Added 1 new A* page:Hey! Tune in Saturday (technically today, but I mean later on) because I'm finally going to get together my report on tracking down the best eraser IN THE WORLD. Probably. Anyway I ordered a bunch of fancy erasers and tested them against each other in a plastic eraser deathmatch sort of thing where there could be only one survivor--because obviously I'm not gonna work on A* with a second-best eraser, sheesh. I need all the help I can get!
Many erasers were shaved in the research for this report!
Don't miss it later today!
(While you're waiting, why not check out Wikipedia's article on erasers? For instance, did you know that in 1770, Joseph Priestly, better known as the discoverer of soda water and oxygen (his "dephlogisticated air," which he "first tested it on mice, who surprised him by surviving quite a while entrapped with the air, and then on himself, writing that it was 'five or six times better than common air for the purpose of respiration, inflammation, and, I believe, every other use of common atmospherical air'")--in 1770, I say, this somewhat eccentric English theologian and natural philosopher "described a vegetable gum to remove pencil marks: 'I have seen a substance excellently adapted to the purpose of wiping from paper the mark of black lead pencil.' He dubbed the substance 'rubber'."
And then later in 1770, I guess, English engineer Edward Nairne (who constructed the first marine barometer) developed "the first widely-marketed rubber eraser" after having "inadvertently picked up a piece of rubber instead of breadcrumbs." In fact, crustless bread was still used as an eraser by students in Tokyo as late as the early 1900s (the bonus was, if you got hungry, you could eat it--although I suppose maybe not if you'd done a lot of erasing with it already).)
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