Abubakr—who works at Microsoft Research in Hyderabad—says that if you arrange the table in circular form it gives you an idea of the size of the atoms. The closer to the center, the smaller the atom element would be. That's why hydrogen and helium—with less atomic weight—are the nearest to its center. His table also preserves the periods and groups, and manages to look neat and pretty at the same time.

The Physics arXiv Blog at MIT's Technology Review disagrees. They said that the table is flawed because it can only be read by rotating it—which doesn't make much sense, since you can easily rotate an image on the screen. Their other criticism is valid, however: They say that the genius of Mendeleev's table is that it can "predict the properties of undiscovered elements," arguing that Abubakr's table is not as intuitive.

Whatever MIT people, you chemistry dorks you, I just like how it looks. [Technology Review]

I like the choice to omit the actual shell of the controllers themselves, opting instead to focus on the button arrangement, floating ghostlike without any housing. I also kind of like that this is overlaid on a what may be the back of a Waffle House paper placemat.

Attention designers: please continue to chart interesting thigns using the schema of the periodic table. [Flickr via Technabob]

Designers Squidspot created the table, with fonts arranged roughly into related group columns showing (although Akzidenz Grotesk and Helvetica not being in the same family! Ok, I'll stop). They've also ranked each roughly according to popularity according to a number of sources.

It's really cool to see who designed which typeface and when, and where everything falls in the popularity queue. [Periodic Table of Typefaces (full-res JPG) by Squidspot via Lifehacker]