Today’s ad from the ThinkGeek folks offers a Batman t-shirt:
A complex play on the periodic table of the elements.
The figure on the shirt has the table’s entry for sodium (Na, atomic number 11) 16 times, or as ThinkGeek geekily has it, Sodium * 16, representing two repetitions of an 8-note instrumental figure in the theme song from the television show:
This is followed by an entry for Batmantium, with the Batman logo from the movies —
(which can be seen as a black bat on a gold background, or as gold teeth on a black background, but in the ThinkGeek version is only a bat ), representing the Batmaaaan! in the theme song.
The table entry has the atomic number 27 (normally assigned to Co, cobalt) and the atomic weight 19.39. This is a little comics joke: as the Wikipedia entry for Detective Comics tells us, the series is
best known for introducing the iconic superhero Batman in Detective Comics #27 (cover dated May 1939)
#27, 1939, get it?
August 15, 2012 at 3:20 pm |
Yes, I`ve got it. But whose are the teeth?
August 16, 2012 at 10:41 am |
The bat’s, presumably.
August 8, 2013 at 7:58 am |
[…] Batman theme (alluded to above) can be heard in a video in my 2012 posting “Batmaaaan”, along with a discussion of the mock chemical element Batmantium. In another posting of that year, […]
October 4, 2023 at 7:56 am |
How does cobalt come in?
October 4, 2023 at 11:39 am |
This is explained quite clearly in the posting.
October 4, 2023 at 1:01 pm
I imagine what is not clear — I had the same question — is how the tiles are arranged that the Batmantium tile appears in the 27th position; huge coincidence! But upon magnifying the image, I see that the tile itself gives #27 and atomic weight 19.39; that’s the joke, no coincidence involved. The entire tile is fictional, not just the element name.