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Interesting story behind that... Theodore Gray was one of the cofounders of Wolfram Research with Stephen Wolfram. Apparently long ago there was a brewing trademark battle with another company over the Wolfram name. He resolved it by convincing the other company to go with Tellurium for their name (without mentioning that tellurium is a toxic metal that gives people exposed to it nasty, chronic BO)

Yes, but it's low in potassium, so it's got less radiation than normal lettuce!

Obligatory link: Periodic Table Table: Potassium

At least according to http://theodoregray.com/periodictable/Elements/031/index.s7.html gallium and at least some of its alloys are really sticky, leaving residue on most anything. "Unfortunately, it stains your hands and is hard to get off, so I don't recommend it. In fact, it stains or sticks to just about anything, which is very irritating because it would otherwise make a very nice substitute for mercury where a liquid metal is called for."

I've used one of those gallium-containing fake-mercury thermometers myself, and after a few uses the liquid metal got stuck to the glass tube, and it never worked again. They could have made some better alloy of it or something, but that's not mentioned in the abstract, at least.

(Also, someone is actually using Medium? Impressive, I was compelled to use it for a course, and it was the most dead "social network" I've ever seen.)

according to http://www.theodoregray.com/periodictable/Elements/009/index.s7.html , its pretty difficult to make a container to store pure F2 gas, maybe this is a way to at least transport it, assuming you have enough of the rock, or can make more of it.

Also, you smelt it? whats the safe distance you can get near this stuff (before/after you crush it) without doing nasty damage to yourself.

We used to just set off fission and fusion bombs in the air and on the ground, so I would kinda think the long term risk from a small amount of PU238 at the bottom of the ocean is not all that much in the grand scheme of things, especially since it may be completely contained.

Oh, and there may be a few people still walking around with similarly plutonium-powered pacemakers in their chests...

http://www.theodoregray.com/periodictable/Samples/094.3/index.s12.html
http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/miscellaneous/pacemaker.htm

G.

I'm not sure how directly applicable it is, but The Periodic Table Table at http://theodoregray.com/periodictable is a great science site.

It takes something on the face of it boring (the chemical elements as a simple diagram) and makes it really interesting. If it's not good enough to show to students directly then it should contain plenty of ideas for how to make elements interesting.

A couple of examples: get some tungsten and some magnesium of about equal volume and anyone will notice that one is much, much denser despite both being normal-looking metals. Get some indium and let the students bend thick metal rods with their bare hands.

While it's obvious that the Parent Child Test product isn't real, some or all of the others probably are!

First of all, you really can buy uranium ore. If nowhere else, you can go on ebay and get a revigator. Lots of countries can and do dig up uranium ore; but it takes a lot of processing to do anything nuclear-chain-reaction-related with it.

I'm pretty sure the rabbit is real, probably sent packed in ice or something. Rabbit meat is sold; I once ate rabbit bought at a local grocery store.

The only thing suspicious about the milk is its price. I'm sure milk can be easily bought online.

So some or all of these products are real products that have been the unfair butt of too many jokes.

http://theodoregray.com/BrainRot/index.html

tl;dr

Theodore Grey has an excellent take on this argument,

http://theodoregray.com/BrainRot/index.html

--
The most profound engine of civilization is the inability of a larger and larger fraction of the population to do the basic things needed to survive. -- Theodore Grey

Interestingly enough, uranium isn't the heaviest naturally occurring element. It occurs in two ways. One is extremely small amounts of natural Pu-244 The other is muromontite, which is a beryllium and sometimes uranium-containing form of allanite, making it a natural breeder reactor.

You must look deep inside for the answers you seek. Trust in yourself and be one with the force.

Interestingly enough, uranium isn't the heaviest naturally occurring element. It occurs in two ways. One is extremely small amounts of natural Pu-244 The other is muromontite, which is a beryllium and sometimes uranium-containing form of allanite, making it a natural breeder reactor.

...here's an interesting rant from one of the guys behind Mathematica.

I recommend that you read Brain Rot by Theodore Grey and Jerry Glynn. Among other things, it discusses this very topic. The summary I took away from it is you should make the game open-ended, giving full freedom to the player to go down the wrong paths, rather than being led down the right path.

Interesting snippets:

Software should not be unnecessarily hard to use, but neither should it shy away from or disguise the inherent richness of the subject matter. It should be open-ended, deep, and capable of doing senseless things if asked.

In a continuation of the above point, in a discussion of programs to teach geometry:
If students decide to build a completely useless geometrical construction, the program won't stop them. It lets them discover for themselves that their construction is uninteresting. This is very important: By allowing freedom to go off in the wrong direction, the software is giving students the opportunity to learn.

Still you should see the caesium air battery I built, heavy as a brick and explodes first hint of damp weather.

You actually get less 'boom' out of caesium than some of the lighter elements, as Theodore Gray demonstrated.

Speaking about Wolfram products and math education, I think it is a good moment to remind this
discussion.

Is also known as the guy who made a periodic table table (for which he was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize).

Generally speaking, the hydrogen gas explosion contributes more to the overall visible size of the explosion than does the initial metal-water reaction. And this brings into play an important fact: When you go down the periodic table from lithium to cesium, the atomic weight goes up from 6.94 to 132.9. Higher atomic weight means fewer atoms per unit of weight, and the amount of hydrogen gas generated is directly proportional to the number of atoms. So 5 grams of cesium liberates only about one twentieth as much hydrogen as five grams of lithium, and a bit over one sixth as much as 5 grams of sodium.

Could be worse. Could be cesium.

You forgot the link for lake-full.

This guy now seems to bring this "sodium party" thing to a new, unprecedented level...

Yes, there is some good science on Youtube. I'm a fan of music played over Tesla coils personally.

But the Brainiac clip of alkali metals in a bathtub was admitted to be fraudulent. The producers didn't think the real reaction had enough bang, so they actually used explosives. You can catch more information about this from Bad Science or from a guy that actually did the reactions. The second link has a decent explanation too.

And my dad's "fun experiments for kids" kind of book had tons of fun experiments kids could do with X-ray tubes. Such experiments were strangely missing from the children's science books for my generation. =)

Radiation was used really, really often recklessly back in the days. X-ray machines here, nuclear elements there... I recently saw one documentary that mentioned an X-ray-based shoe fitting machine (complete with eyepieces for the salesman, the customer, and the customer's kids!). There was a segment about a rather famous invention called Revigator; zaps the drinking water with a good healthy dose of alpha particles with truly magical effects all around...

They care about kids having less and less of a chance to educate themselves and they care that kids curiosity isn't being fulfilled nearly as much.

With the internet, the kids curiosity is being fulfilled more often than not. The problem with the internet isn't the lack of information. It is the dilution with distractions. Kids are more likely to spend time on myspace than on one of the science pages. There is more information online now than was ever accessible when I was a kid.

The internet is the great equalizer. I remember the old chemistry sets of the 1969's. They were pretty boring with a few things that changed color and kept matches from burning and such. Online the high power learning is great. I can now find the information to build rockets from Salt Peter and powdered sugar, how to mix explosive gasses (Spud guns propane air mix), create fun reactions (Mentos and coke) (sodium and water) and lots of other fun stuff I couldn't do with the chemistry set of the 60's. Some stuff that is too dangerous or illegal to do yourself, there are online videos for your enjoyment. There is more info in the following links than is in most chemistry sets.
http://www.burntlatke.com/
http://www.jamesyawn.com/candyrocket/
http://eepybird.com/dcm1.html
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_kind_of_liquid_is_in_instant_cold_packs
http://www.humeseeds.com/stump.htm
http://www.ufomind.com/area51/articles/1996/popsci_9604/
http://theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/
http://www.theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/Stories/011.2/
http://fullygeek.com/2007/01/20000-pounds-of-sodium-dumped-in-lake/

Without a chemistry set, but with internet, I can find out where to buy components to build fireworks mortar shells, buy local explosive components (Nitride and oil) and such. It was the internet that taught me where to locally buy small amounts of Ammonium Nitrate and Salt Peter with no questions asked.

A trip to the hardware store is now an adventure as I read the ingredients on the packages.

I have learned more online than I could have ever learned from a chemistry set from the 1960's Not all is illegal or dangerous. Some is a lot of fun.

They care about kids having less and less of a chance to educate themselves and they care that kids curiosity isn't being fulfilled nearly as much.

With the internet, the kids curiosity is being fulfilled more often than not. The problem with the internet isn't the lack of information. It is the dilution with distractions. Kids are more likely to spend time on myspace than on one of the science pages. There is more information online now than was ever accessible when I was a kid.

The internet is the great equalizer. I remember the old chemistry sets of the 1969's. They were pretty boring with a few things that changed color and kept matches from burning and such. Online the high power learning is great. I can now find the information to build rockets from Salt Peter and powdered sugar, how to mix explosive gasses (Spud guns propane air mix), create fun reactions (Mentos and coke) (sodium and water) and lots of other fun stuff I couldn't do with the chemistry set of the 60's. Some stuff that is too dangerous or illegal to do yourself, there are online videos for your enjoyment. There is more info in the following links than is in most chemistry sets.
http://www.burntlatke.com/
http://www.jamesyawn.com/candyrocket/
http://eepybird.com/dcm1.html
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_kind_of_liquid_is_in_instant_cold_packs
http://www.humeseeds.com/stump.htm
http://www.ufomind.com/area51/articles/1996/popsci_9604/
http://theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/
http://www.theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/Stories/011.2/
http://fullygeek.com/2007/01/20000-pounds-of-sodium-dumped-in-lake/

Without a chemistry set, but with internet, I can find out where to buy components to build fireworks mortar shells, buy local explosive components (Nitride and oil) and such. It was the internet that taught me where to locally buy small amounts of Ammonium Nitrate and Salt Peter with no questions asked.

A trip to the hardware store is now an adventure as I read the ingredients on the packages.

I have learned more online than I could have ever learned from a chemistry set from the 1960's Not all is illegal or dangerous. Some is a lot of fun.

I think he can find some here.

Although it would be cool to be able to stroll down to the "chemistry store" and pick up a couple of ounces of, say, salt's better half.

Why bother to walk to the "chemistry store" when you can buy it online?

If worse comes to worse you raid your old "Super Advance Kiddee Chemistry Set" and dose yourself.

For what it's worth, I suspect that "Chemistry Store" is Canadian for "Pharmacy". I know that in Britain, you go to the "chemist's" to get your prescription filled. Although it would be cool to be able to stroll down to the "chemistry store" and pick up a couple of ounces of, say, salt's better half.

You might want to check out Ben Goldacre's Bad Science articles on Brainiac here. As a sampler, here's what actually happens when you add alkali metals to water, rather than rely on stage explosive like the Brainiac crew.

fotherington

Most night scopes are just IR LEDs coupled with a high-sensitivity CCD with significant gain feeding an LCD panel.

Glow-in-the-dark keychains are just phosphorus.

AFAIK, that has been illegal to sell for many, many years.

A level gauge (assuming you mean a bubble level) is just an air bubble in a liquid, which is usually colored ethanol (alcohol).

Theorore Gray (of wooden periodic table fame) also says that Polonium 210 is used in antistatic brushes for film negatives

Antistatic brush.
These brushes, which you can still buy today (2002) are made for brushing static charge off of photographic negatives. The radiation from the polonium element (which must be replaced every year or so because the half life is only 138 days) ionizes the air around the brush, making it conductive and carrying away the static charge.
[...]
Later, while I was in Boston to receive the Ig Nobel Prize for the wooden periodic table, I purchased a brand new brush with a full charge of polonium. That's why this sample is classified as having about 20% actual polonium: It's an average figure assuming I buy a new one every few years (they are fairly cheap).

To scale this experiment up, this chap dropped a big lump if it into a lake: http://www.theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/Stories/ 011.2/ TBH, if the liquid sodium coolant was escaping, I think its reaction with the water would be the least of my worries.

Considering the massive force of a black hole explosion (implosion, whatever), tinfoil is *not* going to be strong enough (sorry, saskboy). I'll stock up on the following items, courtesy of the Periodic Table Table entry for "Silver":

Silver-lined tinfoil hat, cleverly disguised as a normal trucker's hat.

Silver Boxer Shorts -- while all you smartie-pants rationalists are protecting your *brains*, I'll be protecting Man's truest contribution to the future of humanity.

Considering the massive force of a black hole explosion (implosion, whatever), tinfoil is *not* going to be strong enough (sorry, saskboy). I'll stock up on the following items, courtesy of the Periodic Table Table entry for "Silver":

Silver-lined tinfoil hat, cleverly disguised as a normal trucker's hat.

Silver Boxer Shorts -- while all you smartie-pants rationalists are protecting your *brains*, I'll be protecting Man's truest contribution to the future of humanity.

I would just like to say in my defense that in the form I submitted the story it wasn't just a shameless plug for my poster. It was a shameful plug disguised with interesting links to the recent Brainiac alkali metal explosions fiasco, which I'm genuinely surprised didn't get any attention on slashdot. Sorry about the server, again. It was supposed to be able to handle it. Unfortunately they have their hands around my bandwidth neck because for some reason our sysadmin department feels it's more important to keep wolfram.com running than my periodic table table site. Where is the appreciation for fine art in this world? If only people would buy my poster, I could afford more bandwidth for sodium explosions. There, now you have a truly shameless plug to complain about.

This is getting way offtopic, but...

Here are some real videos of Sodium.

http://www.theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/Stories/ 003.2/index.html
D'oh! this fellow

The batteries they talk about here do contain elemental lithium. See here for example: http://www.theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/Stories/ 003.2/index.html

A long time ago I was an elevator mechanic (the 80's). I was already a licensed electrician so the transition was an easy one. Although there were some things that struck me as odd.

The first thing was the tendency of elevator companies to use their own home-grown parts to control the elevator.

For example, for speed control for some of the lifts used what we called "bedsprings" to limit the current going to the motor. The reason why they were called bedsprings was because that's what they were, bedsprings.

Bigger motors would use fence springs mounted on an insulated backplane (Bakelite?) to limit the current going to them. And yes, it worked with AC motors just fine. Even though the frequency wasn't lowered, the motor would slow to about one third speed (making one hell of a racket as it did).

The control voltage was DC, rectified by selenium rectifiers.

http://www.theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/Samples/ 034.11/index.s12.html

With DC it was easy to make a timer out of a capacitor and a resisitor. The downside was that DC tends to eat up your contacts really quick.

Occasionally you will have a set of contacts open up and the current continue to flow as an arc. The contacts will soon melt down, drip, drip, drip... :)

They could have just used dashpot timers and got away from DC. That shows just how little experience with control systems they had outside of elevators.

For determining what stop you were at some elevators used wooden blocks that were mounted to steel bands (think the metal bands that shippers use around boxes).

These bands went from the pit to the crow's nest. Wherever there was a stop, there were blocks screwed to the bands. Limit switches on the cab hit these blocks and told the cab where to slow down and where to stop.

The cabs, cabling, hydraulics, and various mechanical parts were always robust and seldom wore out (other than the rails, which always needed oiling). You could tell that most elevator mechanics were from the mechanical side and not the controls side.

To be fair, I was working on elevators that were made from the 80's all the way back to 1913. So you couldn't expect the controls to be all that robust.

But I still tell people that if they knew how elevators were built, they would take the stairs. :)

As for what happened over at the Apple store, first off the employees should never try to rescue trapped customers. Someone needs a serious bitch-slapping over that.

Nor would I trust the NYPD, FD, Chamber of Commerce, the ASPCA, or whoever to get me out. These guys don't have the training, it's as simple as that.

And please tell me that they really didn't drain the hydraulic fluid onto the floor because they couldn't figure out how to bypass a valve.

And it's not like there aren't any other options.

http://www.google.com/maps?hl=en&lr=&q=otis+elevat or&near=New+York,+NY&sa=X&oi=local&ct=title

In a similar vein, there have been a few products over the years that contained uranium. Check out the Fiestaware and Revigorators on this page.

Dunno about you, but I've never seen "steel" on my periodic table.

Then replace it with a more robust model. Any sturdily built periodic table should be able to carry a good amount of steel.

Lead-lined clay? How last millennium. Nowadays, we use Uranium Bowls. Isn't that red Fiestaware just divine?

High-tech internet replaces real life whining skills

And for you other guys, here's a discussion by Theodore Gray over "Brain Rot" induced by using calculators:
http://www.theodoregray.com/BrainRot/

Theodore Gray has put together a surprisingly interesting site based on his wooden periodic table of the elements (that actually contains samples of the elements - except the ones that would kill the builder and maybe a few of the neighbors).

On the site he has a mathematica based app (he works at Wolfram) which will take a string of characters and attempt to construct it from element sybols.

Theodore Gray has put together a surprisingly interesting site based on his wooden periodic table of the elements (that actually contains samples of the elements - except the ones that would kill the builder and maybe a few of the neighbors).

On the site he has a mathematica based app (he works at Wolfram) which will take a string of characters and attempt to construct it from element sybols.

Mercury and Asbestos hysteria is far out of proportion to the risk.

This page on mercury

http://www.theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/Elements /080/index.s7.html

(scroll down) shows a guy sitting (floating) in a vat of it. My high school chemistry teacher used to demo mercury by putting a little puddle in each childs hand.

Did you ever think that by reading through it, it would increase you intelligence, and ability to do it again. Learning isn't supposed to be easy, the harder the climb, the more pathways you develop, and the easier it is to do again.

Ok. here we go:

Just from your own post to keep this small.

"No. There's no extra energy."

"...allow the engine to be shut down when it is making more power than necessary."

thought that there was no extra energy so it could never be outputting more power than is necessary.

"No. Cars are not nuclear powered. Einstein has nothing to do with internal combustion. No material is used up or converted to energy."

You even post where I state this as a matter of course: "Now we can't get the entire subatomic amounts Einstein was talking about..."

What don't you understand about this sentence:

"...we can have the best chemical reaction amounts if we make a system that extracts the energy more effeciently from this reaction."

This is the basis of all fire related energy extraction. it is a chemical reaction between a fuel source, oxygen and a spark that they teach in 4th grade science class.

"No. It's not even close to how a fuel cell works. A fuel cell converts hydrogen and oxygen to water,..."

What did I say: "fuel cells that we all accept work by harnessing hydrogens easy molecular structure and it's easy seperation and combination charactoristics."

That sounds kinda like a hydrogen oxygen "combination" resulting in water. This in enabled by hydrogens easy combination charactoristics.

one last bit:
"This system adds energy to water to get hydrogen and oxygen, and then figures burning the hydrogen with oxygen to get water will net them a gain."

uh no. they have gasoline somewhere in there too if you read the article.

and on your last comment:

"Ever wonder why fuel cell vehicles don't carry their hydrogen in the form of water? Because the extraction consumes more energy than can possibly be harvested."

Then why go to a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle if it takes more energy to make the hydrogen in the first place? Big plants generating hydrogen could have just used the power by putting it on the electric grid and we could all go around using electric powered vehicles for cheaper than hydrogen right? use the costs associated in transporting and storing and distributing hydrogen to make electrical outlets and battery swap stations in the back of gas stations.

but wait, there's another 4th grade science experiment that creates hydrogen with a small 9v battery! here.

But oh wait, hydrogen does help an internal combustion engine. Ford already did it last year. from the article: "fuel efficiency improves by 25 percent with hydrogen" But yes, they have to store it onboard.

so you combine a 4th grade 9v battery experiment and an engine ford built in 2004 and... but wait, Fortress says it can't work so we all go home.

The SrxAlxOx is not the important part though. It is what is DOPED into the strontium aluminate that is important. Note that is says Sr4AL14O25: Eu Dy. That means dysprosium and europium are doped into the matrix of strontium aluminate. THESE are the important dopants which are responsible for the extremely long phosphorescent glow times.

Apologies if already posted.... http://www.theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/