One of the advantages of working at a small university that puts a variety of disciplines cheek-by-jowl in a single building is that I get exposed to all sorts of different stuff. It sometimes has its downsides — I’m on an interdisciplinary search committee, so next week is consumed with seminars in statistics and computer science, all very mathy, that will sorely strain my brain — but I get to learn stuff all the time, which makes me happy.
So this semester I’m always trundling stuff up and down between the second and third floors for my genetics lab, and the third floor is where all the chemistry labs are taught, so I run into these cool posters that I have to stop and stare at every time I go by. They’re cartograms of the periodic table of the elements from webelements.com, and yes, you can buy them for yourself ($10.14, cheap). Unfortunately, the thumbnails available on their site are fairly low quality and don’t do justice to them — they’re very pretty posters.
So here’s some perspective for you, two periodic tables where each element is proportionally scaled by abundance (the product of the big bang!), the top one of abundance in the universe, and the bottom one showing abundance in earth’s crust (products of nucleosynthesis in exploding stars).
That’s what the universe is all about: thinly distributed hydrogen and helium in a vast space, with traces of heavier elements occasionally forming in energetic accidents.
Also, any time I see a periodic table anymore — which is all the time — I am reminded of that awful debate with Jerry Bergman in which he claimed that Darwinists were trying to criminalize the periodic table because it revealed that all the elements were irreducibly complex. That’s how out of touch with reality those guys are.
I guess I’m lucky I had a nuclear physics unit in high school. Haven’t they at least heard of atomic bombs or nuclear power?
Every time God pokes an unstable isotope with His ghostly finger, it decays. It drives Him nuts, having to race around the universe, trying to keep all the half-lives accurate to tens of decimal places. He wishes He’d thought up a better system for nuclear decay — He should have learned His lesson after His grand plan for neutrino oscillation.
What’s a “jowel”?
That ‘sometimes’ in your title is pretty cheeky, PZ, considering that YOUR science is the stinkiest, and the grossest.
#4, moarscienceplz:
Are you accusing me of being an organic chemist? Because them’s fightin’ words.
As anyone who visited a “green” industrial water treatment facility can attest, the stink associated to microbiology (as in biodegradation tanks) can rival that of organic chemistry. ;-)
It’s a deflationary structure designed to store the superfluous E’s Dr. Meyer receives in his correspondence until the alphabetic economy can correct itself.
Oh, and now there’z a zhortage of S’z. Type accordingly, and uze only when a zuitable replacement iz impozzible.
I didn’t realize there was so much aluminium in the earth’s crust. That’s pretty cool. I also like the abundance in the universe one, it’s pretty stark.
I like the ones that have logical relations between them, too: the volume and density cartograms, one bulging where the other is pinched. Thanks, PeeZed, this was a cool add to my day. :)
Let me doubt that: 1, 2.
Clay, mudstone, shale, schist = alumosilicate stuff.
Makes sense, DM, I just hadn’t put it together. :)
We walked into the dentist’s waiting room a couple of days ago and saw a book on the table that a kid had left there while he saw the dentist. It’s title was “Exploring God’s Creation through Chemistry”.
Hubby, who holds several science degrees, including chemistry and biology, looked at me and rolled his eyes. When the kid came into the waiting room, I was worried that he might say something.
I was glad that hubby was called back before the mother of the kid arrived in the room, since I’m sure that he might have said something snarky to her and might have caused a scene.
She asked the boy if he had finished reading a chapter and told him that they would discuss it at home. Going through my mind was “How in the world can the state of Texas have such lax rules that a religious housewife can think that she can teach chemistry to her kid?” The schools always tout that they have “highly qualified” teachers, meaning that they hold degrees in the subject that they are teaching. As a former educator, I resent those religious housewives thinking that they can do the job for which I spent years training so that I was “highly qualified”. Considering that the man I live with has a broad base of knowledge about science, I know that he resents them, too.
One bright spot – John Lennon’s “Imagine” came on the radio that was playing in the office, and I purposely started singing along while I filled out forms. I was amused at how quickly she hustled the boy out of the building.
(Do read the comments at the links I posted. Mwahah.)
Sometimes? My crystals of transition metal complexes are far prettier than your zebrafish (even before dissection) any day of the week.
Aw, David Marjanovic beat me to it with the geology :( the one chance to use my degree…
You’ve been beating me to a lot of stuff recently. You don’t work for the NSA, do you?
@DM #10:
Nice. I admit I hadn’t thought down the oxygen-sulfur column! Still, I think the very worse stench I ever had the displeasure to experience was the biodegradation tanks used to treat the waste waters of a paper mill… The sulfur compounds from the chemically processed wood pulp were only the start of it. <__<
But… subatomic particles…
Ha. Add a couple more subatomic particles to carbon, and it isn’t carbon any more, now is it? QED.
I’ve smelled pyridine and other amines, I’ve smelled phosphines, and I’ve smelled sulphanes. The one smell I never want to smell again is an osmium compound.
Gee, thanks.
Wow – these are a whole new shade of awesome (I’m one of those chemistry heathens)! Thanks for sharing these, PZ.