Issuu

What’s the deal with all these new elements?

Only 1860s kids will understand.

NATALIE RADULOVIC CONTRIBUTOR

Last week, I was at the mall looking for a volumetric flask and a gram of rubidium, just as any ordinary person does, when I overheard a conversation between a few teenagers. It went something like this:

Teenager #1: Did you hear about the newest element?

Teenager #2: You mean oganesson? I heard it was created in a cyclotron in Dubna, Russia.

Teenager #3: [Sigh] I wish I could afford a cyclotron…

The teens continued to talk about the new element, praising the scientific innovations that led to its creation. As I listened to their conversation, I thought to myself: what is this ‘oganesson’ they’re talking about? Since when was that an element? Is this some kind of fad among the youths? I mean, whatever happened to classics like hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, etc.? I’d never even heard of it until now. So, as one does, I decided to look into this ‘oganesson’ and see what the kids are up to these days. And the more I read about oganesson, the more I began to be repelled by it—in the same way an electron is repelled by another electron. You see, back in my day, elements used to last a long time. And when I say long, I mean long. Hydrogen-1, the most abundant hydrogen isotope, is stable. In fact, recent experiments have shown its lifetime is over 1030 years. In this day and age, it seems that elements don’t last more than a few seconds. Just take a look at oganesson, the latest thing the kids are raving about: its half-life is only around 0.7 milliseconds. What the hell are you supposed to do with an element like that? Whatever happened to practicality? With the short halflives of these elements, one might find it hard to believe that they are synthetically made—which brings me onto another gripe I have. I don’t like how synthetic everything is in this day and age. Back in my day, elements were made by Mother Nature, not scientists using a cyclotron. And the cost to make these elements is astounding; a cyclotron can cost anywhere between a few million to tens of millions of dollars— all for an element that doesn’t even last a second. Now, you may call me a conspiracy theorist, but when you look at the cost of these atoms compared to their half-lives, it becomes clear that this is all a money-making ploy by Big Atom. The fact that each new element’s half-life is shorter than the last is orchestrated so that you spend more money buying atoms that you don’t need. Sadly, the youths of today have fallen for this trap. (If anyone is skeptical about my claims on Big Atom, send me an email; I have

dozens of internal documents by Big Atom executives that back me up.)

After all that, you would think the element names would at least be decent. However, looking at recent ones, it’s as if they have no thought put into them. Now there’s an element named californium. Can you believe that—californium? Gee, can you guess where that was made? It’s like nowadays, when naming elements, people just add “-ium” to the end of the name of a person or place—it’s about as original as a teacher assigning a titration as a lab exam. What’s next in this world of ridiculous element names? Is there going to be an element called scientistium? Intelligentium? Einsteinium? (That last one’s real, by the way.)

I truly feel sorry for this generation, as they will never get to fully appreciate the beauty and uniqueness of the original elements as I did as a child—it’s something I think only 1860s kids will understand. Instead, the youths of today are driven by fads on social media sites like Iongram and ThermoTok to buy all the latest elements. All in all, these modern elements are as ridiculous as the properties of a photon, if not more.

Now, you may be thinking that I’m doing a whole lot of complaining and a whole little of problem solving, but, rest assured, I have thought of a solution (to the half-life problem, at least). As any kindergartener can tell you, the reason why newer elements have such short half-lives is because they have too many protons, causing them to repel each other more than the strong force can handle and the nucleus to split up. But what if the nucleus didn’t split up? Is this possible? I present to you the solution: Gorilla Glue. If one were to Gorilla Glue the protons in the nucleus together, this would keep the nucleus stable and increase the half-life indefinitely. No more elements that disappear in less than a second; no more buying elements that you don’t need. Gorilla Glue would be an effective solution for many reasons: it’s the most adhesive substance on Earth, it’s estimated to last for at least 6.7 ×108 years, and it’s cheap (take that, Big Atom). One reader may think to themself: But, is Gorilla Glue really stronger than the strong force? The answer o that question is an unequivocal yes (I’m speaking from personal experience). This is all to say, despite the tragedy of modern elements, perhaps there’s hope somewhere—hope in the form of Gorilla Glue.

What’s the deal with this guy selling me stuff on

the bus?

Transforming public transit into private commerce

CATRIONA AIKMAN CONTRIBUTOR

Who among us hasn’t at one time found themselves in possession of some merchandise that they needed to offload?

Whether it’s a lackluster Christmas present from a lesser aunt, a couch that must be sold before an approaching moving date, or an LCD television recently liberated from an electronics store display, at some point everyone takes up the merchant’s mantle.

According to common wisdom, the best places to engage in this kind of horse-trading are Facebook Marketplace or among gullible cousins who might be cajoled into purchasing a mattress that has seen heavy use. However, I’ve discovered an under-recognised venue for hawking your goods through a recent interaction witnessed on the number 16 city bus in East Vancouver, which turned out to be home to a thriving resale market.

In this case, the entrepreneurial subject boarded the bus carrying his goods. Immediately, he identified a fellow passenger as a prospective customer. Upon establishing eye contact – not an easy task among the emotionally unavailable, transit-taking public – with a winning smile, the seller opened his pitch by asking the man if he wanted to buy a car radio, and assured him that “it’s not stolen.” Initially, the customer was resistant, shaking his head to indicate a lack of interest. Undeterred, the merchant patted his car radio of assuredly legal provenance.

“It’s a great radio,” he insisted, brandishing his wares. “I’ll give

you a really good deal,” he said, looking coquettishly at the car radio.

Unfortunately, after a few feeble refusals and some nervous shuffling, the desperate customer gestured to himself and played his trump card: “Look, man! I’m riding the bus!” Thwarted, the seller sank back into his own bus seat and began looking around to start the process once more.

The sale on this occasion was ultimately not to be, reminding us that the most important rule for any salesperson is to know your audience. However, it did elicit some valuable insight: public transit can be an avenue for private commerce. Next time you find yourself in possession of something you’d like to sell – windshield wipers, spare tires, catalytic converters, or fuzzy dice, for example – please consider the business opportunities available to you on the bus, train, or streetcar.

FELT

Felt Blake Williams and any consistency which forms a set

PATRICK IGNASIAK DESIGN EDITOR

a film directed by Blake Williams and premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, September 4–14, 2025

Blake Williams recent filmography is composed using anaglyph colour filters—the 3D effect produced by a stereoscope of chromatic opposites. FELT is first and foremost 3D, and only really a film as a secondary effect of images being in some time-perception. This is to say, it’s an excellent film. You can intuit immediately an ambient world-ness through the two-fold movement of each image:

1) The emancipation of the mobile camera through the somewhat stochastic recollection of purposeless Americana.

2) The stereoscopic depth of multiple overlaid images presented in the same duration of time, which is manipulated to create a dense sensory-motor situation. For instance, the shadow of a fly on a windowpane might be displaced deep into the foreground of a long stretch of highway, and so the relative conditions of these distances coexist in a state of anxiety. It’s a difficult movie to recommend—how many pairs of 3D glasses do you have in your home? At one point, the narrative digresses into the audiovisual omnipresence of telecommunications; the free-floating telephone wire becomes the camera’s muse, and, accompanied by electromagnetic field recordings, is expertly posed in America’s greatest sightseeing locales. Williams establishes each of these irregularities as a small-scale artifact of an abstract and self-similar distance, reproducing distances of road and distances of memory at various levels of a structure of general filmic recollection. Blake Williams assembles the Grand Canyon into a rich diversity of spatial perceptions, and the viewer is thought within this pseudo-organism’s vibrations or their apprehension of the film’s structural integrity.

I found FELT abruptly and enduringly arresting. I think taking the time to screen films like this—films that have logistical or economic obstacles preventing their mass distribution—should be the primary draw of TIFF, especially in a media sphere already so overdetermined by the aura of exclusivity and the speculative financial value of each cinematic decision. FELT’s central drive involves brief interludes of the director, as conveyed by a point-of-view shot, folding a single plane of origami paper into sub-multiplies of peaks and valleys. It’s one of those beautiful movies that proceeds entirely without objects, and just elaborates on the state of the composition, a kind of labour we can then encounter on our own terms. Really, FELT is one of the finest among the legacy products of so-called structural film—the movement of Snow, Frampton, Brakhage, Wieland, etc.—only reformulated towards today’s prevailing politics of ongoing spatial collapse.

I would also recommend Blake Williams website (blakewilliams.net), where you can access his assembled writings and videos. It’s a shame that, year after year, Wavelengths is further reduced into the festival’s novelty niche despite its programming so consistently offering Toronto’s most singular encounters with film as a medium. This year, previews of up-coming television series were given far higher weights of TIFF’s total screen time than the Wavelength programme, which pretty clearly demonstrates the festival’s endemic capitulation to the industry of movies, rather than the watching of movies.

Regardless, FELT is perfect termite art, to borrow Manny Farber’s terminology. The entire particularly of America’s mythology is available to Williams’s omnivorous diet, even extending this buglike immersion in the process of filmmaking to an audience member’s disorientation in the chromatic aberrations that produce Williams’s 3D image; that is, if you accept the exaggeration of depth as a useful distortion of the cinematic environment, rather than a ‘life-like’ gimmick. FELT inevitability culminates in this process of distortion, losing its objects entirely, instead hanging on the relational logic by which some structure (the Grand Canyon, the 2024 election) can meaningly contribute to a common mould of peaks and valleys without actually necessitating any particular mould. What’s striking about FELT is its extensibility across mould-to-mould distances, the exactitude of images being replaced with other images which we’re only beginning to seriously consider as a formalisation of whatever it is that we cannot experience immediately. In that sense, FELT is quite difficult to recommend. You should absolutely find some avenue to watch it.