Going Paperless – Page 3 – Auxiliary Memory

Kindle DX versus Netbook as Textbook

The holy grail of ebook visionaries is the electronic textbook. Textbooks are huge, heavy and expensive and some poor school kids carry more weight on their backs than soldiers on a march. It’s as common to see backpack humps on college kids backs as seeing cell phones in their hands. Ebook promoters see dollar signs whenever they spot one of those humpback students lugging around all that printed matter.

And those ebook promoters are right. Why carry forty pounds of paper when you can carry 1 pound of electronics? But is the Kindle DX the answer? I don’t think so. First, let me give you a little story. Years ago, before audio books were even common on cassette tape, I took a two semester Shakespeare course. We covered almost 20 plays, each tested with a very detailed 10 question quiz. I remember how I faithfully read and studied the first play and was shocked when I only got six of the ten questions. The professor had a pattern. Half of the questions could be easily answered with a fair reading of the play. One question was always about a very obscure detail that kept most people from getting a perfect 10, and the other four questions divided the class between those who really got into the play and those who didn’t.

I realized a quick reading the night before class wasn’t going to cut it, so I went to the library and got each play on LP. They came in boxed sets of 3-4 discs. The records were old and scratchy, but usable. This was in the early 1980s. I’d play the records while reading the play – it took hours. After that I always got perfect 10s on those quizzes. Now my magic retention rate only worked if I faithfully followed the words on the page while listening to the same words spoken. Reading or listening by itself didn’t work. Other than these two Shakespeare courses I never used this learning technique again in school.

However, when I started using my ears as my main sensory input for reading back in 2002, I started playing around, experimenting with each form of input. I paid attention to what I noticed when just reading with my eyes. Then I paid attention to what I noticed, just from listening with my ears. I would then read something I had just listened to, or vice versa. Each time I’d found details I had missed with the opposite method. I discovered what the eyes learned was different from what the ears remembered.

One book I did this experiment on was Emma by Jane Austen, a book I was reading for a book club. I listened for an hour. Then I reread that hour with my eyes. Listening was great for getting a sense of character and dramatic action, but it was poor on retaining words. Austen immediately introduced too many characters – that made the story confusing. Each character live in a house with a name, often set in a different village, with another name to remember, so I was overwhelmed by people and place names. Seeing all those names in print helped clear up many issues.

Again, I concluded that to study a piece of writing for academic purposes, I needed to see it with my eyes if I wanted to memorize words and spellings. However, by listening, I experienced the nuances of conflict, characterization and plot better. Hearing stories helped me to to imagine 3D action and settings. I saw color and details better when I heard the words rather than read them.

Listening, which is far slower than reading, forced me to concentrate on the subject, and that was especially reinforced when I watched the words while also listening to them. Seeing a word and hearing it made me think about it’s pronunciation and spelling more than when I just read it with my eyes. But listening alone is terrible for learning spelling. There are many books I’ve only heard that I have no idea how to spell the character’s names.

I think these observations are key to the success of future etextbooks. Strangely enough, the Kindle now offers to read books to their owners, but they also allow Kindle users to play MP3 or Audible.com audio books while reading, although I think few people take advantage of this feature. I sold my Kindle 1.0 to my friend who prefers to read with her eyes and loves to travel, but I do have the Kindle reader software on my iPod touch and do some reading with it. However, iPods can’t multitask, so I have to play the audio book on my Zune and read it on the iPod touch.

From this one anecdote you might surmise that the Kindle DX will make a great etextbook, but I’m not so sure. I found the e-ink technology clumsy for random reading, which is often what people do when they study. Also, kids studying will be taking notes for writing papers or passing tests, so I think the future of etextbooks will be on netbooks, and those little devices are great at multitasking, allow reading and note taking and even cutting and pasting of quotes.

To really memorize details for a studied subject, I think you need to see it, hear it, and then write about it. iPhones and Kindles don’t help here. When I write this blog I keep a browser window open, with tabs to Google, Wikipedia and OneLook (a dictionary gateway site).

The computer literacy movement of the 1980s promised so much but delivered so damn little. I’ve always wondered why programmers couldn’t write programs that taught math. Kids will play video games for hours, games that mesmerize them into deep rapt attention, tricking them into learning a myriad of details from game play. Teaching mathematics via interactive computer animation should be a no brainer, but most software that attempted the job came up with dull drills and tedious flash cards. That doesn’t mean the concept of computer aided learning is a bust. Anyone who has played with Mathematica should shout they’ve seen the light.

What’s needed is a synthesis of many learning techniques and technologies. First, I think etextbooks won’t be ebooks. That’s way too lame. Etextbooks should combine video lectures, film clips, audio, computer CGI, and photos to go with old fashion black on white text, plus add tests, quizzes, puzzles, word problems, virtual worlds, games and any other interactive method to get kids to practice math.

If I had the money and resources to create etextbook on mathematics I would build my course around the history of math. I’d take it from anthropological ancient history to theoretical here and now. But I’d build it as a suite of components, usable on different platforms in different study environments. So if the user only wanted voice, in iPod mode, they could spin through the centuries to find MP3 podcasts about the history of math. If they were in a mood to play with their Nintendo DS, they could load up a mathematical game, or install a challenging game app on their iPhone. If they were in the mood for a documentary, I’d let them stream video to their television sets. Hell, I’d even offer to print puzzles for when they have to sit on the pot.

I’d also find some way to create a scoring system, especially one that could be tied to a Elo type rating system, like they use in chess, so students would feel challenged to compete. It would be great if the American Mathematical Society had a way to rank people’s knowledge of the various Mathematics Subject Classifications. Kids love video games because they enjoy beating friends with a specialized skill, and they also love competing against a computer too. Traditional schooling is so boring and passive. Etextbooks need the challenge of competition, but it would be so tired if all they did was offer time competitions on who could finish solving ten equations first.

What if a Civilization type game required various mathematical skills to play, so if a student wanted to build a pyramid in the game he’d need to know geometry, or if she wanted her little Sims to sail across an ocean, she’d have to use celestial navigation to advance the game.

In other words, if publishers are only going to take the text from their printed books and put it in an ebook, that’s not going to work. Even if the Kindle had full color and resolution to match the printed page, so a Kindle book could contain all the photos and illustrations of the real textbook, I still don’t think it will be equal to using paper volumes. Modern textbooks are gorgeous compared to what I remember I had to use as a kid. If I had the choice between 5 books, weighing 40 pounds, and 1 Kindle weighing less than a single pound, I’m afraid I’d shoulder the burden, because real textbooks are far easier to use, and much more spectacular to look at. I kid you not. If you haven’t seen a text in forty years, go find a kid and look at theirs.

When I owned my Kindle and subscribed to Time magazine, I found it easiest to read from page one to page last, and endure the time it took to page past articles I didn’t want to read. There were navigation links, but between flipping back to the table of contents and to an article to see if I wanted to read it, it was just easier to stay in linear mode of page, page, page, page….

Etextbooks will only be better if they offer a variety of ways to study. Ultimately, I don’t think individual etextbooks will be the answer. I think students will subscribe to an online textbook service, and pay $4.99-$19.99 a month per course, and access a myriad of multimedia features, paying about the same as buying a textbook for a one semester course.

The old way to going to college involved scheduling a class with a professor and studying a book together in a room with other students for a few months. Online instruction means studying on your own with a professor you might never meet who shepherds unseen students through a system of requirements. Wouldn’t you prefer a textbook service that gave you podcasts to listen to at the gym or grocery store or while doing the dishes, and video lectures to watch before bedtime, and online games to play against your classmates, and ebooks to read on your iPhone at break at work. Local college professors may stop lecturing, and end up becoming educational gurus who help their students find their way to enlightenment in the subjects they paid to master.

The textbook of the future will have to be very flexible. I don’t even go to school, but I study all the time. I just finished the audio book The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg about cosmology of the early universe just after the big bang. I’m about to read the hardback and listen to the audio book of The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene, which will go deeper into many documentaries I’ve been watching lately on The Science Channel and PBS, but I also want something more systematic, so I’m going to get a DVD set or two from The Teaching Company. Their great DVD courses would be fantastic to keep on a netbook.

The more I study cosmology and physics, the more I feel the need to study mathematics. I wish I could find something like the RosettaStone language courses to help me. I also wish I had something that tested and rated my knowledge. I don’t feel the need to go back to college and major in physics, but if an astronomical association offered online testing, with amateur rankings, I might be tempted by their challenge. Our K-12 upbringing made most of us to hate learning, mainly because they made gaining knowledge all about passing crappy tests. Video games are a form of test taking, a fun kind, that addict kids.

It’s a shame that most adults study new subjects like snacking on potato chips. We constantly nibble on information but are never challenged to do anything with our empty data calories. People will spend 60 hours a week playing online video games that require an amazing amount of study just to slay imaginary dragons or build pretend lives in Second Life. Why not set up servers and let players build an historically accurate virtual Tudor England, so they could apply their hobby history scholarship to a challenge. What if teachers told their students, “Your homework for this week is to create a virtual Mayflower, and show why the Puritans came to America. Each of you must flesh out one historical character and show that person in twenty scenes from their life interacting with the characters your classmates create. Please tell you’re parents they aren’t allowed to play this week.”

See why I think existing invention of the textbook shouldn’t be converted into a gadget that only displays electronic words and images on an electronic page because it’s lighter than a bulky book? Modern textbooks are already bursting their bindings trying to become multimedia experiences. E-ink would be a huge step backwards. Go find a 2009 textbook, and flip through it. What I’m saying will be obvious. It will also be obvious that the weight of all the knowledge within that tome won’t be easily consumed by your darling rug rat. Today’s kids chow down on HD video and 1080p Xbox games. The Sirens of virtual worlds call to kids and the printed black letter on white paper, or gray e-ink, just won’t charm them.

JWH – 7/3/9

Going Paperless 7 – Junk Mail

It’s been over a year since I started on the paperless path and my life is still full of paper. I’ve spent this Sunday shredding files with personal information. When I started this project I was mostly concerned with the tons of magazines I was getting in the mail each month. Now my mailbox is mostly magazine free, but my paper recycling bucket has plenty of paper in it every week. After canceling magazines I loved, my mailbox is still full of crap that I never wanted.

Since we bought the house my wife grew up in, we get mail for her dead parents, and after my mom died, I had all her mail forwarded here, and between our five names we get piles of unwanted mail. Hell, we got a letter the other day for a man who lived in the house before my wife’s folks bought it in 1961. We also get mail for my wife’s two brothers and several of their children. And we get mail for two very special people: occupant and resident.

I’ve tried to write some of the regular senders and inform them about the deceased, but many types of mail we get are due to our names being on endless lists. Lists that are sold from one marketing company to another. It’s harder to fight junk mail marketing than unsolicited phone calls because there is no official federal do not mail registry, like the National Do Not Call Registry. (There is a campaign, Do Not Mail, that’s collecting signatures for a petition for the federal government to create a Do Not Mail service like the National Do Not Call Registry.)

The Direct Marketing Association does offer DMAchoice.org. Of course, these are the people trying to help businesses sell you stuff, but they claim they want to develop good relations between customers and sellers, so you can register for what you don’t want or what you do. However, many marketing companies do not belong to the DMA.

I have found a number of other web sites with good advice on how to reduce the flow of junk mail:

There are pay services that will do some of this work for you, but I couldn’t find enough information about them to risk hiring them. All these advice sites require work, and some of the advice requires contacting agencies and giving them your SSN. I’m still mentally debating that.

I have joined DMAchoice.org but it’s not simple to use like the National Do Not Call Registry, but it is helpful. DMAchoice divides junk mail into four categories: Credit Offers, Catalogs, Magazine Offers and Other Mail Offers. This service helps you to add or remove your address from hundred of member companies mailing lists, or it helps get you onto lists that warns companies not to market to you at all. But it’s not perfect. Any company that you buy from, or subscribe to, will continue to send sales offers to you. For example, I buy from L. L. Bean, and I get catalogs all the time in the mail, and emails about specials. And my wife would probably get mad at me if I canceled the J. C. Penny’s sale catalogs. DMAchoice.org expects you to take notes on what you get in the mail and work carefully to thin things out. Also, DMAchoice.org has a service to stop junk mail to deceased recipients.

I get a lot less mail than I did a year ago. Because I quit subscribing to magazines, I get far fewer offers in the mail. I’ve even had a rare day of getting no mail whatsoever, and on many days my red Netflix envelope is the only thing in the box. I bet my mailman loves me, if he’s not worried about losing his job. If only I could only convince him not to deliver those weekly bundle of local ads.

Going paperless takes work, a lot of work. Maybe a year from now I’ll have the junk mail under control. Not only will that save trees, keep carbon out of the atmosphere, but it will save me time. I’ve already saved a lot of time by paying bills automatically through bank drafts, so most of the mail I do process now is junk mail. However, I still get lots of printouts from Blue Cross Blue Shield after each doctor’s visit, and those monthly statements from my banks. And some companies that I pay by bank draft want to send me their statements anyway, which is a total waste.

My paper recycle bin will always have paper in it because of product packaging, but the amount I put out by the curb gets smaller over time. In today’s society where most people have a computer, there’s little reason to deal with the printed word. Email has replaced the letter, and now the web is replacing catalog shopping. I read far more news stories on the web than I do in magazines and newspapers. Instead of printing out copies of things I want to save, I just make a .pdf and file it away. Eventually, I think most of the communications we get in our mailbox can be processed digitally, including any junk mail that we might actually want.

JWH – 3/29/9

We Need A Number

Go do a Google search on this phrase – “Target Atmospheric CO2” – and include the quotation marks, and you will find 2,400 links. The links point to essays discussing a scientific paper by James Hansen and other scientists called “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?” The gist of the story: The likely safe high range for CO2 in the atmosphere is 350ppm, and we’re beyond that at 385ppm. Hansen is the NASA scientist that first alerted Congress to the global warming problem back in 1988. Randomly read some of those essays reacting to the paper and you’ll save me the time paraphrasing it. The paper itself is perfectly readable, if you’re patient, but it’s bumpy with scientific speak, so it might be easier to read the commentaries.

Many of the writers act like 350 is the magic number we need, and in some ways that’s true. It gives humanity a very specific goal. It tells everyone that if we want weather like the nice weather we grew up with, then everybody needs to go on a carbon diet and get the atmospheric CO2 below 350 again. However, that does not convey the sacrifice needed to achieve the goal.

I think we need another number. Scientists need to decide what is the fair share target number we all need to stay under personally to get the job done. Recycling paper and buying compact florescent lights are not going to do the trick. I think until we have a personal number to target, along with proper labeling on everything we buy, people won’t understand how much CO2 they need to cut out of their lives.

How much sacrifice do we need to make? If the nations of the world had a crash program to switch to 100% solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear and other sources of clean energy, would that solve the problem? Would that be one way to solve the problem without asking individuals to think about the details? Or should governments just kill off some of the most polluting industries? Do we need to give up the beef industry? Or the paper industry? Or the airline industry? Or all of them plus more? Or would it be better to ask the citizens themselves to take on their own share of global warming responsibility and let them make their own decisions on how to clean up their share of personal waste?

If we had a number to measure our personal use against, we could all decide the sacrifices we’d like to make. Some people might be willing to dry their clothes on the line outside for a year to budget flying to New York City for a vacation. Other people might buy high tech cars that put little CO2 in the atmosphere so they can enjoy living in a larger house. Others might choose to walk to work so eating steaks wouldn’t break their personal greenhouse gas consumption budget.

Many people have suggested having a carbon tax to help fund a Manhattan style project to convert to clean energy power plants. This would discourage waste and finance change. Having a tax would be one way to quantify for the public their duty to humanity. It could also simplify the decisions people make. If gasoline with a carbon tax was $12 a gallon, then you’d think long and hard about wasting it. If the price of electricity from coal went to 4x with a carbon tax, it would give utility companies income to build new plants and customers incentives to make their houses energy efficient.

This would be the easy route. What if in the next ten years we screwed around and didn’t do anything and it became frighteningly obvious we need to do something drastic? Would we make bigger sacrifices then? What if we had to outlaw the gasoline powered car? Or outlaw airplanes? Or ration electricity?

There are thousands and thousands of things we can do now by freely making the choices ourselves before the governments of the world have to get heavy. If we knew what our carbon allotment was, it would be easier to make those choices.

Take for instance paper. I have no idea how much paper contributes to the problem of global warming, but I have seen one number that says that junk mail adds 114 billion pounds of CO2 annually. My reaction is to give up paper completely. I’m phasing out my magazine and newspaper subscriptions, I’m doing my best to never print computer documents, I’m working to reduce junk mail, and I’m finding ways to shop for products with less packaging.

If everyone thought this way, paper magazines would disappear from society and everyone would read electronic periodicals. Is this good or bad? That’s a lot of jobs lost. Potentially, it could mean a lot of businesses would go under. I’d hate to see that, but on the other hand, paper really isn’t needed in our computer networked society. My local newspaper just started offering a weekly electronic edition that looks just like the print edition, but costs less than the Sunday only paper subscription. I’m moving to a paperless lifestyle, but even though it’s logical to me, is it what everyone else should be doing too?

I draw the line at magazines and newspapers, but feel that books are worth their environmental costs because we preserve them and consider newspapers and mags disposable. What if that’s wrong. What if there’s a way to have environmental safe magazines? Unless scientists tell us the values associated with all our consumption we won’t know how to make enlightened decisions. If a National Geographic subscription form came with a number – 24 – for 24 pounds of CO2 added to the atmosphere per 1 year subscription then that would be a big step in understanding the problem.

However, unless I know my allotment number, say 1,000 pounds per year, I wouldn’t be able to practically use the 24 figure I got from National Geographic. So Mr. Hansen, it you and your science buddies would be so kind, give us another number. 350 is cool for the world to know, but we all need another number, a number that would tell us how to live by so all 7 billion people riding on spaceship Earth pulls that 385ppm figure down to 350ppm. That number is the maximum amount in pounds of greenhouse gases we can each safely add to the atmosphere in a year.

President Elect Obama, you could help with this too. Instead of offering another general economic incentive package, offer us tax breaks on buying specific clean energy products and services. That would be another way to quantify a solution. Tax what’s bad for the environment, and subsidized what’s good. Get the U.S. to do more than it’s fair share to get the world below that 350ppm number. We owe the rest of the world.

JWH 11-9-8

Going Paperless 6 – Zinio

I started this series about Going Paperless back in February and I’m slowly progressing towards my goal. My initial plan was to give up paper editions of newspapers and magazines, and in theory replace them with editions for the Kindle or on audio for my iPod, but Zinio electronic publishing was also recommended to me, and that turned out to be third path to going without paper. I haven’t renewed any of my paper magazines yet, and I’m still reading paper editions because many subs haven’t expired. As they expire I’ve got to find a paperless solution, thus giving me the incentive to subscribe to Zinio editions.

Even though I haven’t yet subscribed to a magazine through Zinio, I have gotten a number of free subs and issues. Today I discovered a major change in how Zinio delivers magazines that makes a vast improvement over their old solution. The previous method centered around a software reader installed on your machine, and magazines were saved on your hard drive, in the “library” as the program calls it. The new method is entirely web based, and what’s amazing, the online reader is better than the fat client! Web software programs are making quantum leaps in quality these days – it’s just mind blowing compared to just two years ago.

One thing I hated about the old reader was how it dealt with photographs. Photographs didn’t handle magnification like text. Text got bigger and stayed sharp, but magnified photos just got pixilated and jaggy. If you want to see a photo in a real magazine better you hold it up closer to your face and you can see more details. Now, with the online version, you can magnify the photo almost like you have Photoshop. Sure images will eventually deteriorate, but it’s good for three levels of blow-up. This is great for reading magazines like Popular Photography.

And there’s more! The online version is quicker and easier to scoot around within a page. Onscreen reading is greatly improved. The online program tries to be intuitive and guess what you want, so it has fewer controls. It takes a little getting used to, but I attuned to it fast. In full screen one click magnifies to 200%, another full click de-magnifies back to 100%. At 200% a hold-down click allows you to grab the page and slide it around. There’s a -/+ magnifier icon for 100% 200% 400% and 800% magnifications, so only mouse clicking is needed for quick reading and page turning, saving you trips to the top menu. On my 22″ LCD monitor I can read the magazine in full two-page view with no scrolling, but it’s easy and quick to magnified and read in large print.

Zinio isn’t perfect yet. You have to read at the computer, but net reading has gotten me used to that. What I’ve always wanted is a way to build a personal periodicals library that also had a search feature. Now this would work in two ways. I want full-text word search on all the magazines I own in my digital library. At the next level I’d want a full-text word search for all magazines published and be offered a chance to buy a magazine with an article I needed.

I like having an online library. Not only do I not have to save my paper copies, but I don’t even have to clutter up my computer with digital copies. Boy, I wish I had my years of back issues of Sky & Telescope and Astronomy Magazine stored away in the Zinio library – I’d gain enough shelf-space for a hundred books.

Since I started my going paperless quest I’ve learned some limitations about being perfectly paperless. Magazines like F&SF and other short story periodicals are something I’m going to read in a chair, and they are fine to get on the Kindle. I didn’t like Time on the Kindle. Magazines that I want to save like National Geographic or Sky & Telescope might justify their tree killing ways if I do keep them for years. I feel books are worth their ecological paper costs if we keep them for decades or centuries, and the same would be true for magazines we want to preserve. And since I want to sell a story to F&SF someday, I want to subscribe to the paper copy, just in case I ever get a story printed. I can read most of my favorite magazines online with no trouble. Something like Popular Science which has very busy layout, would be easier to read as a Zinio edition.

Zinio still doesn’t offer all the magazines I subscribe to, nor is the pricing on most journals what I think electronic editions should cost. If the publisher can skip printing, postage and distribution costs, then the electronic subscription should be significantly cheaper than buying paper, and in most cases it’s not. 12 issues of Popular Mechanics for $7.99 is A-OK. 12 issues of PC World for $19.97 means I read the free web version. And I’m not even offered magazines like Scientific American, Discover, Seed, Entertainment Weekly, Wired, Time, Newsweek, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and most of my regular reading.

Strangely enough, I can find many of my favorite magazines online offering their content for free – this makes me wonder if Zinio might be undersold by free web content. For companies like Zinio to succeed will require a new way of thinking about how magazines are priced.

I figure the NetFlix or Rhapsody Music model of pricing would be a better system. I pay $10 a month to each of those services and have unlimited access to their entire libraries. Rhapsody Music provides subscription music to nearly everything that’s for sale on CD for one monthly fee and I can listen all day long. NetFlix will send me one movie at a time from their vast library or let me watch a growing list of films on my computer any time for their monthly fee. Zinio, and other companies should offer a similar service for online magazines.

Some of my magazines have expired like The New Yorker, PC Magazine, PC World and Maximum PC, Time and Linux Journal. I don’t know if I should say this, but free web content has filled the need completely over these paper editions. I’m tempted to get The New Yorker on Audible.com, but I don’t miss the others.

My subscription is about to end for Entertainment Weekly, a zine my wife and I both read and enjoy. Susie is not on the path to paperless living, and I don’t want to renew. Much of EW’s content is online, but reading their website is like running a gauntlet of ads, and EW paginates the hell out of their stories forcing you to see page after pages of the same crappy ads. And their RSS feeds aren’t much help either. The paper copy is the easiest of their distribution methods to read. If it was available for a reasonable price, Entertainment Weekly would be perfect to get on Zinio. Because it’s not on Zinio and I want to stick to my paperless philosophy, it means I have to give up reading EW.

Jim

Too Many Paper Towels

I’ve become a semi-bachelor this year when my wife had to take a job out of town. Because of this new status I have to do my own shopping, and I’ve always hated shopping. When we first got married over thirty years ago, I volunteered to do the laundry if Susie would do all the shopping. Learning to shop properly is hard to do, as I’ve discovered late in life. And with the current climate of shopping to save money while also being green, I feel like I need to buy subscription to Money Magazine, Consumer Reports and The Economist to effectively make a foray to the grocery story.

Susie always bought large bundles of paper towels that we had to squirrel away in all our closets that would take years to use. Well, the last batch ran out this past week, and since we have a couple of cats that love to groom and puke, paper towels are a necessity. Of course this could be a green issue. I could wipe up my feline family member’s hairball regurgitation with a rag that I could wash out, but that’s time consuming and messy, so I take the easy paper route of buying towels.

When I got to the store and the isle with the paper towels I made a troubling discovering – there are dozens of choices. I didn’t remember which brand Susie bought. I stood staring at the selection for several minutes not knowing what to do. I considered asking one of the many women passing by but worried they might have considered my genuine ignorance as feigned male stupidity for a pick up line. There were so many brands, so many styles, so many patterns, so many bundle choices, and I figured I’d needed a laptop and a spreadsheet to calculate which was the cheapest if I figured for length of roll, number of sheets, number of plies, and number of rolls in a bundle.

And even more confusing was trying to figure out quality. Some looked pretty cheap and were cheap, and others looked cheap and were not. And none of them claimed to be good for barf removal from rugs. I stood there totally befuddled, not knowing what to do when I saw the name “Brawny.” Hey, I remembered that from the TV, and it sounded manly, and I’m a man, so I figured that was a sign from God. I bought one roll, thinking I’d give ole Brawny the vomit patrol test. When my wife got home this weekend, all she said was, “I like the kind that have the half-sheet tears.” Well, they do clean up after Nick and Nora just fine.

The question now is did I get a good buy? I have no idea. I don’t know how much I paid for that Brawny roll. In my panic to select I didn’t look. Just now, I jumped on Google and started studying the problem. First off, I found that there are paper towels promoted as being green because they are made from recycled paper and less chemical processing. And there’s toilet tissue also made from recycled paper. This sounds like a no-brainer, so the next time I buy I’m going to look for recycled paper products, but I don’t remember seeing that at my store. GreenDealsDaily also recommended 100% biodegradable sponges, but that sounded nasty when I imagined how all those cat crunchies expanded with digestive juices would clog up its pores.

There’s lots of confusing information on Google, but after looking at several links, I found Paper Towels and Napkins vs. Cloth. Melissa Breyer rates various types of cleanup solutions by their friendliness to the Earth. I’m sold on recycled paper products, but she also makes a good case for cloth napkins and towels

If I go with cloth I’ll have to wash them, but I won’t have to shop for paper towels anymore – a relief that saves money. I wonder if I can live without them? Since I hate shopping, this decides the issue for me, and it gets me out of the math of figuring out which paper towels are the best buy. However, if I spot some of those green recycled paper towels I might buy them to keep for fast cleanups like when I hear the lovely call of a retching cat when I’m trying to run out the door to work.

Jim