Dynamic Periodic Table | Hacker News Reader

Dynamic Periodic Table

ptable.com

125 pointsmhb20 comments

The interface feels a bit on the skittish side – it's one of those pages where you're afraid to move because it's going to change something, and where dragging the mouse around threatens to give you a seizure. And I'm not sure the color scheme is going to win any design awards.

But, still, excellent. There's a great deal of information in there. It beats consulting a big paper handbook.

Yeah, the skittishness is my biggest critique of it.

I think adding a quarter of a second delay would be a good fix. If you move out of an element, go into another, you've got to remain in that one element for a quarter of a second before it changes. If you exit it before then, the timer is reset and you stay on the original element's details.

Also: if you're navigating by keyboard and on the orbitals tab, there's a bug when you're on Be. You can't hit the up arrow to go to Helium, despite it being visually placed above Beryllium. Nitpicky, I know.

Edited to add: not the creator, just offering some random impressions to the creator, if she/he's reading.

I'm a high school science teacher, and I love this. I've always been surprised at how few wide-format periodic tables are out there. I think the periodic table looks much cleaner in the wide format, and it's much easier to teach atomic structure using the wide format.

I look forward to seeing how students respond to playing with this next week.

The temperature slider at the top which when changed dynamically shows the gas/liquid/solid state of each element is a nice touch.

Not just a nice touch. I just learned from it that Helium is the only element that will not have a solid phase at zero Kelvin at room pressure!

When I wiki'd that I also learned about the freaky phenomenon of superfluids. :)

The Wikipedia windows that open are the _least_ of this site's functionality. Watch the Demo linked at the top.

Thanks. I didn't even see the tabs at the top.

All the Gold that we (humans) have ever mined makes only a cube with 20m side. Does that sound right?

Yup.

If you beat a 8000 m^3 cube into a big sheet of gold, you could cover the entirety of Connecticut and Delaware.

So we probably don't have enough gold to make a single ship using gold instead of steel?

The displacement of a Nimitz-class carrier is around 100,000 tons; if it's entirely made of steel, that comes out to around 11,000 cubic meters, or a 22m cube.

So, it seems like we would be a bit short of the amount of metal needed to make one of them if we wanted it made entirely of gold. But the right order of magnitude.

Of course, smaller ships are of far lower displacements, so we could make several of them.

Helium is a liquid at 0K? I thought absolute zero meant everything was a solid.

It forms a superconductor at low temp and the state depends on Pressure too. Above a certain pressure it would be solid. If I remember the phase diagram correctly.

EDIT: http://www.google.com/search?q=phase+diagram+helium

Why isn't this sort of thing the norm? After reading about dynamic pictures on http://worrydream.com/ I've become frustrated by how most things on the web don't allow this sort of exploration by users.

Great! Now let's see the table of nuclides.

All 4000 are under the Isotopes tab.

It's not quite the same.

It's broken on iPad.

How so? It should adjust layouts based on orientation.

I wish I had this while in school.

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