welcome · from the editor
Six protons, an unreasonable amount of warmth.
We started this club because nobody else would have us. The geologists found us too soft. The biologists found us too rigid. The astronomers had a point about us being everywhere, but kept losing their place. So we made a small, well-lit room, and we put out coffee, and we said: bring your favourite allotrope.
What you have in your hands is the sixth issue of our quietest magazine, written by people who like atoms more than they like deadlines.
members · profile
Yui, who only attends on rainy days
She arrives with a small bag of graphite shavings and an apology nobody asked for. She likes that carbon, like rain, finds the lowest place in any room and stays there. We have stopped trying to seat her near the window.
C: [He] 2s² 2p²
members · profile
Mateo, who brought a fullerene to show-and-tell
It was the size of a peach. He had built it himself, out of folded card, and labelled each face in tidy pencil. When asked why, he said: "because somebody should." The room agreed, quietly, and refilled his cup.
C₆₀: 60 vertices, 32 faces
“A diamond is just shy graphite that decided to commit.”
-- minutes from the april meeting
field trip · report
An afternoon at the molecule museum
We took the train out to see the new exhibit -- molecules, but blown up to the size of weather balloons, suspended on invisible wires above the schoolchildren. Methane wobbled when the air conditioning came on. Benzene was perfectly still. Ethanol smelled, faintly and impossibly, of itself.
Marie put her hand inside an inflated water molecule and said it felt like standing in a polite argument. We bought postcards.
club almanac
Things carbon does, when nobody is watching
- 01 forms a chain longer than the sentence describing it
- 02 agrees to be a ring, then changes its mind, then agrees again
- 03 shares electrons more readily than most of our members
- 04 waits patiently inside a leaf for a billion years to become coal
- 05 arranges itself, occasionally, into something that can be loved
recipe · from the kitchen
A small cake, in the style of carbon
Take flour (mostly C, H, O, like all of us), and butter (a long, friendly chain), and an egg (which is mainly an idea). Apply heat. The Maillard reaction will do the introductions. Let it cool on a windowsill, where the carbon will quietly thank you.
letters to the club
Dear tanso.club,
I have been carrying a piece of charcoal in my pocket for three months. It hasn't done anything. Should it have? -- K., from a wet city
Dear K., it has been doing the most important thing all along: not being on fire. We hope this finds you both well.
next month
we are planning a quiet picnic, on a hillside, with no agenda.
Members are encouraged to bring one small carbon object they are fond of. A pencil. A piece of toast. A graphite drawing of a friend.
until then -- the tanso.club editors