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B O E I N G

transition from pencils to pens

^ my physics notes

This semester, I switched from pencils to pens. I have been using pencils for the past two semesters. At that time, I could never understand people (fellow classmates) who use pens. You can’t erase with pens – it’s like using a bad old typewriter, if you make a mistake it stays forever.

However, now I understand the profoundness of using a pen!. Pens are almost frictionless. They glide effortlessly over the pages like a zero-volume mass sliding down a frictionless decline. Using a pen feels like you’re saving nano-joules of energy due to fewer friction. The experience of using a pen is unparalleled to that provided by any pencil I’ve ever used. Pencils are TI-10s. Pens are TI-89s. So, wonder why I stopped using pens two semesters ago?

A little history, I sometimes try to be perfectionist. I always try to perfect my MATLAB codes; it gives a pleasure while I attempt to make it concise as possible. However, over the course of my education, I’ve gotten a lot better of turning off my perfectionist tendencies — like when the professor alters the notes after I copy it down. Before, I would have erased it — with the eraser-end of my pencil, of course. Now, I don’t have to. I feel like it’s less efficient; it takes around 5 seconds to erase few words, while it only takes a second to draw a line across the same few words.  So what if I wrote “Kircoff’s rule” instead of “Kirchhoff’s rule”? Well, when I go back to my notes, I would still understand it, and if I don’t know to how to spell it, Google’s “Did you mean….” will save me.

Just the other day, I submitted my Physics (Electricity and Magnetism) problem set. I had few scratchings across some calculations, but I became more conscience later on. You might wonder this would have created a bad impression. Guess what happened after I got it back? Absolutely nothing. I’m pretty sure my professor didn’t care at all and has completely forgotten it, unless he reads this post.  

This shows that I’m really putting my education to great efficiency and doing some Calculus constraining (and also some probability). After putting time fixing my slight errors, I’ve already reached the point of diminishing returns. The slightly decreased probability of something going wrong just isn’t worth the additional time I’d spend to attain it.

I am not on a discriminative drive towards perfectionism (although it wasted too much time), but I think perfectionism shouldn’t be applied to less important things. I think pencils are great (wait, don’t think I’m contradicting) but only for sketching! Pencils, used wrongly, will more likely to obfuscate people than enlighten them. Finally, to me it is a rapture to be a pen person now.

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