Biodegradeable

I'm all for saving the environment. We have spent thousands of years messing up this planet. It's time to right the wrongs, stop plundering the planet get the place back in order. It's time we cleaned house.

There are things that one can do to facilitate this: drive eco-friendly cars (or ride a bike), recycle glass, plastics and paper, and buy environmentally friendly toothpicks (see: Spirit of Nature).

But there are some environmentally "friendly" products out there that make no sense at all. Take, for example, scented plastic bags used for disposing dirty diapers. Living in a household with small kids, I understand the whole nappy sack thing: you want to keep the smell in the bag. I relate to that. So why would you want to buy biodegradeable nappy sacks? Your Huggies won't biodegrade for a thousand years, yet the nappy sacks take only 60 days to turn to dust. What a great invention! I suppose that 60 days is long enough to get the sack out of your house and into landfill. That might be okay for you, but think of future generations!

In a thousand years archaeologists will excavate our current rubbish dumps to determine what sort of society we lived in. And what will they find? Dirty, bagless nappies! Their conclusion will be that we were an unhygenic society that disposed of dirty nappies without enclosing them in a scented bag first, like any normal futuristic parent would. Of course they wouldn't know that we first wrapped the nappy in a bag because it degraded 1,000 years ago (less 60 days).

So by using this product, you are actually destroying the reputation of an entire generation of people. We will be viewed in the same light as those from the middle ages who thought it was physically dangerous to wash yourself.

In fact, the whole biodegradeable business is a disservice to our society. If you buy all the biodegradeable stuff out there on the market, in 60 days there will be no evidence that any of that stuff actually existed! Let's say that we all go pro-biodegradeable to "save the environment" - there will be nothing left for future archaeologists to find.

Now that I think about it, how do we know that what we dug up from 1,000 years ago is really indicative of that society? What if they were really an advanced culture? What if they actually used only biodegradeable products and all the evidence of their society disappeared 60 days after use? What if the fragments of clay utensils that we found are really museum pieces that they found in their excavations of societies that existed 1,000 years before them?

It is therefore irresponsible to use cutlery made from corn or disposable plates made from sugarcane. It would be a travesty of history to buy biodegradeable pencil sharpeners or biodegradeable refridgerators.

Give future historians a chance to learn the truth - and keep those 1,000 year old nappies away from me!

Are Museums Outdated?

According to 24 Hour Museum News 15,462 people visited the Coal Mining Museum for England in August 2004. Between April and August of the same year, 2,118,518 visitors passed through the turnstiles of the British Museum.

While these statistics are almost as old as some of the exhibits, one wonders why so many people go to visit museums. I mean, in this day and age, everything you want to know about any subject - including History - can be found on the internet. If you want to know about Christopher Columbus, go to www.columbusnavigation.com If you want to know about Australian explorers, Burke and Wills, go here:www.burkeandwills.net.au If you want to learn about Herod, Wikipedia will help you out.

Do you think that you will learn something extra by being in the same room as a wax replica of an original reconstruction of an ancient tool, based on either fragments of iron and crustacean fossils or some book-worm-historian's educated (best) guess of what life was like way back when?

Do you think that by going to a museum and standing face to face with inanimate objects labeled with glossy tags and well-written explanations on embossed card will give you more information than a Google search of millions of articles, worldwide?

Are the closing times, noise-police, do-not-touch signs, overpriced gift shops and crowds of people worth the mortgage-your-house-to-get-in entrance fee?

So why did 331,605 people visit the Kyoto National Museum in 2005 or an unpublished number of people visited the Frank and Jane Clement Brick Museum in any given year?

The answer is simple. People like to collect things, and the museum is the one place that people can go to see what the government, organizations or private individuals have spent their time accumulating: dinosaurs, machinery or, surfing memorabilia.

We are pack-rats by nature. And we like to hold on to things for so long that others will pay good money to come and see that well-presented pile of stuff. Pictures on the internet don't (yet) give you the full sense of how much stuff of one kind can be displayed in a building. But walk up those steps, through the rotating door and into a museum, the reality of what your tax-dollars have been spent collecting over the past thousand years really hits home.

So next time you find yourself sitting at your computer taking the virtual tour of The Museum of HP Calculators, stop and consider for a moment whether you are really treating yourself to the full experience. Get in your car, hop on a bus, take a train, tram or bicycle (or some ancient method of transport from, say, the era of the Empire of the Great Qing) and get over to your local museum. They've spent millenia collecting things, you may as well go and see them.

This blog post was written in response to a challenge to write about why people visit museums.

News: Entertain Me!

To me, there is nothing like sitting on the couch with a nice big, hot cup of coffee and a newspaper. It's a mystery to me, but for some reason it can be very relaxing to be able to sip a steaming cuppa and read the news: usually morbid stuff like how many people died in what tragedy in which part of the world.

I remember that when I used to have a TV at home I would watch the news as a form of entertainment. Sure, I rationalized that I was "informing myself" about world events. But, get real, it was enjoyable to sit and munch on a cheese-topped cracker and listen to the newscasters report on things that only happen to other people.

It is for this reason, I also used to like listening to the news on the radio. Talk-back radio was especially fun because you got to hear regular people air their opinions on how leaders of foreign countries should shape their policies towards other foreign countries. When it comes to foreign affairs (especially someone else's), everyone is an expert.

The Internet has brought a whole new dimension to the news. If the regular news isn't entertaining enough, you can now amuse yourself with made-up news (ala The Onion) or with news of people doing stupid things (News of the Wierd).

One of my favorite books "Chronical of the 20th Century", is a compendium of newspaper-like articles spanning the 20th Century. The articles in the book include happenings from around the world, but have a focus on Australia and its involvement in world affairs. A marvelous gift from my parents-in-law.

There are serious articles about world wars, political upheavals, tragedies and famine. Then there are nostalgic pieces covering social, cultural and sporting issues (like the fact that Kaarlo Makinen of Finland won the gold medal for wrestling in the Bantamweight division in the 1928 Amsterdam Olympic Games). The inside front cover of the book is a map of the world as it stood in 1900. The inside back cover shows a map of the world as it stood in 1999. It's really quite interesting to see how events moved those lines around.

The great thing about this book is that you can pick it up at any point in the 20th Century and then just go with it and follow the articles through time. The articles themselves are not original newspaper articles. Each piece is written using the style and terminology of the day, with the knowledge of the time. It is absolutely fascinating. Break out the beer and sunflower seeds and I can sit for hours, and relive Israel's miraculous birth and survival or immerse myself in the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Whichever way you look at it, it's funny how news, no matter how stupid, inspiring or horrible, keeps us entertained. So next time there's an earthquake, tsunami, economic crisis or upset in international one-day cricket, boil the kettle, make yourself comfortable and enjoy yourself.