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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."
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.
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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
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.
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."