Revising Your School Days, One Iconic Learning Tool at a Time (UPDATED)

There's a new version of the Periodic Table of the Elements. It's not a table anymore.

I'm so not a chemistry guy--it just never really clicked for me. But this thing is way cool. And they're selling posters.

UPDATE: Here's a slightly larger image, though you still can't read the sidebar.

Nothing to Say

So, I've been quiet. Sort of a rough weekend, and a rougher day yesterday. A friend, a guy I've known from the music scene here and in Madison for probably ten years, was killed in a car crash last Friday with two other Chicago musicians. Yesterday was the memorial. It's been somewhat in the news here due to the circumstances, which are messed up.

This is not something I care to blog about extensively. Mostly I'm in shock. John and I weren't as close as I would have wished; I was closer friends with other folks in the band. I saw him just a couple of weeks ago, at Cal's downtown, where the Returnables played a show over the 4th of July weekend. We shook hands and we traded how-are-yous and then there was an awkward sort of pause where a conversation might have started. But I ducked out, as I tend to do, and we didn't have the conversation, and now we never will.

There were a lot of people at the service, perhaps 400 or so, and most of us were in the late twenties to early forties range. John was thirty-five. As we stood around in the cemetery, it seemed to me that we were all children, completely unequipped to deal with what was happening. But maybe that's what death does to all of us, no matter what our age. It makes us children, because we don't understand. I, for one, never will.

Headline Silliness

Apparently Norway is cutting its aid to Norway.*

Who do they think they are, the U.S.?

*(Link will probably be fixed by the time anyone sees this, but oh well.)