Putting the 'Tech' back in 'Low-Tech'?

Bingo Foo asks: "Have you sharpened a pencil lately? Today was my daughter's first day of first grade. Last night, in preparation, I sharpened some pencils for her. I haven't sharpened a pencil in years, and it was an entirely new experience. It's not made of wood! I'm not talking an inferior substitute, either; it was made of some uber-substance, the way Plato would have envisioned a pencil. What other kinds of technology have changed under our noses while we've been upgrading our kernels? How technological has low-tech become?" I would be interested in knowing who made those pencils and what they were made out of, for one thing.

Comments

Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it's just me, but non-wood pencils have been around for a long time. "Bic" comes to mind. Of course, this question specifically says the funky new pencil was not made out of an inferior product, so I guess "Bic" doesn't count.

A couple of things I've noticed that have changed:
a) table tennis balls - they don't bust as easily and a stinky yellow gas doesn't come out of them anymore when they do
b) light bulbs - they last longer. nuf zed.
c) the public's attention span - no explanation required

Re:Hmm

[grammar nazi]

Instead of a wiring harness on new Ford automobiles, they have a little Token Ring Network.

When you turn on your headlights, the switch doesn't complete a circuit between your battery, the switch, and the bulb. Instead, your console sends out packets telling the lights to turn on and the lights will recieve the packets and then turn themselves on.

Gauges don't measure a voltage to display fuel/oil/foo. Instead, they have little servo-controllers in them that automatically matches up with the levels that the various sensors send out.

Sawdust?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know exactly what you may be talking about, it's been years myself since I set eyes on a pencil. But all *my* pencils in high school (about 5 years ago) were made of glue + sawdust.

While technically still wood, it really _does_ _not_ look like wood until you start taking it apart, or do some research on it. :-P

Of course, I'd heard strange stories of some weird plastic type of pencil, and of course there's the cheap rubber versions.. (inferior imo)

Re:Sawdust?

[Tower]

Yeah, there were the particle-board pencils (that's what we called 'em - very solid, but didn't sharpen as well as 'real' ones), funky rubberish pencils (no good for anything... pencilwars, writing, sharpening... they just sucked). There was a superior pencil, of course... the Dixon Ticonderoga - real wood, a good thwacka sound, good leads, erasers that didn't just smear the lead and leave an orange/red mark on the paper... those were pencils.

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Light bulbs

[shippo]

There are a few light bulbs in existance, still working, from around 1910. The reason why these have lasted so long is that *ALL* (or nearly all) the air has been pumped out.

More recent light bulbs only have most of the air removed, allowing the fillament to oxidise, causing it to fail. The brand of lightbulb sold at my local supermarket seem to have had very little air removed at all, judging by their lifetime.

Re:Light bulbs

[bluGill]

Those old light bulbs are still working because they don't operate as bright. Put a modern light bulb on a dimmer set to just barely glow and it will last 100 years too. (assuming no earthquakes or other outside forces)

[OT] Cajun

[tooth]

I have been thinking about placing a linux PC in the trunk of my car, and setting up a voice recognition mp3 player. with more then a enough space for a few weeks of music. I can't remember the Web page with the program

Try this: http://cajun.sourceforge.net/

I don't know about voice recognition, but it should get you going in the right direction. I've been intending to put a mp3 player in my car too, but I'm having problems with power (I don't want to use an inverter).

Planned obsolescence?

[Pseudonymus Bosch]

More recent light bulbs only have most of the air removed, allowing the fillament to oxidise, causing it to fail.

Really? And this imperfect vacuum, is intended as a trick to make you buy more bulbs or is a problem of the manufacturing process?

I thought that bulbs died because of random evaporation of the wolfram of the wire, independently of air.
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Re:Cork [OT]

[deGleep]

There's been a scare for the past few years about a cork shortage. Actually, the worldwide cork crop (>90% of which is grown in Portugal) has been susceptible to a taint known as 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA). If you've ever uncorked a bottle and it smelled musty, like damp cardboard or old newspaper, you've experienced a "corked" or tainted bottle of wine. Unfortunately, the human palate can detect as few as 4 parts per trillion of TCA.

Over the past few years, tremendous research has gone into both cork alternatives and remedies to this blight. So, currently we can choose between a number of plastic and other artificial cork alternatives (Cellukork, Twin Top). At the same time, the TCA blight seems to have been at least contained, if not eliminated. According to Amorim, the cork crop is growing at around 4% per year. This is good news, but considering the fact that cork can be harvested from a tree only once every 9 years, I believe we're going to see a lot more artificial replacements in the future...

deGleep

lumpy@DONTLIKEPORKINACAN.fc.net
"I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers."

Plastic cork is *evil*

[streetlawyer]

Just a note -- try not to buy wine with plastic corks. Two reasons:

*The wine is invariably cheap shit, and you deserve better.

*Plastic corks are driving the Portugese cork farmers out of business, with fairly disastrous results for an impossibly beautiful part of the earth.

Re:Plastic cork is *evil*

[streetlawyer]

The Portugese cork oak plantations are indeed fantastically beautiful, and numerous species of European bird life cannot, in fact, find another business.

Newspaper

[TheTomcat]

I can remember my mom buying the ultra-cheap recycled newspaper pencils for me when I was in High School. Man did those things suck. Not only did they not sharpen well, the graphite would constantly break because the pencils were so flexible -- you could bend a new pencil almost 90 degrees before it would break, but also once they WERE sharpened, the outer layer of the pencil, made of newspaper wouldn't offer enough support for the 'lead', which tended to lead to tip-breaking, and more sharpening.

Stupid tree huggers.

It is made of wood, sort of.

[Crutcher]

The material that most pencils are made of is still, basically, wood. But it is wood ground to a powder, and then rebonded with a polymer into the desired shape. It saves an immense amout of wood, as the polymer is a thermoplastic! and thus the wood goo can be reworked (and you dont throw away the scraps of the distribution process.

Translation: Heat a modern pencil, Tie it into knots. It works.

-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>

Re:Know what I hated?

[Tower]

The Dixon Ticonderogas alway won these for us... of course, you had to hit and defend with the wood grain oriented properly - you could almost never lose that way. Same as a baseball bat... one way will hit the ball 400 feet, the other... 40 feet, and the rest of the bat will fly further than the ball. I had one pencil (Dixon Tico #4) that won something like 30 straight games... of course, you never recover from that first loss.....
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