Thanks for helping us!

Thanks again to those of you who are helping us with our ibuprofen research. The purpose of this blog is to share information and show you some pictures of what we are working with. We have gotten ibuprofen from Argentina, France, China, Australia, Czech Republic and Japan. We will share pictures of these as we begin preparing them as samples. If you have any contacts in other countries who might be willing to send us some ibuprofen, we would be thrilled to have samples from as many countries as we can get! The more exotic, the better.

This is my favorite package, from Japan. It was sent to us by Justin Wyatt, another C of C professor, who has been in Australia for the past year on sabbatical. Thanks Justin!



It reminds me of the package of soap with Homer as Mr. Sparkle:



I took Japanese in college, and while I don't remember much, I can read the characters (when I have an idea already of what they say). Japanese characters like these stand for a syllable rather than a single letter. The yellow letters on the ibuprofen label say "eye-be-be-ro-fe-n" and the Mr. Sparkles label says "mi-su-ta-a sa-pa-a-ra-ku". Japanese uses 3 alphabets, and these characters are from the alphabet they use for words that are not Japanese. Like ibuprofen and Mr. Sparkles.

Homer seems to be saying "ha-ku-u ku-ri-i-tsu," I could be wrong about that, since it doesn't make any sense. Does it?

I just thought I would share that with you!

Working with me on this research is Corby Harris, who will be posting to the blog as well. You can check back periodically for new information and interesting tidbits such as the one above.

Soon we will have a post concerning our Glove Compartment research, including information about the samples that we are sending to many of you around the US. We hope you will receive them by this weekend; please put them in your glove compartment when you receive them and you can email us to let us know when you get them in place at:

coryw@cofc.edu


Thanks again for your help!