Periodic table table
The 2002 Ig Nobel Prize winner for chemistry is Theodore Gray, who made an actual periodic table. You know, four legs, wood, the kind you can sit at to eat lunch, but with inlaid wooden squares on the top, and under each square a sample of the element. The site is fantastic: this guy has a taste for statistics, sorting, and random information that may even exceed my own: on his Collections of Elements page, he sorts the elements in more than thirty ways, including “Elements [you can buy] at Walmart”, “Coin Metals”, and “Elements that spell OLiVEr SAcKS”. He has a page on How to Get Your Own Element Collection, and each element has its own page.
He also has an interesting discussion on education at the site:
Jerry: People are very attached to the value of their skills. They believe that the skills of their generation should be preserved, with new skills added on.
Theo: Such an attitude represents a tremendous degree of disrespect of our forepersons. It was really, really hard to be a cave person. The skills needed to live comfortably in, say, northern Europe in 20,000 BCE were extremely complex. They required then and would require now the full range of human intelligence.
To think that a modern human should be able to do everything that previous generations have been able to do (hunt, speak Latin, do square roots by hand, etc.), and also have any time left over to learn anything new (microbiology, email, calculus), is basically insulting to all those previous generations, since it implies that they under-employed their intelligence. It is also quite false.
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