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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."
Can 50 lines of perl and word list get me a main page story too?
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.
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
In chemicalese that is
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I want to know how many of these words' constituent chemicals could actually combine into a valid molecule.
Here's three that explain this post...
THC.
At least we know the dupe will be better.
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!
Though I'll admit I used a one line python program to construct the regular expression from a file listing the chemical element symbols.
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".
'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