Objective Advantages Of Wooden Pencils

Well. it was requested :)

Let's see. Wooden pencils are easier to chew on than mechanical pencils, and there are all kinds of interesting ways to sharpen them. They have kind of an old-school, working-man's feel about them. They are inexpensive and come in different colors, designs, and logos. They're distributed with golf scorecards more often than mechanical pencils.

You can get a pack of twenty for a buck

This is an old anecdote, whose origin I don't know: Early in the space program, NASA realized that ballpoint pens would not work in zero gravity. They spent lots of money developing high-tech pressurized space pens. The Soviets, faced with the same challenge, used wooden pencils. That story is a largely-false urban legend; and pencils have their own problems See http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp

I never understood that story, why don't biro's work in space - they don't need gravity to make the ink come out, that's surface tension, surely.

Surface tension ensures the ball will pick up any ink next to it, but there needs to be something else to ensure more ink moves down to replace it. Normal pens rely on gravity to move the ink column down, and space pens rely on compressed gas. Without those, the ball is quickly surrounded by a bubble of air and stops writing. Try using a pen upside-down for a while, and you will see.

Question: How did they sharpen them, and what did they do to prevent the shavings from floating around and fouling up the works? they used mechanical pencils

More importantly, the graphite tips are capable of conducting electricity, and thus could short out the electronics. But by stripping off the wood, one has a variable resistor and can make an excellent light dimmer.

Or a carbon arc light, thus providing both illumination and dimming (not to mention tanning and Bat-Signs projected on the clouds). Well...actually you can't use a dimmer with an arc lamp, but hey, who'd want to?

Wood pencils are excellent to chew on while thinking. Ink pens dye your tongue and lips blue and computer keyboards are really awkward to get into your mouth.

they are biodegradeable

This game is childish. I never said that strong-typing and provably-correct are "useless". Strawman. I'm only saying they are not objectively the GoldenHammer you claim unless you prove it net. Thus, your pencil analogy is not a real analogy. It's based on the distorted reality in your convoluted little head. Trolls-be-Gone. --top

Eh? Have you not referred to such things as "MentalMasturbation", "UselessTruths", "bloated", "red e-Tape", etc.? With all that, the pretty obvious conclusion is that you do find them useless. In fact, when you refer to it as a "UselessTruth" you are saying it's useless.

In any case, I found it rather amusing even before I discovered it was linked to you. I propose deleting this section and letting the rest of the page stand.

I'm not sure what you are comparing to what. Topics names? Statements?. It almost sounds like, "since you do stupid shit, I should be allowed to do stupid shit also." And, there is already an "Objective Advantage of [everyday thing]" topic. Why the hell do we need 2? (It wasn't funny the first time either.) --top

re: They spent lots of money developing high-tech pressurized space pens. Actually, PaulFisher?, a private commercial American chemist, invented the SpacePen (which see).