You know how to easily determine whether you had taken the multivitamin pill in the morning: just check the color of your urine before noon.
But what if you are color blind?!
This portable spectrograph can do the color checking for you in seconds. And since it only needs to "look" for a certain color, it doesn't have to be an expensive hospital-grade urine spectrograph. It can actually be a simple polyethylene strip with a few dots of the needed color. Just dip it in and see if the dots vanished visually -- and if not, you better rush to take that vitamin pill!-- xipetotec, Aug 17 2007 Colour blindness simulation http://wellstyled.c...heme2/index-en.htmlShows how different colours are perceived by people with different types of colour blindness [imaginality, Aug 17 2007] Some colour-blindness tests http://home.wanadoo...ulschils/05.03.html [imaginality, Aug 17 2007] Wiki on colour blindness http://en.wikipedia...iki/Color_blindnessIndividuals with Americanitis cannot see the 'u' in the above phrase [imaginality, Aug 17 2007] There's also an obesity test based on the colour of your urine stream. If you can't see what colour it is, you're obese.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Aug 17 2007 My obese what? Stop leaving me in suspense with your sentence fragments!-- globaltourniquet, Aug 17 2007 See link for an interesting colour chart that shows how different colours are perceived by colour-blind people. Useful for graphic designers, map-makers, and the like. And as a deuteranomalous (red-green colour-blind) person, I found it interesting to try it in reverse to see what you normal folk are seeing.-- imaginality, Aug 17 2007 Nothing new here, my urine has always been portable.-- normzone, Aug 18 2007 Thoroughly Baked. However, it goes by the name "colorimeter", if made in China for sale in the US; or "colourimeter" if made in the US for sale in the UK. (Make sure you're looking at the Beer - Lambert - Bouguer [haven't I seen him befoure?] absorption colo(u)rimeter, not the emission version with a suction cup on the front for measuring the color of your monitor.) They come as portable, and as precise, as you want to pay for.
In fact, in 1979, Brink & Slegers studied glomerular filtration rates (that's kidney function) in rat kidneys, using vitamin B12 as a marker, measured with a fiberoptic colorimeter. They showed results identical to the previous standard, vitamin B12 spectrophotometry.
It was a good idea then; you just aren't up on reading research abstracts from the University of Nijmegen. No fishbone for you.-- lurch, Aug 18 2007 //sentence fragments// Ooops. Fixed - thanks.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Aug 18 2007 So [imaginality] try eating a meal of beetroot and then tell us what colour it turns your urine....go on, it'll be fun...-- Hairy Sock, Aug 19 2007 Sure thing - any excuse to eat some beetroot. Yum.-- imaginality, Aug 19 2007 [normzone] I hope that wasn't sp: potable.-- zen_tom, Aug 19 2007 random, halfbakery