No. 2 pencil

It means HB.

I wrote this because of the SAT exam. It’s conducted all over the world, but they really can’t understand that except the US, the rest of the world calls it HB.

In fact, Faber Castell has capitalised on this, by rating HB as a No. 2 ½ pencil, so people buy a “No. 2” pencil when an HB pencil is referred to by that name. Just good business, they call it.

I call this distinction a complete waste of time and energy.

“No. 2” pencil, the name itself sounds so odd.

“HB” makes more sense than “No. 2”, because the word HB is based on how (i) hard and how (ii) black the pencil is.

Since the lead of a pencil is a mixture of clay and graphite, their differing proportions is what decides the kind of pencil. More graphite makes the pencil rougher and harder, but less blacker. Corresponding to that, more clay makes the pencil softer but blacker too (since more graphite is left on the paper).

A pencil is always better than a pen. That’s what I always say, because you can erase what you write by pencil and reuse paper. That’s the second R of “reduce, reuse and recycle”, and it’s better than recycling paper because the latter requires energy to be input (because if paper could be recycled without spending energy, the entropy of the Universe would decrease, which is not possible).

My favourite colour, if you don’t count white, is green, because it is the colour of a leaf that’s saving our lives all the time (CO2 in, O2 out), and I just want to appreciate that by planting more trees.

(You’d get more pencil too.)