A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
I’ve owned a fair few Fisher Space Pens throughout the years. It’s an interesting bit of space memorabilia that’s functional and affordable. It’s an impressive bit of engineering.
As a space nerd, I love the pen. As a pen guy…. There’s better options. The cartridge just doesn’t write as smooth as I like, nor is it a really bold, saturated line. For daily actual writing use, I use a Lamy Safari rollerball or a Pilot B2P.
They're small, but when you open them up, they're full-sized. It fits in my knockoff Ridge wallet. I buy blue cartridges because I hate signing stuff in black.
10/10 for me, but it's all about utility for me.
Rite In The Rain pens are awesome too. Ultralight for backpacking.
also, fucking pencil shavings?
pencil shavings contain graphite (great for getting into shit and shorting shit out) and thin paper (think, kindling)
did the russians gnaw the fucking things sharp? no? idiots...
Grease pencil, you pull a tab and the things unrolls.
nice alternative, and that'd make great sense except... now you have a bunch of long strings of grease covered paper floating about the cabin.
so no. no thanks.
No I mean that's literally what they were using not graphite.
having used grease pencils before, no thanks, due to the remainder of greasy paper you unwind as you use it.
They aren't suggesting using a grease pencil as a better alternative to a graphite pencil, they are saying that the Russian cosmonauts used grease pencils before moving to a pressurized pen.
You don't need to say "no thanks" to it, no one is suggesting using it. The first comment was ambiguous, but your response to this one is just baffling.
no thanks.
I'm pretty sure astronauts are trained on the usage of garbage receptacles.
side note, mechanical grease pencils are literally some of the best goddamn marking tools ever invented by humans, and the fact that we’ve moved away from them as a standard in favor of sharpie-style disposible markers is APPALLING.
there’s myriad “industrial” markers you can buy, which are generally especially well suited to one specific inclement situation. low temp markers won’t freeze, but will often bleed and feather. oil-proof markers will write on a slippery surface, but will smear and take ages to dry proper (RIP lefties). paint markers can write on anything, but only as long as the surface doesn’t immediately destroy your nib and prevent future wicking.
grease pencils (quality ones at least) go down like a crayon, stick to ANYTHING, and generally won’t smear at all. obviously no one should be writing their thesis with one, but they can do pretty much everything we use permanent markers for. they’re also cheaper and produce far less waste.
as far as i can tell the biggest downside is there’s a smaller profit margin for the manufacturers.
Im a fan of grease pencils yeah, especially for marking on windows. I'm a mechanic and sometimes I just do the diag notes on the cars Windows or if laziness.
I love my grease pencils and use them for writing kitchen leftover contents on glass and ceramic dishes. This works like a dream when the dish is warm and just fine when the dish is room temperature.
However, it's nearly impossible to write on cold or frozen dishes. In my old lab when was young and stupid, I'd hold the spot I wanted to write on over a flame for a few seconds (lucky I never exploded a liter of expensive research water and glass on myself, or worse). Now I do my best with vigorously rubbing the spot with a kitchen towel for a few seconds, but still usually get a barely readable mark.
Aside from figuring out how to etch those little white squares that lab glassware has onto my kitchen dishes, anyone have any ideas around this?
maybe a difference in the actual composition of the grease? i was writing on polished stainless pots at below freezing temps, but i was ALSO using new-old-stock refills bc the current standard size is it’s own proprietary can of worms lol
Huh. Never occurred to me they likely come in different compositions for different uses.
also you can etch those lil white squares surprisingly easily with commercially available glass etching creams, my mom used to fuck around with em a lot in like the 90’s i think.
oh god oh fuck what have you done do you understand how many niche DIY toolkits I have now I'm forced to add another
edit: oh wait it's just one bottle. what's one more bottle of engineering goo? 🫠
Think of how revolutionary crayola twistables would have been for NASA?
So they could have infinite chunks of broken crayan floating around them. I can never not break those no matter how lite I use rhem
You're the kid I stopped sharing my colours with.
Oh shit wassup
The air filters would capture it eventually. It's not like the ISS has dead air.
You're assuming I wouldn't try to eat them all like floating packman
Well, then the problem would be solved anyways!
Fair enough. But I just needed someone else to have the imagery I had.
Also you DON'T FUCKING WANT GRAPHITE DUST FLOATING AROUND IN ZERO G
Why not? I'm not well versed in the theme. Would it be flammable?
edit: just saw another post mentioning this: lack of gravity, enter floating in the electronic, causing short circuits as main risk.
Also your body doesn't do a good job of breaking it down either. Id imagine that in your lungs would suck.
I have a piece of graphite in my leg from 7th grade still. I'm 33.
I have a graphite stain in my palm from 8th grade and I'm 40.
Left handed or did you get stabbed too?
Got stabbed by a friend at lunch.
The theme is to pretend recently-learned information was available half a century ago, and also to ignorantly inflate its importance. It turns out exposure to graphite dust in large concentrations can cause respiratory problems (like any kind of dust), but the amount of graphite emitted into the air by pencil use is insignificant, even in zero gravity.
For decades these pens have been brought up to criticize wasteful spending, inaccurately. Fisher Price didn't even develop the pens for NASA, they were just a sales gimmick, and NASA didn't spend thousands of dollars each on them, they just bought them. Space flight was getting a lot of publicity back then, so products that related themselves to space were popular, like Space Food Sticks - tootsie-rollish snacks supposedly full of protein and nourishment. To me they tasted too much like raw flour. "Energy" of course was a euphemism for sugar.
I got big into pens for a bit before settling on my edc one-size-fits-most pen. During my travels, I saw that the Fisher Space pens are still highly regarded as great writers even for us grounded folk. Yeah, there's better, but for the size and build quality they're great options. I went with the Ti Arto by Big Idea Design instead. Just so I could use basically any pen cartridges (except cheap bic roller ball).
Huh, the Arto used to be 70usd. I'd say not worth anymore. I got the black one and the paint has already chipped plus the clip is not titanium unless you buy an expensive "premium" clip.
