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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.
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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?
I already memorized the Tom Leher song.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Come on WTF?
Some of those are not haikus
chemists are retards
Hint: read heliums...
Science and Poems
Merged in novel harmony
But for what purpose?
Lyrics and all can be found here: /ex
lyrics and quicktime versions of Tom Lehrer's Elements song
periodic table
;)
with rhythm of haiku
I remember
ducks
the bitter cocktail
of a colonoscopy --
grin and barium
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Element poems
Until Slashdotted link.
I am sad.
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 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.
No way in sacrificing childhood memories for the periodic table... too easy to just go look up a copy.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
"56 Barium
the bitter cocktail
of a colonoscopy --
grin and barium"
lesson for us all:
nerds good at periodic,
bad at humorous.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
And it would be even better if 5-7-5 wasn't just a Western convenience.
..I'd rather wear one of these than read through that thing.
Seriously though, memorizing the periodic table in school was far easier for me than things like the MLK speech, the pre-amble, the 'To be or not to be' soliloquy, and whatnot. Flashcards will do wonders for small bits of information that you can later forget and look up on tshirts.
I still think some of his finest work was embodied in the old classic poisoning pigeons in the park.
I love that one...
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
None of these are true haikus. A true haiku has 5-7-5 sylables and must have a kigo or seasonal theme.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Well, the 5-7-5 is often adhered to in Japanese haiku, but as I understand it, the idea of the haiku is to express some thought with a certain sort of spontenaity. It's more about method than form. The idea is to be contemplating some idea, and then simply write the haiku immediately without deliberating about how to fit it into some arbitrary form. My understanding is that the 5-7-5 myth is akin to "Columbus discovered america" that I also learned in 4th grade -- it's so oversimplified that it is no longer strictly true.
92 Uranium
Fission or fusion?
World leaders seek security
As uranium time ticks away
94 Plutonium
burial markers
destroyed by vandals
unEarthing
future plague
legacy of death
no prophet warnings
95 Americium
Fire's high-tech bane,
radiation's toxic pain--
Americium Dream
96 Curium
all the way to Mars
before one human footstep
curium spectrometer
97 Berkelium
just academic
protesting commercial use
feels it in his bones
99 Einsteinium
laughing with God
eternal craps game
betting GUTs
['If you want to give God a laugh, tell him your plans']
['God does not play at dice with the Universe']
[Grand Unified Theory, a mystery he planned to solve]
101 Mendelevium
almost forgotten
my Table lives after me
a lesson on pride
[The value of Mendeleev's table is that it predicted the gaps in the vertical rows, indicated the properties of the then-missing elements and suggested where to look for them in Nature. But all other knowledge of Mendeleev himself was nearly lost to time and indifference.]
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
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.
20 Calcium
Festering cows
puss and antibiotics
got milk, kids?
Looks like they had a visitor from PETA...
Are we really that nerdy? Do we actually care about a new way to remember the periodic table? I hope not.
00
It shames me to say,
but there are some truly bad
Haikus on the page
01
The page we just read
contained incorrect haikus
too few syllables
02
Those that follow rules
all have seven syllables
surrounded by five
03
Count my syllables
and you will understand it
An acquired taste
there's just one thing you must do
that's five, seven, five
But I haven't found one haiku on the website. :( Is there a joke I'm not getting? At first I thought the varrying syllables were an encoding of orbital numbers, weights, or something as a mnemonic, but I didn't see a pattern.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
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...
When Hydrogen Tech played Oxygen U,
the game had just begun,
when Hydrogen racked up two fast points,
and Oxygen still had none.
Then Oxygen scored a single goal,
and thus it did remain,
at Hydrogen 2 and Oxygen 1,
called because of rain.
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
Disappointed
Lithium rhyme
not a haiku.
For further reading,
Molecules With Silly Names
is amusing too.
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Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
The helium entry reads (formatting theirs):
lighter than dream
flight between worlds
Deja Thoris
serial rescues in
afternoon sun
Haiku is a 5 sylable, 7 sylable, 5 sylable structure. Am I just daffy or does this not even come close?
My
Limekiller
In grade 8 we were asked to memorize the first twenty elements of the periodic table. Of course I put it off way too long and ended up cramming the night before the test. So I just made up a little mnemonic poem. Here it is in phonetic form:
Hydrogen Helim Lithium Beryllium (that's as far as I got with the names)
Bicknoffnee Namgal Sipsclarkca
In symbolic form, that's H He Li Be B C N O F Ne Na Mg Al Si P S Cl Ar K Ca. Can't forget the damned thing after seventeen years.
5-7-5 = rigid format which cannot be directly related to original Haiku. Also OK?
Therefore the question has to be, does an attempt to represent the feel of haiku have to follow what are in effect arbitrary rules? I suggest not.
Spirit of haiku != programming language syntax.
In fact, the idea of a short poem based around a single feeling can manifest itself in other ways. I happen to like the limeraiku:
which is a long way from haiku but would never have existed as a form had the haiku not existed.Some of the element "haiku" are mildly amusing, some are thoughful, some belong with the Sweet Singer of Michigan, but the attempt to do something with a form is surely worth doing if only to see if it works. This is a mannered exercise in writing a very short verse on a single subject. Arguing about 5-7-5 or whether it works as a menmonic misses the file system checking point. Extending the Housman Test, I'd suggest that whether or not these verses work AS POETRY depends on:
Enough rant. Back to work.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Ebonics version
Table-ized A.I.
Ex Star-Trekkie guy Now he plugs Priceline dot com He gets half-price rates. *bows*
The Human Cow - bringing you scrumtrelescence since 1995
A mosquito was heard to complain
:-|
That a chemist had poisoned his brain
The cause of his sorrow
Was para-dichloro-
diphenyltrichloroethane
Bwahahaha, that's funny, now everybody laugh
I'm sorry to say, but most of them I read are NOT the correct form of Haiku. I believe it was posted earlier, but buried in a response, that the correct Haiku form is 5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables. The only one I can remember reading that is correct is Hydrogen.
Even worse, most of them are nonsense freeform poetry that would certainly NOT help me remember the periodic table.
Furu ikeya
kawazu tobikomu
mizu no oto
A very old pond.
Suddenly, in jumps a frog.
The splash of water.
Slashdot Eds Link Anonymous Posts With Logged Posts
They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
Give me an R!
Give me a P!
Give me an I!
What's that spell?
M-I-T Wan-na-be!
(Yes, I was accepted to both schools mentioned, but attended neither, so no sour grapes accusations)