playing with dirt

My mother-in-law, Kay, lover of the earth that she is, has a backyard compost barrel. It's a pretty amazing contraption. I like to volunteer to take out our food and yard scraps so I can observe the progress, which is fairly rapid for most materials. After a big discussion about decomposition rates in landfills, we were curious to see how quickly newspaper breaks down into compost. We're betting my father-in-law, John, that the newspaper will be illegible after three weeks. What do you think?