Slashdot Mirror
The 11 Year Soap Bubble
-Overdrive- writes "Popular Science has an interesting article about an inventor and his 11 year quest for Colored Bubbles" From the article: " It turns out that coloring a bubble is an exceptionally difficult bit of chemistry. A bubble wall is mostly water held in place by two layers of surfactant molecules, spaced just millionths of an inch apart. If you add, say, food coloring to the bubble solution, the heavy dye molecules float freely in the water, bonding to neither the water nor the surfactants, and cascade almost immediately down the sides. You'll have a clear bubble with a dot of color at the bottom. What you need is a dye that attaches to the surfactant molecules and disperses evenly in that water layer. Pack in more dye molecules, get a deeper, richer hue. Simple. Well, on paper anyway."
Mad Scientist Invents Colored Bubble
Posted by Zonk on Thursday November 17, @03:19PM
Is expecting the /. editors to read the articls they post themselves too much to ask? Apparently so, and emailing the "on-duty editor" is a complete waste of time. Digg is looking better and better...
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
I noticed from the article that the dye they're using is a new/unusual organic compound. They're talking about people using the compound in their mouths (to know how long to brush their teeth), and the company's website shows pictures of kids playing with the bubbles.
But... is this product even safe? I'm not an organic chemist by any means, but it seems to me that you'd want to do a significant amount of testing on any new compound to make sure that it's not going to have any long-term negative effects.
--
Free 411! 1-800-411-SAVE
Free Conference Call -- No Spam, High Quality
I dunno, I realise that it's unlikely that he's spent 11 years on only this problem, but I can't imagine that there aren't any other problems/topics that are more important that he could concentrate on.
Assuming of course that there are no useful applications of a coloured dye that sticks to bubbles.
SonicNonsense.com - Random stuff from a bunch of random people.
Yes, it is a duplicate entry because editors don't do their job... and this scientist/inventor/nut is still a jackass.
OK, please explain something to me, because I've never understood this. What is the big deal if a story is a dupe? It should be instantly obvious from the summary that you've read the article before, so why not just skip it? More importantly, why go to all the trouble of clicking on the description of the story you've already read, hitting reply, and then posting a diatribe about how it's a dupe and Slashdot is going further down the drain with every day and so on.
This is especially true given the often-Libertarian nature of many of the comments on Slashdot. Many a time have I seen comments along the lines of "if people don't like violent video games, they should just not play them" etc. So why not apply the same logic to dupes? You see it, recognise it for what it is, and move on. There are plenty of other stories to check out.
Sometimes, I miss the original story (if it was only posted to games.slashdot.org for example and not the front page, or if I just don't happen to click on the original). In those cases, the dupes are helpful. And they really don't seem to harm anyone, so who cares if they pop up from time to time?
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
Well, I missed the original story, so I don't mind the duplication. As for the actual substance, traditional soap bubbles are multicoloured, swirly and beautiful anyway. Monocoloured bubbles look very boring by comparison. What a waste of effort!
Wow.
Maybe some of us like things to be better?
Maybe some of us think they'll correct themselves if we point this out again & again?
Maybe it's just that we're nerds, and cant tolerate *OBVIOUS* mistakes, especially when it's trivial to prevent?
You know, if you keep missing these posts, you might as well subscribe to the remaining sections too right ?
Just a thought.
> What is the big deal if a story is a dupe?
It's sloppy journalism. It reduces the value of ads, as it puts people off returning to the site if they keep seeing repeats. It's boring, and suggests the people running the site don't even bother to read it. Given the site's nerdy nature it's amazing no-ones knocked up the simple code required to give at least a simple pass over the stories before they're posted looking for some correlation between a new story and existing stories. And it happens very frequently.
Maybe it's just me, but it really sounds like he should have just spent the money to hire a real chemist in the first place, rather than spending about 10 years on trial and error, and causing lots of damage.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Because slashdot has thousands of submissions each day. Every dupe is a story that could have been posted that might have been more interesting.
sig?
People get irritated when they feel that 20% of the readers pay more attention to the site than the paid, so-called "editors."
I got the same thing from the article. The scientist only gets a brief mention. The inventor wasted tons of time and money as well as risking his health, guessing and trying to solve the problem hap hazzardly. He failed, so he got some capital then found a dye expert to figure out the solution.
hope they're paying the dye science guru guy well..
-A