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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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Just goes to show that it is easier to make duplicate stories than coloured soap bubbles.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
... 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
Also, I noted that the article referred to soap bubbles as "the world's most popular toy". Here is an interesting question for all of us: what is actually the world's most popular toy, and how do one measure it? I'm willing to bet a good amount soap bubbles isn't the correct answer...
... that doesn't talk about this article being a dupe!
Oh - I did it too, didn't I?
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
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.
Sigh. To easy. Give me a hard problem.
how about spelling?
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.
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
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.