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."

Comments

Singing Chemistry

[biocute]

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.

Cool

[Anonymous Crowhead]

Can 50 lines of perl and word list get me a main page story too?

Re:Cool

[Bogtha]

You don't even need that many!

Descrambling CSS w/ 7 Lines Of Perl A DMCA Violation?
World's Shortest P2P App: 15 Lines
Perl Haiku Poetry Contest

Excellllllent!

[Ruff_ilb]

acacias? carnies? fireboats? lanners? samisens? tawer?

What a nonesevently cromulent enumeration!

Re:Excellllllent!

[Red Flayer]

Off the top of my head, some definitions of these (mostly) (relatively) common words:

Acacias -- pl., Acacia. N. A family of shrubs (trees?). Acacia gum is a pretty common ingredient in foodstuffs.

Carnies -- pl., Carny. N. A non-temporary worker at a carnival. Carnies have their own culture, some of which is not considered "healthy" by modern us moral standards.

Fireboats -- pl., Fireboat. N. A type of ship used extensively in the Colonial/Victorian era, often a converted civil vessel, used in ship-to-ship combat in close quarters. Modern, a boat used to fight fires.

Lanners -- pl., Lanner. N. A bird of prey, used in falconry. I think it's Mediterranean.

Samisens -- pl., Samisen. N. A musical instrument of Eastern origin -- India?

Tawer -- N. A leatherworker... I think this is like a tanner.

I mean, really, these words are not all that odd. Some of them are not in common usage outside their fields, but I some across the first three words fairly often. Not so much lanner and tawer, but as a Medieval and Renaissance buff (like many a good Slashdot nerd), I've heard them before. And samisen is common enough to those with an interest in culturally diverse or historical music.

"What a nonesevently cromulent enumeration"

Whereas, 'nonesevently' and 'cromulent' are not words (though 'cromulent' appeared on the Simpsons as a joke). Enumeration is perfectly valid, and you've used it correctly in this context ;) .

On the other hand, there are plenty of words on the list that are way, way too obscure for one person in a thousand to know.

... ow?

[davecrusoe]

Go, little server, go! (Or more appropriately: Here come the hordes, prepare to be /.'ed!)

Bumper sticker

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

Anyone ever see the bumper sticker?

|C|Ho|C|O|La|Te|
Better Living Through Chemistry

this is science?

[Bassman59]

The terror^H^H^H^H^H^H Intelligent Designers have won.

Nifty.

[millennial]

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.

First page?!

[dartarrow]

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"?

Re:First page?!

[osu-neko]

Is this really front page worthy?

New around here, are we?

It's one of the most front-page worthy stories currently on the front page.

F Ir S Pt Os Ti

[EmbeddedJanitor]

In chemicalese that is

ummm.... what?

[wickersty]

i've had diarrhea that made for better news than this.

Valid molecules?

[allanc]

I want to know how many of these words' constituent chemicals could actually combine into a valid molecule.

Phonic Frugalities

[digitaldc]

What pointless waste, pure foolishness of syntactic tabulations.

(Note: these are just words found and rearranged to form a sentence)

other ways to combine letters.

[Cruciform]

Here's three that explain this post...

THC.

At least we know the dupe will be better.

The wooden periodic table

[cyclone96]

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.

One Line (Though a long one)

[jefu]

egrep -i "^((ac)|(ag)|(al)|(am)|(ar)|(as)|(at)|(au)|(b)|(ba )|(be)|(bh)|(bi)|(bk)|(br)|(c)|(ca)|(cd)|(ce)|(cf) |(cl)|(cm)|(co)|(cr)|(cs)|(cu)|(db)|(ds)|(dy)|(er) |(es)|(eu)|(f)|(fe)|(fm)|(fr)|(ga)|(gd)|(ge)|(h)|( he)|(hf)|(hg)|(ho)|(hs)|(i)|(in)|(ir)|(k)|(kr)|(la )|(li)|(lr)|(lu)|(md)|(mg)|(mn)|(mo)|(mt)|(n)|(na) |(nb)|(nd)|(ne)|(ni)|(no)|(np)|(o)|(os)|(p)|(pa)|( pb)|(pd)|(pm)|(po)|(pr)|(pt)|(pu)|(ra)|(rb)|(re)|( rf)|(rg)|(rh)|(rn)|(ru)|(s)|(sb)|(sc)|(se)|(sg)|(s i)|(sm)|(sn)|(sr)|(ta)|(tb)|(tc)|(te)|(th)|(ti)|(t l)|(tm)|(u)|(uub)|(uuh)|(uup)|(uuq)|(uut)|(v)|(w)| (xe)|(y)|(yb)|(zn)|(zr))+$" your-favorite-word-list

Though I'll admit I used a one line python program to construct the regular expression from a file listing the chemical element symbols.

Re:One Line (Though a long one)

[belmolis]

I ran this regular expression, using egrep, against the ENABLE wordlist. It took approximately ONE SECOND on a 1.6GHz P4 with 512MB RAM, not exactly a supercomputer. Mathematica is a great tool for some purposes, but not for this.

Re:One Line (Though a long one)

[popechunk]

Using Mathematica to find all of the English words made of element names: 2800 hours

Having some punk on /. do it with a UNIX one-liner: Priceless

Obligatory

[xigxag]

SLaSHDyOTeDs.

Don't tell the NSA about this...

[zymurgy_cat]

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.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Aluminium? Caesium?

[damian cosmas]

Aluminium and Caesium are the correct IUPAC spellings of those elements for historical reasons.

Caesium comes straight from the Latin caesius for the color sky blue, which is the most prominent line in the element's emission spectrum. Aluminium was so named because many elements at the time had -ium suffixes, and is the official spelling endorsed by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. The American Chemical Society, however, uses "Aluminum".

Not So

[cagle_.25]

But close. Molecules like AlCl3 are frequently used as catalysts in certain organic reactions, and the entire class of organometallic compounds are exceptions to your rule.

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.

Re:Not So

[cagle_.25]

You won't go far with that attitude. In life, it is impossible to know whether or not you really know something. Science, for example, makes no pretentions about "truth"; it simply presents models concerning the best possible interpretations of the evidence. See here and here.

Howdy, kids.

[nandorman]

'Sup, y'all?

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, ..., 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?

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

Shouldn't this story be on Digg.com?

[shoolz]

This is the type of blog-static that should be on Digg.com, not a 'quality', moderated tech site like /.

let's reproduce Belmolis's results.

[3-State Bit]

Here's a challenge, gentle readers!

From the article:

As a last note, it took me about 2800 computing hours on three computers to come up with all of this (parsed among three computers), not to mention the hours it took to program everything correctly. (The words on their own only took about 25ish hours, including programming - the longest parts were running the 4x4, 5x5, and 6x6 word square searches.

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

Re:let's reproduce Belmolis's results.

[belmolis]

My total time to find a list of the elements and create the regexp, which I actually did prior to reading OP's comment, plus finding and downloading a copy of the ENABLE list, was about ten minutes. For anyone with much experience using regular expressions constructing the regexp is pretty trivial. Even typing it all in manually while looking at a list of the elements can be done in a few minutes. So, sure, it isn't 25 hours vs. one second, but it is something like 25 hours vs. 10 minutes.

Pop Quiz for Chem Geeks or Biologists

[PGillingwater]

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.