Friday, November 13, 2009

A birdbrained solution?



Everything old is new again “V” and Melrose Place are back, calling people rather than emailing is the new way to communicate and people are looking to history for solutions to today’s problems. As part of a school competition to figure out a way to communicate during a disaster when technology is down my nephews turned to the past. Their solution? Homing pigeons-yes, like the ones used in WW1. They even met with a pigeon specialist to inform their decision. Apparently pigeons can not only carry information (on zip drives etc.) and deliver medicine they can also do so in blinding rain, wind and snow and with amazing accuracy. Some countries still rely on pigeons today for daily communication because it’s more reliable than their postal service. Their team came up with a real solution that’s environmentally friendly not to mention cost effective-as pigeons are known to work relatively cheaply. I applaud their school system for bringing real life issues to kids and asking them to provide solutions. I think they’ve come up with a pretty good one. It gets me thinking…what other ways might we recycle and retool old ideas to serve us today-not just as relates to disaster but to anything? Reasonable solutions to whatever is concerning us may very well be right in front of us-and in some cases even pecking at our feet eating popcorn or crackers.
Here’s what Wikipedia had to say about pigeons

1 comment:

Singh said...

It is interesting way to looking present problems solutions in the history. However, it is not always realistic. Homing pigeons way is an inexpensive way rather than mail or email. Through the postal and other services we can confirm the message deliver to the receiver. It is not possible to confirm the message deliver to the receiver through homing pigeon. What is the security of your confidential message? What will affect make on business world if the technology failed and we are looking the homing pigeons alternative of email or mail? It can be used only in some specific situation. Homing pigeons is an interesting subject. It can be most popular in young generation for a limited time period. But it can't be alternative of email or mail. It is not realistic.