As we interpret the few surviving prehistoric carvings and paintings, we gather that humanity’s earliest concern seemed to center on basic needs – and possibly the existence of a deity. The cave paintings found in Europe, depicting animals and stick human figures that hunt them say food and survival in eloquent terms. The oldest are paintings, but there are newer scenes that have been carved; all of them found on the solid-rock walls of caves.

In the course of time, humanity learned to write, and this seems to have led to war and conquest. Or maybe we think so because, until writing came about, there was no simple way of telling about these things. The ancient civilizations' written record focuses on military prowess, deities, and life after death. These timeless questions have come down to us across the multi-millennial gap. Why are we here? Who put us here? What is good? What is evil? What is the meaning of life? How can we secure our established order? Who is our enemy? How rich can we become?

Taking wealth from others is one way of enriching oneself, but that leads to enmity because the loser always wants it back, and thus starts the cycle of war. Making the wealth on your own is slower, and definitely harder. Besides, for best results, business records must be kept. The earliest accounts, dealing with the larger issues, were set in stone – but this was laborious, expensive, and definitely hard to transport. Clay tablets, on the other hand, were inexpensive, easily inscribed, and could be baked for permanence. Also, a carved ring could be used to emboss a signature before baking, as proof that the deal had been “sealed.”

This method worked well until the business grew, and its rapidly multiplying trade records demanded enormous warehouses for safekeeping. They could be quite heavy, too, these tablets, so just taking along the details of a complicated deal demanded many pack animals; not a very flexible arrangement, to be sure. That’s when vellum (the cured skin of sheep) became popular, because it could be rolled up, was easily transported, and also was fairly durable. But it was expensive as well. Although the word vellum resembles the Latin velum (meaning sail, covering, awning, curtain), it is actually derived from the Old French veel (prepared skin), which gave origin to the Middle English velim and the Middle French velin. Following the path of a word’s development from its origins to our present day (its etymology) can be fascinating.

The Egyptians had lots of reeds growing by the banks of the River Nile, called Papyrus, which for thousands of years they used to weave mats, make fans, and fashion baskets. Probably by accident, they discovered that beating them to a pulp and laying this out to dry resulted in a flexible surface on which they could write. Since it was very cheap, it soon proved its worth as a substitute for vellum – provided the record was only needed for a few years.

Our word for it, of course, is paper, derived from the Middle English papir, in turn from the Old French papier, the Latin papyrus, and the Greek papyros [παπυρος). The chain to the past ends there, because we don’t know how the Egyptians called it, but since the last Egyptian dynasty, the descendants of Ptolemy (one of Alexander the Great's generals), were Greek, we reason that the Greeks, being eminently practical people, must have lifted the word from Egypt just as they found it. (As the Spanish lifted chocolate from the Aztecs' Nahuatl word chocolatl.)

Paper has reigned supreme until recently, and thanks to paper, printing, and books the arts and sciences have flourished. Through paper, the ability to transfer knowledge by using printed words became a basic building block of civilization. And words became abundant, descriptive, with a rich selection of meanings attached to them. Thus thought was born. With thought came invention. And with invention, progress. Finally, the machines arrived.

The first computer was a card-reading apparatus. Soon the computer got smaller, more powerful, and far more complicated, doing away with cards altogether. Now there was a set of symbols that one could use to address the computer and make it do useful things, not just add and subtract. We called those symbols a computer language, as if the computer were able to understand a language at all. Well, computers do, even if not quite in the same way as human beings do.

Computers themselves became streamlined, shed tubes and gained transistors, transistors shrank and got stuck on printed circuits, and eventually were embedded inside ever-smaller computer chips. Recently, IBM unveiled a computer chip into which they’d manage to squeeze two billion transistors. (My first transistor radio had only seven transistors, and they were large as peas.) Here's the irony. Humanity started out writing on rock. After a very long time, rocks turn to sand, and the sand can be used to make silicon, which is the current medium into which transistors are embedded. Moreover, the primitive peanut-sized transistors that replaced those old tubes large as half bananas are now, vastly shrunken, measured almost in the number of atoms they contain. Yes, they are getting that small. So small, in fact, that their working is beginning to escape the rules of electricity and pushing into the realm of quantum physics.

Once, news spread around the world through the universal medium of newsprint, printed paper, the modern descendant of papyrus. And along came a few atoms and the Internet, which are killing the newspapers, to the point that the latter are quickly re-inventing themselves as online entities. Just like this newsletter.

There is a critical need to always follow this regulation, especially when performing Air Force assigned missions (AFAMs), to ensure that media inquiries are handled properly and interviews are conducted in a professional manner. CAP MIOs are trained and certified to carry out such duties, and only they are authorized to do so.

With this in mind, please ensure that when an AFAM is conducted, all members in your region and wing follow procedures as outlined in CAPR 190-1. Also, please remind all your members that all contact with the news media regarding specific missions and other incidents (especially when possible fatalities are involved) "must be made by a corporate officer, Incident Commander, or PAO/MIO ONLY." (Read PDF version.)

Col Joe R. Smith, Texas Wing Commander

This is a superb media interview, and a superb job by TX Wing on the mission. The find was made by a CAP observer riding in a Texas Dep’t of Public Safety helicopter. TX Wing does a great job with interagency operations.

Here is the link directly to the story http://www.keyetv.com/mediacenter/local.aspx?videoid=17793@keye.dayport.com&navCatId=5

Joe  - please pass my thanks on to Texas Wing for a job well done on this mission. If you haven’t already, please be sure NHQ/PA knows about the coverage. – JJ

Our beloved Chaplain (Maj) Ron Whitt has accepted the position of Texas Wing Chaplain, which had been briefly vacant as a result of Chaplain (Lt Col) Nancy Smalley's acceptance of her new post at Southwest Region. Rather than abandoning Group III, Ch. Whitt has now embraced all of Texas Wing. A larger flock is his.

So for this month, since a replacement for Ch. Whitt has not been found, I've selected an article addressing the bringing of spiritual comfort to our Air Force personnel, written by Chaplain (Capt.) Robert Johnson, 480th Intelligence Wing – Living with Hope. Some questions take a short time to ask, but a very long time to answer.

Arthur E. Woodgate, Editor

When this newsletter was in its infancy, and I tried to get Lt Col Steve Haney, the Wing Communications Officer, to write an occasional contribution for it, he said to me, "Arthur, have you talked with Toby Buckalew? That's one smart young man, and he's right there in your group. I'm sure he'll work with you."

And so he did. I got to know Toby in a hurry, and so did others. He wrote some great sections, readily accessible to the non-communicator, yet ever so useful and informative. They were so good, in fact, that some of them were picked up by another wing for their own magazine.

Indeed, as predicted, he turned out to be young, and smart too. That's how he got a better job and his time became increasingly scanty. He had to choose and, of course, the winner of his energy was the job itself. Thanks to him, Group III has become far better trained in the "black arts" of radio waves, interference, sun spots, procedure and hardware compatibility. It comes as no surprise to me that he has been chosen this year's top communicator in Texas Wing.

Congratulations, Toby.

Mark you calendars and watch your e-mail InBox for more information – slots will fill up fast!

Take this Group III website, for instance. Not counting the newsletters, at this time it contains 174 HTML pages. There are also 23 issues of the newsletter posted online, from the first one (June, 2006) to the one you're reading right now (April, 2008). On top of that, there are additional pages with restricted access, grouped in the "Members Only" section. This Group III website, by the way, was a Balsem Award winner at last year's PAO Academy, an event that ran concurrently with the National Conference in Atlanta, GA. The judge's comment was, "It does the job."

Look at how information is presented here. An opening screen at the root (the "splash") proclaims ownership, no holds barred. The visitor has the choice of bypassing the splash at any time, or wait. If no action has been taken, after a pause, the visitor is passed through automatically to the first inside page, where a relatively narrow (but legible) top banner establishes ownership of each page.

• Under the banner, each of six buttons in a row opens a major section within the website. Think of the buttons as a row of so many filing cabinets.

• Each open button has its own left sidebar with links. Think of these links as drawers in the cabinet.

• Some of the links, in turn, lead to pages full of links. Think of these grouped links as folders within that drawer.

The images are discreet, often just thumbnails linked to larger images, a stratagem that doesn't force the visitor to wait a long time for the page to display. A page full of large images can take a very long time to load, even with broadband access. Worse yet, with a telephone connection, a slow-loading page can be sheer torture.