The story goes that when NASA started sending people into space, it encountered the problem that regular pens did not work in a weightless environment. After spending many $100Ks on research, NASA did manage to engineer a special pen that could work in zero gravity. Naturally, the Soviet space program had the same problem but did not have the same resources and technology to solve it. The Russians did find a very effective solution, both technically and financially: they simply gave their cosmonauts lead pencils.
The story rings like a good metaphor for (more…)
