Theo Gray demonstrates his Element iPad ap -- and "debuts" the Japanese version of the Elements song

The first thing you see is a periodic table, which looks a lot like the front page of periodictable.com or like any of the periodic table posters that I sell, except that it's all turning. All the objects in there, if you can see closely enough, they're actually all rotating. And if we pick one, I'll try to navigate upside down. Here we go to Copper. So for each element, there's two screens. This is the equivalent of the left page in the printed book, so it has one giant picture, but again it's rotating, unlike the paper version. And we've got an assortment of interesting pieces of information about the elements. If we were connected to a network, which we aren't here, I'd be able to touch any of these numbers or the Wolfram Alpha logo there, and it would then call up a screen that would give much more detailed information, downloaded immediately from the Wolfram Alpha service. And that does things like give you the current market price for elements that have market prices, or gives you much more detailed information about all the elements. We then go to the second page, and here you see the same text that's in the print book. Every word that's in the print book is in here also. And you see in fact a layout of objects that is again very much like the print book, but the big difference is that you can touch these things and you can spin them. You can do as many as you want, you can use several fingers at once because this is a multi-touch screen. You can get them all going. This is something you definitely can't do with the paper version because paper is frustratingly impervious to touch. You can double tap one of these and that will then bring it up full screen like this. In this mode, you can click the stereo button and now you actually see it in stereo. If you have either very flexible eyes that are able to look at two different things at the same time, or an inexpensive pair of glasses that we sell on our website, you actually see this thing popping off the screen in three dimensions. And all we're doing here is showing two different frames from the rotation slightly offset, which gives the stereo effect. So it's kind of neat being able to see all these things in stereo 3D. So you can then just continue on. For each element, you get this one nice big beautiful page and then you get a bunch of stories. All the element names that occur — oh, this is actually one of my favorites here. This is a penny that has been split so you can see the zinc core and the copper cladding separated out. In the print book, you only see it like that, so you can't see how they're held. But in this version, you can see that I took a couple of incredibly thin pencil leads and glued them with tiny drops of superglue to hold these things together. All the element names that occur are links, so we can click on them and go immediately to that element. And there's various search features. You can search the text. And last but not least, there's the Tom Lehrer elements song built in. There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium, and hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium and nickel, neodymium. If you get sick of that, very important to have the skip song button there. And actually, let's just quickly show you my other favorite thing that is not quite in there yet, but we will go to it right here. Yes, so here we have the brand new, not entirely finished yet, Japanese version of the element song, with the same animation except the names are all Japanese. And on the left we have Lena Lickstein, who is the performer of the Japanese version. And this is your first cousin once removed? First cousin once removed, yes. She's half Japanese, so my cousin, who is American, moved to Japan 20 years ago to become a lounge singer and performs in fantasy hotels in the Osaka area. And then during the day, he has jobs writing music for video games and performing American hits for the Japanese audience. So he did the arrangement and reset the Gilbert and Sullivan tune to match the number of syllables. It turns out the song in Japanese is much longer than the song in English. There's three reasons for that. One is that Tom Lehrer can sing this faster than anybody else on the planet. If you compare just the rate at which he's producing syllables, it's amazing. Second, there's way more syllables in Japanese element names than there are in English. They pronounce more of the letters separately, even when the name is the same. And there's a bunch more elements that were discovered since 1959, so at the end you'll get a whole bunch of elements that are not in the Tom Lehrer version. So it's actually about a minute longer altogether. So I don't know where we are. We're getting close to the end. Now that was one take on her part. No, that was actually lip-synced. And if you look carefully, you'll notice that the actual — I mean, it is really her singing, and the audio portion of what you heard was pieced together out of a number of takes. And there were some places where we improved the enunciation of some of the letters by audio processing, you know, where some elements were not quite perfect. But she basically sang the whole thing.

Thank you.