Periodic pillows

 

Rozenn had bought some awesome periodic table fabric (which I got for my birthday a few months back) and she finally had the time to complete a pair of periodic-table pillows for my office.  They are awesome.

There’s still plenty more fabric, so I suspect there will be another set for my home office as well.

Periodic Tables at BCCE 2018

I’ve just gotten back from another wonderful BCCE conference (that’s Biennial Conference on Chemical Education) which was held at Notre Dame.  It was a great opportunity to catch up with some friends and colleagues that I’ve missed since leaving CSU last year to join the College at Brockport.

I presented some of the work I’ve been doing on 3D printed periodic tables and will blog about their construction and use in the near future.  There were some folks in the audience who wanted to get started right away with the objects, so I’ve posted them here on my website.  You can download a zip file that contains 19 tables (about 3 MB).

The zip file contains the following periodic trends:

  • atomic radii
  • ionization energies
  • electron affinities
  • electronegativities
  • human abundance
  • exceptions to the aufbau principle
  • absolute (Pearson) hardness

For the first four, there are four different sizes

  • 132×76 $mm^2$ table with title, f-block elements and symbols on each of the blocks.  These objects take about 3 hours to print.
  • 150×21 $mm^2$ table with no title, no f-block elements and symbols on each of the blocks.  These objects take about 2.5 hours to print.
  • 108×36 $mm^2$ table with no title, no f-block elements and symbols on each of the blocks.  These objects take about 2 hours to print.
  • 60×24 $mm^2$ table with no title, no f-block elements and no symbols on the blocks.  These objects take about 45 minutes to print.

As I build a collection of posts and materials for 3D-printed periodic tables, I will collect them here, so if you have interest in this project, bookmark that page.

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Mandy – origins

I wrote this piece for a Wolfram technology blog a while back. It’s a bit Mathematica centric for that reason. The blog got delayed, then the editor left the company, then the new editor blew off the piece and I got tired of waiting, so here it is.

Not so long ago…

In 2012, the Raspberry Pi Foundation released the Raspberry pi, an affordable, credit-card sized computer originally designed to help younger students learn programming. It peels away the black-box of computers and exposes users to the fascinating world of how software controls hardware that control sensors that interact with the user’s surroundings. The computer science community refers to this idea as physical computing. As an Analytical Chemist, I call it a scientific instrument. Since much of my research and teaching deals with scientific instrumentation, the Raspberry Pi has turned out to be an excellent platform for exploring new ways to make measurements.

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Mandy, I am your father…

I could turn this post into a commentary  about the importance of doing a thorough literature search, and despite how thorough you think your literature search is, it is not thorough enough.  Alternatively, I can make some Star Wars references; let’s go with that.

Soon, my wife and I will buy our first home.  My wife and I just bought our first home.  I have been looking at videos on how to paint rooms and found myself looking at periodic-table wall-art.  I came upon this website which was coincidentally published one year ago today.  Until now, I had not seen an RGB blinky-light periodic table besides Mandy, and it appears as if Mandy was coming to life just as apaf1 (send me your real name and I’ll edit, if you wish) was completing his project.  What does that mean for Mandy?

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