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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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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
the bitter cocktail
of a colonoscopy --
grin and barium
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
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."
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.
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.
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