Friday, December 01, 2006

Long Live the Pink Flamingo

To paraphrase Mark Twain,  rumors of the death of pink flamingos are greatly exaggerated.

The so-kitschy-that-they're-cool pink flamingos will now be made by Pink Inc. (Morton Grove, Ill), picking up where Union Products left off since the latter when into bankruptcy.  Pink plans to make the products here in the states, which makes sense as I can't imagine that there would be much cost savings in shipping the blow molded products around the world.  Besides, to the best of my knowledge, the flamingos are pure Americana.  (Don't really think that Osama bin Laden has them set up outside his cave.)  I just imagine approaching the Chinese to make these, watching them trying not to double over in laughter during the discussions.


Monday, October 23, 2006

Polymers in the Proceedings

The current issue (October 17, 2006) of Proceedings of the NAS http://www.pnas.org/content/vol103/issue42/ has a special feature section on polymerization.  Lots of top notch researchers: Samorjai, Matyjaszewski, …  I'm always amazed by how little chemistry there is in this journal.  Fortunately, that makes it a quick scan.

Thursday, October 19, 2006

Rheology at the Edge

I sat in a talk yesterday by Gerry Fuller (Stanford U) on Interfacial/Multiphase Rheology. I'll leave a few of my biggest take-aways here over the next few posts.

While it makes sense, I had never thought about how a particle will likely not be located evenly between the two fluids, but will be more or less in one of the liquids depending on the surface energies involved (other specific attraction/repelling forces are being ignored). These particles can be used to stabilize emulsions and can be extremely difficult to dislodge if they are micron sized. The energy required is on the order of 10^6 kT, but the energy goes the square of the particle diameter. Nanoparticles then, a much easier to remove.

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Off and Running

It's about time that a polymer oriented blog was started.  There really isn't anything out there. 

John