vinyarb

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been noticing that the bin in my office toilet has been filling up exceptionally quickly. And I started to think to myself: Exactly how much paper is used up in the world each day on a frivolous task as drying our hands?

After washing our hands, why can’t we just use an air dryer to dry our hands instead? There’s always the jeans option as well. The way we’re plowing through our planet’s resources is just astounding.

And as more and more cities expand and creep into rural and forested areas, these resources are just going to be depleted further and quicker. When the wife and I went to Japan for a holiday, we found toilets with washlets/bidets very common, and that after taking a dump, washing instead of wiping was the norm with the Japanese. Although it definitely felt weird at the time, it was certainly… refreshing to try.

Reading up more though (from cracked.com no less), it seems that the use of toilet paper is really causing a lot of damage to Earth. Using a washlet may be an alien concept to a lot of us, but think about it. When we’re dirty and sweaty, we take a shower. Water is the best cleaning agent, not paper. Otherwise, we’d be wiping ourselves, and not washing ourselves.

If the trend catches on, and the world at large used washlets to cleanse their anuses, and used airdryers to dry their hands after washing them, god knows how much paper and how many trees can be saved.

I would be very very keen to install for at least one toilet in my home, and take one small step towards saving Gaia.

Now, time to go convince the wife.

Fun fact: It takes 384 trees to make the toilet paper that one man uses in his lifetime. We’re hitting 7 billion people this year. Do the math.

The future of everything seems to start from your mobile. There used to be a time when people used mobile phones to make calls. These days, calling seems to be the last thing we use our mobile for.

We text, watch videos, listen to songs, read the news, read our books, play games, do our shopping and even bank on our phones. I don’t even think we can legitimately call it a phone anymore.

Its a device. Everything we do starts with a swipe to unlock.

One unlucky victim of this mobilification (not a real word) is the book retailer. With so many distractions tucked in our pocket, who has the time to flip an actual book anymore? Plus, with ebooks, the future is paved for animations and deeper interaction with the stories.

This is where the next wave of authors will rise. No longer will the written word be enough. There will be images, videos and sound involved.

How else can our ADD-infused young be satiated?

Unfortunately, not everything can be slid to unlock. Like a woman’s.. erm… mind.

Taking off a woman's top... pretty sure there's an app for that

As if there aren’t enough reasons to want to be Brazilian (the beaches, the music, the samba..), here’s another:

The Brazilian President Dilma Rouseff recently approved a bill that mandates OT pay be applicable to employees (citizens only) who reply emails after working hours. Given the increasingly mobile working population with the addiction of checking their berries, I’m not sure employers will take to this well.

Well, hoorah to Brazilians!

What about you? Do you have a workphone that you can’t help but check every 30 minutes or so, even on the weekends? Would you like some downtime, or are you secretly elated each time you spot the red blinker on your blackberry?

Source: Venturebeat