Theodore Gray

Hey, that's my app, and it's definitely still there! https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-elements-by-theodore-gray/id36414784… Fun fact: when we made the app the song was of course not yet in the public domain, so I made a deal with Lehrer to trade him an iPad for the use of the song in my app. He was already talking at the time about eventually putting everything in the public domain. His main concern was to try to do it in a way that would prevent record companies from ever making money from his work. Theodore Gray https://theodoregray.com

Recommended reading: his tale about the construction of that table: http://theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/History.html

"Technology's greatest contribution is to permit people to be incompetent at a larger and larger range of things. Only by embracing such incompetence is the human race able to progress." http://www.theodoregray.com/BrainRot/

I always find that whenever such topics come up for discussion Ted Gray had the best take - https://theodoregray.com/BrainRot/. With AI and specifically LLMs, I feel many of the points raised here about 25 years ago still stands. Any LLM based learning isn't meant to push students into thinking about the problem or even guiding students along the path to the correct answer. It's mostly about returning some answer -- mostly right but not really of a good quality. As pointed out in Ted Gray's article, any assisted learning mechanism should work towards making the student think about the problem at hand and reason their way through it. It's an aide to the human teacher because, it being a machine and most importantly software, can adapt to each and every single student's ability and work at the student's pace instead of 3 periods of an hour each per week. An LLM by definition is the opposite. It gives you the next most probable character without any idea of what it's saying. There is a lot of work being done on this ofc, but what's available today isn't a reasoning aide/teacher.

Theodore Gray has a story about visiting a company with an electron beam furnace with Oliver Sacks to turn a pile of loose iridium beads into a bar: https://theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/Stories/077.x3/index.html Some of the cost isn't just from using the equipment, but because you'll have some evaporation from melting in vacuum. He says at the start of the article that Sacks started with a kilogram of beads: >After melting from both sides and a lengthy cool down period (plus a couple of "ouch, where are my gloves" moments) Sacks' iridium was consolidated into a block a little over 2" square and less than 1/2" thick, weighing 1.7 pounds. It's startlingly heavy, distinctly more so than a similar sized tungsten block (which would be about 15% lighter and about 10,000% cheaper). If true, the melt lost 22.7% of the mass, which is pretty painful. Google is saying iridium is about $167,000 per kilo right now! I assume they've got a cold trap on the vacuum line, and recovered some of the difference in weight as fine iridium dust, but the rest is going to end up coating the inside of the vacuum chamber. If they routinely melt platinum-group metals, I wonder how often they scrap the entire chamber to melt it down and recover the evaporate.

Theodore Gray has one of these in his periodic table. This quote stood out to me: "I've held this thing up to the strongest sources of radiation I have and the balls don't budge... I think it's safe to say that if you do ever see the balls drop, you should run, not walk, to wherever you think there might be less radiation around." https://theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/Samples/094.4/index.s12.html

Thank you! That was driving me crazy. And now I see why I got confused: it's another phonograph-related dangerous-element fact that I learned from reading Theodore Gray's book, The Elements [0] [1]. Now if I could only remember why I thought neutron beams were involved... [0] https://theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/Elements/084/index.s7.html [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B011IZNWZU

So I imagine some of you already know about this but I randomly stumbled upon Theodore Gray's 'Wooden Periodic Table' today ( http://www.theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/index.html ) which led me to his visual table of elements. Most entries have numerous photographs of various specimens of the given element, I've lost about 3 hours to it today so far and have only looked at a handful of them! Really neat.

This project is interesting in its own right, and links to a cool tool by the same author http://blog.jgc.org/2012/01/international-object-sizing-tool.html for showing the size of photographs, which I just told my Facebook friends about and printed out for my children, who are practicing photography. The heavy-duty version of a periodic table table is that made by Theodore Gray, http://www.theodoregray.com/periodictable/ who is quite a fan of the periodic table. http://periodictable.com/

I've had pretty good luck using the MAA recommendations list for libraries: http://mathdl.maa.org/mathDL/19/?pa=content&sa=viewDocument&no… I recommend reading Theodore Gray and Jerry Glynn's Brain Rot article for some ideas on what math skills are worth intensive study and development and which are less important: http://www.theodoregray.com/BrainRot/ There are several articles and blog postings on the topic of math self study that I found interesting and you might find useful in determining what and how to study: Developing your intuition for math: http://betterexplained.com/articles/developing-your-intuition-for-math… Math every day (Steve Yegge): http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/math-every-day Math for programmers (Steve Yegge): http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/math-for-programmers.html How to read mathematics (Shai Simonson and Fernando Gouvea):http://web.stonehill.edu/compsci/History_Math/math-read.htm