This is a weird, ‘inversive’ though almost, but I’m going to try and explain it anyway. Ok, so I’ve just started doing my Masters degree, and nobody is quite sure yet what exactly I’m supposed to do in terms of experiments. There have been lots and lots of ideas, but if I were to carry them all out I would be at this university at about seven more years – and hopefully they would give me a doctorate for my effort. Anyway, so currently I have no samples and no course of action, so I’m just busy reading and reading and reading some more (and writing up things for meetings, and having meetings). This whole reading thing is creating a lot of paper though; because I print everything I read, for archival reasons and because I’m not really comfortable with reading from a computer screen. Why, you may ask? Well, because computer screens tire my eyes very quickly, the dimensions are all wrong (I happen to have a large-ish computer screen but it’s still not quite A4 length) and I like tagging, marking, writing on and holding my research (I have a complicated system, this is big for me).This whole paper thing has become a bit of a mission though, because I work a several locations (my home, my library, two academic departments that are rather far apart) and I’ve gotten a bit annoyed with having to lug so much paper around. An then I have this thought about how cool it could be if you could just compress paper into something small and then decompress it when you need it. I thought about it for a minute, a realised, duh, that is what having Adobe files on a flashdisk is all about, and I felt really lame.
But it still wouldn’t quite be paper, though.
(And yes, I can’t wait for the day when we actually have this kind of technology going around.)
Posted by jossiesideways 