Recipe for Making Symetrical Holes in Water

scottZed writes "Danish researchers found a simple way to make curiously shaped air holes in a bucket of water. Simply rig the bucket to have a spinning plate at the bottom, and depending on the speed, you can get an ellipse, three-sided star, square, pentagon, or hexagon. The effect may help explain such shapes seen in atmospheric disturbances on Earth and other planets. One practical use: really trippy washing machines."

Comments

Re:Sloppy reporting.

[m0nstr42]

Seems that they realize that this is but baby steps, and there needs to be much more work done.

Amen. I'm getting sick of people reading a /. summary of a summary of someone's legitimate results and deciding then and there that the original research (whose message is now 2x re-interpreted by the successive authors) is crap. These people do this for a living; many hold tenure positions at prestigious research institutions that are reserved for the brightest in their fields. Most of their really significant results appear in peer-reviewed publications. They're probably slightly more qualified to decide what is significant in their fields than you are.

Popular media tends to mangle the crap out of stories in an effort to make it accessible to a wide variety of people. This is necessary for the sharing of information and the generation of public interest in scientific progress. If you're semi-intelligent and a particular story catches your eye, you should know enough to read between the lines a little bit. If you want to make any claims regarding validity, you need to find the original publications and make a slightly better assessment than a half-page web story can provide you with.