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Colorchemistrycrayons

Color chemistry crayons

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Extremely clever concept from Etsy seller QueInteresante: Label crayon

colors with the names of the chemical compounds that produce them
As much as I like this idea, Im obliged to point out a bit of hand-waving going
on with the ne points of spectroscopy, here. One of the crayons, for
instance, is apparently labeled Barium Nitrate Ba(NO3)2 Flame, which is to
say that the crayon is the same color as the ame produced when you burn
barium nitrate in air, not that barium nitrate is the pigment used to produce
the color in the crayon itself.

Reectance spectrum of solid barium nitrate, left, versus emission spectrum,

right.

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This is understandable, really, because the chemical composition of many

crayons, even if you ignore the wax binder and just focus on the coloring, is
extraordinarily complicated, containing many different pigments carefully
blended to achieve just the right color. Even if the formulations werent trade
secrets, itd be doubtful if many of them could be t on a crayon label in a
legible typeface. [via adafruit]
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By Sean Michael Ragan

@seanragan

August 27, 2010, 8:21 am PST

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If you can believe it, Halloween has come and gone the holiday season is
nigh! Its time to break out the string lights, whip up some eggnog, spend
some quality time with friends and family, and start on your gift lists.
While we cant help you untangle those string lights, we thought we could
help out with that gift list. So today, we launched the Make: Gift Guide.
Whether youre looking for tools to help you make your own gifts, youre
shopping for the makers in your life, or you want to support other makers
selling their wares, weve got tons of goodies lined up for you. Dive in and
discover awesome tools, books, kits, gadgets, toys, and more!
Each pick comes personally recommended by Make: staff, celebs like Laura
Kampf, and makers like you. Yes, makers like you! Do you use something all
the time that you love and that other makers need to know about? You can
write to us at editor@makezine.com for a chance to have your
recommendation featured in our Gift Guide.
Also, be sure to check back on the Gift Guide as we add new
recommendations and feature daily picks everyday throughout the holiday
season.
Happy Holidays!

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By Sophia Smith

5 hours ago
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Math Monday: The Quest for the

Platonically Ideal Cornucopia

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This fall promises a strong harvest of math-y and make-y designs and
activities, so todays column kicks off a celebration of all those goodies to
come. The traditional way to celebrate a good harvest is to gather the pick of
the crop in a cornucopia. And if you browse images of cornucopias, it looks
like a pretty mathematical shape. So you might say were beginning our
celebration with a quest for the Platonically ideal cornucopia.

A great rst step in a building project, especially one in search of a

mathematical ideal, is to start by modeling the object youre trying to create.
And there seem to be two key aspects to the form of a cornucopia: it has
circular cross-sections that get smaller toward the closed end, and it has
some sort of a twist or spiral in it. To model an object with lots of circular
cross sections, my tool of choice is the freely-available Geogebra interactive
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geometry system. Its spreadsheet mode is ideal for creating lots of similar
objects, and in this le I have lots of parallel circles whose circumferences
(and hence radii) gradually decrease, and which line up at a point on their
circumferences which migrates around the circle by a xed angle at each
step. The rst set of parameters I tried, decreasing the circumference by a
half-inch and rotating the tangency point by 10 degrees at each step, led to a
cornucopia that looked too squat to me. Thats the great thing about
modeling I just change the parameters (to decreasing the circumference
by 3/8 at each step and rotating the tangency by 8 degrees) and regenerate
the image.

This looks pretty good, so its time to see if we can actually build this
idealized cornucopia. The plan is to bend the circles out of thin strips of stiff
material, and then attach them at the prescribed tangency points.

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Heres the material I chose: 3/32 by 1/32 strips of bass wood, available at a
local art supply store, along with a cutting tool to create the necessary
lengths. The strips come in 24 lengths, so the circumferences of the circles
in the model range from 24 down to 12 in increments of 3/8. So rst we
mark a series of strips at every increment of 3/8 up to 12. We can use the
short sections from each strip for the smaller circumferences and the longer
sections for the larger sections.

Heres how the cutting tool works, although a regular wire cutter will work as
well it just doesnt have guides to help keep the cuts square. Cut carefully,
since in many cases you will be using both the resulting pieces.

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Once all of the pieces are cut, it is time to fasten them into hoops. The
simplest and most reliable method I found was to use one drop of instantbond glue on one end of a stick, and bend the other end around and squeeze
them together briey with a at pliers. (The usual caveats with instant-bond
glue apply: dont use too much or your work piece will cement itself to your
pliers; dont squeeze with your ngers because the glue voraciously bonds
skin.) You may note that the overlap introduces a (varying) discrepancy from
our modeled circumferences.

This seems like a small perturbation, but if it is of concern, you can try
making butt joints, perhaps wrapped with a stiff tape, like thin packing tape
with glass bers. The difculty is the hoops then want to kink at the joint.
Note that you have one extra 12-inch piece to practice on, as the last strip
was cut into two 12-inch lengths, only one of which is needed.

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When theyre all done, another nice characteristic of the 3/8 circumference
increment emerges: the hoops nest beautifully. Note that at about ten inches,
the wood strips starting snapping repeatedly, so our cornucopia will be left
with a hole in the end. If thats bothersome, you could continue with strips of
cardstock, or just insert a cone made of a stiff sheet material, again perhaps
cardstock; manila would match the wood color fairly closely.
Next, we need to mark 8-degree arcs on each of the hoops, so that the
connection points when we put them together in a stack can rotate eight
degrees with each additional circle. Theres a nice trick from geometry that
makes this very easy. Print out this diagram of a 4-degree angle. Why four
degrees? Because whenever an angle is inscribed in a circle, it cuts off an arc
twice its measure. So you just put a circle down so that the vertex of this
angle is touching the circumference, and mark the two points where the legs
of the angle cut the circumference. I found it convenient to use the inside end
of the wood strip as a pre-made mark, so I lined that up with one leg and then
marked where the other crossed. If you want to save a sheet of paper, you
can even just do the marking right on your screen.
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Once theyre all marked it is time to attach them. We just want one mark of
the top circle at each junction to line up with the other mark of the bottom
circle.

Heres a completed stack of two circles, just using a tight wrapping of clear
tape at the junction point.

I wasnt sure whether it would be easier to stack from small down to large or
from large up to small, so I did half and half. Although I found it easier to
reach the next junction point and line up the marks when working large to
small, it is likely best to go both ways, as eventually the weight of the stacks
makes them compress, and you need to add some strips of tape applied
loosely inside the cornucopia, opposite the main junctions, for additional
structural integrity.

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Heres the bottom half just before the two sections were united.

And heres the completed cornucopia.

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