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Chemical Words List
An anonymous reader writes "Mark Nandor, a teacher of mathematics at The Wellington School, has recently posted a new chemical words page. For those who haven't seen this before, it is a list of English words that can be spelled using chemical symbols."
If Mr Nandor joins force with this lecturer, we will have karateoke in chemistry classes.
This might be spammers' wet dream, like Carbon Iodine Aluminium Iodine Sulfur or Vanadium Iodine Silver Radium.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
Can 50 lines of perl and word list get me a main page story too?
What I want tou knouw... can Aluminium be spelled soulely with chemical symbouls?
503 Sig Unavailable
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acacias? carnies? fireboats? lanners? samisens? tawer?
What a nonesevently cromulent enumeration!
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
Go, little server, go! (Or more appropriately: Here come the hordes, prepare to be /.'ed!)
Anyone ever see the bumper sticker?
|C|Ho|C|O|La|Te|
Better Living Through Chemistry
Technoli
The terror^H^H^H^H^H^H Intelligent Designers have won.
My friends and I did something like this in our college chem class. We came up with things like C3Po (or C3PO). Needless to say, acronyms can be a bit easier than actual words.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
What is the minimum number of words to use all of the elements (I realize there is some debate above ~ #109)
Is this really front page worthy? FTA: "If you use this page in your research, classroom, &c., please reference me!"
How many of us has a class in "pointless waste of time"?
I love humanity, it is people I hate
Clearly we see now the motto is an OR statement not an AND statement.
Awesome. I went to high school with this dude. Brother of frequent slashdotter pudge. We always expected big things of Mark.
ok so informatics and widely available information will change the world... I really believe this.
but this is just information masturbation
...'pkx's real initials'
Potassium Chrloride, bitches!
In chemicalese that is
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Unless I am mistaken, The Wellington School is a "An independent, coeducational, pre-k through 12, college preparatory day school."
I wasn't aware that primary and secondary schools granted the title of professor, something usually reserved for tertiary institutions (and only some of them at that).
Besides, on his school pages he always refers to himself as "Dr. Nandor".
i've had diarrhea that made for better news than this.
Alright, who'll be the first punk to post a bash script doing this...
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
there's still no cure for cancer.
We need a list to help us pick up pronounceable hexadecimal numbers like 0xDEADBEEF or 0xCAFEBABE.
I want to know how many of these words' constituent chemicals could actually combine into a valid molecule.
What pointless waste, pure foolishness of syntactic tabulations.
(Note: these are just words found and rearranged to form a sentence)
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
How do you get to be a professor at a high school?
Here's three that explain this post...
THC.
At least we know the dupe will be better.
that is just a theory, chemistry was created by atheist scientists
;)
--no seriously, I like this list. My favorite words there, for some reason, are secessionisms and vivaciousnesses.
No explorer or firefox in the list, but there are firebirds, operas, and even links and porn. I tell you, it's chemists who make those browser thingies, not programmers!
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Theodore Gray has put together a surprisingly interesting site based on his wooden periodic table of the elements (that actually contains samples of the elements - except the ones that would kill the builder and maybe a few of the neighbors).
On the site he has a mathematica based app (he works at Wolfram) which will take a string of characters and attempt to construct it from element sybols.
Worst...sig...ever!
For the longest time, I've had a private gripe that I just can't seem to shake off. Many years ago, I took a chemistry class at Cornell during the summer that gave me my first taste of the collegiate experience. Some of the things I've learned I could do without (for example: Cornell has the hightest suicide rate among ivy leagues? I still think I was being toyed with). But one of the most enduring experiences that has stayed with me were some of the lab stuff we did when we got to the organic chemistry part of the class. It was pretty mind-blowing for me (just a high schooler back then) to open up a little vial of liquid or wet gauze and have the sweet pungent smell of fresh fruit waif out at me. Similarly, I was amazed that some of the most evil smell produced by bacteria and mold could be so definitively identified as well.
Even since, I've been mystified by the fact that our society has standard color charts for use by artists and precise tuning standards of notes and scales for use by musicians, but there seem to be no standard or measurement criteria for smells or odors. None that are taught in school anyhow. Yet, in everyday literature, we often enough come across descriptions of smells and odors which the authors seem to take for granted without concern for whether the readers know what they are talking about.
And so I ask my fellow slasdoters, how does one concisely characterize the experience of say, the multitude of different ways milk can spoil; the various acridness of old unwashed gym cloths; the powerful fetidness of well-used, unwashed trash containers? and be absolutely certain that one is getting one's point across? Is there a practical dictionary or directory for such things?
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
I was confused trying to find the news story in this, and now I have it! The news is not the word list itself. The news is that someone cares enough to post it on /.!
99 bottles of beer in 175 characte
l33t sp34k for chemists? No wonder why Einstein has left the building!
YSe, Ti CaN.
Though I'll admit I used a one line python program to construct the regular expression from a file listing the chemical element symbols.
And so I ask my fellow slasdoters, how does one concisely characterize the experience of say, the multitude of different ways milk can spoil; the various acridness of old unwashed gym cloths; the powerful fetidness of well-used, unwashed trash containers? and be absolutely certain that one is getting one's point across? Is there a practical dictionary or directory for such things?
How about an aroma wheel? There's a nice round up of them here: http://www.eblong.com/zarf/flavorwheel.html
Is there a converter? Like input a paragraph, have the script convert, to the results with chemical symbols.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
SLaSHDyOTeDs.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Science l33t speak.
That information is a trade secret. It's also been patented. You'll never see what goes into them unless you work for one of the big food companies.
:-) Remember - eat organic!
Anytime you see either "natural flavours" or "artificial flavours" (or flavors, if you insist), it's a chemical that smells/tastes like whatever it is you're supposed to be smelling/tasting. (The difference between natural and artificial is that "natural" is from some living matter and sells better - the chemicals are identical) Go look in a supermarket and see all the ingredients with "flavor"s. They are all chemicals that are very precisely measured by the companies that produce them.
Yum yum
--LWM
N/T, see title.
Easy...it's not the smell one is trying to communicate, it's the memory that goes with it.
"Jack's bathroom smelled like a freeway rest area." isn't intended to communicate that Jack's bathroom stank, it's supposed to communicate that if you went into Jack's bathroom, you felt you risked stepping in someone's crap. Or at least seeing some still floating around in the toilet.
The same goes with taste. You don't say, "The taste was a combination of 3 parts salty, twenty parts sweet, seven parts sour," you say, "It tasted like a lightly salted slice of a Red Delicious apple." You're not communicating the sense of taste, you're trying to recall a memory.
And if the reader has never had a Red Delicious apple, well, they don't have the right memories for the writer to evoke, anyway.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
You just *know* that someone will claim that people are sending coded messages (for WMDs, no doubt) through regular emails or phone conversations:
Analyst: "Sir! We just analyzed that last phone call from Mike in Idaho to his mother, the missionary feeding poor children in Afghanistan. If we use the new chemical-word-filter, he's clearly providing instructions on building some type of chemical weapon, one based on vinegar and what looks to be corn syrup...or maybe pecans."
NSA supervisor: "We can't afford another 9/11. Engage the standard rendition plan and have them relocated."
Analyst: But sir! Shouldn't we get a warrant or find some corroborating evidence?
Supervisor gives a glaring, angry look.
Analyst: Just kidding! ahahah...man, that gets you every time!
Supervisor: Good one! I guess the beer's on me tonight.
Patriotic music plays as supervisor slaps analyst on the shoulder and both freeze in place with big smiles.
-- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908
Comment removed based on user account deletion
3,4,5-trimethoxyphenethylamine!
well it's because there's really no way to quantify smell. you can talk about color even if you're color blind. all you do is define the wavelengh (or mixtures) and you can uniquely identify a color. likewise you can quanitfy sound even if you're deaf. middle C is 440 Hz (or is it A, i don't know i don't remember my music theory). how do you quantify a smell? the only thing that makes a smell unique (other than your subjective perception) is the molecule itself.
And without sulphur, the list is halved?
"Sure there's porn and piracy on the Web but there's probably a downside too."
Fluorine
Uranium
Carbon
K (Potassium)
Uranium again
Phosphorus
Sulphur
A most unlikely compound, to be sure.
Inventor of the LOLbalrog meme.
"Dykes playbook of alimony acceptance is orgies of superbitches". That could be the cure for cancer.
Why would you trust a testimonial when choosing hosting?
I'd go on with more examples, but I'd rather not compound your problems.
Glad to see porn[o][os] in there!
Join Tor today!
But your overall point, that metals tend to be so electropositive that they form ionic bonds, is what I teach my 1st year chem students.
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
FP
Brian Stableford used this idea in the novel Wildeblood's Empire in the '70's, which was part of the Daedalus series. These books are worth reading if you can find them--some of the best scientific puzzle stories ever produced, with extremely interesting speculations regarding alternative ecosystems.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Time to trot out a link to a page I truly love: Molecules with Silly or Unusual Names.
Arsole! Megaphone! Spermine!
Have fun.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
What's next? Books: Telephone Directory?
*takes bong hit*
Ar!
If you RTFA, you'll find that the guy in TFA only uses properly named symbols (so no Uuq, or other three letter symbols which are really just numbers, not proper names). Thus, you can only use the elements they actually have official names for if you follow his rules.
From the web page: "The words on their own only took about 25ish hours, including programming..."
s ymbol clicking edit above the list of current symbols, copying the text in the textarea and pasting it into a terinal running:
/^\|([a-z]+)\s/i;
One minute of "programming" and 0.1s of CPU time gets you a list of 26811 such words, reasonably close to the 26182 claimed on the web page, but since his list is a huge HTML table which wget tells me will take 60 hours to download I don't know if he's got one wrong word, or if I missed one, or if my ENABLE list is different than his, or if wikipedia contains garbage data...
Note: "programming" means creating a regular expression, which was as simple as going to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_elements_by_
#!/usr/bin/perl
my @s;
while () {
push @s, lc $1 if
}
print "egrep '^(",join('|',@s),")+\$' ";
And then cutting and pasting the output and appending words.txt (everyone has ENABLE and TWL98 files handy, right...)
CRaP - it's radioactive
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
I know of more than a few professor types who have tried to "passionately teach students" as a priority over getting tenure. They all managed to not get tenure and at least a couple of them are no longer teaching students in any way (passionately or not). Most of the rest changed their priorities - so that now students and teaching are not very important to them. Such is the way of American (at least) higher education.
Theory
dnuof eruc rof aixelsid
One of my high school teachers asigned that as a contest for her classes. You were only required to come up with 100 words but every 100 extra you did would count as a regular grade. The class with the most would get to watch a movie (which we usualy did anyway). I only made it through a b c d e g l m v x y and z befor i ran out of time. I ended up with more words than the 2 highest classes. But the teacher ended up giving my class and the second place one the prize since she thought me being in a college english class gave me some sort of edge.
You may think his sig sucks, but your comment sucks.
Besides the fact that you're a troll, paid subscribers can go to cinnamon colbert's user page and see all of his/her comments...
Just because you can't see that comment doesn't mean that others can't.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
You can talk about color if you are color blind, but you won't have much to say (about the color). You can talk about odors without a nose, but what would you say? Your reasoning is hard to follow.
Light and sound have measurable structure and properties in addition to their visual and auditory effects. Chemical structures have measurable structure and properties in addition to their olfactory effects.
Biology adapted a complex sensory mechanism to adapt to the compexity of molecular structure. However complex chemical structure and olfactory response is, it certainly can be measured quantitatively and qualitatively, just as with light and sound.
Smells and flavors are sorted by molecules and groups of molecules with similar structure. Salts, esters, fatty acids, aromatics, alcohols, etc. can be used to identify smells and tastes.
Google flavor chemistry. It is a rich, actively investigated science.
Be heard || Be herd
But is it 'all' bad? Personally, I'm glad they mixed the rotten-eggs with natural gas. I'll never forget that smell...not since the accident, anyway.
Hmmmmm....
While this is midly amusing and something of a curiousity (much the same as a two-headed freak), I fail to see why this is "news". Surely, if he has that much time to program regex, he can find a use far more beneficial to the planet.
2 cents,
Queen B
HDGary secures my bank
A3 is 440 Hz.
If anyone wants to try names and other non-words, try the script I wrote for this purpose a few weeks ago. (And to think, I could have submitted it and made the front page!)
What do you get when you combine Beryllium and Argon ions? Be+Ar- A polar bear.
Actually, Cornell does have the highest suicide rate (of all, I believe, but I could be wrong there).
Wow, thanks for that link.
The description of gossyprol (found in cottonseed oil) on that page.. very intriguing. Might have to visit my local Chinese herbalist this week. Googling around, I see that medical studies on the net are in some conflict as to how permanent the contraceptive effects are, but it seems that 10mg or so every other day for 75-180 days, followed by weekly maintenance doses of 35 mg, generally work well with few side effects.
'Sup, y'all?
..., 11x11 word squares and magic word squares. Just checking every matrix using all of the possible 7-symbol chemical words would mean that you're looking at evaluating 7685305573422409190000000 matrices to determine if each is a valid square - I don't think there's a one-line code that would work and take less time than a few billion universe-ages. Using Mathematica to set up some shortcuts in evaluating those is pretty easy, though. Since I was in Mathematica already, and knew I had some restrictions (like using only words with distinct chemical symbols), why use something else? Besides, my job is not in the technology industry at all, so I only know 6-7 programming languages - and not any of the new ones. And it's not like I spent my life doing this, it was background while I did my actual teaching job. So if it took a long time, what do I care?
Yes, it is a waste of time.
Yes, I'm sure there are better/faster ways to generate the list of words - the reason I used Mathematica is that I was finding the 2x2, 3x3, 4x4, 5x5,
No, I'm not a professor (not sure how that one got started). I have a Ph.D. in physics from Ohio State, so the parents and administration at Wellington make me call myself "Dr. Nandor"; otherwise, I'd just as soon go by "Mr. Nandor." Besides, the kids like calling me "Doc."
No, I didn't even think to censor the list. Oops. Since it's on a school website, I'll have to *** some things out.
No, I'm not sure how "berg" didn't make it onto the list, and I'll have to add it. I only found Rg words at the end of my "work," since I didn't know element 111 had actually been officially named, so I must have copied/pasted it in incorrectly into code I was using.
Hope y'all enjoyed it for the random "entertainment" it was meant to be. My brother submitted the story, so.... thanks?
Nandor
This is one of the lamest thing I have ever seen...
Ryan - http://www.thecosmotron.com/
Cornell has the hightest suicide rate among ivy leagues? I still think I was being toyed with)
I think this is true, actually. Not sure who is #2, but I think MIT is #3.
Slashdot's shark-jumping moment. Sure, there have been many questionable "stories" in the past, but this one takes the cake for the most useless and inane.
This is the type of blog-static that should be on Digg.com, not a 'quality', moderated tech site like /.
I was parodying some earlier meme-ish posts I had seen weeks ago. --gk
Cornell has the hightest suicide rate among ivy leagues? I still think I was being toyed with)
I think this is true, actually. Not sure who is #2, but I think MIT is #3.
According to Cornell (gannett.cornell.edu) over the last ten years the suicide rate is two students per year, about the same as the US college average; apparently the suicide rate is twice as high among Americans of the same age range who are not in college.
Cornell happens to be near a very deep (and pretty) gorge where a number of people have leapt to their deaths; possibly that's where the idea got started.
By the way, MIT isn't an Ivy League school. I'm pretty sure MIT doesn't even have a football team.
From the article: Reader jefu has produced (but not yet disclosed) a one-liner that gives the correct word-list in one second! Let's try to reproduce his results![1]
Slashdot Reader CONTEST
As an exercise to the slashdot reader, let's reproduce jefu's results, only this time noting total programming time as well. If you're interested, type:
$ echo 'started programming!'; date
at your bash prompt now! Ladies and gentleman, start your engines! Remember: post only your total programming time, and total execution time, not the actual one-liner you produce. (Don't ruin it for other readers.) May the power of script be with you!
[1] jefu, please refrain from disclosing your one-liner for generating the e-grep line above until the completion of the contest
The oxford english dictionary that comes with tiger doesn't recognize "firepink" as a word, and neither do I. Anybody?
Although as Ra used to be Rd (yes, really) he could also have had the rare neon-radium compound of NeRd.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Tom Lehrer's immortal periodic elements song, which I first discovered on a Doctor Demento album. And as if that weren't enough, I found a Flash cartoon about the song. http://www.privatehand.com/flash/elements.html Isn't that interesting?
OK, let's see how many of you really understand BioChemistry. Pop quiz time: which METAL occurs most commonly in mammals?
Don't google it -- just put down your best answer, and we'll see what firms up.
Paul Gillingwater
MBA, CISSP, CISM
|Co|W|B|O|Y| |Ne|Al|!
Who needs chemists if they can't even write "salt" with theit own symbols..
"Since when is samurai an English word?"
Am I wrong here, or is that a mistake?
___ I don't respond to Anonymous Cowards, and I Never Mod them UP.
I'm pretty sure MIT doesn't even have a football team.
They do, the MIT Engineers. They're in the New England Football Conference. 2-7 and 0-6 in their division in 2004, so they're not necessarily a _good_ football team, but they have one.
Ba Au-H20
:)
This is not my sig.
Hi,
I was the winner of NPR's Sunday Puzzle a few weeks ago that he refers to on his website. I used a program to find the best grid. As he states, there was only one 3x3 grid that has ALL 2-letter elements in it (which Will Shortz seemed to know even though I didn't tell him).
Anyway, he is right that it takes a very long time to generate all the grids when you go above 3x3. An easier problem is generating all possible Word Squares. I did this a few weeks ago after being motivated by the previous Slashdot post about a 10-letter word square. It's much easier to narrow down the Depth First Search in this situation (every row is the same as every column). I used C++.
Interestingly enough, not only are there no 10-letter word squares, there are no 9-letter ones either. And, there are only five 8-letter word squares.
A distribution of the results as well as the 8-letter squares can be found here.
Jeff Terrace
If you like this, you might also like my definitive four fours answer key. The goal of the four fours problem is to find a mathematical expression for every integer from 0 to some maximum positive integer, using only common mathematical symbols and exactly four fours (no other digits are allowed). For example, zero is 44-44, one is 44/44, 2 is 4/4+4/4, 3 is (4+4+4)/4, and so on.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Meh.
Salting apples? Weirdest thing I've heard today. Granted it's still fairly early.
We came up with things like C3Po (or C3PO).
Hmmm.. and here I thought Steven did.
Try it...it's actually pretty good. :)
Personally, I like cutting out the core, then cutting the rest of the apple like a pie.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
tchotchkes.
...that's pretty sodium difluoride.
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.