Sometime rather alarmingly late in the Mathematica 6 release cycle it started to emerge that Stephen had a bunch of people working on an insane idea: including in Version 6 an entirely new set of features never before considered and definitely not on the release plan.
Read MoreI've been a "professional" user-interface programmer for 20 years. In that time I've written a grand total of three little apps just for the fun of it. Two of them I snuck in as hidden buttons in the Mathematica About Box, because it was just too difficult to start a new application from scratch. All of them can be replicated in a few minutes using Version 6. In my experience, writing GUI (graphical user interface) applications in C or Java or Visual Basic--or whatever--is fine if you plan to spend weeks or months on a program, but prohibitively horrible if you really only have a few minutes to dedicate to the task.
Read MoreSo far as I am aware, history does not record whether the great chemist Sir Humphrey Davy, who discovered sodium in 1807 by electrolysis of molten sodium hydroxide, ever threw any in a lake. But I think it's safe to say that very few chemists since then haven't.
Read MoreThe Ig Nobel prizes are awarded every year by the journal The Annals of Improbable Research for scientific work that "cannot or should not be reproduced". It is a very silly prize, given at a very silly ceremony by a very silly journal. It is, in fact, the highest scientific honor of the silly category in the world. And it is without doubt the highest honor for which the Periodic Table Table is eligible.
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While anecdotal evidence would suggest that many people have thrown sodium into the lakes and streams of the world, they have been reprehensibly lax in documenting the results. I could find no reliable, and I stress the word reliable, reports on what actually happens. What reports I did find were contradictory: As you will see, I now know why.
Read MoreMy reasons for making the physical Periodic Table Table were purely practical: We needed a new conference table for my office area, and I didn't want an ugly one from the office supply catalog. But my reasons for making and then greatly elaborating the website were more subtle, so subtle in fact that I didn't know what they were until the website was very far along.
Read MoreFor well over a hundred years the world has failed to take proper notice of the word "Table" clearly contained in the name of the famous Periodic Table of the Elements.
One evening while reading Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks, I became momentarily confused. He begins a chapter with a description of a periodic table display he loved to visit in the Kensington Science Museum, and in mis-reading the paragraph, I thought it was a table, not the wall display it actually is. While my confusion only lasted a few seconds, when I found out there wasn't a Periodic Table in the British Museum, it left a hole I felt I had to fill.