Charting the course of the crayon industry

crayons_big1.jpg

The number of Crayola crayon colors grows at an average rate of 2.56% annually.

Thus, "Crayola's Law": The number of colors will double every 28 years.

To create the chart, Velo gently scraped Wikipedia's list of Crayola colors, corrected a few hues, and added the standard 16-count School Crayon box available in 1935. Except for the dayglow-ski-jacket-inspired burst of neon magentas at the end of the '80s, the official color set has remained remarkably faithful to its roots! If the Law holds true, Crayola's gonna need a bigger box, because by the year 2050, there'll be 330 different crayons!

WeatherSealed Blog: Color Me a Dinosaur

(Via, Cort Sims)

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Maggie Koerth-Baker

I do the Twitter, the Google+, and (to a much lesser extent) the Facebook.

Books
Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us, my book about the future of energy in the United States, will be published April 10th.

Upcoming Appearances
• February 20 at British Columbia Sustainable Energy Association — Vancouver. 7:00 pm
• February 29 at University of Minnesota: Frontiers in the Environment seminar
• March 1 at Huge Theater, Minneapolis: The Theater of Public Policy
• March 12 at University of Illinois — Urbana-Champaign
• March 27 at Penn State Institutes on Energy and the Environment
• March 29-31 at York College of Pennsylvania: Writer in residence
• April 2 at MIT: The New GeekSpeak: Science Journalists' New Toolbox, with Eli Kintisch and John Bohannon — Maseeh Hall, 4:00 pm
• April 9-13 at University of Colorado, Boulder: 64th Annual Conference on World Affairs
• April 10 at Colorado State University, Fort Collins — 4:00 pm
• June 22-25 in Aspen, Colorado: Aspen Environment Forum

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