Chemical Haiku: Elements' Qualities in a Few Syllables

Frr pointed out this interesting approach to the periodic table: Haiku. This might even help you remember the elements.

Comments

Other kinds of poems might be better?

[DeepDarkSky]

Poems rhyme and have a regular meter and that's what makes it easier for us to remember (songs with catchy, rhyming lyrics are the same). Haikus are not exactly easier to remember because they don't rhyme (although the fixed number of syllables help).

I could be wrong, but I think it might be better to use another kind of poetry for this?

A little chant...

[Colz Grigor]

My father, a chemical engineer, was forced to learn this chant in his days at RPI. He taught it to me during junior year chemistry in high school. It helped a lot in remembering valences. Heck, without it, I doubt I'd even remember what a valence was...

HAgLiNaK HAgLiNaK
CuBaCaFePbZnMg
AlFeBiNiKr AlFeBiNiKr
SiC SiC SiC

Phoenetically:
Haglinak, haglinak
koobakafapibzinmig
alfabiniker alfabiniker
sick sick sick

Yeah, so this isn't quite a haiku, but it got me by. Only other thing he taught me from his RPI days, the RPI Cheer:
e to the x, dy/dx
e to the x, dy
cosine, secant, tangent, sine
three point one four one five nine
square root, cubed root, log of pi
disintegrate 'em RPI!

I guess what I really learned was that a bunch of nerds went to RPI.

::Colz Grigor

Re:A little chant...

[Spunk]

the RPI Cheer:
e to the x, dy/dx
e to the x, dy
cosine, secant, tangent, sine
three point one four one five nine
square root, cubed root, log of pi
disintegrate 'em RPI!

The RPI Cheer, you say? Interesting. My Alma Mater calls it the WPI Fight Song. And supposedly we stole it from MIT anyway :-p

...

Holy crap. After searching google, quite a few other schools call it their own:

Caltech, Georgia Tech, Rice, Purdue, Princeton, Carnegie Mellon, Rose-Hulman, Northwestern

Re:What a waste of mental effort

[arvindn]

Is anyone actually forced to memorize the periodic table these days? Talk about a pointless rote memorization task...

I thought "learning" like this went the way of the dinosaurs in the 80's (of course, I teach on the university level, so I'm a bit removed from elementary education). Can any education types confirm that this kind of thing still goes on?

I'm from India, and I can confirm that such pointless torture of students is the norm here :(

I was forced to memorize the periodic table when I was in high school.

Not only that, no calculators allowed until you are in university. Every time someone tries to change it, the luddites start screaming that use of calculators harms the students' powers of mental arithmetic and so on.

In the case of the periodic table, though, I'm actually not sure it is completely pointless: the properties of the elements are to a great extent dependent on their position in the table. If you involuntarily "see" an element in its position in the table whenever it is talked about, then you get to correlate its properties to its position much better, and you understand it better.

At least, that's the idea. The question is whether the purported gains are worth the effort.

I subscribe to the penguin theory of learning. After a certain point, your brain only holds so many recallable facts, just like an iceberg can hold only so many penguins. After that, for each new one you add, an old one must be shoved off (or at least relegated to subconscious long-term storage). I know memory is theoretically infinite, and that everything we learn is supposedly deep down in there somewhere, waiting for the right moment to be dredged up... but this kind of memorization is a waste of space on the iceberg.

I'm not sure about the waste of space part. Sure, brain space is finite. However, you remember a zillion important details about your everyday life. The more things you consciously memorize, the faster the useless things are going to get dumped out of your brain. And memorizing more actually makes you better at storing and recalling things. OTOH, this kind of memorization is a huge waste of time, and is hence unjustifiable.

BTW, some people might _want_ to memorize completely pointless things by rote for whatever reason. For instance, I memorized 1000 digits of pi :-)

If you want to get more technical...

[chiasmus1]

The real Japanese haikus can have 5,7,5 syllables, but it is not the syllables that are counted. The Japanese count the letters, which I might add can sometimes be only part of a syllable.
ryo is a combination of ri and yo, but makes one syllable. It would be counted as two letters. On the other hand, n can be by itself. As in something like the Karate Kids Daniel-san. Sa and n are different letters and count as two, but they form a single syllable.

Sesame-Street-Alphabet-Song method

[sanqui]

I remember Big Bird singing a song about an incredible word: Ab-ca-def-ghi-jk-l-m-nop-... you get the idea. The day before my Grade 11 Chemistry Exam I used the same method, and can still bring it back 10 years later:

H-HeLi-BeB-C-NOF-Ne
NaM-gAlSiPS-ClArKCa
Sc-TiV-Cr-Mn-FeCoNi-CuZn

Not the most attractive (or pronouncable) words, but it worked for me...

And Then We Have The Element Song...

[the eric conspiracy]

There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium,
And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium,
And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium,
Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium,
And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium,
And gold, protactinium and indium and gallium,
And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium.

There's yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium,
And boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium,
And strontium and silicon and silver and samarium,
And bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium, and barium.

There's holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium,
And phosphorus and francium and fluorine and terbium,
And manganese and mercury, molybdenum, magnesium,
Dysprosium and scandium and cerium and cesium.
And lead, praseodymium, and platinum, plutonium,
Palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium,
And tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium,
And cadmium and calcium and chromium and curium.

There's sulfur, californium, and fermium, berkelium,
And also mendelevium, einsteinium, nobelium,
And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc, and rhodium,
And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin, and sodium.

These are the only ones of which the news has come to Ha'vard,
And there may be many others, but they haven't been discavard.

Sung to the tune from Gilbert & Sullivan's "Major General Song" from "Pirates of Penzance", it is an amazingly perfect parody by Tom Lehrer

Along those lines...

[Tim Macinta]

For further reading,
Molecules With Silly Names
is amusing too.

Re:Hmm haikus

[taliver]

Now, IANAEMTG (I Am Not An English Major, Thank God), but we seem to be prety lax on this whole concept of Haiku.

From the little I understand, part of the art of Haiku is to have the first two lines be completely unrelated, and the third tie them together.

Bane of Chernobyl,
First End of Life for our subs,
Curse you, O Xenon!

Also, I've often wondered how translatable 'syllable' to the original Japanese word are. I have absolutely zero knowledge of the language, but I'm certain an original Haiku would not translate with the same rhyme scheme we seem to imply.