As the world continues to become more paperless, the postal network gets a lot of scrutiny.
Postal service continues to be a bit of a hot-button issue for everyone. Something as inherently boring as snail mail can really stir up people, it seems. New Zealand is considering a plan to move mail delivery to only three days each week. Like many postal services, theirs appears to be bleeding money. As someone who sends things through the mail on an annual basis, I would have no problem with Canada Post eliminating a day or two of their mail delivery each week.
I also wouldn't have a problem with them jacking up the price of stamps to ensure their business does well. I don't know if the price of a stamp accurately reflects the costs to send a letter, considering man-hours, fuel and the dwindling number of letters entering the system. It seems like a deal too good to be true.
The problem with mail is that we live in a world of technology, and the mail system is very low-tech. People certainly don't communicate via letters any more.
I can vaguely remember when e-mail started becoming the norm for written communication. There were people who considered a hand-delivered letter more personal, for I assume nostalgic reasons rather than logical ones.
The postal service is becoming pretty obsolete. Things will always need to be shipped, and that's what shipping companies are for, but mail delivery is a bit of a dinosaur.
It's the same as newspapers. It was real nice for me to hear a few years ago, sitting in a journalism class as the world of print media crumbled everywhere. Journalists were being laid off en masse as I trained for a job in which my prospects involved fighting for jobs with recently laid-off reporters from around the country.
I got into print media as it was becoming obsolete, and while it won't completely die, perhaps ever, it is definitely nowhere near as necessary as it once was. That's what the postal service is dealing with.
Businesses may still want daily postal traffic, and that may need to be available, but delivering to every house in every city every day, is an unnecessary waste. New Zealand may be the next country to re-organize its postal service, but we can all definitely look at ways of revamping the outdated mail system.
In other news, in a world where we require the use of our memories less and less, the World Memory Competition helps prove the brain is an incredible tool.
During the past championship, Germany's Johannes Mallow memorized a number with 2,245 digits in an hour. It took him just five minutes to memorize a 500-digit number. After 30 minutes he could string a binary sequence to the 3,954th digit.
It's impressive, considering I have difficulty remembering seven-digit phone numbers. That wasn't always a problem. I still remember phone numbers I dialled regularly as a kid, but I have the office phone number scrawled on a piece of paper at my desk to ensure I always correctly give it when leaving a message for someone.
With phones or computers storing so much data for us, what we really need to remember is how to find that information. I remember how to track down a phone number in my phone, so remembering a number is pointless now, except for international memory competition fame.
Even still, learning some advanced mnemonic techniques would be an interesting skill to have in the repertoire.
