Phase State Fantastica!

2005/02/23w
Life is good and math is fun! And chemistry is pretty fun, too. Today I'm implementing a handful of changes of which I'm embarrassingly proud.

First, and my personal favorite, phase state coloring is implemented! Phase state indicates, for a given temperature, whether an element is solid, liquid, or gas. Now, to indicate this requires a temperature. And it wouldn't be any fun unless you could change the temperature yourself. So, I've created a horizontal thermometer that appears below the table and to the left of the electron orbital mini graph. It only shows up when phase state coloring is invoked.

Naturally, the thermometer grows and expands when you mouse over it as the other mini graphs do. No clicking required. When it pops up, just move your mouse left or right over it and it will change the temperature. More importantly, the cells of the periodic table will automatically color to represent the phase state of its element: blue for frozen solids; red for hot gases, and purple for an in-between liquid. The default melon-ish color is used when I don't have the necessary data. The attribute mini-graph is not updated with the new info until after you mouse off of the thermometer.

The state is determined based on both the melting and boiling points in comparison with the current temperature. Personally, I find this is more useful to see this when the lanthanide and actinide series are embedded in the table (see the config. menu panel to do this). The resolution of the thermometer is about 30° on my monitor, but I think that it will increase if you have a higher resolution monitor as it is based on absolute positioning of the mouse. Scrubbing left and right over the thermometer gives some useful visualization of which areas of the table love the heat and which the cold.