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(Image credit: Flicker user “The Wanderer’s Eye”)
by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, AIR staff
Which came first — the chicken or the egg?
The question has a reputation for being difficult, perhaps even impossible, to answer. Philosophers treat it as a conundrum. But in the hands of an experimental scientist, the question is simple and straightforward, and the answer is easily obtained.
I doubt that I am the first to solve the chicken-and-egg problem, but a search of the scientific literature turned up surprisingly few accounts — none, in fact — of previous work. Here, then, is an account of my work on what turns out to be a trivial question.
Figure 2. The 2003 USPS regulations for mailing chickens.
Which came first — the chicken of the egg? I tackled the question experimentally, using a chicken, an egg, and the United States Postal Service (USPS).
I mailed the chicken and the egg, each in its own separate packaging, and kept careful track of when each shipment was sent from a post office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and when it subsequently arrived at its intended destination in New York City.
more …
From the archives of the National Postal Museum comes this photo of a postal carrier with a young boy in his mailbag.
After parcel post service was introduced in 1913, at least two children were sent by the service. With stamps attached to their clothing, the children rode with railway and city carriers to their destination. The Postmaster General quickly issued a regulation forbidding the sending of children in the mail after hearing of those examples.
For the past three years, Phillip Herr of the US Government Accountability Office was tasked by Congress to find out what’s wrong with the US Postal Service.
He came to this conclusion (unsurprising to some, I’m sure):
Herr and his team concluded that the postal service’s business model was so badly broken that collapse was imminent. Abandoning a long tradition of overdue reports, they felt they had to deliver theirs 18 months early in April 2010 to the various House and Senate committees and subcommittees that watch over the USPS. A year later, the situation is even grimmer. With the rise of e-mail and the decline of letters, mail volume is falling at a staggering rate, and the postal service’s survival plan isn’t reassuring. Elsewhere in the world, postal services are grappling with the same dilemma—only most of them, in humbling contrast, are thriving. [...]
The problems of the USPS are just as big. It relies on first-class mail to fund most of its operations, but first-class mail volume is steadily declining—in 2005 it fell below junk mail for the first time. This was a significant milestone. The USPS needs three pieces of junk mail to replace the profit of a vanished stamp-bearing letter.
The package was en route from Appomattox, Virginia to Puerto Rico. At the post office in Lynchburg, Virginia, postal workers noticed the box was moving. They had to get a search warrant, and when they finally opened the package, inspectors found a ferret inside! Postal workers promptly named it Stamps.
Photos from the Postal Inspector’s office show someone stuffed Stamps into a makeshift cage, doped him up on Benedryl, and tried to mail the ferret to the U.S. Territory.
The Postal Inspector handling the case, David McKinney, believes whoever tried to mail Stamps knew they were up to no good. The return address on the package is an abandoned house, and the sender doesn’t exist.
A local family with 15 other ferrets has adopted Stamps, who is healthy and estimated to be about two years old. Link -via Arbroath
(image credit: US Postal Inspector)
The British Royal Mail service commissioned Studio Dempsey to create first class stamps with classic albums covers. The covers include albums from Blur, New Order, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, Primal Scream, David Bowie, The Clash, Mike Oldfield, Pink Floyd, and Coldplay -but no Beatles.
The final selection of ten sleeves (which perhaps oddly doesn’t feature one of The Beatles’ album covers) will appear on a set of 10 stamps that will launch on January 7, 2010 – and the stamps will be uniquely shaped, as shown in these images, to accommodate a glimpse of a vinyl disc poking out of each record sleeve.
Link – via babycreativeblog
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(image credit: Smithsonian National Postal Museum)
