Jigsaw 9, Series 3

The first jigsaw for a while (see reference 1), cunningly playing to my blogged interest in the periodic table (see reference 2).

Nicely produced jigsaw from the Royal Society of Chemistry, but with no clue on the box as to where the image came from or who actually cut the puzzle. So I have no idea whether the little pictures which come with each element have any significance, beyond illustrating this jigsaw. Perhaps the fact that they do not appear in the book at reference 2 is a clue. I note also the slightly non-standard presentation of the lanthanoids and actinoids.

A regular puzzle, with exactly four pieces meeting at every interior vertex.

Unusually, I did not do the edge first, rather the two blocks of words, easily the easiest part of the puzzle. Easy to pick out and easy to assemble.

Then finished the edge and then a bit stuck. Not the sort of image I was used to at all. Tried arranging some of the pieces with the legible beginnings of the names of elements in alphabetic order but that did not help much, perhaps because the table I use was not quite big enough to do this particular puzzle in complete comfort.

But I then noticed that the elements were colour coded.and it then proved quite easy to pick out all the pieces of any one colour, for example yellow. And it then proved easier than I expected to pull the right little pictures out of the heap to complete the row or column in hand. Worked in from the bottom three edges, doing the chunk of blue in the middle, roughly sodium across to roentgenium, last. The heap was by then small enough that the relatively large size of the chunk was not a problem.

The sky - in this case the small areas of deep blue, helped along by pink veins - was trivial compared with the sky in the average puzzle.

All in all an entertaining resumption of puzzle activity, ending up slightly bemused that so many of the little pictures had a circular theme, bemused as I could not think of any good reason why this should be so. Does it reflect the dominance of images with circular themes in the sort of image library one would have used to make the puzzle?

Probably rather easier to find out why so many, but by no means all, of the element names end in 'ium'. One presumes that the fact that most of the elements which have been around for a long time do not so end, for example gold, is related to the fact that most of the most common verbs are very irregular. Left as an exercise for the reader.

Last but not least, where is the element to the right of roentgenium and below mercury? Is there some mathematical or physical reason why this one does not exist, or is it just that no-one has gone to the bother & expense of creating it yet?

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/jigsaw-8-series-3.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/the-works.html.