Best Of MetaFilter

Seb Lester calligraphy

Lovely ink links recently on Mefi:

Penmenship isn't dead: the vibrant art of well-crafted written forms introduces two talented young penmen

Chinese calligraphy and painting manual from 1633 now online, in full offers a view of "the earliest and the most beautiful example of multicolor printing anywhere in the world"

How the ballpoint pen killed cursive looks at the surprisingly complicated influence of the biro

I should be able to read that discusses Copperplate, a beautiful and elaborate script that in its time was considered a basic penmanship style

And in Ask Me: "What are some good resources for a southpaw to improve his handwriting that don't involve the kind of cursive I was (not) taught as a child?" and "What's the best non-bulky fountain pen you've used?"

Apollo 12 Pacific Recovery by NASA Goddard Photo and Video (cc by)

In a thread about the wonderful "writes upside down" spacepen, member eriko explains why pencils in space can be quite deadly and unsafe:

Realize that a piece of graphite between two conductors with enough current behind them becomes a light bulb. Briefly. This isn't good in sea level atmosphere, in a pure oxygen atmosphere, this is deadly. Gemini used mechanical pencils, which got rid of the wood, but left the graphite, and graphite+oxygen+spark=fire. Bad.