Hacker News Reader

Comment by placebo | Hacker News Reader

I would continuously lose ballpoint pens. At one point I thought the solution was to buy an expensive ball point pen as that would make me more aware of not losing it, but the effect was that it would just take a bit longer. I finally settled on buying many cheap pens. One humorous thought that I was curious about was that since I never found any pens (either my own or those lost by others), was it the case that there are people who find pens in the same way I lose them or do they just vanish into another dimension...

View on HN

"Somewhere in the cosmos, he said, along with all the planets inhabited by humanoids, reptiloids, fishoids, walking treeoids and superintelligent shades of the color blue, there was also a planet entirely given over to ballpoint life forms. And it was to this planet that unattended ballpoints would make their way, slipping away quietly through wormholes in space to a world where they knew they could enjoy a uniquely ballpointoid lifestyle, responding to highly ballpoint-oriented stimuli, and generally leading the ballpoint equivalent of the good life." -- Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1322240/

Haha, awesome, thank you.

"We propose a somewhat more speculative theory (with apologies to Douglas Adams and Veet Voojagig). Somewhere in the cosmos, along with all the planets inhabited by humanoids, reptiloids, walking treeoids, and superintelligent shades of the colour blue, a planet is entirely given over to spoon life-forms. Unattended spoons make their way to this planet, slipping away through space to a world where they enjoy a uniquely spoonoid lifestyle, responding to highly spoon oriented stimuli, and generally leading the spoon equivalent of the good life"

I knew it! :-)

I take this strategy of buying many of a thing to scatter all over with a few things. I've found it very effective.

In particular, I live in a sunny area at high elevation where sun protection is a big deal; finding out that one's only tube of sunscreen is lost or empty could have serious consequences on an outdoor activity day.

Tubes of sunscreen and sunglasses distributed to all vehicles, all backpacks, and all house entrances have ensured no sunburns in the family the last two years.

Interesting. For contrast, switching to the one-good-pen approach was what finally did the trick for me. These days, I find I'm more likely to run out of ink than lose my pen. To each their own!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com