Now Buckyballs, Too?
December 10th, 2011On a recent cross-country flight, I happened upon this advertisement on page 125 of the Holiday 2011 edition of SkyMall:
As if it wasn’t bad enough that some despicable marketing hacks re-branded the term “organic“, now “Buckyballs” has been pilfered from the world of chemistry. Sadly, a Google search of the term returns the toys before the molecules. I don’t understand what, exactly, is so “bucky” about these balls. I also don’t understand how you could get away with trademarking that name, which has famously referred to C60 and friends since the 1980s.
I hope these toy makers get lumps of coal in their stockings this Christmas.
December 10th, 2011 at 8:27 AM
maybe “bucky” is the name of the first kit that ate some of these and had to have his bowels cut out.
December 10th, 2011 at 9:35 AM
You’d be less pissy if you actually had them. They are super fun.
December 10th, 2011 at 10:02 AM
They are indeed lots of fun.
December 10th, 2011 at 10:34 AM
You guys are sell-outs.
December 10th, 2011 at 1:50 PM
Ah, “buckyballs”! I gifted them to my nephew last year and explained to him why their shape had nothing to do with actual fullerene molecules. This led him to look up fullerenes on the intertubes and a productive scientific conversation ensued. Mission accomplished. Plus, buckyballs are fun!
December 11th, 2011 at 11:46 PM
I am angry at Big Bang Theory for fucking jamming the whole ferrous wheel thing. There’s no wiki page and all the reviews are too hard. Can’t find a simple mechanistic explanation on the web.
December 12th, 2011 at 10:28 AM
“There’s no wiki page and all the reviews are too hard.”
Well if there is no wiki page, then something doesn’t exist.
“Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject. So you know you are getting the best possible information.”
“The other reviews are just too hard” (pout, pout). Yonemoto might (might) just have to think.
December 16th, 2011 at 1:35 AM
oh for chrissakes, I found it on page five of my google search, it was in an ancient google books scan, and the chemical diagrams were all janky, had to redraw them to understand what was going on.
Doesn’t change the fact that BBT makes us stupider.
December 16th, 2011 at 1:53 AM
To be more specific: when I’m in a virtual teleconferenced meeting trying to explain a biochemistry concept to a bunch of biologists, and trying to look up something real quick and obvious on my phone trying to make an argument, I don’t have the time to “think” to search through a bunch of pdfs and digest and synthesize the information contained in reviews to do the simple step of confirming my knowledge that the iron-dependent step of central metabolism comes right next to the place where the citric cycle is broken in autotrophs that use carbon metabolism to sense nitrogen starvation and switch between ammonia and nitrate.
March 6th, 2012 at 6:16 AM
BAM! Yonemoto: 1 CR: 0