working on a theory of ballpoint pen disappearance using an equilibrium model.
problem: i bought a 36-pack of cheap ballpoint pens two months ago. I keep putting a new pen on the coffee table by my notebooks, and yet, there is never a pen there.
constraints: i live alone, so it's unlikely someone is stealing my pens.
hypothesis: there are many places where a ballpoint pen may be needed, and only one place where pens are introduced into the system. for example, when i take a notebook to the coffee shop to work, i put a pen with that notebook. in this way pens are dispersed to places where i use my notebooks. this is much like how gases expand to fill a container until they reach a uniform pressure, or water molecules pass across a semipermeable membrane until they reach a uniform water concentration, or heat passes between two bodies until they reach thermal equilibrium.
can we use such a model to predict the behavior of my ballpoint pen collection? what implications will that have? for one thing, it posits the possibility that one day my ballpoint pen collection will achieve uniform density across all the places where i may use a pen, and the pens will stop disappearing from my coffee table.
why is it that we have never observed such an equilibrium in practice? well, there are a few possibilities. perhaps the space my ballpoint pen collection is trying to fill is simply too vast, so that the ballpoint pen density at any one point is too low to be observable. perhaps the lifespan of a single pen is so short that there is, as it were, a leak in the system, due to pens dying and exiting the system (via the trash can). perhaps --
wait hang on. Fucking. Post cancelled. I just found three working ballpoint pens in the bottom of my backpack.
conclusion: there is a one-way ballpoint pen valve in my backpack.
