bubble glass water

I started wondering this evening why bubbles form in a glass of tap water when it sits around overnight. Luckily, the power of the interweb helped out.

Before reading this explanation, see if you can explain it completely. It's a very good exercise in logic and chemistry. I also thought about it pretty hard before seeking an answer, and I got the explanation only about 50% right.

Try to explain:
- where does the air come from
- why are the bubbles only along the glass
- why do the bubbles reach a constant, stable size instead of continuing to grow or shrink

There are second-order questions that are more important, but I can't ask those upfront without giving too much away.

As a side note, I should say that just doing this little bit of scientific sleuthing on the Web really scared me. I have a little son and I am imagining him doing a lot of his research for school on the web. I have a couple of engineering degrees, so even though I didn't have the complete answer, I could easily tell the idiotic answers, or even the slightly wrong answers, from the golden and true answer (tell me if I'm wrong!). But a child would probably believe any/all of what they read. The problem is not just the single instance of misinformation, but the fact that being exposed to misinformation over time actually hurts your chances of building a solid foundation for logic in your mind.

In this particular query, the first result was acceptable and came from a stellar website, Scientific American. The answer wasn't wrong, just a bit incomplete. The second result, courtesy of Yahoo! Answers, shows a page with regular people guessing at what an answer could be, and ranges from reasonable to flat out silly. The third and fourth results were kind of unrelated and short/inaccurate from WikiAnswers. Finally, the fifth result from some random site I'd never heard of called Answerbag contained the glorious answer I had been seeking, but it: 1) had no votes, either positive or negative, 2) had no comments, 3) was written in a funny 'cowboy' vernacular that could make it seem less credible, and 4) had an author whose screen name was 'notmrjohn' and whose pic is literally a horse's ass.

That's it. When Elliot is grown, he will not use the Internets for homework. We will go to the library and get books. If he needs to surf to answer that immediate question, we will do it together to separate the wheat from the chaff....

(Yeah, right - and I will feed him nothing but organic, sustainably-grown, home-cooked food and sew clothes for him of organic cloth. We all know the boy will live on the Internet without parental supervision and will eat junk food. It will be interesting to see how it all works out.)

This query also highlighted a failing in Google's ad system. The single ad shown for the query [air bubbles form in a glass of water] is this, it's almost poetic:

Bubble Glass Water

Bubble Glass Water Online.
Shop Target.com.
www.Target.com

Yeah. I'm sure Target would love to sell me some air bubbles. They, Google, should have known that I was looking up something about basic science and tried to sell me a science kit, a subscription to a basic sci mag, or some kit for making bubbles. It's all in the gestalt of language people; put it together now. A human could do it, so eventually the computers will too, if we tell them to.

note to Ikea

Dear IKEA,

Please understand that I have the utmost respect for the operation you have going. The size, scale, and complexity of it all is a joy to behold. However, it's an idiosyncrasy of mine to find problems in systems - loopholes, inefficiencies, ways to scam. It's just the way my brain works and I've been that way since I was a young tot.

I have shopped in your stores many times and never until today have I found a problem. In fact, when I notice little things, like how the picture frames and other little items in your room displays are tagged on the bottom with room codes, so that when the unavoidable happens and someone moves the item into another room or to the cashier's station, your little minions will know exactly which room is missing a piece of its display, I am genuinely impressed.

Why then, IKEA, do you allow your patrons to wait for upwards of two hours in your customer service department clutching their deli-style numbers so that they can return a pair of ill-fitting blinds, or a chair that didn't fit into the nook that was envisioned? Those idle, annoyed bodies could be shopping or at least getting some exercise walking along the corridors of your fine store. I'm sure, given a small random probability of making a purchase per unit of time perusing your wares, that in the time you have them waiting, these circulating bodies would actually spend as much or more money than the value of the goods that they are attempting to return, should you devise a system that injects them efficiently back into The Maze for the duration of their wait.

This is how it works, in a nutshell:
1 - Minion meets customers slogging merchandise back into the store for a return at the Customer Service (CS) entrance.
2 - Minion takes the cart or basket, affixes a large number onto it, and gives a numbered electronic doo-dad to said customer, a la The Olive Garden.
3 - When the CS queue length approaches the customer's number (according to your current staffing guidelines, this would be about 2 hours later), transmit a signal to the doo-dad so that it beeps and tells the customer to get their no-good arses back to your customer service department. With the magic of computers, you can optimize the buffer time Tb, but as a good starting point, I will choose 10 minutes. So, at T - 10, you instruct customer to begin the trek from The Maze back to C.S.
[As an optional extra credit task, you could even send an update, through the power of Electro-Magnetism, to all the people in your store with a do-dad, letting them know their individual remaining estimated wait time. So if they were eyeing the Swedish meatballs but weren't sure they'd have the time, they would then realize that they had time to sample all of the delicious items in your cafe before being customer-serviced - imagine the joy this would induce.]
4 - Customer then finishes their wait (bounded from above by Tb) physically in the waiting room of customer service, where they can enjoy being coughed upon by snotty nosed toddlers but hopefully not trampled on with carts and pointy bits as those have been removed from general circulation within CS in Step 1.

I do understand your position that it's best not to make this returning process too enjoyable for the nefarious customer, lest they choose to make it habit. However, with the system I have described here, you stand to gain as much as we do and hopefully neither of us will go insane in the process.

Efficiently yours,
Sarah M

baby words

Hi everyone,

This is my first blog post. I'm not planning on sharing this with "the world" any time soon. Nothing in the past has inspired me to write a blog, but being a new mom has finally done it. So, it took me 10 months to do it. See, before, I thought I would remember every little detail of Elliot's life, but now I'm realizing that my brain is dropping memories like a sieve and I'd better write this stuff down. Let me be clear: this blog (or at least the baby portions of it) is for ME. I know that all you hipper-than-though blog readers couldn't give a rat's behind about my baby and what he says/eats/extrudes, but I DO, and I am way too lazy to write this stuff in an actual notebook. What we all do when services like Blogger start to go down X years from now is another story - I guess that's why printers will never become obsolete. But I digress.

So, today's missive is about The Boy's current vocabulary size. He's not talking yet (except for "hi" and "hey" which he's been saying for about 3 months). As far as I can tell, the first word he started recognizing was...

BOUNCE / BOUNCY / BOUNCING

This happened when he was about 6 months old and in his Fisher Price Rainforest Jumperoo, aka Bouncer. When he first got that thing, he would go berserk in it jumping as hard and fast as he could for about 10 minutes. I would jump around him yelling "bounce, bounce, bounce!" and I think the excitement of it all and the repetition made his little brain understand the word almost immediately. Within days, if he was just hanging in the bouncer and I came by and said "bounce, bounce!" he would start laughing and bouncing like crazy. Now, even if he's not in the bouncer, saying "bounce" just one time quietly will get him to start bobbing up and down.

HI / HEY

This happened around month 7. He would say it and sometimes bring his hand up for a spasmodic wave. We could get this to repeat by saying hi repeatedly to him. My mom is the one who first claimed (noticed?) that he was "talking" because he would always "say" "heeeeey" in a squeaky tone when she was on speaker phone. I was doubtful, but the context was certainly appropriate and over the weeks and months the "heeeey" sound did morph into a "hey" and then a "hi" (complete with American-style intonation and diphthongs, to my great enjoyment) which he would usually say when first starting a "conversation" with someone or when looking in the mirror at himself.

UP

When he was laying down and I would say "up!" he would tense up his neck and back so I could pull him into the standing position. This was repeatable. It gave (still gives) him great enjoyment after having to lie still for a diaper change.

EAT

Also around month 7 or 8 after he'd been eating solid foods for a while, I introduced a little eating sign for him to tell me that he wanted food. I would say "want to eat?" or "are you hungry?" and make an eating motion with my mouth. He quickly picked it up and would come over to me like a puppy whenever I was eating at the table, looking up and giving me the munching motion as a sign. I always had (have) to oblige this little sign because it's just so darn endearing. Now, when he hears the word "eat" he makes the sign, so I know there's a mental connection there.

NO

This one is debatable, but around month 8 or 9 it seemed that he started understanding the ever-present word "no." He tends to stop what he's doing momentarily giving him enough time to look over his shoulder and make eye contact with you before he continues doing exactly what he knows you want him to stop. That's the question, I guess. Does he understand that he's supposed to cease entirely, or does he just think he's supposed to pause and look at you? I tend to think that he doesn't really understand what we're asking for. Either that, or he understands the intent but, much like a senior with Alzheimer's, he forgets after about 3 seconds what it is that you just told him and continues on his merry way sticking his hand in the toilet bowl.

MORE

While you're feeding him, you can often get his attention by saying "more?". I'm not sure that he really recognizes the phoneme - perhaps any odd uttering would achieve the same thing.

BABY

He definitely knows this one. If I say "where's the baby?" when he's looking at a baby product, he can pick out the baby and point to it. I don't think he realizes yet that he too is a baby.

NOSE

When you say this word, he points at your face with his index finger. If you allow him, he will come forward and touch your nose and/or scratch and poke it dangerously.

LIGHT

He likes to point at the lights in the house and in the past week (month 10) he will point at the lights after you say "where's the light?" In the last month he has become hyper-aware of lights turning on and off and very interested in light switches.


That's about all that I'm aware of. Of course, he could understand much more and I'd never know it. Last night for example, he picked up his drum stick and looked up at me. I said "hit the drum!" and immediately he leaned over and started hitting the drum right in the middle of the drum head. It's possible that was his plan all along, but I don't think so.