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
... that whenever there is a dupe, there are people like the above posters telling everyone that it is a dupe. In reality, their comments are merely duplicates of previous posts. If duplication is really an issue for you at slashdot, either:
/. anyways?
:)
a. attempt to become a staff member
b. submit some non duplicated content.
halfway down this preachy tirade, I realize that someone already has probably told the dupe police here that what they are doing, is in fact, duplicating duplicates. So I find myself dubiously duplicating the disasterous duties of other dupe police dislikers.
FFS, talk about the article, say something funny/insightful/etc, or troll around to waste time at work. I'snt that why we come to
OT: Hope that didn't burst anyone's bubble
-AC
So I can have that feeling of Deja Vu... all over again, Slashdot style.
... that doesn't talk about this article being a dupe!
Oh - I did it too, didn't I?
We have this nice moderation system ... it can't be too difficult to change the story submissions to a system with checks. I'm thinking about a mixture of digg and slashdot. Just let a group of slashdot readers preread everything and vote on stories ( with a big "DUPE!" button ).
The editors still choose the stories but we have some kind of quality control.
This dupe btw could have been avoided with a little script to compare the text and the links in the story with all the stories submitted in the last weeks.
Maybe Slashcode is a little too focused on the user and should try to work on the editor part instead.
*an infinite number of monkeys wrote this sig
You should add a small snippet of code and insert it into the publication process; this snippet of code extracts all URLs from the href's in the proposed posting, and searches all posting of last 18months to see if they appear somewhere: in that case, a HUGE RED warning will flash on the screen, asking the post writer (and/or the editor) to check that the proposed posting is not a duplicate.
For example, Nov 11, the posting Mad Scientist Invents Colored Bubbles appears in
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
The rate of at which Slashdot runs stories that appeared on Slashdot first is getting embarrassing too.
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.
Sigh. To easy. Give me a hard problem.
how about spelling?
because, this early in the morning, I was thinking it was Thursday again.
And the inventor solved that early on. Indeed the dye has to be attached to the soap or else the relatively heavy dye will sink to the bottom of the bubble to form a dark spot in a clear bubble.
The other problem (if you'd read TFA you'd have known) is that parents do not like it much if their kid comes home when it is splattered with your dye, no matter if it washes of easily. He solved that problem with a dye that can switch between colored and uncolored.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
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?
Your to late for the ketchup idea.
Since 1952 the US Government has been testing ketchup. Ketchup must flow between 3-7 centimeters in 30 seconds to be considered Grade A. Ketchup that flow closer to the 3-centimeter mark receive better scores. Ketchups that are too thick or too runny receive poor grades.
They have a video on their website of what these things look like:
s wf
http://www.zubbles.com/flash/ZubblesVideoPlayer2.
"First go like this, spin around. Stop! Double take three times. One, two three. Theeeen PELVIC THRUST. Whoooo, Whooooooo. Stop on your right foot, DON'T FORGET IT! Now it's time to bring it around town. Bring-it-around-town. Then you do this, then this, and this, then this, then that, then this and that..."
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
"a finger paint that fades from every surface except a special paper, a hair dye that vanishes in a few hours, and disappearing-graffiti spray paint. There's a toothpaste that would turn kids' mouths a bright color until they had brushed for the requisite 30 seconds, and a soap that would do the same for hand washing"
Not just washing for kids: doctors and nurses too, this could slow MRSA superbugs a bit! Anyone think of any other cool uses for the dye?
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
Maybe it's the subject line, maybe it's the dupe factor but it seems the real point is being missed here.
It's not the bubbles that are important.
It's the *dye*.
A dye that will fade to nothing in air, or because of friction, or with plain water - anywhere, infact, other than in specific materials (i.e. the bubble solution), is fantastic! Anywhere where colour would be desired but has previously been avoided because of it's permanancy is now a target.
Yes, toys (ink grenades or coloured water gun fights anyone?) are the easiest applications to think of but I'm sure there are many more.
One I can think of (although I'd rather it never came to pass) is temporary signage or even (vomit) advertising. Some mobile printer just inks over whatever surface is available. After a set time, the print fades away. No more messy fly poster fragments or ripped posters.
Another that's just come to mind is the idea of exposure markings on air-tight or sterile products. Think medical syringes, dressings etc. Markings on these sealed products are made using one of these dye variants. It fades within 30 seconds or so. So if you get a approached by a nurse weilding a clear syringe you know it's been sitting around somewhere and can politely (or otherwise) ask for a fresh one.
What they have here is a completely new dye group - they have a scaffold they can tweak to get the exact properties (colour, fastness, fade speed etc.) they want. It's not gonna change the world but it's still an acomplishment.
OK, enough ranting - I guess I'm just quite taken with this idea. It seems like a mirror of what went into designing inkjet inks... Brings back fond memories of my student chemistry days too!
"...So I hung back and lurked. For 18 months. Can't beat a good old-fashioned lurking."
Because they're obviously testing us, man. You see, right now the dupes are pretty damn easy to see, but eventually the dupes will get harder to spot and the stakes will get higher. Those who don't point out the dupes will be eliminated and the ones who point them out get lower numbers. In the end, there will be one person and he will be crowned King of Slashdot, and he will get girls. And touch their boobies.
My kingdom for some mod points. For that comment, sir, you should be awarded a special sneak preview accidental-but-on-purpose brush with your arm against said boobies (through clothes) in advance of judgement day.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato