Need an idea for a newspaper or magazine article? Cookbook recipe #801:

• Look around you and pick a commonplace, everyday activity — brushing one's teeth, stepping on the brake of a car, throwing a piece of junk mail into the wastebasket, unlocking the front door, flipping a light switch, looking up a factoid on the Internet, biting a fingernail ... — whatever comes to mind, but the more widespread and frequently performed, the better;
• Multiply the number of people in the country (or on the planet) times how often the chosen activity is done times some physical parameter associated with that activity — ergs of energy, milliliters of water, cubic centimeters of landfill occupied, seconds of time spent, micrograms of metal eroded, bits of entropy generated ... — the smaller the unit, the better; and then
• Wax wroth over the woeful waste of world resources as, every day, people insist on doing X, and thus cause Y units of irreplacable Z to be destroyed.

Be sure, however, not to look too closely at the benefits of the activity you're decrying — and never compute the costs of not doing it. That would weaken your case!

(cf. Celebrity History (8 May 1999), Basement Worries (15 Jun 2002), That Which Is Not Seen (5 Sep 2002), ...)

TopicSociety - TopicWriting - 2007-05-10

(correlates: RunningVersusTraining, SocialWealth, ExpertPlayer, ...)