41–50 of 117 posts
Growing up in India, all the pencils I used were red and black striped made by Nataraj. I remember seeing yellow pencils in western movies though. https://cwpencils.com/collections/nataraj/products/621-hb-pe...
In my mind, Faber-Castell will forever be the ultimate pencil. I think yellow pencils are a staple of American culture but in my mind pencils are green... http://www.fabercastell.com/products/pencils/GraphitepencilC...
How is this particular item a "spare" pencil? > Spare pencil for the Castell 9000 perfect pencil Surely any time you buy a new pencil it is a spare or replacement for the pencil you already have?
Explains my confusion with early internet "cliparts" and icons being always in yellow. I am sure most non westerns might be equally confused. Pencil meant black and red for us in India - Natraj FTW
It's not even Western, from my experience it's just the US. In Australia, I don't think I'd ever seen a yellow pencil, other than one that came in a set of coloured pencils for art. I hadn't realised it was the norm in the US until relatively recently. We have these, just for example: https://www.faber-castell.com/products/GraphitepencilGoldfab... https://www.staedtler.com.au/en/products/pencils-accessories...
Only in later years green ones appeared and yellow with black stripes.
[0] - https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/lead-pencil-isolated-white-b...
In my mind, Faber-Castell will forever be the ultimate pencil. I think yellow pencils are a staple of American culture but in my mind pencils are green... http://www.fabercastell.com/products/pencils/GraphitepencilC...
How is this particular item a "spare" pencil? > Spare pencil for the Castell 9000 perfect pencil Surely any time you buy a new pencil it is a spare or replacement for the pencil you already have?
I'm reminded of User Testing at Powerset. When we did unbranded search testing of Wikipedia, late-stage Powerset usually won most search comparisons by users. But if we branded the search results against Google, we lost. At first we thought this was an artifact of the test data, but then we ran an experiment where we randomly assigned a brand to our search results and asked users to rank them. Same GvP comparison. The Google branding won. We took it a step further: sometimes random recall searches crept in (there aas essentially no logic to what we put in front of the users other than keyword match). If those got branded "Google", sometimes they still won just by the power of brand association, even against Powerset's sophisticated NL-powered search.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is this particular item a "spare" pencil? > Spare pencil for the Castell 9000 perfect pencil Surely any time you buy a new pencil it is a spare or replacement for the pencil you already have?
I could be wrong, but I think it means 'spare' as in 'singular' or 'loose', not as in 'replacement' or 'extra'.
In my mind, Faber-Castell will forever be the ultimate pencil. I think yellow pencils are a staple of American culture but in my mind pencils are green... http://www.fabercastell.com/products/pencils/GraphitepencilC...
So the story is, as it is for nearly every physical artifact in my life, "Because people are easily lured by bright objects and catchy marketing into associating quality with anything but the quality of the goods." I'm reminded of User Testing at Powerset. When we did unbranded search testing of Wikipedia, late-stage Powerset usually won most search comparisons by users. But if we branded the search results against G…
Almost all the pencils in my childhood were red. The manufacturer was Berol. Of course, my schools didn't necessarily buy the highest quality pencils for the children, and they probably all came from the same supplier. The high-quality ones, which a relative who was a draughtsman used, were dark green [1] [1] https://www.ebay.ie/itm/12-x-Berol-Venus-H-Fine-Quality-Writ...
if your schools are buying pencils for the students, you're one up over my childhood in canada.
