High tech

[ffutures]

Just glanced into one of the labs to see one of the science teachers using an interactive whiteboard (cost £800), AV projector (about £1100), installation (£500-ish), sound system (£150-ish) and computer (£400-ish) to simulate... a blackboard. Black background, white scrawled text, etc.

OK, yes, I know you can use it for other things, but it seemed very silly somehow.

Comments

[madbaz.livejournal.com]

It's like the thousands America spent in developing a pen that could write in zero g, while the Russians just used a pencil.

Mind you, at Uni I would ocasionally have killed for the chance to download what the lecturer had just scribbled on the blackboard before he wiped it out to make room for more. The words "If you've all finished with this..." still haunt me.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

The pen thing is an urban myth. Most ball pens do work in zero gravity, it's pressure differences that cause problems, and that's what the money was spent on - for use by fighter pilots etc. rather than astronauts. It was also largely funded by industry on the basis that they'd be able to sell them to the USAF and gullible civilians as well as NASA, which is a ridiculously small market.

[madbaz.livejournal.com]

I stand corrected. Thank you. But useless gadgetry is the very life and soul of commerce, where would we be without our steam-driven, triple action reciprocating portable walrus polishers?

[kalieris.livejournal.com]

We would have very dull walruses.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Goo-goo-ga-joob...

[armb.livejournal.com]

More at http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp, which says they were developed for astronauts, industry paid, and both Americans and Russians changed from using pencils to using the pressurized pens (which, unlike pencils, can't cause electrical shorts when small pieces of broken graphite lead float around).

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I'm the one that stands corrected then.

I'd imagine that another benefit of using pens was that people stopped accidentally inhaling teeny bits of wood, which must have been very annoying.