Chemical Words List 197
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."
Singing Chemistry (Score:3, Funny)
This might be spammers' wet dream, like Carbon Iodine Aluminium Iodine Sulfur or Vanadium Iodine Silver Radium.
Re:Singing Chemistry (Score:2)
(OK, so as a schoolkid, when presented with a periodic table made up of separate cards for each symbol, I just *had* to rearrange something, and of course the best my childish mind could come up with at the time was ArSe)
Re:Singing Chemistry (Score:2)
Cool (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Cool (Score:1, Funny)
Hell, DeCSS [slashdot.org] was only 7 lines.
Re:Cool (Score:2)
I'm impressed, and I think scrabble is stupid! This is...well, at least i'm impressed
--LWM
Re:Cool (Score:1)
Fluor, Uranium, Carbon, Potassium, ; Nobelium! (Score:2)
Re:Cool (Score:3, Funny)
You don't even need that many!
Descrambling CSS w/ 7 Lines Of Perl A DMCA Violation? [slashdot.org]
World's Shortest P2P App: 15 Lines [slashdot.org]
Perl Haiku Poetry Contest [slashdot.org]
Aluminium? Caesium? (Score:1)
Re:Aluminium? Caesium? (Score:4, Informative)
Caesium [webelements.com] 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".
Re:Aluminium? Caesium? (Score:2)
Excellllllent! (Score:3, Funny)
What a nonesevently cromulent enumeration!
Re:Excellllllent! (Score:1)
Re:Excellllllent! (Score:3, Insightful)
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 s
Re:Excellllllent! (Score:2)
... ow? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:... ow? (Score:2)
Feel free to
Re:... ow? (Score:2)
Re:... ow? (Score:1)
Re:... ow? (Score:2)
Bumper sticker (Score:5, Funny)
|C|Ho|C|O|La|Te|
Better Living Through Chemistry
Re:Bumper sticker (Score:1)
In particular, I recall "Old chemists never die, they just reach equilibrium", and "Honk if you passed P-Chem"
Never took P-chem...what, is it a particularly hard class?
Re:Bumper sticker (Score:1, Informative)
Any retirement-age republican chemists? (Score:2)
this is science? (Score:4, Funny)
i don't believe in chemistry (Score:1)
--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!
Nifty. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Nifty. (Score:2)
A lot of lore that was passed down from thousands of chemistry teachers and chemists, conveniently indexed and illustrated for your convenience.
Like this? Try four fours problem too. (Score:2)
min number of words for all elements (Score:2)
Ooops! I feed the troll! (Score:2)
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.
Re:Ooops! I feed the troll! (Score:2)
First page?! (Score:4, Insightful)
How many of us has a class in "pointless waste of time"?
Re:First page?! (Score:2)
Yes, I think this is a waste of time, buy you know what, IM A GEEK, and I happen to think it's cool that some one would try this kind of thing. It's a brain work out, kinda Iron Chef, or
Re:First page?! (Score:2)
Re:First page?! (Score:2)
The point is that you can have fun and still have a point. What we see here is an example of totally pointless diversion. You give your students no real knowledge this way. I always hated this kind of diversions, both as a student and as a teacher. When I was tea
Re:First page?! (Score:2)
Re:First page?! (Score:2, Funny)
New around here, are we?
It's one of the most front-page worthy stories currently on the front page.
He forgot... (Score:1)
Potassium Chrloride, bitches!
F Ir S Pt Os Ti (Score:5, Funny)
ummm.... what? (Score:3, Funny)
huh (Score:2)
Valid molecules? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Valid molecules? (Score:1)
42, check it yourself.
/me runs
Re:Valid molecules? (Score:2)
They'd just be highly unstable.
Not So (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:2)
Re:Not So (Score:3, Insightful)
Phonic Frugalities (Score:2, Interesting)
(Note: these are just words found and rearranged to form a sentence)
Re:Phonic Frugalities (Score:1)
Re:Phonic Frugalities (Score:1)
other ways to combine letters. (Score:5, Funny)
THC.
At least we know the dupe will be better.
Re:other ways to combine letters. (Score:2)
The wooden periodic table (Score:5, Interesting)
On the site he has a mathematica based app [theodoregray.com] (he works at Wolfram) which will take a string of characters and attempt to construct it from element sybols.
apologies, slightly off-topic...[but only a little (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:apologies, slightly off-topic...[but only a lit (Score:1)
How about an aroma wheel? There's a nice round up of them here: http://www.eblong.com/zarf/flavorwheel.html [eblong.com]
OT: IT's a trade secret (Score:2)
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
Re:apologies, slightly off-topic...[but only a lit (Score:1)
"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,
Re:apologies, slightly off-topic...[but only a lit (Score:2)
Re:apologies, slightly off-topic...[but only a lit (Score:2)
I think this is true, actually. Not sure who is #2, but I think MIT is #3.
I've worked it out (Score:2)
oh noes! (Score:2)
One Line (Though a long one) (Score:5, Interesting)
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) (Score:4, 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.
let's reproduce Belmolis's results. (Score:3, Interesting)
From the article: [wellington.org]
Reader jefu [slashdot.org] has produced (but not yet disclosed) a one-liner that gives the correct word-list in one se [slashdot.org]
Re:let's reproduce Belmolis's results. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:One Line (Though a long one) (Score:2, Interesting)
I just compared my results, using egrep, with Nandor's. He failed to find two valid words "berg" and "urges", but found three non-words, "cryosurg ical", "urg es", and "v irgins". The correct count is therefore 26,811.
Re:The regex uses different symbols. (Score:2)
Actually, I only used the proper symbols, that is, the ones for the first 111 elements, so my regexp differs from the OPs in excluding uub, uuh, uup, uuq, and uut. As it happens, the results are no different.
Re:One Line (Though a long one) (Score:4, Funny)
Having some punk on /. do it with a UNIX one-liner: Priceless
Re:One Line (Though a long one) (Score:2)
Then, in part because I could not run it on some local machines at the university (which seemed to reboot every night), I rewrote it in Haskell to use a trie to hold the word list. The Haskell version (compiled, -O3) with three letter words and the preprocessed word
Is there a converter? (Score:2)
Obligatory (Score:4, Funny)
Don't tell the NSA about this... (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Re:Don't tell the NSA about this... (Score:2)
Counter Strike Chemistry (Score:4, Funny)
The list *is* self-documenting (Score:2)
Uranium
Carbon
K (Potassium)
Uranium again
Phosphorus
Sulphur
A most unlikely compound, to be sure.
Re:The list *is* self-documenting (Score:2)
Can't spell "douchebag" ... (Score:2)
At least they got the basics. (Score:2)
Glad to see porn[o][os] in there!
Wildeblood's Empire (Score:2)
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.
On a related note. (Score:2)
Arsole! Megaphone! Spermine!
Have fun.
What an idiot (Score:2)
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 r
Re:What an idiot (Score:2)
Howdy, kids. (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Shouldn't this story be on Digg.com? (Score:3)
Glad to see "nerds" is in there (Score:2)
Friendly companion to: (Score:2)
Pop Quiz for Chem Geeks or Biologists (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't google it -- just put down your best answer, and we'll see what firms up.
Re:Pop Quiz for Chem Geeks or Biologists (Score:2)
Re:Pop Quiz for Chem Geeks or Biologists (Score:2)
Going to also object on the grounds that, unless you eat quarters or something, elements in the human body don't occur in their metallic form, but their ionic form.
Re:Pop Quiz for Chem Geeks or Biologists (Score:2)
Re:Pop Quiz for Chem Geeks or Biologists (Score:2)
Re:Pop Quiz for Chem Geeks or Biologists (Score:2)
Um, since when is that English (Score:2)
"Since when is samurai an English word?"
Am I wrong here, or is that a mistake?
As my school chemistry teacher used to say... (Score:2)
Re:News for nerds, stuff that matters (Score:1)
Re:first... to know this guy (Score:2)
Re:informatics (Score:2)
Re:Stuff that matters? (Score:2)
Be careful what you ask for. That's all I'm saying.
Although, here's a yellow pages review [unixreview.com] that would be at home on Slashdot. Maybe.