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Science Marches On!
Dec. 17th, 2002 01:35 pmIf you're like me, then you've frequently asked yourself, "When are they going to come up with unbreakable soap bubbles?" I'm afraid the answer is, not quite yet.
Sitting beside me on the desk is a product called "Touchabubbles", which bills itself as 'The Scientific Breakthrough that Doesn't Break!' (heh). It promises bubbles that 'magically harden when they contact they air', so that you can have hours of fun 'catching them, stacking them, or watching them roll along the floor'. It goes without saying that I HAD to have this.
Here are the drawbacks I noticed in my experiments with Touchabubbles (with the office door closed, thankyewverymuch). I'll take the selling points in reverse order.
"Watch them roll along the floor"....unless you have carpets, or little grains of dust, at which point they will stick and remain stuck until they deflate;
"Stack them"...if you can catch them in your hand before they hit the floor and they happen to connect with another bubble. Once they've landed, any attempt to lift them up using fingers, a pencil, chopsticks, a thin piece of cardboard and/or blowing on them causes deflation. I don't think "stack" is the right word to use; possibly "facilitate the midair collision" comes closer.
"Catching them"...here's the fun part. They hang in midair a *long* time, and it is possible to get a nice collection in your hand (or to spin around in the middle of the cloud, get covered in them, and burble "Lookit me, I'm a pretty Christmas tree!" ((Not that I did this. No.)) ) .
The drawback is that they *do* deflate, and when they do they leave a little 'skin' behind. No, really, it looks like dead skin, the sort you peel off in long strips when you're sunburned. Which means that a minute or two after catching a handful of bubbles and watching them deflate, you look like an extra from the last five minutes of the special uncut edition of "Dr. Strangelove", if you know what I mean. Or maybe "CHUD".
So there you go--it's sort of nifty, but hardly a fog-ring-blowing smoke gun.
Sitting beside me on the desk is a product called "Touchabubbles", which bills itself as 'The Scientific Breakthrough that Doesn't Break!' (heh). It promises bubbles that 'magically harden when they contact they air', so that you can have hours of fun 'catching them, stacking them, or watching them roll along the floor'. It goes without saying that I HAD to have this.
Here are the drawbacks I noticed in my experiments with Touchabubbles (with the office door closed, thankyewverymuch). I'll take the selling points in reverse order.
"Watch them roll along the floor"....unless you have carpets, or little grains of dust, at which point they will stick and remain stuck until they deflate;
"Stack them"...if you can catch them in your hand before they hit the floor and they happen to connect with another bubble. Once they've landed, any attempt to lift them up using fingers, a pencil, chopsticks, a thin piece of cardboard and/or blowing on them causes deflation. I don't think "stack" is the right word to use; possibly "facilitate the midair collision" comes closer.
"Catching them"...here's the fun part. They hang in midair a *long* time, and it is possible to get a nice collection in your hand (or to spin around in the middle of the cloud, get covered in them, and burble "Lookit me, I'm a pretty Christmas tree!" ((Not that I did this. No.)) ) .
The drawback is that they *do* deflate, and when they do they leave a little 'skin' behind. No, really, it looks like dead skin, the sort you peel off in long strips when you're sunburned. Which means that a minute or two after catching a handful of bubbles and watching them deflate, you look like an extra from the last five minutes of the special uncut edition of "Dr. Strangelove", if you know what I mean. Or maybe "CHUD".
So there you go--it's sort of nifty, but hardly a fog-ring-blowing smoke gun.
