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Comment by sudb | Hacker News Reader

Reminds of me of the "most expensive peanut butter" at ~$2.44/g - sold by NIST, I assume for some sort of peanut butter factory process calibration: https://shop.nist.gov/ccrz__ProductDetails?sku=2387

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For more context, sample reference materials from the NIST reference catalogue are not meant to be exceptionally high purity examples of the sample -- SRMs are usually commercially-produced products. The real value is that each sample comes with a datasheet with incredibly detailed and accurate measurements that are (as you said) used for calibration of measuring devices in industrial settings. To quote a Veritasium video about the topic from a few years ago[1], "the thing you're paying for is not the peanut butter, it's the knowledge of exactly what is in the peanut butter".

[1]: https://youtu.be/esQyYGezS7c?t=226

Truth. I once paid nearly $500 for a set of 17 certified, calibrated wooden pencils, with documentation showing that each one met their rated hardness levels of 9H thru 6B. And for $500, they don't even come with erasers, that is an added-cost option.

https://www.gardco.com/product/pencil-hardness-test-kit-astm...

Can I ask why :-) Sounds like an interesting project.

His link includes procedures, which suggest he was testing the hardness of some surface coating or similar:

> For the pencil hardness test, reference ASTM D3363, pencils of increasing hardness values are moved over the surface in a precisely defined way until one lead damages the surface. Surface Hardness is defined by the hardest pencil grade which just fails to damage the surface.

> Observe the pencil track. Sufficient pressure must have been applied either to cut or damage the coating or to crush the lead pencil point.

> If neither coating damage or pencil point crushing is observed, repeat the test until a definite observation is made.

> If scratching or damage of the surface occurs, proceed with the next softer pencil grade and repeat the testing process until a pencil lead grade is found which crushes and does not damage the coating.

> If crushing of the hardest lead should occur, the coating is therefore extremely hard and is beyond the measuring range of this test

You use the kit to test the harness of a finish coating, like a paint or a ceramic coating for cars. Pencils have their own hardness scale which can be used to gauge the hardness of the coating. Its really more of a relative qualitative test than quantitative as you'd use this for sample/coupon testing identical coatings. There are more absolute, quantitative methods to measure various hardness characteristics (scratch, indentation, and rebound). Like you'd use the pencil kit on a factory floor to make sure each paint sample performs the same, the sample being a small area on the product or a plate that's painted the same way.

the pencil aspect is because its easy for a person to carry and take notes with?

and you dont need to fit the car into a proper harness tester?

No, these are expensive pencils that have high quality assurance to make sure the graphite is as hard as it's supposed to be. You use a jig to hold the pencil in a specific way each time. Don't think of it as a pencil, it's a kit of rods made from graduated compositions of graphite and clay. You could write with one but that's like making a PB&J with the NIST peanut butter, a waste of money.

The pencil hardness scale is commonly used to assess paint film hardness by checking what is the softest pencil that can mar the surface when you scratch it with a given force. In this case, we needed to assess whether exposure to a certain chemical degraded the integrity of the paint coating that we were counting on for corrosion protection.

I'd like to ask a more specific question than my sibling's excellent "Wait, why?" question :)

Why offer erasers on these things? The procedure described below has nothing to do with using these as pencils, and at $500 for a pack I can't imagine anyone, anywhere casually drawing with these.

(Is there another procedure, similar to the one described below, except instead of dragging the pencil tip across a surface you drag the eraser across it? )

I’d suggest you read “The TSO’d Pencil” to understand the reference.

Http://www.rstengineering.com/rst/articles/tsodpencil.pdf

I had no idea this reference existed, or that it's a a fun, though dystopian, read.

Thanks! :)

SRM 2387 pairs well with a cup of ISO 3103.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3103

Cap your meal off with a NIST 1196a standard issue cigarette? I am told they taste like drywall and taxes.

https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2020/02/nist-releases-...

Perhaps you would prefer some standard issue meat.

https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/US/en/product/sial/nist1546a

A suggested product is "domestic sludge", lol. This is such a fun rabbit hole:

https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/US/en/product/sial/nist2781

Pretty much every process conducted at scale will have such reference samples.

New music genre just dropped

It's only $508 per cigarette:

https://shop.nist.gov/ccrz__ProductDetails?sku=1196a&cclcl=e...

400 cigarettes actually! Not too bad.

That’s $508 for two cartons for 400 cigarettes total, so $1.27 per cigarette. They’re not characterized like the peanut butter, they’re just manufactured to a specific QC standard.

California/New York prices are easily $0.75/cigg so it’s not that much more expensive.

Fags in the UK are around £13-20 per 20!

https://www.tesco.com/shop/en-GB/search?query=cigarettes&inp...

Now I wonder what the GOST ones were like

I had seen the cigarette. But but not the meat which costs $2,690 for four tuna-can size cans and is a mix of pork and chicken

Thinking of a concept for a restaurant meal along the lines of a calibrated fried spam dinner, that costs ~2k for about a can worth, fried like they do in Hawaii.

Come to think of it, would love to see an “iron chef- calibrated foods” edition.

"It was produced by ISO Technical Committee 34 (Food products), Sub-Committee 8 (Tea)."

Yes, it’s a bit frightening to know what a hidden dependency NIST is on many things. In my industry, all calibrations ultimately derive from physical NIST standards for resistance, frequency, etc.

It’s frightening that… NIST is doing the very thing it was established to do back when it was called the Bureau of Standards?

I suspect the fear comes from both seeing NIST as a single point of critical failure, and perhaps also that it is a far less resilient and/or far more vulnerable, institution than may have been previously realized.

You can still make cookies out of reference and/or lab materials :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crjxpZHv7Hk

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