways the strengths of the computer interfere with the
production of that high-quality input. (To sum up the last paragraph,
GIGO.)
All of the economic analysis of hemp as a paper substitute that I have seen assume that the political problems associated with industrial hemp agriculture are solved. In fact, N. Dakota recently passed a law legalizing this, and I believe Wisconson may also do so soon.
The problem is that most of the fiber is low quality. Hemp contains two types of fiber, bast and hurd. The bast is good, and can be made into high quality paper. The problem is that the hurd is crap, and accounts for 75% of the plant. For hemp to be competitive must be seperated from the bast. This both costs big bucks in the processing, but also generates a humungous waste stream. By comparison, groundwood softwood process fiber has an efficiency of 90+%. This means if you try to use hemp you are going to be stuck with a waste stream 7x larger than if you use softwoods.
People often think that because you are not cutting down trees hemp makes a better choice for papermaking ecologically. Well, the fact of the matter is that there are other ecological costs in the papermaking process that are at least as important - paper is a very energy, water and waste intensive business. The use of hemp instead of softwood in this picture would be an ecological disaster because of the overall life cycle efficiency.
Speaking as a paper scientist who has kept up with the research on alternative fibers, the sad fact of the matter is that hemp makes a LOUSY sheet of paper for the buck! It is very difficult to beat softwood tree fiber for phyical properties, especially fiber strength, economical processing and overall life cycle cost for papermaking. If it were an economically attractive fiber source you can bet your bottom dollar the paper industry would be using it; they are EXTREMELY cost sensitive.
If you are interested in this topic I would suggest the misc.industry.pulp-and-paper newsgroup.
Court documents != contracts. Besides, if I were to lose my original copy of my divorce settlement, I can walk into the county clerks office and get for a certified copy for four bucks. Originals are not that important!
.sig: Now legally binding!