“There is no great genius without a mixture of madness…”*
From Steven Padnick, a visual answer to the question “what happens if you mix…?”– animated GIFs of chemical reactions…
See more examples of what you can do with that Christmas chemistry set at Roar of Steven.
* Aristotle
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As we tickle ourselves with titration, we might spare a thought for Publius Ovidius Naso; he died on this date in 17 CE (or so many scholars believe; he was in exile at his passing, and records are incomplete). With his older contemporaries Virgil and Horace, Ovid was one of the three canonical poets of the Golden Age of Latin literature. His poetry was much imitated in late antiquity and in the Middle Ages, and has had a tremendous influence on Western arts and culture; for example, his love elegies (Amores and Ars Amatoria) are the ur-model of love poetry. But his impact was surely greatest with the Metamorphoses, a 15-book hexameter epic poem in 15 books that catalogue transformations in Greek and Roman mythology from the emergence of the cosmos to the deification of Julius Caesar; it remains a key source document of classical mythology– and a great read.
The first taste I had for books came to me from my pleasure in the fables of the Metamorphoses of Ovid. For at about seven or eight years of age I would steal away from any other pleasure to read them, inasmuch as this language was my mother tongue, and it was the easiest book I knew and the best suited by its content to my tender age.
– Montaigne
Ettore Ferrari’s 1887 statue commemorating Ovid