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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the Rest Is Science. I'm Hannah Fry.
- [00:03]
B
And I'm Michael Stevens. Today on this episode of Field Notes, I've brought some very cool things that are important to me, and I'm going to just ask that you indulge me as I nerd out about mechanical pencils.
- [00:17]
A
This is the kind of nerding out I can get behind my fingers.
- [00:21]
B
I try to nerd out to everyone I meet about this. And by everyone I meet, I mean my wife and daughter. My daughter's into it. My wife is just done with all the little things that I need to say about mechanical pencils. But today, I'm gonna get it out of my system.
- [00:35]
A
Okay, do we need to make this into a 2 parter, 3 parter, 7 parter, or.
- [00:39]
B
I think it's gonna be a new podcast.
- [00:44]
A
Yeah. Or we just have a third episode every week, you know, for the rest of time.
- [00:48]
B
Hopefully not. My goal is to get to a point where I'm exactly happy with all the features. It's exactly what I want, and I think I'm gonna have to make it myself.
- [00:57]
A
Okay. All right, well, this is something for us to look forward to. Yeah, let's get on with it.
- [01:09]
C
This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research uk.
- [01:12]
B
Here's something strange. Your DNA contains more ancient viral fragments than genes. The genes that build our cells make up only 2% of our DNA. And for years, that is what scientists focused on. They treated the rest, the ANC viruses and stuff, as junk.
- [01:32]
C
But now we know that that hidden majority, sometimes called the dark genome, influences how our biology works and how diseases like cancer behave.
- [01:42]
B
It's a reminder that progress rarely comes as a single breakthrough. It builds gradually. Cancer Research UK plays a central role in that progress, supporting decades of research into over 200 types of cancer, work that's helped double survival in the UK over the past 50 years.
- [02:02]
C
For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org therestiscience.
- [02:14]
D
For adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matters. Tremphya offers self injection or intravenous infusion from the start. Tremphya is administered as injections under the stage skin or infusions through a vein every four weeks, followed by injections under the skin every four or eight weeks. If your doctor decides that you can self inject Tremphya, proper training is required. Tremphya is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's Disease and adults with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis. Serious allergic reactions, increased risk of infections or lower ability to fight them and liver problems may may occur before treatment. Get checked for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu like symptoms or need a vaccine. Explore what's possible. Ask your doctor about tremphya today. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more or visit
- [03:11]
B
tremphyaradio.com I sold my car in Carvana last night.
- [03:16]
A
Well, that's cool.
- [03:17]
E
No, you don't understand. It went perfectly. Real offer down to the penny. They're picking it up tomorrow. Nothing went wrong.
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B
So what's the problem?
- [03:25]
E
That is the problem. Nothing in my life goes to smoothing. I'm waiting for the catch.
- [03:28]
A
Maybe there's no catch.
- [03:29]
E
That's exactly what a catch would want me to think.
- [03:32]
A
Wow. You need to relax.
- [03:33]
E
I need to knock on wood. Do we have wood? Is this table wood?
- [03:36]
B
I think it's laminate.
- [03:37]
E
Okay. Yeah, that's good. That's close enough.
- [03:39]
B
Car selling without a catch. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up fees may apply. So I used to be a pen guy. Okay. I've got one of those stories, one of those, like conversion stories. I thought pencils were ridiculous. And honestly, it began with my father who did crossword puzzles every day, the New York Times crossword. And you know how they get harder through the week. You know, he got. And he was very adamant that you do it in pen. Confidence, commitment, confidence, commitment, being bold. Pencils were for people who were like, I'm not really sure. Is this the answer? And he's like, grow up. When you commit to a letter, it's the way it is.
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A
Yeah, he's a mad liner.
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B
And I said, that's me. And I made this my mantra. And I got really into pens and I had my favorite types of pens. And the pens said they were archival quality pens, that the ink was waterproof and fade proof. And that was all a lie.
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A
Oh, go on.
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B
So I have a shelf of notebooks of all of my ideas and thoughts and everything. It's not really a journal. Journal's my thoughts. But I fill these notebooks up and I've got them on a shelf and they're all in pen. Well, one day I had like four of them that kind of all together. Had all my thoughts about some topic. Had them in a bag with an energy drink. I was an energy drinker back then. And they were just in like a little plastic bag and the energy drink exploded. In the bag spilled liquid all over the journals and it just washed the ink away. I'd say about two thirds of each journal lost. Like, I can't even tell what it used to say because the ink bled through the pages. And these were moleskin notebooks. I'm gonna name brands, okay. It was a. It was a sugar free rock star energy drink.
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A
Yeah.
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B
That spilled on moleskin notebooks.
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A
That's why you're not allowed to have energy drinks in libraries. You know?
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B
I know now. Yeah, I know now. Human knowledge, it's too fragile. All three of the notebooks, many of the pages are just. I can't even recreate what they were. I quickly dried them, I put them on a heater and they're dry. They're all crispy and wrinkled up now. They don't shut all the way and so much of what was in them is lost. So I looked into it and I found that, like, pencils are just better.
- [06:10]
A
You can't wash them away.
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B
Essentially they don't wash away, but they erase. Here's the thing, they can be erased, but they scratch the paper so much they leave a groove.
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A
You can see it like, it is
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B
a frustrating part of pencils is that when you try to erase, you can always tell there's always a ghost left. Even like a mechanical, actual, physical groove in the paper where it was scratched. But that means it's still there. Rockstar energy drinks can't get rid of that.
- [06:39]
A
Okay, here's a question though, because what about the indelible mark that those notes made on your mind? Right? Because the thing is that if they were really, really good ide, you wouldn't have forgotten them.
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B
Yeah, I haven't forgotten the details. Like I can kind of get a sense of like, oh, this is more stuff about philosophy of the past. But the exact words are important to me. In fact, some of the words, I would scratch them out and I would like choose a different word. I want to see that process. And that's all gone. With pencil, you're talking about carbon on the paper. It's not going to fade again. It can be erased, but there's still something left. Whereas my ink journal's gone.
- [07:19]
A
I mean, because there are some people I remember talking to. I think it's Steven Moffat, the guy who writes, who wrote Sherlock, the one with Benedict Cumberton. Yeah, I remember having. I was having a chat with him once and he was saying that actually a lot of the time he doesn't write down his ideas for the purpose that the act of him managing to remember them or not demonstrates whether it was actually ever a good idea. And he said he was like, having a really amazing idea is like being complimented by God. Right? And like, what, you're just gonna forget being complimented by God?
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B
No, I think that's a little lie he tells himself. I think that there are a lot of good ideas that you still don't remember.
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A
Okay.
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B
Even if they're good. I don't think that's enough to trust that the idea won't go away. And I also think that some bad ideas are worth keeping because of what they can inspire later.
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A
I mean, definitely a pencil and paper. It has this. I mean, you're right. You can't wash it away. I mean, you could burn it away.
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B
Yes, you can. But at that point, you can also burn something written in pen away.
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A
But it's also, you know, like a hard drive. You can't magnet it away.
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B
No, it does.
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A
It is, you know, it's one step below tablet and chisel.
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B
So I haven't even mentioned tablets in the electronic, modern sense. Tablet and chisel would be great. I think there's also something, for me, at least, this is a personal episode for me. I need to get as many different modules in my brain involved to really remember own and move forward with an idea. It can't just be, oh, I thought it, or I typed it, or I voice recorded it. I need the muscles to get into it. And then I really have that idea. So I write and I fill up notebooks of stuff for the fiction that I read. I don't underline stuff because it didn't get indelibly deep enough into my brain. I copy down verbatim.
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A
Is it all longhand? Hang on. Your writing is so tiny.
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B
It has to be tiny in order to.
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A
You've got two lines per line, people.
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B
Two lines per line.
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A
This is like. Do you remember when. Well, do you remember Darwin when he went off on his voyage?
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B
I remember, yeah. Yeah.
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A
You know, I missed it. And he. Paper was really short, so he would write, you know, like this, and then he would also write like that. And then sometimes like that. And if you're really careful, you could. You could. You could actually get all of it. It's incredibly neat. I think pencil's just a bit smudgy though, you know? Gandalf continues, are there evils? There are that may come, for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Mm. You really are writing down the quotes.
- [10:05]
B
I really am writing down the quotes. So obviously that's from When I was reading Lord of the Rings. And look at what kind of notebook I'm using, by the way, it's not that earlier brand I mentioned. It is right in the rain, all weather universal. Oh, so this is waterproof paper. Yeah. So pens actually don't really work on it. I think you can use maybe a permanent marker. But pencils work best. And the same company that makes these waterproof journals also makes pencils that. I mean, a pencil, it can get wet, whatever, you get a new one. But they make waterproof mechanical pencils as well. So that's what I'm using now. And I have. Cause I bike to and from work, and it'll rain on them while they're in my pocket, and they're just like, I don't care. And I'm like, finally, I feel so much stronger. And then the question became, what type of pencil do I use? And my favorite is wooden pencils. All right.
- [11:04]
A
I mean, classic lines.
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B
It's classic. The feel of it is great.
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A
What kind of softeners we talking? Air 2B.
- [11:09]
B
Oh, I'm talking 4H. Yeah. Let me give some background to those of you who might be wondering. So pencil lead comes in different hardnesses and softness, and to distinguish them, they're given names. B is soft. B means black, because soft graphite will just. It'll smear off onto the page so thickly that the line is very black. B for black. In the other direction, you get into the H leads, where H means hard. These are hard. There's less clay in the graphite, so the line that it leaves is much fainter. It's almost more of a silvery color. But it doesn't, of course, wear down as fast. It'll keep a sharp point for longer. There are some 4H's Markart makes a 4H that is actually still quite dark, but it's like you're scratching a needle on the paper. And I love the physicality of, like, I'm doing this to you, you know? But a soft, like M, you're using like a 6B. You're just smudging around paint on the page, basically. It doesn't use.
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A
Yeah, you're massaging the paper into something brilliant, though.
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B
It's too kind. It's too massage y. I need to be scratching and tattooing the page. So problem wooden pencils, you have to sharpen, eventually they get too short. They don't really fit in your hand very well. Also, I became too obsessed with constantly sharpening my pencils. And so I was just. I would Write a sentence. And then halfway through it, I'd be like, I could give this a few more cranks. So I moved on to mechanical pencils. And mechanical pencils, you can get lead of any kind of softness or hardness that you want, but you can also get mechanical pencils with different lead widths, so you can get thinner and thinner leads which simulate a sharper and sharper pencil. Now, where should I begin? Here's what I'll say. For the last few months, my go to pencil has been the GraphGear 500. 0.3 millimeter with H lead. And it's this one right here. And here's what I'm proposing. I think that we should write with these on a sheet of paper. And I don't know if we can do this. The producers can tell me, but we should, like, sign this and write on it and then give it away to some listener.
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A
Auction it for charity.
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B
We should auction it for charity. Can you guys. Can't say no to charitable causes.
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A
Maybe leave your bid in the comments. And frankly, if your bids 1p, like, you're gonna win it. So you may as well start.
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B
May as well start. I don't know if we'll bid that way, but. But, yeah, leave us comments anyway because it's good for engagement.
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A
This also. This feels a bit like. This feels a bit like. You know that scene in American Psycho where they're comparing their business cards?
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B
Yes, it was.
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A
I think it was when you gave me the exact name of this. What was it called again?
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B
The GraphGear 500. Now, that's 0.3 millimeter lead, which is quite thin.
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A
It's very thin.
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B
Usually a mechanical pencil that you might find, like, in an office supply closet is going to be a 0.7 millimeter. That's still very thin. But I love the amount of control I have with such a thin lead. It's almost like it slows me down and it makes me write more legibly.
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A
Oh, I think it's quite scratchy.
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B
You think it's too scratchy? Well, that's H lead as well.
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A
So it's hard for me. I mean, look, it was a continuous experience, right? Like, if you get a really hard pencil, I find it scratchy, but it's sort of. The lead doesn't flow smoothly across the table. It sort of catches almost. But yeah, it is like writing with a needle.
- [14:45]
B
Yes, it is. Okay, so let me give you the opposite. Now, this is a pencil that is known as the Rotring 600. And it is a completely metal body. This is much heavier. This one has a lead indicator on the end, so I can actually dial in which kind of lead I've put in it, so you don't have to forget. Yeah. And it's 0.5 millimeter lead, so this is thicker. Also, this is incredibly soft, this pencil. Let me just make sure it's working before I hand it to you, because some of the leads have broken inside.
- [15:18]
A
I don't actually know what lead is made from because it's obviously not lead.
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B
It's not made from lead, the metal. Good question. It's made from graphite, which is a form of carbon, an allotrope of carbon, just like a diamond, but the atoms are arranged differently. But there are other things added to it to make it either stronger or softer. Like, I think pure graphite would be extremely soft. That would be, like, a thing that you would. It's like a piece of chalk, and you would be really putting down a lot. Pure graphite, I think, would be too. A little too hard. But you can add, like, clay or something to it to make it soft enough that it's smooth.
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A
Cause if you get pure graphite and you rub it, I mean, you can basically get down to, like, incredibly thin layers of graphite.
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B
That's right. That's right. Okay, so when it comes to. Again, just to give you context, please. Pencil leads range from B to h. And the number before the letter is a degree of blackness or hardness. So, like, a 6B is much softer than a 2B. The number 2 pencil that we use in school is right in the middle. It's an hb. So it's a hard black. It's right in the middle. If you want to get any softer, you're gonna move into the 2B. 3B, 4B. Any harder, you're gonna be moving towards actually F. F comes first. F is very close to a number two first. No, F is for fine because it's a little harder than a number two pencil so that it keeps a fine point longer. After that in hardness is the pure h. And then 2h, 3h, 4h, and so on.
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A
What does it go up to?
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B
The biggest H I've ever seen is only 4h. But the biggest B I've seen is, like, 12b.
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A
Whoa. Yeah.
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B
And that stuff is goop, like writing with a cloud. It's like writing with an oil slick. All right, so here, try the rotring 600. And this has 4B lead in it.
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A
Okay.
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B
That's what I use for underlining in nonfiction books.
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A
See, this is more My thing.
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B
You love that.
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A
I like that a lot.
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B
Yeah.
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A
I didn't know we were doing this day, otherwise I would have brought in my fountain pen collection.
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B
Well, we should do fountain pens because
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A
it's honestly, I am as nerdy about fountain pens as you are about mechanical pencils. And the thing that I like in a fountain pen is what's known as a wet noodle.
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B
See, I don't even know what that means. This is why we need to do this episode, because I don't know fountain pens at all.
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A
Oh, fountain. Oh, the delight. I want to be like a drawing with the sloshiest pen nib that exists.
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B
Interesting.
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A
I want to be pouring ink onto that paper. I want the paper to be like a sponge, like soaking it up.
- [18:00]
B
That's so great. I love this personal side of writing implements because my opinions that are being expressed today are mine. That might not work for you.
- [18:10]
A
What's interesting, though, is that my reasoning is exactly the same as yours, which is that I like the sloshiest pens because it makes me slow down.
- [18:19]
B
Oh, interesting. They make me speed up.
- [18:21]
A
Do they?
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B
Cause it's just too much of an amusement park ride.
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A
Whoa, whoa.
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B
I need a surgical instrument where I'm like, I'm just delicately slicing into the brain as I copy things down or as I write down my thoughts. Otherwise I can't read them later because it's too sloppy.
- [18:37]
A
I think you're right. It is a bit like an amusement park ride, but it's sort of like it makes me really take care over the beautiful shape of the letters, you know?
- [18:45]
B
So let's keep going. This is gonna become a three hour long episode, which is fine. It's the way it's gonna be. Everybody now, you'll notice that those two pencils you've used are drafting pencils. They have really sharp points on them. And the lead comes out of what's called a lead pipe that's very long. And that's so that you can use thin leads, but also so that when you're using a ruler or a stencil, they fit in and the sides of the pencil don't get in the way. Problem with having a long lead pipe is that it's fragile. I mean, this thing is so thin, if you drop the pencil, that lead pipe gets bent. Lead's not gonna come out of it again.
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A
You've broken your pencil.
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B
You've broken it. And it can be very difficult to fix. I dropped the rotring 600 on the third day that I had it, and that lead pipe got Bent. And I had to bend it back, and I think I got it. It works. Now it works again. But there's no cap. There's no way to protect it. That's how it is. You put this in a pocket, you're gonna reach in and stab yourself on
- [19:48]
A
that like a hypodermic needle.
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B
It's gonna rip into fabric, and it's gonna bend itself again. So I have to use these little protective caps which fit on these pencils. And that's how I carry it in my bag.
- [19:59]
A
Wait, where do you get the protective caps from?
- [20:01]
B
I got these at a craft store in London, actually. I just. I just.
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A
But it's not a branded one. It's like. It's just a generic thing.
- [20:07]
B
It's a generic little thing. It's like a piece of aluminum that's formed into a cap with a little slit on it so it can expand and then tightly hold onto whatever you shove in there.
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A
It looks a little like a bullet.
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B
It looks a little bit like a bullet shape. That's right. And it's curved here. And so it's protecting. You can use these on wooden pencils to protect the lead, but on this, it's protecting the pipe of the mechanical pencil. Now, here's what I want to say. I want to show you. Well, I want to show you 12 more things.
- [20:35]
A
Just kidding.
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B
But it's close to 12, so I do think you might love this. Now, this is right in the rains, mechanical pencil. And it uses lead that is 1.2 millimeters thick.
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A
Whoa. Fat boy.
- [20:49]
B
It's a fat boy. And this came with 2B lead. And I'm sorry to say, knowing that you now like the soft ones, I've replaced it with 2h lead.
- [20:58]
A
Okay.
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B
That's still a lot because I wanted it to hold a sharp point. So if you look, it's pretty sharp. And that's because I've sharpened it using a special sharpener that can sharpen mechanical pencil lead.
- [21:06]
A
Okay, now try that one was called.
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B
That's called the. Right in the rain. 1.2 millimeter. What do you think?
- [21:16]
A
I prefer it to the old scratchy boy. Got it. Yeah.
- [21:20]
B
Well, and look how much darker your writing is.
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A
It also feels nice to touch.
- [21:24]
B
It's got a really, really nice weight to it. And the best eraser ever invented in human history. Try that eraser out.
- [21:35]
A
Oh, that is. That is actually quite good.
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B
That's really good.
- [21:39]
A
You know, I once actually, I was reading the Japanese stationary awards, which I. Which is the kind of thing that I do, and there was a new eraser which won. Or clean sweep, which is quite nice to imagine an eraser getting a clean sweep.
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B
Clean sweep.
- [21:57]
A
But I think it rivals this.
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B
Okay, so I haven't tried every eraser. I shouldn't say that this is a very good eraser. It's the best eraser I've ever experienced.
- [22:06]
A
Yeah.
- [22:06]
B
That's why the perfect mechanical pencil for me is going to be Frankenstein. Out of all these. It's going to be the things. It's going to be the eraser from right in the rains mechanical pencil. It's going to be like the form factor of the graph gear 500 with a protected lead pipe. So watch this. How do you protect the lead pipe? Well, one way to do it is to have a cap that actually comes with the pencil on the market. Right now there are only two mechanical pencils that that are capped. One is the Kuru Toga Dive, which is like $120 if you wanted.
- [22:43]
A
I feel like I'm having an out of body experience. Everybody.
- [22:47]
B
I could work at a mechanical pencil store and never make a sale because I won't just stop. I won't stop talking.
- [22:52]
A
Right. Tell me what it was called again.
- [22:53]
B
The Kuru Toga Dive.
- [22:55]
A
Okay.
- [22:56]
B
Are you familiar with the kuru toga mechanism?
- [22:58]
A
I have a feeling I'm about to be.
- [22:59]
B
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. And so your lines wind up being thicker and thicker as you draw because
- [23:25]
A
the lead is not wearing down evenly across the.
- [23:27]
B
It doesn't. If you rope 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.
- [24:02]
A
Amazing. That is pretty good.
- [24:05]
B
That's pretty amazing.
- [24:06]
A
That's pretty good.
- [24:06]
B
For me, it's too much movement. I don't want to feel the lead moving a little bit more.
- [24:11]
A
You can feel it.
- [24:12]
B
You can feel it. And I'm a guy who wants that scratch. I want to be doing old school cuneiform, like enclay on stone type work. I don't want this, like delicate little. Hello, I'm doing a little dance for you. Right. But Kurotogo dive has that mechanism and a cap. The Pintel Carry has a cap. And it's just a more standard one.
- [24:35]
A
This looks like a fountain pen from afar.
- [24:37]
B
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, the button goes through.
- [24:50]
A
I think the feeling of this is like. This is sort of like what I would describe as a. As a lady pen.
- [24:56]
B
You know, I do feel ladylike with it, especially the sparkliness, the shininess.
- [25:02]
A
I think Montblanc actually literally make lady sized pens for smaller hands. I'm not actually joking.
- [25:10]
B
My hands are pretty small. Your hands though, they are absolutely Ginormo. Famously. Ginormo.
- [25:17]
A
Ginormo.
- [25:18]
B
I'm kidding. There was once where you were like hiding your hands. Cause you were showing. Showing something up close to the camera and thought it made him look too big. Now that also has like 3 or 4B lead in it.
- [25:29]
A
What's this one called again?
- [25:30]
B
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.
- [25:41]
A
Yeah, I don't like it as much. It's too small. It's too small. Too small.
- [25:43]
B
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.
- [25:50]
A
Yeah. This one, I feel like, you know, it could sort of double up as a screwdriver if required.
- [25:56]
B
That's the Right in the rain 1.3 millimeter pencil. And it is for, like, work outdoors. It's for. You're doing construction. You need to draw lines on boards and whatnot. That's why it has thick, soft lead.
- [26:07]
A
Not to gender your pencils, but this one feels very manly.
- [26:10]
B
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. 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?
- [27:08]
A
This is incredibly thin. What's this one called again?
- [27:11]
B
That's called the Pentel Orenz. 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. So you are right now writing with a fifth of a millimeter thick lead. That's 2B softness. So it's a quite dark compared to the stuff at the top. The GraphGear 500. The GraphGear's H lead looks like gray.
- [27:37]
A
It does. It does. Even though it's incredibly thin, you're just putting way more.
- [27:42]
B
Way more graphite atoms per stroke. Right. Then 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 Orins called the Orenz Nero. And it automatically shoots more lead out, so you don't have to push the button. 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.
- [28:24]
A
This one's your absolute favorite.
- [28:25]
B
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.
- [28:36]
A
How about the one that looks like a screwdriver?
- [28:38]
B
That one. That one was more. That was like $17, I think.
- [28:43]
A
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 knowing that my fountain pen Collection is not as extensive as yours. These are substantially cheaper than fountain pens.
- [29:00]
B
You can make more money if you want. Like there are Pentel Orenses with like newfangled metal grips that'll cost you like 23 bucks. I mean, that's a lot more than a wooden pencil.
- [29:14]
A
Agree.
- [29:15]
B
However, it's worth it in the long run. So I think, yeah, today when I walk around, I carry the Pentel carry and I also carry the Pintel Orens. If you hold down the button, you can push the pipe all the way in.
- [29:32]
A
Oh. So it doesn't stab you.
- [29:34]
B
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. 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 doing 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.
- [30:01]
A
And that works. Even if they've got lady hands.
- [30:03]
B
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.
- [30:15]
A
Yeah. 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.
- [30:26]
B
It's gonna be one of those rare episodes where viewership goes up the longer it lasts. Like people are inexplicably showing up, their friends are saying, where did you come from?
- [30:37]
A
Where did you come from?
- [30:38]
B
Yeah.
- [30:39]
A
Yeah. Well, if you are still watching, you're a hardcore pencil fan like Michael, you need to sign this as well in order to.
- [30:45]
B
I know. I realized I wasn't writing. Cause I mean, the microphone's in the way of the table. What did you write down?
- [30:51]
A
I just wrote down what the name of the pens were.
- [30:53]
B
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. I live 7,636 kilometers away. From Hanna. 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 Gull Hanger's inaugural festival. It's gonna 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 Centre. General Sale goes live on the 2nd of June at 10am so get some tickets and get ready for some fun, some serious fun. Go to southbankcenter.co.uk to find out more.
- [31:55]
F
This episode is brought to you by attio, the aicrm. Gary here from Goal Hangers. The rest is football. Football moves quickly now. Teams have more data than ever, but the real skill is knowing what actually matters. And it's exactly the same in business. The problem is work gets scattered across platforms. The info is there, but with so much noise, it's easy to drop the ball. That's why Attio is useful. It's an AICRM designed for how teams actually operate today, fast and in sync. By connecting your tools, you get a complete picture of your business. So while others are scrambling for answers, you just ask Attio what you want to know and you get to the right answer faster. When everything's moving quickly, that sort of clarity matters. Ask more from your CRM. Ask Attio Try Attio for free at a t t I o.com goalhanger.
- [33:00]
C
This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research uk.
- [33:03]
B
We often think of beating cancer as treatment, but imagine stopping it before it begins. After years of work, Cancer Research UK scientists are launching a clinical trial of lungvax, the first vaccine designed to prevent lung cancer.
- [33:19]
C
It builds on Tracer X, the world's largest cancer evolution study, which tracked lung cancer cells over many years to uncover the disease's earliest warning signs. Lung Vax is designed to train the immune system to spot these signs early on, destroying faulty cells before cancer develops.
- [33:38]
B
So it's not treatment, but preventative, with the potential to stop lung cancer before it starts. The first stage of the trial starts this year. Focusing on people at higher risk, it
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C
shows what long term research makes possible.
- [33:52]
B
For more information about Cancer Research uk, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org the rest is science.
- [34:11]
A
Okay, welcome back. We have 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 flow upwards, seemingly against gravity. True. What happens in space when there is no up?
- [34:32]
B
It's funny, I was just watching a British astronomer. Astronomer? A British astronaut.
- [34:38]
A
Was it Tim Peake?
- [34:39]
B
I don't know.
- [34:40]
A
Was he ginger?
- [34:41]
B
I don't remember. I don't see.
- [34:43]
A
There is only one.
- [34:43]
B
British yesterday are so obsessed with hair color.
- [34:46]
A
Like hair color and class.
- [34:49]
B
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?
- [34:57]
A
It's cute. Excuse me, that was on South Park. That is very much.
- [35:00]
B
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.
- [35:10]
A
Yeah. But you know why? It's because, I mean, I have not fact checked this to be absolutely clear. So it's okay, good. But it's. 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.
- [35:34]
B
They're more indigenous to these isles.
- [35:37]
A
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, et cetera. Right, but yeah, the sort of. The Celtic blood was considered sort of savages.
- [35:52]
B
The like. Oh, yeah, who? The Normans? The. Yeah, yeah.
- [35:55]
A
I'm not just saying that that bit is absolutely, completely true, by the way, that, 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. We've gotten to gingers now again, just. It seeks out the edges. But yeah, the ginger people who came from Ireland, the Vikings, stopped off in Ireland on the way to Iceland, picked up loads of women, which you can see in the DNA of modern Icelandic people that it was female from Ireland. Anyway, when they had churches and stuff, all of the ginger people had to sit at the back.
- [36:39]
B
Really?
- [36:39]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [36:41]
B
It's fun that we can all have a little bit of fun. Insulting gingers. And it's like, safer.
- [36:50]
A
Safer than insulting other people.
- [36:52]
B
Cause 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. I thought they'd made that up until I met people from England, from Britain, and they were just like, oh, no. Like, oh, it's real. It's real.
- [37:07]
A
Yeah. I think it's less real than it used to be.
- [37:09]
B
Okay.
- [37:09]
A
I think like in the 80s, it was. It was much more real than it was now. Yeah. Anyway, but that's why Tim Peake's the ginger guy.
- [37:15]
B
I just. I don't remember because. Yeah, again, I see everyone as a human. Okay. 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.
- [37:36]
A
They just expand.
- [37:37]
B
They just expand. So it. On the International Space Station, a can of carbonated liquid will expand and it'll be like a kind of a foamy mess, but it's gonna all come out as that pressure change causes the gas to come out of solution. And now it's gonna 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
- [38:04]
A
in just the explosion. But this is what's happening inside the human body. I mean, because gases are released when you're. When you're digesting. And on Earth, you know, it's fine. Sort of like it kind of comes up to the top and you end up burping out. But 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.
- [38:27]
B
Yeah. It makes you thankful for gravity keeping things down.
- [38:31]
A
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?
- [38:48]
B
Wow. Can it be in the future?
- [38:51]
A
Sure, yeah. I mean, I just stipulated. So I think you can do whatever you like.
- [38:54]
B
I Think of so many cool historical eras of science, but I feel like I'd be there and I'd be a little bit like, we've moved past this. But also, I can't really explain to you how we did, so I'm of no use. 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 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. Yeah. When there's that new way of looking at reality where we go, oh, of course, yeah, of course. Newton. Newtonian physics and Einsteinian physics are all just approximations still. And there's still something else there, and that's what's going to push us over the edge to faster than light travel, creating wormholes, stuff like that.
- [40:07]
A
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. I mean, even really, I think even if you go back 100 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 repercussions.
- [41:00]
B
Yeah. By yourself.
- [41:01]
A
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.
- [41:08]
B
You need gigantic teams. You need gigantic equipment like neutrino detectors and particle accelerators the size of a country or telescopes that take a decade to build. Right.
- [41:17]
A
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 to understand it. Yeah.
- [41:44]
B
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 Leeuwenhoek and his microscope. When was that? Like the 1600s? Late 1600s.
- [42:00]
A
Little bit later, maybe 1700s.
- [42:02]
B
Let's check it out.
- [42:03]
A
Leeuwenhoek. But he was the one who first saw sperm, right?
- [42:08]
B
Yeah, he is.
- [42:09]
A
Imagine that you just get like a little instrument. It's just like, well, what should I put under it next?
- [42:15]
B
Famously, Leeuwenhoek did not invent the microscope, but made some adjustments to make it like 300 times stronger, magnification wise, and scooped out some gunk from his infected tooth and looked at it and saw microorganisms, and he called them animalcules.
- [42:34]
A
Like molecules?
- [42:35]
B
Yeah, like molecules, but animals. And he was the first human to see a sperm. 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 preformation.
- [42:54]
A
Absolutely.
- [42:55]
B
That when life began, every individual that ever would be already existed. And that my children are in my sperm as little tiny things, and inside them, the boys have some sperm.
- [43:10]
A
They're Russian dolls, my friend.
- [43:11]
B
It's Russian dolls all the way down
- [43:14]
A
in the shape of a human. This is when it goes into the woman. It's like a tiny little human and then it just gets slightly bigger.
- [43:19]
B
Slightly bigger, 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. But on the way.
- [43:30]
A
But the woman's got a bit more to do with it.
- [43:32]
B
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 youf Life and Others. And he's got a short story in here, this is all sci fi, where he imagines a world where preformation 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. 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
- [44:09]
A
to come to an end.
- [44:10]
B
Is about to come to an end.
- [44:11]
A
That's a great idea.
- [44:12]
B
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 gonna fix this? And I won't tell you how they fix it, but it's a pretty neat story that.
- [44:25]
A
That's a great story. Yeah, good answer. Good answer. I 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? Now, okay, on this, I think that. I mean, sure, there's like, supernovae and stars and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but I think we're really biased towards vision in all of this. 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 1 another and then measure the difference. I mean, that is. It's also the fact that, you know, we turned on SETI to listen. You 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 with. 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?
- [45:47]
B
I don't know. It'd be really funny if I pretended like. Oh, yeah, at most.
- [45:52]
A
Hang on one second. It was really quick. Oh, okay, this is interesting. So they hadn't. They were supposed to turn it on to do the first official observation on September 18th. They actually found the first gravitational wave on September 14th, four days before the original start date, when it was in engineering mode. Wow. How cool is that?
- [46:19]
B
Very cool. 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.
- [46:28]
A
Yeah. I mean, they literally turned it on. And we're like, oh, no, there's one.
- [46:32]
B
Wow.
- [46:32]
A
Yeah, that's. I think that's really cool.
- [46:34]
B
The gravitational waves.
- [46:35]
A
Right.
- [46:35]
B
It's not like a wave in water or in. It's a wave in whatever it is we are on the stage that all the matter is set on. 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.
- [46:56]
A
It's such a shame that we can't conceive of things in the fourth dimension, isn't it? Because the two dimensional analogies where it's like, oh, it's like you live on a curtain and then the curtain is being rippled. Like, sure, okay, fine. But it just doesn't. It's not satisfying.
- [47:10]
B
No. Because it makes you think of a curtain and how a curtain will bend and fold into a third dimension 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.
- [47:29]
A
Yeah, agree, agree. Okay, 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
- [47:38]
B
of beautiful in its own way.
- [47:39]
A
Hey. Hey. There you go. There's the philosophical.
- [47:41]
B
It's always a good answer.
- [47:43]
A
Thank you for joining us for this episode of Field Notes. As ever, you can write to us theresedesignsoldhanger.com you can leave comments for us under the videos in whatever app you happen to be accessing this, we read all of them.
- [47:57]
B
Thanks for watching, guys.
- [47:58]
A
Thank you.
- [48:06]
G
You can't reason with the sun. Trust us, we've tried this summer. It's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute. Columbia's Omnishade technology is engineered to protect you from the sun's harsh rays that can burn and damage your skin. The sun is relentless, but so is our gear. Level up your summer@columbia.com to spend more time outside and less time slathering on aloe lotion. You're welcome. Welcome. Columbia engineered for whatever.
- [48:37]
H
Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Because behind every headline is a bottom line, whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. And when you see the money side, you understand what others mean. Ms. Get the Money side of the story. Subscribe now@bloomberg.com.