Scribe

Look at this tree. Blood gooping out of this tree. Perhaps I will see if it removes pencil from my notebook.

I'm great. Thank you guys so much for having me on. This is so much fun.

Yes, I only make my husband do that.

We weren't on together.

Sure. I am writing with some. With a vintage eagle turquoise drawing pencil. It's f. It's a hackwing, of course, because that's my thing. And this is a black stripe on a gold ferrule. It's got a black eraser. And I was realizing that it's a black stripe from before the 530 came out because I put it on with marker. Oh, yeah, it was a sharpie black stripe. And it's kind of wearing off.

hard Favre, actually on hack wings, I should say, as I recall. But yeah, I used to do a bunch of them. I did them with nail polish. I had a red stripe on one way, way back. And actually I had a red ferrule before the. Before the Dorothea Langston 344. Yeah, before the 344 came out.

I think so. Although if somebody else laid claim to it, I would immediately relinquish it because I could have picked it up from somewhere else.

We can say it goes back so far. I tagged a bunch of crap with it, though. I was the one who went through and, like, tagged everything with. With hackwing tags. And then I'm also sitting here enjoying a Fall City Pale Ale. This is a brewery in North Carolina. This is a brewery in Kentucky, where I actually live. This is a brewery in Kentucky that had gone under, and I think it used to be kind of maybe PBR level, and now it's been opened back up again, and now it's PBR level,

But ironically. But it's actually very good. So it's, you know, just kind of this traditional. They claim to use the original recipe and stuff, and it's really good. And then Spawn and I have been watching Buffy. We're up to season six, and, spoiler alert, bad things are about to happen. And I'm really dreading it because it's her first time through.

Yeah, yeah. I don't know if Dee does so much, but Les and I can spend some time talking about Buffy for sure.

Okay, this. See, your podcast is not so much more. How much do you want to know about this?

Okay, I will give you the true answer. That is also quick, and that is Buffy is at her best when she's not in a relationship with a man.

So, I mean, throughout the series, she, you know, it's rough when she's just broken up with somebody, but when she's alone is when she's really is when she really shines, you know?

I can't comment on that.

They had something about that with the new Wonder Woman movie, too.

So, anyway, Andy, how about you?

She.

That is so brilliant.

No, I haven't seen it.

I like Jason Bateman, but I haven't seen him.

Well, what else can he do?

So it's like a sequel to Arrested Development.

Or smack him

Yes. So I've been frantically making notes here. This podcast is more fun. Johnny rules. Andy too. Pens are silly. Those are my fresh points also.

And so much more.

I don't have any brush points. And I have to confess, I gave an exam to almost 300 people last week and I'm still grading them. And I have another one to give on Thursday to another hundred people that I haven't started writing yet. I got nothing. I got nothing. So nothing is fresh. So you guys, please go ahead.

That picture made me like salivate.

Right. So what, what is made out of black shiny vinyl and has grooves cut in it?

Associated with the number 33 and a third.

Is that true?

I'm in.

Leslie Nielsen Forever.

You know those toys we used to have that were like. They were like a zip tie, but the way the grooves were made, if you dragged your fingernail across it, they would say something.

Do you remember those?

I think it should be that. I think when you drag your fingernail down the barrel of the pencil, it should say something.

Once he. Once it comes out, he will be.

Right.

Yeah.

Who could say no to Carolyn?

I was actually really hoping that the pencil box was going to come in before we were recording today. Yeah, that was kind of my backup plan. I'll have something to talk about.

Yeah. It's just that by the time. By the time this actually drops, it'll be stale points.

Yeah. And the 602 is. It's a really shifty gray. Like, I mean, I don't know how you could match that in a different medium because it really looks different in different light and from different angles and next to different things. It's got that kind of slightly metallic Thing going and it's, it's a different color. I mean, you could match it once, but then you would change. You know, you'd walk into a different room and it wouldn't match anymore.

Blue ones, right?

I finally given up on jumbos.

Kept trying to find, you know, I kept trying to like them, and I just couldn't quite do it.

Thanks.

Love you back. Yeah.

The smearing. We have our smudged hands to unite us.

Yeah.

even the plastic bag that it comes in.

If it doesn't come in the same bag, I'm out.

It's the color of the cub, isn't it?

The cub.

Yeah.

Oh, it's coming through very different from that on my screen.

What a get. That's terrific.

I'm mapquesting Shelbyville.

Yeah, it's kind of far from me, actually.

I might still crash your party. You better not tell me when it is.

It's really true. Hey, can I share a back to school story with you guys?

Nobody in my life understands this. Right. So I went and had lunch with school on at her school last week and I got there and they weren't down in the cafeteria yet. So I went up to her room and she was in there working and they weren't lining up yet. And I went in and just kind of Squatted down next to her. She's in fourth grade. And then I realized she's doing her work at school with a 2 11. I was like. And she's using it too, like that brown eraser. It's half gone. And, you know, it's like she's. She's on it. I'm thinking, okay,

Well, she, you know, I mean, she. She claims one of everything that came that comes into the house. Right. So, yeah, so she's, you know, and. And just remember that when they came out, they were just like the same price as any other blackwing. Right. They're just, you know, just a couple dollars a dozen more expensive than any other blackwing. So she had a couple. We didn't know they were special back then. Right. We didn't know that they were gonna be special later on, you know, Like, I've got one box left that I'm kind of hoarding because I really like them. But apparently I like them more than what I could get on ebay for them,

So I just thought that was really funny. And then we. And then that evening, we're sitting at the kitchen table and she's doing homework and I look over and she's using a 24.

So, yeah, she's not upset. It's not because of her tools.

Well, except that, you know, except if she doesn't.

She's like, well, this is kind of weird. Whatever.

Right.

It really is. Yeah. I did tell her she might want to just keep an eye on that 2:11 since if it goes missing, like, whoever takes it is really going to not know what they've got. Anyway, I knew you guys could appreciate that in a way that practically nobody can.

There's a limited audience for that story. Like my favorite joke has a really, really limited audience.

Oh, what do you get when you cross a rock climber and a tsetse fly?

Nothing. You can't cross a vector and a scalar. Thank you for laughing politely. It's kind

All right, do you want to little calculus.

I think it's a good time for it, chemistry.

Yeah, I probably should have done this before. Where the beer.

Yeah, exactly. Throw in the word quantum and everybody glazes over.

Exactly.

All right, shoot.

Okay, so I'm going to trust you guys to know better than I do what's actually going to be interesting to people. And you can edit this down for content and interest however you want to. Okay.

mustache.

I've got much less mustache. Thank you. Okay, so. All right, so this is kind of what I would call sort of the bottom up approach to thinking about this. When you say that they're similar on a molecular level, that's both kind of completely true and completely wrong, depending on how you want to look at it. And here's what I mean by that. They're both forms of carbon. And what that means is that all of the atoms are absolutely identical. And if you think about a. If you think about like, you know, a picture in your head of a molecular model, each of the little spheres in that is a single atom and molecules are made out of atoms. So if, you know, if you don't know that if you don't remember that from your. From your chemistry class or whatever, atoms are kind of like the letters of chemistry, and molecules are kind of like words.

So you can assemble these atoms into different words. And not every assembly that you could make of letters is actually an English word. Right. So you can put together things that you could write the letters down, but they don't actually make a thing that's real. You can write down combinations of atoms that don't make a real thing that could actually exist. Right. So the analogy actually goes pretty far away, But. So all of the atoms are the same, but what's different is how those atoms are grouped together. So in graphite, you have this structure where all of the atoms are arranged into sheets that are one atom thick, and the atoms are attached to each other in kind of these infinite sheets. And if you look at a picture of it, it kind of looks like a chicken wire, like, hexagon pattern with an atom, each corner of the hexagons and those sheets, even though from a molecular level, from the point of view of any one atom in that sheet, it looks like that sheet kind of goes on infinitely. But if you think about a particle that has 1,000 atoms in it, like a sheet 1,000 atoms large, most of us would think that's a pretty big sheet. But if you have. Let's say I'm doing some math in my head here real quick. If you had an ounce of carbon, then you'd have somewhere on the order of 10 to the 21st, 10 to the 20th.

Of those sheets.

Yeah, a one with 20 zeros after it. So, yeah, so that's a really, really large number of these tiny, tiny particles. And each of those tiny, tiny particles contains a really large number of atoms, right?

And so those sheets, even though each sheet is pretty strong, the sheets themselves are very, very tiny. And they only aggregate to each other with forces that aren't really. They're not chemical bonds. They're more like static cling, like sheets of Saran Wrap sticking together or something like that. And so it's fairly easy to shift those sheets apart from each other. And because of that, you get these properties of graphite where it's. Where it can be used as a dry lubricant. Right. If you put graphite dust between metal parts, then the metal parts rubbing together just rubs those sheets apart from each other. It doesn't have to break any chemical bonds. And because you don't have any oil in there. It's not collecting dust or other large rough particles. And so the graphite, the hard thing with graphite is actually getting it to stick together. Right. More than scraping it off, it's getting it to actually stick together. And so when you have these large pieces of graphite, they're filled with, you know, just bajillions huge, huge, unimaginably huge numbers of these little sheets of particles that can slough off and scrape off of each other really easily.

Well, if you're going to talk about the minerals, then you've got kind of another layer of sheeting there where the. Where the sedimentary layers have laid down. And there's sort of not a bounce, but, you know, it's kind of how it's laid down. That's why you get the sheets there. It's not actually because of the microscopic sheets. It's because of the deposition.

So that's a little bit different, but, yeah, it's a similar phenomenon at a different scale. You know, you could definitely think of it that way. And so when you have a piece of graphite, you know, if you think about, like, a piece of charcoal is largely impure, graphitized carbon, that. That can make marks really easily. And it's because those little. Those little chunks of graphite can slough off really easily, and they can continue to kind of crumble to finer and finer pieces.

And if you think about, I don't know if you've ever looked at the surface of a piece of paper, seen pictures of a piece of paper under a microscope, but, you know, that surface is really, really, really rough at even the microscopic level, let alone the atomic or molecular level, it's really rough. So it's, you know, it's like the Himalayas. And when you rub a piece of anything soft over that, it scrapes off.

And then those pencil, the graphite particles, the same kind of. Same kind of attractions, the same kind of static cling that makes the graphite sheets stick together, also makes them stick to the paper and not just shake off in the way that, like, chalk particles tend to just be easier to shake off.

Well, so those large sheets that we were talking about, you know, thousands and maybe millions or even bigger collections of atoms in each of those sheets, the way that they're chemically bonded together makes them absorb photons of light over a very wide range of wavelengths, which is why it looks black.

And we didn't actually, I didn't go back and talk about diamond. Like, why is diamond hard? Is kind of the same thing for why is diamond clear? And why does diamond have very high thermal conductivity and stuff like that? In diamond, rather than having those atoms be arranged into sheets and the sheets kind of loosely held together? In diamond, it's more like kind of a tinker toy structure in which. And we should put up a picture because it really does look a lot, it helps a lot to see the picture. But you have a three dimensional lattice where those atoms are bonded to each other.

So within the sheets of graphite. Go ahead.

Exactly, exactly. Your graphite lattice is two dimensional. And then you stack up a bunch of those sheets and they don't hold onto each other very tightly. But with the diamond, you actually have chemical bonds going in all three dimensions and they're very tightly held together. And those bonds are very rigid because carbon atoms are really small. Carbon's a really early element in the periodic table. The atoms are very, very small. And so those bonds are very rigid and very stiff. And that gives you the hardness of diamond. But it also gives you like the fact that diamond is one of the most thermally conductive materials that we know about. Like the, you know, if you take a sheet, like a disc of lab grown diamond material and dip it into something cold, like you instantly feel the cold in the part you're holding, like way faster than you would feel it with a piece of metal. And it's because those bonds are so rigid that as soon as they stop vibrating as hard at one end, if they get hot or cold at one end, then you feel that in the other end very, very quickly because the vibration passes, the change in the vibration speed passes through the entire sample really quickly. So you get a very fast transmission of heat and sound as well. The whole thing is very rigid. So all of those Properties are really tied together, but chemically, there's really kind of nowhere for it to go. I mean, you're not. Light hitting those bonds is not going to break them.

And it's even pretty resistant to oxidation. You know, usually for inks, the problem and for paper and a lot of things, the problem is oxidation. We've got all this oxygen in the atmosphere that's wildly reactive, very, very toxic. Looking for something to react. You know, you hear about antioxidants in the body, and the reason that you need lots of antioxidants is because oxygen is attacking all of your tissues all the time and creating these free radicals. And, you know, the only thing that'll kill you faster is not having oxygen. So we're kind of in this catch

It really is. There's this. I can't remember now what the number is, but it's this ungodly percentage of your body's processes that, you know, like the total number of enzymes in your body or whatever that are just devoted to repairing the damage from breathing oxygen. It's crazy. So. But, you know, for carbon, for both forms of carbon, graphite and diamond, they're just not that reactive with oxygen at room temperature kind of. You know, you have to get it to high temperatures for them to be reactive with oxygen. And so, you know, light's not going to do anything to them. There's kind of just nowhere chemically for them to go. Oxygen isn't ferocious enough to really attack them at the temperatures that we're dealing with. Whereas with the molecules that are typically pigments and ink, those are large. They're not thousands of atoms, kind of sheets. They're sort of large, unwieldy molecules. And the reason that they have color is because they absorb photons of light at certain wavelengths. But the fact that they absorb those photons of light at certain wavelengths means that the light is doing something electronically to them, and that makes them a little bit more reactive, and it makes them break down over time. And so, you know, you give something a few decades of light shining on it, or for a lot of pigments, a few months or even, you know, for some of them, even a few weeks of light shining on them, if it's bright light, particularly if it's uv, that's a higher energy, and they're catching those light particles. And some of the molecules, you know, with every. Every now and then, one of those molecules is just, you know, kind of gets broken up into Something else that's not the right color anymore, so it's different. And when you said pigment, whatever that is. Right. Pigment can be anything.

Charcoal can be a pigment. Right. Pigment is just the word that we give to whatever gives something color.

But the pigments that are in ink need to be soluble in a solvent, and that lets out something with huge molecules like graphite.

Because graphite's not soluble in any normal solvents, Although you know what it is soluble in if you want to dissolve graphite, like if you get soot stains in something, you know what it's soluble in?

Molten iron.

Stain right out. Absolutely. Works every time.

Well, it's kind of the same thing because, you know, with the ink, you've gotten some molecules that have been carried in by a solvent, and they've gotten kind of under the fibers, or depending on what the fibers are made of, even inside the fibers, you know, because you've got. Again, you know, if you think about these kind of at a molecular level, those fibers are kind of porous. Right. And so this stuff can get inside the fibers and stay. It soaks in. But the graphite's dry. You know, just like when you put graphite dust into your front door lock to lubricate that mechanism. It's dry, it's not wet, and it's just sitting on the paper. It's held on there by static cling. And so, you know, so it's unreactive, and it stays forever if you don't try to remove it. But if you put something sticky, you know, if you hit it with something sticky, it'll pick up if the thing that you're hitting it with is stickier than the paper.

Right, right, right. And, you know, even there, like, the word sticky is not very technical or well defined because there's a lot of different kinds of adh. If you start looking at adhesives sometime when you have a few hours to spare, ask an engineer about adhesion or adhesives, because you have all of these different characteristics and all of these different kinds of adhesive and adhesion that you have to define if you're going to have intelligent conversations about these things, which I cannot for the record. But there's a lot to that as well into how at the molecular level things are adhesive. So the difference between thinking about glues, Right. The difference between something that's like an epoxy resin versus something that's a glue that dries out and is holding things together by the fact that it dries versus something that is sticky and stays sticky. Like there's all of that stuff going on. And so rubber that's used in pencil erasers has this. Or the synthetic kinds of rubber or the plastics they use to replace those things, they all have these properties of being, you know, that having a surface that's somehow stickier to the graphite than the paper is. Right. So you want it to. You want the. You want the graphite to prefer the rubber, to prefer the eraser over the paper, but you don't want the paper and the eraser to like each other.

Well, it doesn't work very well because the rubber usually has a fairly, you know, smooth surface and it doesn't scrape off very much. Although, if you think about actually, you know, like the pink pearl, you can write on that with a. With a pencil because it's rough. It's got some. In addition to the rubber, it's also got some abrasive in there.

Right. Yeah.

Right. Okay. So partly, you know, you guys should try to get a geologist on the show sometime because, you know. Yeah. Because the geology of graphite and clay would be a whole other thing. And I think geology is really fascinating, but I get overwhelmed really quickly because their chemical formulas do not look like our Earth chemical formulas. So, you know, like, I can't. I get confused really quickly. It takes me a little while to parse things out. But most of the graphite deposits in the world where. Okay, so graphite's super common, but most of it is spread out into other minerals, right?

So in order to have something that you can actually commercially mine to use for something like pencil cores, it has to be really enriched. And that's kind of luck about where those depends deposits get made. Right?

Not many of those deposits are of sufficient purity or sufficient. They don't have the right properties to be able to just cut rods out of it. You know, most of it is most of the graphite. You wouldn't be able to just successfully, like, cut a chunk of it out of the ground and slice it up into pieces and put it in pencils. Yeah, it wouldn't work. And so the biggest. What advancement was figuring out that you could take this graphite, mix it up with something that you can mold around.

Right, Clay, which people have understood very well for many thousands of years, and shape it into the shape that you want, and then take that clay mixture. Basically, we think of it as graphite with clay. Clay in it. But really what it is is pigmentized clay, right?

Clay with graphite in it. I mean, and it's both. But there's a little bit of a mental shift if you think about one versus the other. So, you know, we're taking a stick of fairly soft clay that we've mixed color into. Right. So, you know, again, that's. Clay chemistry is also pretty interesting. Clay is sort of a loosely defined group of aluminosilicate minerals, which means that they've got some glassy stuff going on, but they've also got aluminum in there, like some aluminum oxide, some ceramic stuff kind of going on. There's a close association, of course, between glasses and glazes and ceramics and clays. And one of the cool things about clay is it's everywhere, you know, so pretty much, you know, I suspect anywhere you go in the world, you're going to be able to find deposits of clay that will work at some rudimentary level for making pottery out of. And stuff. And so, you know, we had talked before about the Bavarian clay, and I couldn't find out anything special except that it just, you know, it sounds cooler if you say that it's Bavarian clay,

Right, Exactly. You know that there's probably some nice clay there, but it sounds really cool if you specify. Because people love a story. Right.

I mean. Sure. When was the last time you commented on how great the glass was that your beer bottle was made of?

That's a good point.

But if it's not there, you don't have beer. So, you know, we tend those. Those kinds of things are 99% invisible. Right?

Somebody should make a podcast about that. So, yeah, you know, and then the wax. The wax is the one component that is really going to be affected by temperature changes around human temperature ranges. Because for the graphite and the clay, you know, how for us, the difference between 100 Fahrenheit and 0 Fahrenheit is like the difference between inhabitable in the middle of that and uninhabitable at either end. Right. That seems like a really big temperature swing for us. But. But for the graphite and the clay, that temperature range is really all the same. I mean, it has practically no effect on the properties of those substances to go from zero Fahrenheit to 100 Fahrenheit, because you're really, you know, so what you're going from. Gosh, I have to do math in my head again now. You know, you're going from 260 kelvins up to 300 kelvins. Big deal. You know, who cares? So, you know, on an absolute temperature scale, that's very little difference. But for waxes, you know, waxes are specifically. We call something a wax because it's waxy.

Right. And the fact that it's waxy specifically means that it's sort of soft around the temperatures we live, but, you know, not liquid. Right.

And so as you go up in temperature, they get softer, and as you go down in temperature, they get more harder. And so, you know, those are the things that are going to really be affected. So I, you know, this is me conjecturing. I haven't actually done tests on this or really into it very deeply, but when people comment about certain pencils, you know, not seeming to work as well, if they leave them in the car or whatever, you know, I suspect that's because those are waxier pencils and they're being affected more. They're going to get harder at lower temperatures. Whereas if you have a low content of wax and it's mostly graphite and clay, it's really going to be hardly affected at all by temperature because it's, you know, it's all rock hard at that point.

but I don't know that much about the clays. I mean, about the waxes that go into them. There's a lot of different things. Wax is not a chemical term. Wax is really a practical term. And so a lot of biological waxes do have A certain sort of chemical structure in common. They are, they're basically like, like oils but bigger molecules. So they tend to be solid at room temperature rather than liquid.

So I think, Johnny, you had mentioned animal fat. Stearic acid is one of the, one of the common things that's, you know, one of the common wax additives and that's frequently derived from animal fats. And there can be other things, you know, and then you've got beeswax and you've got paraffin waxes that come from, from. They're just heavy petroleum molecules. So that's a really, there's a lot there. And I suspect those formulations are proprietary.

And also boring. Sorry.

Yeah. So this is. I had a little bit more trouble getting information on this and I will say that wood science is not chemistry. I can tell you that the wood is made of cellulose, but that's not going to be very helpful in talking about the specific properties of it. But I was looking at actually some woodworking websites about this and they say that cedar is a really nice choice for carving. It holds fine detail, but it's still soft. And that's not a really common combination. Right. So like you can carve really fine details into oak, but it's very hard. So I don't think oak would make a good choice for pencils because you couldn't have a little hand pencil sharpener that you change the blades on once in a blue moon and have it be sharpenable. Right. And that's one of people's big complaints about the Swiss wood, is that it's hard to sharpen. And it is. And I think that's partly because of the kind of wood it's made out of and partly because of that heat treatment that they do. It makes it very, very hard and very, very dense. And some people like that for writing with it. But it does make it much harder to sharpen. So you need something that's going to be soft, but it's also got to be hard enough that when you're sharpening it, you don't get that Kind of fiber surface pulling up like you do on some, you know, those really cheap, like, novelty pencils, like the Halloween pencils or the foil pencils.

And you sharpen them and you get that kind of fuzzy layer, you know, where the fibers are coming up, and it's just horrifying. Like, it's so awful. They're made of sadness.

Yes, yes, sadness. And I think there's like 5% tears of the damned in there. It's so bad. But, you know, that's the wood, right? It's a really fibrous wood. It's very soft. It's probably cheap, which is why they're using it. But it doesn't. You know, it doesn't make for a good. You know, so you're kind of doing that balance between hard enough to have a nice smooth surface on it, but soft enough that you can actually cut it with a. You know what? Let's face it to. A woodworker would not be considered a very competent hand tool. Right. Your. Your typical sharpener.

So. Yeah. But, I mean, you know, if you guys get a wood scientist on or even a wood carver on to talk about this stuff, I would. I would totally love to hear that.

You can have them on.

There's never just one science.

No. Iron.

I know, right? Who doesn't have that handy on their desk? Yeah. I don't know. And I think it's really just coming back around to that texture thing that it's something that people would have had handy that has a surface that. I mean, basically, if you kind of think of graphite as dirt, then, you know, any surface that it would cling to you could in principle use as an eraser. Right. You just have to find something that the. That those little flecks of dust would rather stick to than they would rather stick to the paper. So. Yeah, I think it's just that similar kind of thing that it's a little bit sticky. But not sticky enough to damage your paper. And. Yeah, and I don't know if you guys have ever done the thing where you pick up, pick up pencil marks with scotch tape.

So you know, that's, that's something that's directly sticky that if you're careful to not get it too stuck to your paper, you can pick up graphite with it. And if you did it repeatedly, you could probably remove most of it. Right. So I think it's just that same thing again. I think it's just that static cling kind of effect at the molecular level where those little particles are jumping off of the paper and onto the other surface. And rubber, I looked chemistry of rubber is a little bit crazy. We've talked a lot in the group about erasers hardening up over time or going, you know, they either go hard or they go chewy, right?

And it's because again of that oxygen and UV light. Because the rubber, natural latex rubber is, you know, there's like the 90 to 95% of it that's actually the polymer, the. Oh shoot, I forgot what they called it. Poly. It's like a poly isoprene something. I've got the structure, but I can't remember the name of it. But it's like 90 or 95% that polymer. But then it's also got a bunch of other stuff in it. Five percent of it is like proteins and fatty acids and resins and salts and waxes and other things that come from the SAP of the plant. Right. Because these are things that ooze out of the cells of plants. And what it's really there for is to seal a wound on the surface of the plant and maybe poison some bugs. It's to seal over those wounds in such a way that they don't get fungal spores or bacteria in there that can attack the plant. Because plants are constantly under attack from pathogens just like animals are and they have to constantly fight them off. So this is part of the immune system of the plant. And so, you know, there's all of this other stuff that's in there. So if you make synthetic rubber, it's more stable over time because there's just less stuff in there that can react with oxygen and UV light over time. Because the plant's not making this rubber to last for decades.

The plant only needs to last for long enough to seal off the wound so it can heal over. And then we're annoyed because we pull out a box of 40 year old pencils and the eraser doesn't work anymore. Right.

Yeah. So, you know, there's a lot of very complex chemical stuff that can go on there. And just, you know, even the latex polymers themselves have some reactivity and they can cross link and react with oxygen over time. So there's a lot of stuff that can happen there. It's not simple.

Right.

They probably make a really crappy pair of boots.

Yeah, it should

Oh my God. Well, so, but think about it, right? Because if you're just making plastic, right? Okay. So the tree, the tree does not care about your magnum opus. Right. The tree does not care about your dry feet or your, or protecting your hands from whatever kind of ick you're wearing rubber gloves to stay away from. Right. The tree has, it's doing its thing and we've taken this stuff and sort of adapted it to a bunch of other purposes because it's kind of a magical substance. Like it's an amazing substance, rubber. But still we're adapting something that exists. So if you set out, you know, once plastic exists, if you set out to make a plastic that has certain properties for a certain application, you can tweak it however you want to. Right. You can just mess around with it until you find something that is the best that you've found.

Right. So why do they work better? Because they're engineered is why. Because people actually played with the chemistry of it until they got something for one specific purpose. But I don't think that mars plastic is going to be, you know, it's probably not the same kind of rubber or polymer formulation that they would use to make rubber gloves or rubber boots. Right. Or a rubber zipper pull or something like that. Right. All of those. If you set out to make a formulation that's good for one purpose, then you're making it specific to that one purpose. And the advantage of that is it's probably going to be great for that one purpose. But when you get specificity, you lose generality. Right. So, you know, why are the plastic erasers better? Because they made them for the purpose of erasing things. Instead of being like, look at this tree blood gooping out of this tree. Perhaps I will see if it removes pencil from my notebook.

I'm a hopeless romantic. What can I say?

Like most other blogs, they would have three episodes, an apology episode, and then it would be gone.

Yeah, I can't even, like. I can't even start to talk about metal. But, no, I think we've gone well beyond anything I actually know enough to talk about, so.

Yeah, the Hagaromo chalk.

Yeah. It's so lovely. So I will say there were three brands that we actually talked about significantly on that episode, and I am drawing a blank on the other two names. I'll try to remember to look them up and put a link in the show notes because they are very, very nice materials and I should not be shorting them by not being able to remember their name. Hagoromo has the marketing because they print their name on the sticks and that's why I can remember the name of that one and I can't remember the other two names. Uma Jirushi is one of them. Uma Jirushi is one of them. So with the chalk, you know, it's kind of similar to the kinds of things that we say about pencils where, you know, you want the graphite to come off Easily, you know, but you want it to also not so smudge, and you want it to not make a lot of dust. You want to not have to write too hard to do it. You want it to not break easily. All of those considerations are actually also there for chalk. So, you know, the premium brands of chalk have these very nice, dense sticks when you write on the board.

Oh, you know what? I actually don't know if the chalk formulations, I don't know to what extent they have to have binders in them. Physically, the structure of chalk is somewhat similar to what we were talking about. Well, we didn't really talk about this with clay, but with graphite, actually. Interestingly, chalk, graphite, and clay all have this material property of being tiny sheets, tiny, microscopic sheets. And the graphite is actually molecular sheets, but those molecular sheets stack together into kind of microscopic, flaky sheets.

No, calcium. Okay, so calcium is a metal. Calcium itself is a metal. So most of the chalks are some combination of calcium and magnesium carbonate and sulfate, if I'm remembering this correctly, and I didn't look it up because you kind of sprung this one on me. I'm flying without a net here, so I'm willing to be wrong. And with different amounts of moisture content. But with the chalk stuff, you can think about like plaster of Paris, you know, how you get it wet, and then there's actually a chemical reaction where over a short period of time, without really drying. Drying. It suddenly hardens.

And it does that by actually incorporating the water molecules both chemically and physically, into the solid structure of the material so it doesn't have to dry to harden. And concrete does the same thing. And so with these materials that we can use in chalk, they're kind of doing something very much like that. And in fact, you can find DIY sidewalk chalk recipes online that call for, you know, get some plaster of Paris and mix some food coloring into it. And they're not great, but they're okay. So, yeah, you want. You want something that when you drag it across the surface of this macroscopically smooth but microscopically rough chalkboard, it'll scrape off little flakes of the stuff, but then they'll static cling themselves in place without falling all over the place. Place or making big clouds, and then they'll let go when you rub on them with a piece of felt. Right. So similar kinds of properties.

You can always get me back.

I don't know. No, I really don't. I don't know what the materials are that they use in those. And there's a lot of. So metallurgy is kind of black magic. Like it's. It's art as much as science. You get some, you know, you get some kind of difficult to predict things going on when you're looking at metal alloys. So yeah, I don't know. Metallurgists. Yeah, you should get a metals engineer on for that or you know, somebody from the pencil industry. But yeah, I don't think brass would make a very good ferrule because it does tend to be, you know, it oxidizes and it's hard. But you know, that being said, you can find vintage pencils with copper ferrules or brass ferrules and you know, they do turn colors over time if they're. Particularly if they're subject to exposure to moisture and oxygen. I'm guessing that the same kind of, you know, the same kinds of metals that they use in like the quote, jewelry, end quote, that's sold out of gumball machines, you know, this kind of just pop metal.

Well, or. Yeah, I mean, they're alloys because they're whatever is cheap and malleable. Right. But it bends easily because if you. For most kinds of pencils, and I'm not talking about black wings here, because their ferrules are pretty robust. But if you think about most kinds of pencils, the ferrules are actually quite fragile. If they weren't supported by. If they weren't supported from the inside by the eraser and the wood barrel, yeah, they're quite bendy. So yeah, I don't know what kinds of metals, but yeah, you're absolutely right. It would be as much an economic decision as a practical one. You need something that's cheap, that can be worked in your industrial machines that you can stamp out fast and not have sharp edges on and. And that it'll hold up over time.

Yeah. Because that would totally make sense.

Titanium ferrule. It'll get funded on Kickstarter.

If it's got titanium in the name.

Exactly. Right. But then you know, like what you want to do then. And this would be the great hack wing idea. Right. You sell a dozen pencils, but there's only one feral in the box and you just keep moving it from one pencil to the next.

Right. Because if you're going to make it. If you're going to make it out of titanium, you want to reuse that section. You don't want to throw it in trash when you get done.

Yeah, I'm mostly findable through the. Through the Erasable group or the RSVP stationary podcast group on. On Facebook. And you guys should totally check out RSVP if you haven't already, because lesson D and I have so much fun making it and we want to be able to keep doing that. So.

Yeah. And sometimes on Buffy the Vampire, kind of the sister podcast. Right?

So.

We take everyone.

We're ecumenical.