We engineers tend to overlook simple things like these in our grand vision of the world. Yours truly is also at times guilty of getting blinded by these blinder

We engineers tend to overlook simple things like these in our grand vision of the world. Yours truly is also at times guilty of getting blinded by these blinders. This reminds me of a joke that was floating around the internet few years ago. It goes something like this: The US and the USSR were in a space race and trying to put a person in space. To give the trainee astronauts a feeling of working without gravity the trainees were trained under water. But the US faced a challenge. There was no pen that would work under water for the trainees to use. The US spent millions of dollars on R&D and finally produced a pen that would work under water. It was a very proud moment for the engineers who developed the technology. After a few months, there was a world conference of space scientists and engineers where teams from both the US and the USSR were also present. So to get a sense of how the USSR team solved the challenge of helping trainees to take notes under water, the US team mention about their own invention and asked the USSR team how they solved the problem. The USSR team replied, We use pencils :)