This is a nicely done periodic table on the web — I particularly liked the little slider that would let me change the temperature and see which ones would melt and boil.
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« Turning the tawdry into poetry | Main | Bachmann: another Republican against poor children »
Mendeleev would plotz
Category: Science
Posted on: October 10, 2007 4:00 PM, by PZ Myers
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Physical Science
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Comments
Posted by: Wicked Lad | October 10, 2007 4:16 PM
That is an awsome amount of information, beautifully represented!
Posted by: MartB | October 10, 2007 4:28 PM
The language change is also great. It even does my home language (Afrikaans) flawlessly.
Posted by: sam mirshafie | October 10, 2007 4:33 PM
That is a fine looking periodic table, but if you like that, you would love Kalzium. It's a small but powerful application for KDE. The upcoming version of Kalzium, which will be released about the time KDE 4 is released (end of the year), will provide beautifully rendered 3D views of thousands of molecules, among other things.
I use it all the time for my Chemistry homework.
Posted by: Natasha Yar-Routh | October 10, 2007 4:44 PM
Tres cool, thank you PZ. I would have plotzed for this back in high school and university.
Posted by: blf | October 10, 2007 4:45 PM
PZ, thanks for the pointer to that awesome web page.
Sam, thanks for the pointer to Kalzium. The version installed on my elderly system is elderly (0.9.3) but impressive.
And of course, many thanks to the authours of these impressive tools; and to Dmitri Mendeleev for working it out.
Posted by: Jsn | October 10, 2007 4:55 PM
Plotzing - that would be fainting? or ....
Posted by: NinjaDebugger | October 10, 2007 4:59 PM
That would be "exploding", Jsn.
Posted by: Lee Bowman | October 10, 2007 6:06 PM
Such a neat table, it makes you want to sing about it, but keep in mind that Tom Lehrer has you beat.
I always liked Tom, since he's a cool guy, and a confirmed Liberal. Lehrer, a retired mathematics prof at Harvard in the sixties, who did Comedy Club dates on the side. 'The Elements' is one of my favorite pieces he did, altho I'm surprised they never got him for plagiarism, having stolen these lyrics from the periodic table, albeit only up to Nobelium.
http://www.privatehand.com/flash/elements.html
It's a rather simple tune, written in the key of C, and if anyone wants to memorize the lyrics, here 'tis:
http://www.leekhigh.staffs.sch.uk/science/chemistry/Chim/PTfolder/TLehrer.html
This also from Wikipedia: "Though Lehrer's songs today are rarely played on the air, they have been posted on Internet video sharing sites such as 'youtube'. Among the songs put to animation or even Star Wars clips are "New Math", "Pollution", and "The Elements". "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park" in particular has more user generated videos than many top 40 popular songs."
Posted by: Sven DiMilo | October 10, 2007 6:29 PM
Are you joking? Because (as you know if you are joking) another of Lehrer's best songs is about plagiarism ("Don't let others's work evade your eyes...don't shade your eyes...it's why god made your eyes...plagiarize plagiarize plagiarize!"), in which he impugns the good name of a Russian mathematician.
Posted by: Jsn | October 10, 2007 6:55 PM
With apologies to any Yiddish speakers, I never considered "explode" as a possible explanation of "plotz". The only other synonym I could come up with was a bit scatalogical unfortunately...
Lehrer's "I Got It From Agnes" and "The Vatican Rag" are also really good.
"You can do whatever you want, if
you've cleared it with the Pontiff..."
Posted by: Ichthyic | October 10, 2007 7:00 PM
The only other synonym I could come up with was a bit scatalogical unfortunately...
that's my recollection as well.
just to be absolutely clear (and far less subtle), the way I read the title was:
"Mendeleev would shit his pants"
...and I think it might not be too far off from being an accurate statement, given not only the functionality of that chart, but the fact Mendeleev would be looking at it on a computer screen.
Posted by: James | October 10, 2007 7:15 PM
I love it. Especially temp slide. My only question is what that is in? Kelvin? Celsius? Farenheit? I know it's very cool as I discovered that Helium and Hydrogen have very low melting and evaporation points and that at temps above 5870, everything on the Periodic Table is a gas.
Posted by: Tophe | October 10, 2007 7:31 PM
The temperature scale is in Kelvin. When you open it, it starts at 273 K, (0°C).
Posted by: Christian Burnham | October 10, 2007 7:31 PM
It's interesting to see that it's now possible to have little windows pop up within web pages which you can open/close and move around.
Surely it can't be long before someone writes a mini OS that's accessible within the browser. How many years before we can open up a browser window from inside a browser window? Let's get recursive.
Posted by: June | October 10, 2007 7:33 PM
"Plotzen" is probably from the German "platzen",
meaning to explode, break, burst, rupture.
Posted by: Jsn | October 10, 2007 7:54 PM
plotz :pronunciation: (plots), key
--v.i. Slang.
to collapse or faint, as from surprise, excitement, or exhaustion.
Hmmmm, that's not what I would consider explosive behavior.
Posted by: foxfire | October 10, 2007 8:16 PM
Thank you PZ! Utterly awesome! Yet another example of why you lead your students to the power of the Net.
I adore this Blog!
Posted by: David Harmon | October 10, 2007 8:24 PM
By examination, I read the temperature scale as Kelvin.
Posted by: Jon D. Moulton | October 10, 2007 8:50 PM
Alright, I'll be the whiner. It's scant on its cataloged isotopes. I hope development will continue because it is a nice interface for looking at radionuclides, but the catalog needs to be expanded to be really useful.
On the other hand, the phase information based on the temperature slider is very cool.
Posted by: Owlmirror | October 10, 2007 9:09 PM
(Regarding plotz=explode) Don't you get it? Mendeleev was a chemist. Almost all chemists blow something up at least once a week; even more often if they're actually working with explosive substances.
[...]
Posted by: Zarquon | October 10, 2007 9:22 PM
Theodore Gray's Periodic Table table and website are pretty cool.
Posted by: astrolieber | October 10, 2007 10:18 PM
Way to cccccccccccooooooooooooooooooolll
Posted by: astrolieber | October 10, 2007 10:20 PM
I'm sorry, that should've been 'too' instead of 'to'
Posted by: Chris Noble | October 10, 2007 11:25 PM
Silly evilutionists. Mengeleev was a Russian bigamist.
Truth is constant
Posted by: hyperdeath | October 11, 2007 8:23 AM
Very impressive but...
It uses that ghastly layout where the f-block (i.e. that containing the lanthanides and actinides) has been inelegantly ripped out and dumped at the bottom.
The true periodic table looks like this.
Posted by: sam mirshafie | October 11, 2007 8:39 AM
Christian Burnham: Interestingly, there are already many projects for web based operating systems. There's a short list of projects in the Wikipedia article (which needs a massive cleanup), but there are many more. I'm not exactly sure how I feel about web based operating systems, but as you wrote, it's a sign that the Web has matured over the last five years.
Posted by: Jon D. Moulton | October 11, 2007 10:12 AM
I previously whines about the paucity of isotope descriptions on the online periodic table. I WAS WRONG - THE ISOTOPE FUNCTION IS VERY COMPLETE (sorry about the noise, but that should be shouted). The problem was not the table, but the time I spent tweaking the table prior to commencing my whine. If you go to isotope mode, the slider which had controlled the temperature for the isotope phase display will change its function. That slider is then a switch between few-isotope mode and many-isotope mode. When the periodic table is switched into many-isotope mode, I am left with nothing to whine about. Hmmm, well, multiple decay modes and their relative probabilities would be nice, but I suppose when you've handed me the moon and stars I'll moan that the geometry of space-time doesn't quite suit my taste...
Posted by: Johnny Vector | October 11, 2007 12:39 PM
#25: Click the "Wide" checkbox if th' rippin' out o' th' lanthanides 'n' actinides disturbs you. You'll be wanting a 2.39:1 screen of course.
Posted by: Alex, FCD | October 11, 2007 3:36 PM
Wow. My homework will take half the time now. You rock, PZ.
Posted by: Keith Douglas | October 11, 2007 10:24 PM
where truth meets beauty ...
Posted by: Monado | October 11, 2007 10:56 PM
I still think we should posthumously award the 1916 Nobel in Chemistry to Mendeleev. I believe that's the year it was never awarded. And he wasn't considered, apparently, because all the bigwig scientists were German in those days.
Owlmirror, whom are you quoting? It sounds like Terry Prachett.
Posted by: SEF | October 12, 2007 5:28 AM
They don't do posthumous awards. That was their excuse for not honouring Rosalind Franklin for being the real worker on the structure of DNA. However, a retrospective for a missing one might be another matter ...
That's a fun periodic table though. My immediate quibble was that it appears to be assuming carbon in diamond form rather than graphite for the phase data.
Posted by: Owlmirror | October 13, 2007 1:39 PM
But of course. Moving Pictures and Feet of Clay, respectively.