As readers of this blog might know, I have an unhealthy interest in the chemical elements. And Mathematica. The combination means that all my element-related projects are created using almost no tools other than Mathematica. It's not that I use it because I feel like I should---I certainly use other programs when appropriate (Photoshop, for example). It's just that Mathematica is the best available tool for many of the things I want to do. Really.
Read MoreThe spinthariscope, invented and beautifully named by William Crookes in 1903, is a device for seeing individual atoms. Or at least, seeing the death of individual atoms. A spinthariscope consists of a needle, similar to a watch hand, positioned in front of a zinc sulfide luminous screen, with a magnifying glass focused on the screen. At the end of the needle is a small patch of radioactive material. Originally radium was used; more recently polonium, uranium, and americium have been found to be safer.
Read MoreMy poster and related imagery can be seen in several TV shows, and most recently staff at the venerable NOVA science series emailed asking for permission to use my poster image in an upcoming show about metals. They wanted to pan and zoom over it, starting wide and then focusing down onto a few individual elements.
I said, "Fine, but I have something I think you'll like even better.... How about a video where every one of those samples is rotating in place?"
Read MoreSometime 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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