Simple Country Physicist

I have blogged previously on what may be the physiological physics constraints on the paperless office, but a pair of article this week has triggered more erudition on the subject.

The paperless office is an idea that derives from the computer branch of the electronics revolution. (Rah! Quantum Mechanics!) The idea is that when everyone has instant and continuous access to a computer with screen then we no longer have a need to kill trees to communicate. The benefits are supposedly that we not only cease mangling the environment but we save money as well. Hence an idea that appeals to the ignorant of both the corporate and environmental worlds. Sadly, to date the paperless office (or home place) is a grail quest for a ruptured Dixie cup.

For the benefit of any Yankees or young who may happen to visit, the term Dixie cup is Southron for a drinking cup made of paper and waxed to assure adequate watertightness. The cup is a combination of a annular piece of paper rolled and glued into a frustum with a circular piece of paper glued to the small end of the frustum to make a base. Drinking cups are made of 25-30 pound paper while cups for ice cream were made of 50-100 pound paper and had a friction lid. The problem with these cups was that the glue used to seal the cup was water resistant rather than water proof and after a while – about an hour on a moderate day – the cup would fall apart. The idea thus was to drink and discard before the cup dumped its contents all over you.

The dissolved glue of the paperless office is manifold. My favorite to complain about is the functionality of the human vision system. Our vision can handle simple letters in 600 dot per inch (dpi) resolution for about a half hour or 10-20 pages, and then fatigue and muscle spasms set in. (The eye tends to compensate for the low resolution by giggling the eye more often and hence the eye muscles tire and spasm.) The minimum sustaining resolution is 1200 dpi, which is what is commonly found in newspapers. Good books tend to use resolution of 2400+ dpi.

Now a simple calculation of the resolution of a computer monitor will show the  problem. I have a fairly  good monitor that has a resolution of 1600 x 1200 pixels, which directly correspond to dots. The physical dimensions of the viewable area are 16 inches by 12 inches. Hence we get a resolution for my monitor, which I treat as representative, of exactly 100 dots (pixels) per inch, which we note immediately is 1/36 of the minimum resolution for readability. (Recall that we are really talking about solid angle here and hence the equivalent of an area!) Hence unless one is very young and absent of any interesting eye limitations like astigmatism and the like, eye strain will occur sooner rather than soon.

The second problem is that of putting one’s thoughts, observations, … down in some reviewable form. Some people have thought processes that are verbal only and can, for a subset, be expressed only as words. For these people a computer with a keyboard is a adequate information collection device. Others who are visual but have the mindset and temperament to use a tablet computer can be productive. For most humans however neither of these work. They need paper and a pen or pencil (or some equivalent) to write on. And the more specialized these writings are, and the further they depart from words, the harder it is to get them into electronic form. As a case in point, albeit extreme, there is NO optical character recognition capability I know of to convert handwritten maths into a compact encoding.

Let me explain that. When you type words into a computer, they are represented internally using ASCII characters. In LaTeX, maths symbols have an ASCII representation, so in effect, LaTeX reduces those maths squiggles down to the computer equivalent of words. The problem, of course, is the conversion, and to date and to my knowledge, there is no commonly available program to make that conversion. Hence when one converts maths and diagrams and the like into computer form it has to be as pictures and not as manipulable characters.

Hence my amusement this week when I see an article on how to equip a paperless office. [Link] The author has obviously done his homework, put in considerable thought, and has even made some consideration of how people are – he does include a scanner and discusses what capabilities it should have, but he misses the mark on the crucial factors of human physiology and temperament. The resolution issue is missed completely, as is the problem of figures, diagrams, and maths, and hence the superficially sound discourse fails in the details. Again the Dixie cup collapses.

The other article [Link] is a bit more successful in discussing why electronic means have not replaced the book. While the author does make the useful “lean forward” versus “lean back” distinction between monitor viewing and most book reading, the issues of human physiology – although he does touch on the “Gulledge Factor” that says electronic devices don’t go to the toilet – in the form of resolution and eye mechanics, and the matter of things other than straight lettered text. While the issue of maths is made moot by the existence of LaTeX, the matter of figures and diagrams is still relevant. The two combine to militate against the replacement of books by even epaper.
I have mentioned before that when one uses books, one needs to (a) skip quickly between pages and (b) have multiple books present. The former is technically doable but not commonly included in book software. The latter can only be accomplished by multiple viewers which negates the whole idea of epaper. There must be multiplicity of viewers, not unity.

There is, I think, another connection that is overlooked. As with most people, I tend to write “important” things out before I type/key them. I have known a few people who type/key directly but to a person they either compose crap or they spend a substantial time composing mentally first. As with most people, I do some mental composition but I tend to consolidate and refine it on paper, and the key it. My avowed reason for this is that the process of keying, especially with button and feature laden word processors like MegaHard’s WORD, is distracting and one ends up with well wrapped stercus. Of the over 100 articles and reports, and two books (non fiction) I have written, every one was hand written in some detail before keying.