Basic Instructions by Scott Meyer for June 27, 2014

See, you learn something new every day.

Of course, I had to check this out on Snopes.

I’ve never heard this story before. Very interesting.

It’s like the fallacy of lemmings jumping off cliffs. Disney documentary film crews were responsible for that terrible story.

Fisher eventually ended up selling the pens to both US and Soviet space programs, but as Scott observes in panel 4, the real money had to be in selling them to the general public.

I’ve known this story, the myth and the debunking, for a while, but it’s interesting that it comes up right now. I just watched a film that alludes to it as a minor plot point, the Bollywood movie “3 Idiots”.

Did they try the fountain pen that could write on whipped cream?

I’ve carried one of those pens around for years in my emergency kit. Last time I used it was at the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro – it worked great, even after 2-3 years of non-use.

They could have saved a lot of money using cheap mechanical pencils.

I had one of those pens too. Doesn’t that date some of us? (I mean, do they still sell them???)

They also now have zero-G printers that Epson developed for the shuttles and ISS.

Now I’m curious about what they wrote in space.

“3 Idiots” FTW.