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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."

19 of 197 comments (clear)

  1. Singing Chemistry by biocute · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

  2. Cool by Anonymous+Crowhead · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  3. Bumper sticker by Conspiracy_Of_Doves · · Score: 4, Funny

    Anyone ever see the bumper sticker?

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

  4. this is science? by Bassman59 · · Score: 4, Funny

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

  5. First page?! by dartarrow · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  6. F Ir S Pt Os Ti by EmbeddedJanitor · · Score: 4, Funny

    In chemicalese that is

    --
    Engineering is the art of compromise.
  7. ummm.... what? by wickersty · · Score: 3, Funny

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

  8. Valid molecules? by allanc · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

  9. other ways to combine letters. by Cruciform · · Score: 4, Funny

    Here's three that explain this post...

    THC.

    At least we know the dupe will be better.

  10. The wooden periodic table by cyclone96 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!
  11. One Line (Though a long one) by jefu · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

    1. Re:One Line (Though a long one) by belmolis · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:One Line (Though a long one) by popechunk · · Score: 4, Funny
      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

  12. Obligatory by xigxag · · Score: 3, Funny

    SLaSHDyOTeDs.

    --
    There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
  13. Don't tell the NSA about this... by zymurgy_cat · · Score: 3, Funny

    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
  14. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 3, Funny

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  15. Re:Aluminium? Caesium? by damian+cosmas · · Score: 4, Informative

    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".

  16. Not So by cagle_.25 · · Score: 3, Informative
    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.

    --
    Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
  17. Howdy, kids. by nandorman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    '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