The Periodic Table

Introduction

tl;dr: It's a periodic table, start using it! This periodic table is a bit different from the traditional kind, and not only because the lanthanoids and actinoids are arranged as Alfred Werner suggested in 1905. Each element has its own view with a description and links to other resources. Elements are connected to their neighbors, with the ends of the table glued together. In other words, Hydrogen, Helium, Francium and Oganesson are next to one another, as well as periods being connected so Beryllium is next to Boron and Strontium is next to Yttrium. This makes it topologically a torus which is great because donuts are sweet. This project is primarily written for myself as explained in the Motivation section. I have parked it here at tilde.club because I see it set squarely in the community culture of fun within the fediverse. There are easter eggs to be found!

Motivation

This project began as a way to facilitate learning facts about elements by the method of loci, also known as the memory journey, memory palace, or mind palace technique. My hope is that this will help me (and hopefully others!) to learn more basic facts about these chemical elements. This version does not have a completely text-based interface, which was an original goal, but because of this it attempts to take maximum advantage of the features of HTML, JS and CSS while still preserving the plain text aesthetics. Along the way Abigail suggested to me that this could be well-suited for people for whom visual information is not useful, as a result I would like to make it as accessible as possible, and I welcome any suggestions along these lines.

Prior Art

If you like periodic tables, then you should definitely know about these:

Acknowledgements

This project would not be possible without Dmitri Mendeleev, whose idea for the original table is a hallmark of scientific thought. Also thanks go to all of the scientists, engineers and others who contributed to initially discovering the elements. It began and remains a Twine project, but as it has progressed it has become more and more customized, utlimately using shell, python, JS, CSS and HTML. It also uses the wonderful Periodic-Table-JSON The Periodic Videos series is amazing, inspirational, and certainly has had a hand in rekindling my interest in the elements, and the table. Of course, IUPAC makes the names official. Thanks to tilde.club for keeping the lights on. Finally, thanks to testers including Abigail, India, Nevette and the rest.