Sailor Precious Woods

[stan]

I was curious of the types of woods used in the Sailor Precious Woods series and did a search using the newly developed https://chat.openai.com/ search engine.

 

The engine provided the information and following list. Is this true? Were that many types of woods used? Am certain not all were used for the different iterations and generations of models. Would make an incredible collecting effort.

 

The Sailor Precious Woods fountain pen series features pens made from a variety of exotic wood species from around the world. Some of the wood species that have been used in the Precious Woods series include:

• African Blackwood (Dalbergia melanoxylon)
• Amboyna Burl (Pterocarpus indicus)
• Bamboo
• Box Elder Burl (Acer negundo)
• Buckeye Burl (Aesculus spp.)
• Cherry (Prunus serotina)
• Cocobolo (Dalbergia retusa)
• Ebony (Diospyros spp.)
• Ebonite
• Granadillo (Platymiscium spp.)
• Green and Black Demantoid (Uvarovite)
• Imitation Tortoiseshell
• Kingwood (Dalbergia cearensis)
• Makassar Ebony (Diospyros celebica)
• Maple (Acer spp.)
• Olivewood (Olea europaea)
• Paua Shell
• Persimmon (Diospyros spp.)
• Pink Ivory (Berchemia zeyheri)
• Red Sandalwood (Pterocarpus santalinus)
• Rosewood (Dalbergia spp.)
• Walnut (Juglans spp.)

 

It notes, "This list is not exhaustive and other wood species may also be used in the Precious Woods series."

 

 

[womble21]

Are you sure that it's a real search engine, and not a chatbot designed to generate human-like text with no regard for veracity? Based on what I've seen, it's programmed to give you some kind of answer no matter what, even if it has to make things up. A human would say "I don't know" once in a while.

 

This is a much more accurate, though still incomplete, list of pens in the Precious Woods collection: https://pensinasia.com/new/collection/sailor/sailor_wood_collection_263

 

Some woods have both English and romanized Japanese names, like chizusugi (cedar), tagayasan (ironwood), and ebony (kokutan).

[stan]

That seems more like an agglomeration of wood pens by Sailor. Some of the pens shown are in the Precious Woods Series.

 

For the search engine I typed: How old is Mahatma Ghandi? It responded, "Mahatma Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869, and he died on January 30, 1948....." To me, that's pretty good.

 

Tried again something tougher. How prefectures are there in Korea? And, it got it right.

 

How tall was Shirley Temple? Got that right and more.

 

There is no chat. Only AI answering questions.

[XYZZY]

It's too bad that some of the responses to this were lost.  Admittedly, the conversation about ChatGPT isn't quite what the thread is about, but there were some good examples.

 

My personal dislike for ChatGPT is based on the fact that it cannot quote its sources.  It's been trained off a corpus that I cannot see, and its goal is to produce grammatically correct statements based on that corpus that sound confident & factual.  But since I cannot click links and read the source material I cannot see where data is coming from and decide for myself how much faith I have in the answer.

 

Or to summarize:  I think it is a homunculus with good grammar.

 

That is not intended to be derogatory:  I think that is its design goal, and I think it's reasonably good at that.

[Maurizio]

How about combing through Sailor catalogues past and present?

 

I love wooden pens and am gathering more little by little. I do think the Sailor and Platinum offerings are a bit overpriced. I have 2 Pilot Custom Kaedes, just beautiful pens and not excessively priced. I also have a Pilot VP cherry wood, which, I believe is stained beechwood, and it is also very nice. 

 

I would love a bamboo pen made by a quality maker. I ordered Chinese bamboo pen a couple of years ago and it was plain junk.  

[stan]

It would be wonderful to have access to older Sailor catalogues but I do not. A point to consider is that not all models make it into the catalogues. There are short run and special models that are never shown there.

 

Generally, Platinum models are very reasonable unless you are looking at entry level pens.