Why Michael Abandoned Ink For Mechanical Pencils

22:10I feel like I'm having an out-of-body experience, everybody.

22:13Michael Stevens:I could work at a mechanical pencil store and never make a sale because I won't just stop. I won't stop talking. Right. Tell me what it was called again. The Kuru Toga Dive. Okay. Are you familiar with the Kuru Toga mechanism? I have a feeling I'm about to be. You're about to find out. So here's, honestly, I don't like it, but it's changed a lot of people's lives. So imagine that this is the lead in the pencil. As you're writing, what happens is that it hits the page and you draw and you pick it up and you draw another letter and blah, blah, blah. And it gets cut obliquely. So it actually becomes thicker.

22:46Michael Stevens:And so your lines wind up being thicker and thicker as you draw because you're the lead is not wearing down evenly. It doesn't work. If you wrote straight up and down, the lead would hit the page and it would just get shorter. But because you write it in an angle, it's getting cut this way and you wind up with a much larger surface area at the tip. Kuru Toga fixes that by having a little mechanism inside such that each time the lead touches the paper, the lead is actually rotated a little bit. So you draw, lift, and it comes up and then you go back down and it keeps going around and around. So the lead, that tiny 0.5 millimeter lead is actually being sharpened by being used.

23:29Michael Stevens:Amazing. That is pretty good. That's pretty amazing. That's pretty good. For me, it's too much movement. I don't want to feel the lead moving a little bit every time. And can you feel it? You can feel it. And I'm a guy who wants that scratch. I want to be doing old school cuneiform like on clay, on stone type work. I don't want this like delicate little, hello, I'm doing a little dance for you. Right. Right. But Kuru Togo Dive has that mechanism and a cap. The Pentel Carry has a cap and it's just a more standard one. This looks like a fountain pen from afar. Check it out. What's cool is that when you put the cap on the back and you push it all the way in, the lead can still be advanced, even though you've put a cap on the back of it.

24:15Michael Stevens:The button goes through. I think the feeling of this is like this is sort of like what I would describe as a lady pen. You know, I do feel ladylike with it, especially the sparkliness, the the shininess. I think Montblanc actually literally make lady sized pens for smaller hands. I'm not actually joking. My hands are pretty small. Your hands, though, they are absolutely ginormous. Famously ginormous. I'm kidding. There was once where you were like hiding your hands because you were showing something up close to the camera and thought it made them look too big. Now that also has like three or four B lead in it.

24:55Michael Stevens:What's this one called again? That's called the Pentel Carry. It's one of the oldest continuously manufactured mechanical pencils. But you can buy that today for about six bucks. Yeah, I don't like it as much. It's too small. It's too small. Fair enough. I do appreciate that it's got a cap so I can throw it in my pocket, walk around, never worry about the pen getting damaged. Yeah. This one, I feel like, you know, it could sort of double up as a screwdriver. Yes. So that's the right in the rain 1.3 millimeter pencil. That's really bad. And it is for like work outdoors. It's for you're doing construction.

25:29Michael Stevens:You need to draw lines on boards and whatnot. That's why it has thick, soft lead. Not to gender your pencils, but this one feels very manly. It's a manly pencil. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so the last thing I'll say is that I reached the end of my journey by discovering that you can get lead that's even thinner than the 0.3 millimeter you tried with the graph gear. Now, you might actually enjoy these because when lead gets that thin, we're talking a fifth of a millimeter. These look like hairs. They break way too easily. You can't put them in a normal mechanical pencil. They need to have some special protective mechanism.

26:10Michael Stevens:And so here, I'll give you this one first. This is called the Pentel Orens, and they're the only people at the moment who sell a 0.2 millimeter lead pencil. Now, when you look at it, you won't see any lead sticking out. And that's because the pipe protects the lead and it's got a little bevel on it so that when it touches paper, it moves up a little and exposes the lead. See how thin that is? This is incredibly thin. What's this one called again? That's called the Pentel Orens, and it has the ability to hold the thinnest mechanical pencil leads being made right now. And because it protects it so well, you can put in very soft lead.

26:50Michael Stevens:So you are right now writing with a fifth of a millimeter thick lead that's 2B softness. So it's quite dark compared to the stuff at the top, the Graphgear 500. The Graphgear's H lead looks like gray. It does. It does. Even though it's incredibly thin, you're just putting way more. Way more graphite atoms per stroke, right? This is the same pencil, but with a metal grip. And so that's been my go-to. And I think I'm kind of done. It's got a little bit of a different weight distribution. It's a little bit heavier. Now, Pentel also makes an advanced version of the Orens called the Orens Nero. and it automatically shoots more lead out so you don't have to push the button.

27:38Michael Stevens:I don't like it. I think a lot of people will agree that the mechanism that moves lead out is too sensitive. So when you use the eraser on the pencil, it shoots more lead out and you have to keep fixing it every time you erase. This one's your absolute favorite. That's my favorite. How much actually are these? My favorite pencil, that Metal Grip Pentel Orens, that was$9. Oh. Well,$9.90, so 10 bucks. How about the one that looks like a screwdriver? That one was more. That was like$17, I think. Okay. I mean, look, I'll be honest with you. Before we started, I was quite jealous of the number of options that you had here to show me because I was like, well, he's really invested here.

28:19Knowing that my fountain pen collection is not as extensive as yours. These are substantially cheaper than fountain pens.

28:26Michael Stevens:You can spend more money if you want. Like there are there are Pentel Orenses with like newfangled metal grips that will cost you like 23 bucks. I mean, that's a lot more than a wooden pencil. However, it's worth it in the long run. So I think today when I walk around, I carry the Pentel carry and I also carry the Pentel Orens. If you hold down the button, you can push the pipe all the way in. Oh, so it doesn't stab you. So it doesn't stab you and it also doesn't get bent. So this is like, you know, nice and protected. And so I keep this in my pocket and this one. And so if I need to write something, I'll use this.

29:11Michael Stevens:But because it's a bit weird, you have to like just push once and then don't look for lead coming out. I don't want another person to have to use it. They'll think it's annoying and they'll think that I'm being difficult and fancy. I'll just give them this non-fancy one. I give them this one because this works like you would expect a mechanical pencil to work. And that works even if they've got lady hands. Even with the lady hands. This won't overwhelm them. You know. Yeah. So I love it. And this is the one I've been like, I just love fidgeting with it, too. It's got like the perfect size for my hands to just kind of have some fun with.

29:42Yeah. Thank you for that tour. That was, I think that that will have, what I'm interested in looking at is the retention statistics on this episode to see how much we split our audience.

29:52Michael Stevens:It's going to be one of those rare episodes where viewership goes up the longer. it lasts like people are inexplicably like showing up their friends are saying you have to join from where did you come from yeah yeah well if you are still watching you're a hardcore pencil fan like michael you need to sign this as well i know i realized i wasn't writing because i mean the microphone's in the way of the table what did you write down i just wrote down what the name of the pens were what i'm going to do is i'm going to put my own handwriting on here with all the pencils and when we come back we're going to get to your questions

30:34Michael Stevens:I live 7 ,636 kilometers away from Hannah, so we rarely get to see each other in person. That's what makes this such genuinely thrilling news for us. And maybe for you too. Because for the first time ever, you can see both of us live on stage at Goalhanger's inaugural festival. It's going to be amazing to be able to reach through the screen and meet those of you who watch and listen to the show in the flesh. The Rest Is Fest runs from the 4th to the 6th of September at London's South Bank Center. General sale goes live on the 2nd of June at 10 a.m. So get some tickets and get ready for some fun.

31:14Michael Stevens:Some serious fun. Go to southbankcenter.co.uk to find out more.

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32:12Michael Stevens:The first stage of the trial starts this year, focusing on people at higher risk. It shows what long-term research makes possible. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit CancerResearchUK.org forward slash the rest is science. Did you know about one in three people with plaque psoriasis may also develop psoriatic arthritis, which causes joint pain, stiffness and swelling? Does this sound like you? Listen to what it sounds like to be a million miles away.

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33:38okay welcome back we have uh we've got some questions from you guys first up we've got a question from justin who asks what happens to the bubbles inside a soft drink when you open up a bottle on the international space station on earth they float upwards seemingly against gravity

33:55Michael Stevens:true what happens in space when there is no up it's funny i was just watching a british astronomer astronomer a british astronaut was it tim peak i don't know was he ginger i don't remember i don't see there is only one this country are so obsessed with hair color like hair color and class right yeah where i grew up you were a redhead and that was like what it was and here it's all like gingers and the whole like they don't have souls and i'm like what the heck excuse me that was on south park that is very much i know it's an american but i first heard about it from them and it was like out of nowhere my whole childhood i'd never heard that gingers were like outcasts worthy of derision and outcasts yeah but you know you know why it's because i mean i i have not fact-checked this to be absolutely clear okay good but it's uh we had like invaders from you know like the French and the Nordics and then all the Celts were like pushed to the outer borders so like up in Scotland and over in Ireland and so they're really considered the sort of savages like they're the they're more indigenous to these isles maybe not more indigenous because I think there were you know Europeans floating around the whole time and when did this isle become an isle etc right um but yeah the sort of the celtic blood was considered sort of savages the like who then the normans the yeah yeah i'm not just saying that that bit is absolutely completely true by the way that um for example there was lots of stuff during the irish famine where in britain they were sort of like well it's because they're just just a bit lazy you know so that's why gingers were considered genuinely subhuman you know in iceland when they um we've gotten to gingers now again just it seeks out the edges um but yeah the ginger people who came from ireland that the uh the viking stopped off in ireland on the way to iceland picked up loads of women which you can see in the dna of uh of modern icelandic people that it was females from island uh anyway when they were like had churches and stuff all of the ginger people had to sit at the back really yeah yeah yeah it's fun that we can all have a little bit of fun uh insulting gingers and it's like safer safer than insulting other people because we don't really mean it like i guess to me it just never felt like it was real it was like a south park joke like i thought they I thought they'd made that up until I met people from England, from Britain, and they were just like, oh, no, like.

36:32Michael Stevens:Oh, it's real. It's real. Yeah, I think it's less real than it used to be. OK. I think like in the 80s, it was much more real than it is now. Yeah. Anyway, but that's why Tim Peake's the ginger guy. I just I don't remember because, yeah, again, I see everyone as a human. OK. The point is, though, that he had a big blob of water there in the weightless International Space Station and he stuck an Alka-Seltzer tablet, a fizzy tablet in it. And the bubbles form, but they don't go up. Instead, they just go around. They just expand. They just expand. So on the International Space Station, a can of carbonated liquid will expand.

37:11Michael Stevens:And it'll be like a kind of a foamy mess, but it's going to all come out as that pressure change causes the gas to come out of solution. And now it's going to be probably quite quick. I don't know if they've actually done this. I haven't seen if they've done it on the ISS. It would make a mess. I think it would be like if you'd shaken it up and opened it. And then just the explosion. But this is what's happening inside the human body. I mean, because gases are released when you're digesting. And on Earth, you know, it's fine. And it's sort of like it kind of comes up to the top and you end up burping out.

37:43But on the ISS, it's like incredibly uncomfortable, apparently, the bloating that you end up getting. They talk about having like sort of wet burps where it's kind of all coming out of the edges, which is a bit disgusting.

37:54Michael Stevens:Yeah, it makes you thankful for gravity keeping things down. Right, exactly. So, yeah, there you go. There's your answer with a little bit of ginger stuff thrown in. Okay, here's a question for you, Michael. Okay, Adam asks, I've been reading Bill Bryson off the back of Michael's recommendation, and it had me wondering, if you could be alive in any era of science, when would it be? Wow. Can it be in the future? Sure. Yeah, I mean, I just... He hasn't stipulated, so I think you can do whatever you like. I think there's so many cool historical eras of science, but I feel like I'd be there and I'd be a little bit like, oh, we've moved past this, but also I can't really explain to you how we did, so I'm of no use.

38:35Michael Stevens:But I think that it'd be cool to go. I don't know how far, though. I'd like to go to where we've paradigm shifted away from our current thinking where someone's someone's come along and said, guys, all this discussion of quantum electrodynamics and cosmology at really big scales, like all of that is actually part of something else. kind of like what Einstein did and Copernicus did. I want to be around when there's that new way of looking at reality where we go, oh, of course. Yeah. Of course, Newtonian physics and Einsteinian physics are all just approximations still, and there's still something else there.

39:25Michael Stevens:And that's what's going to push us over the edge to faster than light travel, creating wormholes stuff like that yeah i hear you i hear you i sort of think that there's i don't know i think if you look back through the history of science you get these eras where i don't know i think that a lot of the really simple stuff to discover has sort of maybe already happened you know i don't think that there's an equation of biology in the same way there's an equation of e equals mc squared i think that the systems that we are that are now at the frontier are so phenomenally complex that it's probably beyond the human brain to be able to understand the full intricacies of the entire systems all simultaneously yeah um i mean even really you i think even if you go back a hundred years or so it was possible for you as one individual person to pick up on a piece of science and make one breakthrough that actually ended up having this gigantic repercussion.

40:28Yeah, by yourself. By yourself. But I think now we're really in an era where there's like, it just doesn't really happen anymore. You need gigantic teams of people.

40:35Michael Stevens:You need gigantic teams. You need gigantic equipment. You need like neutrino detectors and particle accelerators the size of a country or telescopes that take a decade to build, right? And having big teams of people is exciting in itself, but it also means that you as an individual only ever get to like fully grasp one tiny bit of it you know i like the idea of being able to fully understand literally all of it i just prefer pulling apart things that are mechanical because i can really understand how they're made and how they're designed whereas pulling apart something that's i don't know like a laptop or a smartphone or whatever it's like they're just too complicated for one person yeah right yeah you could be a real renaissance woman if you went back to a time when you could know a bit of everything i think historically, I would like to go back and hang out with Lewinhoek and his microscope.

41:23Michael Stevens:When was that? Like the 1600s? Late 1600s? A little bit later, maybe? 1700s? Let's check it out. Lewinhoek. But he was the one who first saw sperm, right? Yeah, he is. Imagine that. You just get like a little instrument. It's just like, well, what should I put under it next? Famously, Lewin Hook did not invent the microscope, but made some adjustments to make it like 300 times stronger magnification wise. And like scooped out some gunk from his infected tooth and looked at it and saw microorganisms. And he called them animalcules. Like molecules. Yeah, like molecules, but animals. And he was the first human to see a sperm.

42:07Michael Stevens:and he was like convinced because there seemed to be a lot of detail in them. He was convinced that there was an entire little baby person in it. And that this proved the notion of pre-formation. That when life began, every individual that ever would be already existed. And that like my children are in my sperm as little tiny things. And inside them, The boys have some sperm. They're Russian dolls, my friend. It's Russian dolls all the way down. In the shape of a human, this is as well. Then when it goes into the woman, it's like a tiny little human, and then it just gets slightly bigger, slightly bigger.

42:47Michael Stevens:Yeah, and it gets bigger, and the woman's egg provides some kind of, maybe it's a life force, maybe it's just whatever. It turns out that's not true. No. But on the way over here. I think the woman's got a bit more to do with it. They may have a little bit more to do with it. But on the way over here before the show, I finished Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others. And he's got a short story in here. This is all sci-fi. Yeah. Where he imagines a world where pre-formation is true. And the story is set in Victorian times where some scientists have found a way to – I won't give too much away.

43:22Michael Stevens:They found a way to look closer and closer at all these like nested homunculi, little people that are inside the sperm. and they realize that after the next five generations, it doesn't keep going. That the whole human species... It's about to come to an end. It's about to come to an end. Oh, that's a great idea for a story. Because when it formed, however it formed, its creator or nature only gave it whatever, 200 nested generations. And they're like, how are we going to fix this? And I won't tell you how they fix it, but it's a pretty neat story. That's a great story. Yeah, good answer. Good answer.

43:55I think being there at the beginning of the microscope is a really good one. okay last question this is from otis who asks in your opinion what is the most beautiful phenomenon of the cosmos oh now okay on this i think that i mean sure it's like supernovae and stars and blah blah blah blah but i think we're really biased towards vision in all of this um i think that the most beautiful phenomenon i'm gonna go gravitational waves hmm because i think i just think that's really pretty spectacular actually this idea that you can have something like two black holes colliding together and it has these measurable ripples in space time in space time yeah that you can get lasers that are 90 degrees to one another and then measure the difference i mean that is it's also the fact that you know we turned on SETI to listen.

44:51You know, the bias towards vision has always been there, but we turned on SETI to listen, to hear if there was sounds being made by alien civilizations and there was nothing, really. We haven't heard anything. There's no cacophony of sounds. But when LIGO was turned on to look for gravitational waves, it took about, how long was it before they detected the first wave? It was like 48 hours or something, wasn't it? I don't know.

45:15Michael Stevens:It would be really funny if I pretended like, oh, yeah, at most. Hang on one second. It was really quick. Oh, okay. This is interesting. Hmm. So they were supposed to turn it on to do the first official observation on September the 18th. They actually found the first gravitational wave on September the 14th, four days before the original start date, when it was in engineering mode. Wow. How cool is that? Very cool. I mean, what a feeling for you to be like, guys, this is working so well. We're detecting the target and we haven't even started. Yeah. I mean, they literally turned it on and we're like, oh, no, there is one.

45:59Wow. Yeah. That's I think that's really gravitational waves.

46:02Michael Stevens:Right. It's not like a wave in water or it's a wave in whatever it is we are on. The stage that all the matter is set on. Yeah. not a wave in matter, a wave in the thing that we're in and are moving through space and time. I think someday we'll get a better idea of what space time really is. It's such a shame that we can't conceive of things in the fourth dimension. Because the two dimensional analogy is where it's like, oh, it's like you live on a curtain and then the curtain is being rippled. Like, sure. OK, fine. But it just doesn't it's not satisfying. No, because it makes you think of a curtain and how a curtain will will bend and fold into a third dimension.

46:43Michael Stevens:And that doesn't exist for in our minds for a three dimensional space time. So it just winds up becoming like it feels made up and it has to be too mathematical for everyone to really appreciate. Yeah, I agree. I agree. OK, well, that's a bit of a depressing point to leave on. Sorry, guys, the most beautiful phenomenon in space you can't imagine. Which I think is kind of beautiful in its own way. Hey, hey, there you go. There's the philosophical answer. It's always a good answer. Thank you for joining us for this episode of Field Notes. As ever, you can write to us, the rest of science at goalhanger.com.

47:17You can leave comments for us under the videos in whatever app you happen to be accessing this. We read all of them. Thanks for watching, guys. Thank you.

47:37Thank you.