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Or is it just an excuse for another job around the house - http://www.theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/

I dunno -- I prefer the periodic table table here:

http://www.theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/

Now he's going to have to build a new table of elements

Don't tell this guy!

Yeah, but it stains your hands and can be annoying. It's too bad that there's no good substitute for mercury. Dang you, mercury, for being toxic! It means that people can't do stuff like this any more. :P

The mixture is nontoxic. Here, check out this badass website for Periodic Table information. (Damn, I love Google.)

They use liquid sodium metal in nuclear reactors. you do NOT want this in your computer.

Maybe YOU don't want liquid sodium metal in your computer. I think it would be beyond cool, especially when the unit reaches end-of-life and it's disposal time.

Nuclear rockets on cars? probably not, but, as many people here have pointed out, nuclear powered cars are probably not too far off. Tritium is pretty DARN safe(it won't penetrate human skin) and hopefully it(or something like it) will someday be produced in enough quantity so we can have batteries powered by it. Imagine a car or laptop that would run for years on a "relatively" little amount of this crud. I don't doubt that developing a nuclear engine for space travel would have a seriously postive effect on getting radioactive batteries produced.

Anyhoo, NASA has produced a lot more than new rockets, how about catalytic converters that work when cold and cost 25% less.

Here is another great blurb on Tritium from the guy that made the Wooden Periodic Table Table.

What little water was trapped inside caused a massive steam explosion that blew hot dirt for a radius of hundreds of feet.

I'm now the technical support for the financial servers for the federal bankruptcy court for M4.

Bankruptcy? What happened, did they neglect to sell the TV rights in advance? This historic event comes to mind, as does this more obscure one.

While breeder reactors are probably a good idea, there's two seriously noteworthy problems with them. First, without getting into engineering details, breeder reactors must use molten sodium metal as the primary coolant. This, as any self respecting lunatic pyro can tell you, poses non-trivial (albeit not unsolvable) engineering problems.

Second, breeders require reprocessing-- PUREX, plutonium/uranium extraction-- to be useful. Reprocessing leaves the risk of someone getting their hands on either radiological or A-bomb grade plutonium. (Not all produced Pu isotopes are bomb-suitable; all are, however, radioactive, poisonous, and nasty.) Sociopolitical parameters must also be considered constraints for real-world engineering.

Granted, it's not a cushion...

Here's the text from an old Onion article which seems relevant here http://www.theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/TheOnion /FactualErrorFound.html

Factual Error Found On Internet

LONGMONT, CO--The Information Age was dealt a stunning blow Monday, when a factual error was discovered on the Internet. The error was found on TedsUltimateBradyBunch.com, a Brady Bunch fan site that incorrectly listed the show's debut year as 1968, not 1969.

Caryn Wisniewski, a Pueblo, CO, legal secretary and diehard Brady Bunch fan, came across the mistake while searching for information about the show's first-season cast.

"When I first saw 1968 on the web page, I thought, 'Wow, apparently, all those Brady Bunch books I've read listing 1969 as the show's first year were wrong,'" Wisniewski told reporters at a press conference. "But even though I obviously trusted the Internet, I was still kind of puzzled. So I checked other Brady Bunch fan sites, and all of them said 1969. After a while, it slowly began to sink in that the World Wide Web might be tainted with unreliable information."

Following up on her suspicion, Wisniewski phoned her public library, the ABC television network, and the office of Brady Bunch producer Sherwood Schwartz--all of whom confirmed that "Ted's Ultimate Brady Bunch Site" was in error.

Attempts to contact the webmaster of "Ted's Ultimate Brady Bunch Site," identified as Ted Crewes of Naugatuck, CT, were unsuccessful. The page has been taken offline by its host, Cheaphost.net, which released a statement Tuesday.

"We at Cheaphost were deeply saddened and disturbed to learn that one of the millions of pages we host contained a factual discrepancy," the web-posted statement read. "Please be assured that we are doing everything within our power to ensure that nothing of the sort happens again. We will not rest until the Internet's once-sterling reputation as the world's leading source for 100 percent reliable information is restored."

Paul Boutin, senior editor of Wired, said the error is likely to have a profound effect on how the Internet is perceived.

"Will we ever fully trust the Web again?" Boutin asked. "We may well be witnessing the dawn of a new era of skepticism in which we no longer accept everything we read online at face value. But regardless of what the future holds, one thing is clear: The Internet's status as the world's definitive repository of incontrovertible fact has been jeopardized."

Peter Luyck, 30, a Dallas-area graphic designer and frequent Internet user, was crestfallen.

"If it happens once, it can happen again," Luyck said. "I shudder to think that, one dark day in the future, misinformation could again make its way online. In fact, it may already have. How do we know that trusted sites like the Drudge Report and Fucked Company are as accurate as we instinctively trust them to be? Can we blindly trust that SpideyRulez.com is correct in its reportage that the upcoming Spider-Man sequel will feature Christopher Walken as Dr. Octopus? Pandora is out of the box."

Though the Brady Bunch error is the first confirmed instance of false information on the Internet, scares have occurred in the past. In 1998, an e-mail sent to a woman in Warner Robins, GA, made an unverifiable claim that she could earn thousands of dollars from an initial $5 investment. The claim was never conclusively proven false, and no charges were filed.

If you want to know more about uranium, check out Theodore Gray's Uranium page -- U-238 gives off mostly alpha radiation and is pretty harmless unless you eat it or inhale it. (I'd take a Geiger counter to that red Fiestaware, though -- that's definitely something to keep on the shelf rather than use for dinner.) Gray has quite a number of uranium samples, including two pieces of more or less pure depleted uranium. Interesting stuff.

Time to post this link!. The guy basically did what you said: throw sodium into his lake. Much of it. And had great fun!

-calyxa

A real table of elements

This guy got screwed over, yet again.

You wanna see a plasma lamp?

If your at work, look up.

Those florescent lights are plasma lights with a phosphorus coating that absorbs the UV light emitted by the plasma and emits visible light. The plasma is created by applying high voltage to the electrodes.

Did you know that there is no such thing as a white fluorescent light?

The lights are shifted ever so slightly towards either the red green or blue spectrum. Thats why if you go into a older office building and look up you will likely notice that some of the lamps just don't look the same - look at it closely relative to the other lights and you can tell what color shift it has.

Neon lamps (I believe any noble gas will do), cold cathode lamps (the ones people install in their windowed computer cases), those cheesy globes that when you touch them lightning shaped light appears to be reaching for your finger - all plasma.

Read about plasma here:

http://www.prl.dcu.ie/expl.html


Here are the different ways to create plasma:

http://www.phys.tue.nl/EPG/epghome/polylab/sourc es .htm


Or if you can find them - some of you probably remember these:

http://bulbmuseum.net/bulbs/figuralargon.htm


Noble gases:

http://www.theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/Elemen ts /NobleGases/index.s7.html


Anyway the real story here is the tools that they used to capture the data in the instant that is takes to turn on the lamps. I see nothing of intrest here esp. regarding 'life'.

The crap about life is garbage. Plasma is the fourth state of matter (solid, liquid, gas, plasma). They are not "reproducing" thereby mimicking life. Rather, they are merely converting an element from one physical state to another.

Quick theory:

Gas can not pass an electrical current because if the electrons (- charge) in the atom move then the rest of the atom goes along with including the + charged protons.

The electrical potential (voltage) has to be high enough such that the electrons begin to be ripped away from the atom itself. This exchange of energy causes the gas matter to change from a gas state to a plasma state and is called ionization. The emission of light (photons) is caused by the change in energy states. As you can see here..

http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~js/ast123/images/bohr_a to m.gif


When an electron jumps from one orbit to another energy must be released by the atom this energy is released in a form of a proton at a fixed wavelength relative to the distance of the state change (atom specific). If the wavelength falls into the visible range of the EM spectrum you'll be able to see it.

The coolest thing in the Universe is now a cloud of sodium atoms in a laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

>Probably the most powerful income reducing agent known.

I thought that was element 51: Anti-Money?

(drum roll)

The Wooden Periodic Table

Perhaps some of you knew this one already, but it's one of the most useful ones I've found so far and I really like those huge and high quality pictures they have for most elements that you can take meaningful pictures of. :-)

From the article:

By contrast, the efficient low-pressure sodium bulbs now used in some street lamps emit only a narrow range of yellow light. This minimizes ecological disruptions, since creatures don't perceive low-pressure sodium as natural light. [...] But at least one, San Diego, decided to switch back to high-pressure sodium after residents complained that the yellow pall cast by low-pressure sodium bulbs made them uneasy.

I'm with the creatures... I don't preceive that ugly yellow light as natural, either! One Dallas suburb uses what I assume are low-pressure sodium lights, and it's downright painful to drive down the street. In fact, it's moderately dangerous -- you can't tell the streetlights from the traffic lights, especially when fatigued.

On the other hand, I didn't know that the lights were easier on the light pollution -- in fact, I had heard that they were worse, but I probably got them confused with the wide-spectrum high-pressure sodium lights mentioned in the article.

Hmmm... wonder what would happen if you broke a sodium vapor light under water? If you try it, don't forget to send the story to this guy.

Everyone is way too paranoid about radiation. Sure you wouldn't want to handle it every day, but a piece of uranium metal is not the same thing as a nuclear bomb, ok?

You can hold plutonium metal in your hand and you can even eat uranium metal with minimal harm.

Wow, huh?

Even though these samples may be very radioactive, most likely, the handwashing as they say is all you would really need. They're the experts, they deal with it. Trust them.

The article is by Theodore Gray, creator of the ultra-spiffy Periodic Table Table.

And I thought nothing involving Palladium could be popular on Slashdot.

I'm much more impressed with his experiments with sodium

Interesting article on this subject: Will Mathematica rot my students' brains?

see the last sample on the page...

I haven't read the book yet, but gave a copy to my sister-in-law for xmas.

-calyxa

/. posted this a while back... sounds to me like your coworkers need one of these for christmas, huh? :)

Theodore Gray, of Mathematica fame, and recent winner of an IgNobel prize for his wooden periodic table table has a page nicely documenting what happens when you drop sodium into water, which includes a nice quicktime video of a drop of sodium into a lake.

Theodore Gray, of Mathematica fame, and recent winner of an IgNobel prize for his wooden periodic table table has a page nicely documenting what happens when you drop sodium into water, which includes a nice quicktime video of a drop of sodium into a lake.

Theodore Gray, of Mathematica fame, and recent winner of an IgNobel prize for his wooden periodic table table has a page nicely documenting what happens when you drop sodium into water, which includes a nice quicktime video of a drop of sodium into a lake.

From the Periodic Table Table's site:

"the Periodic Table Table was awarded the highest conceivable award for which it is eligible"

Interestingly the sentence works just as will shifted round:

"awarded the highest award for which it is conceivably eligible"

The guy (Theodore Gray, I have one of his Mathematica textbooks, I think) who made the wooden periodic table table is hilarious, and also has a page nicely documenting what happens when you drop sodium into water, which includes a nice quicktime video of a drop of sodium into a lake.

The guy (Theodore Gray, I have one of his Mathematica textbooks, I think) who made the wooden periodic table table is hilarious, and also has a page nicely documenting what happens when you drop sodium into water, which includes a nice quicktime video of a drop of sodium into a lake.

The guy (Theodore Gray, I have one of his Mathematica textbooks, I think) who made the wooden periodic table table is hilarious, and also has a page nicely documenting what happens when you drop sodium into water, which includes a nice quicktime video of a drop of sodium into a lake.

No he didn't you idiot. He meant what he said. Ag and Pd

See ... donated by someone reading /.

Learn to read pillock!

No, Ag pillock.