Mnemonics for the Periodic Table Of Elements

Periodically I try to remember the Periodic Table Of Elements. Here are some mnemonic devices to aid in remembering the names of the chemical elements and their positions on the table.

Some of these I found and some I made up.

Since I first posted this, four new names have been added for ununtrium, ununpentium, ununseptium, and ununoctium. They are Nihonium, Moscovium, Tennessine, and Oganesson.

I haven't managed to fill in the whole quiz at either Sporcle or JetPunk since the four new names were added.

Group 1
Hateful Little Nasty Kids Rub Cat's Fur
helium lithium Na-sodium K-potassium rubidium cesium francium

Group 2
Beer Mugs Can Serve Bar Rats
beryllium magnesium calcium strontium barium radium

Group 3
Says You
scandium yttrium

Group 4
The Zebra Hates Rats
titanium zirconium hafnium rutherfordium

Group 5
Vince Never Talks Dumb
vanadium niobium tantalum dubnium

Group 6
Crows Make Weird Sounds
chromium molybdenum W-tungsten seaborgium

Group 7
Men Talk Real Bad
manganese technetium rhenium bohrium

Group 8
Fire Ruined Our House
Fe-iron ruthenium osmium hassium

Group 9
Cows Really Irritate Me
cobalt rhodium iridium meitnerium

Group 10
Never Poke Poodle Dogs
nickel palladium platinum darmstadtium

Group 11
Cows Are Awful Rulers
copper Ag-silver Au-gold roentgenium

Group 12
Zoos Can Hold Cats
zinc cadmium Hg-mercury copernicium

Group 13 - Boron Group
Big Al Gave In Tiny Numbers
boron aluminum gallium indium thallium nihonium

Group 14 - Carbon Group
Can Silly Germans Snatch Lead Flakes
carbon silicon germanium Sn-tin lead flerovium

Group 15 - Nitrogen Family - Pnictogens
New Popes Assign Subordinate Bishops Monthly
nitrogen phosphorus arsenic Sb-antimony bismuth moscovium

Group 16 - Oxygen Family - Chalcogens
Open Source Software Terrifies People Lately
oxygen sulfur selenium tellurium polonium livermorium

Group 17 - Halogens
Five Cows Barging In At Tom
fluorine chlorine bromine iodine astatine tennessine

Group 18 - Noble Gases
He Needs A Keen Xerox Repairman Only
helium neon argon krypton xenon radon oganesson

Period 4 Transition Metals
Sam Tried Very Cold Money, Felt Cold Near Cold Zone
scandium titanium vanadium chromium manganese Fe-iron cobalt nickel copper zinc

Period 5 Transition Metals
Your Zebra Needs More Time Reading. Reading Pleases Striped Creatures
yttrium zirconium niobium molybdenum technetium ruthenium rhodium palladium silver cadmium

Period 6 Transition Metals
He Takes Women Running Out In Parks And Hopes
hafnium tantalum W-tungsten rhenium osmium iridium platinum Au-gold Hg-Mercury

Period 7 Transition Metals
Rabid Dogs Sure Bark Hatefully. Most Dogs Remain Calm.
rutherfordium dubnium seaborgium bohrium hassium meitnerium darmstadtium roentgenium copernicium

Lanthanides
Lately College Parties Never Produce Sexy European Girls That Drink Heavily Even Though You Look
lanthanum cerium praseodymium neodymium promethium samarium europium gadolinium terbium dysprosium holmium erbium thulium ytterbium lutetium

Actinides
At Three Planets, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Amy Cured Berkeley California. Einstein Failed Making Nobel Laws
actinium thorium protactinium uranium neptunium plutonium americium curium berkelium californium einsteinium fermium mendelevium nobelium lawrencium

The chart above is from Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodic_table

Periodic Table Mnemonics - Mnemonics For The Periodic Table Of Elements - Elements Mnemonics - Memorize the Periodic Table - Memorize the Elements

Any Posts Are Better Than No Posts - The Escape From Twitter Client - #RIPTwitter

I was just thinking a silly thought about an escape from Twitter client for Twitter addicts, that looks like Twitter, but it sends your pseudo-tweets out to numerous forums of your choosing, and it shows posts from those forums similar to how Twitter shows blogs posts, but has a reply box available. Not a real idea, really, just a way of griping about Twitter, really.

When I try to write a reply to a tweet on Twitter.com in a desktop browser, Twitter hides the tweet I'm trying to reply to. Let's suppose you ask to list these numbers in order of preference: 215, 875, 214, 2159, 152, 857, and 421. When I click reply, your tweet becomes unreadable, and I have to try to remember that list of numbers and maintain it along with my resorted version. This is not a design that anyone wanting people to chat with each other could possibly make thinking it's a good system for chatting. This can only be the result of a decision to make chatting extremely difficult. It's not possible to do such a perfect job of making a terrible conversation system by accident.

People talking to each other doesn't pay their bills. A system that makes chat easy also makes harassment and threats easy. So, making a good chat system costs Twitter money without increasing it's income. Users and users talking to each other are baggage, it's only user's wallets that matter, either directly by buying things from within Twitter or by sharing ads or sharing tweets from paying accounts who ultimately want you to buy something.

One gets used to their not or very little monetized free chat system, and then the makers get tired of paying for it, and the users won't pay anything so long as there's any free alternative left, so it becomes an ad server, with users and their chat seen by the providers as a necessary evil.

When I post here, I don't feel like I'm at at party listening to other people talking and occasionally tossing in a few words of my own.  When I'm on Twitter, or any similar system that shows frequent incoming posts, where it feels like there's as many people seeing your stuff as there are people whose stuff your see, it gives you the illusion you are having a shared experience with people.

I'm on a desktop, and whether I'm tweeting, writing a post, on Facebook, sitting at a computer is usually all I'm doing, other than perhaps eating. I'm not watching TV or a movie and tweeting. I might have over a hundred tabs open, but I'm only actually concerned with a few of them while tweeting, like reading something linked to in a tweet.

So some people are watching a movie, talking with someone in real life, sitting back on a couch with a smartphone, looking at Twitter every half hour during commercials, while I'm sitting at a desk focused solely at twitter.com. The illusion of a shared experience is truly an illusion.

Twitter's made using it to talk with other people, to have a coherent conversation, so difficult, so miserable, that while using it, I am diverted from thinking about what's going on in the world, what's happening in my life I want to share, how are the people  I follow who I feel some connection with doing, to "What a terrible system for communicating this is."

#RIPTwitter

Pulling Teeth might be a better blog title for me than Words In Posts

Why don't I write more?

1. Low self esteem. Don't feel I have anything worth saying. Nothing deep, nothing profound. I don't know how to bring about world peace, or stave off global climate catastrophe, or make space exploration vastly more cost effective, or extend human life.

2. Memory. Hard to write with my memory.

3. Ignorance. Can't do anything like roll off descriptions of countries based on my reading, or churn out paragraphs of comparisons between the modern American empire and the Roman Empire. because I've never studied them much. I read some books on politics long ago, but a few books that you've forgotten is a far cry from being knowledgeable.

4. The Twitter Habit.  I got used to trying to say stuff in under 140 characters, hoping for a reply, a retweet, a fave, now called a like. This might be a more important reason than one would think. One is only a tab away from your blog, so why would being on twitter.com stop you from writing? Well, one is reading when on their timeline on Twitter.com, and what one is reading is not long form articles or stories like one can produce in a blog post, one is reading aphorisms, original or quoted, headlines (aka link text) either copied or pasted verbatim

[Hours pass doing other stuff]

Well, it's time to post this or forget about it, and I'm trying to generate some content, so I'm posting it. 

Signmaker's nightmare. Also, former signmaker's nightmare.

Sometimes when my sleeping body wants me to wake up, it gives me a stressful dream, sometimes an all out scare you to death nightmare, sometimes a more moderate unpleasant situation. I used to work at a one day sign shop. Sometimes the wake up nightmare involves signmaking.

This morning my body woke me up with a moderate level signmaker's nightmare. An order had mentioned on a work order than the customer left a banner with us. The color and content of the banner left with us was similar to what the order was for.. So I measured the customer's banner and reproduced on just like it. The work order, however, was for a similar but different design, and we already had the logos needed, knew their fonts, and colors, and we weren't told on the work order to do anything with the customer's banner, neither to look at or clean it up. Basically, there was no reason to leave it with us.

The customer arrives, we show them the banner we'd made; it's not what they want, I'm called out to have my error pointed out, like a puppy having its nose rubbed in the carpet. I's stressed out over my easily avoidable error.

At that point of embarrassment at my incompetence and fallibility, I wake up.

It's been five years since I had my real, 20 year long signmaking job. I think it might be time for my subconscious to stop using sign themed waked up nightmares.

Still, better than the tumbling head over heels in a car, or me with scissor and other people and lots  of blood, and other similar more horrible plots of wake up nightmares my wake up system generated.

Youtube: Don't play it till I click the play button.

YouTube has changed it's behavior, playing videos instantly when you click on them from a search results list, instead of showing you the page, the intro picture, description, comments if wanted, and letting you then decide to play it if you want. 

I never want the current behavior to occur.

The only time to play videos without an explicit per video authorization by clicking is if I've picked a play list and selected autoplay for playlists.

In all other cases, I don't want the video to play  till I click the play button. I want to have time to see the picture, select full screen or not, and read the descriptions and perhaps the comments before the video plays.

Not being able to do this will mean I will use YouTube much much less.

I also don't want the controls to overlay the videos. I want the controls to have a separate space, to make the controls as easy to see as possible, and I don't the videos ruined by having the controls over top of them. 

I have installed a Firefox add-on intended to address this problem, but it doesn't work well enough. It stops some playing without specific authorization but not all.  The extension is

"YouTube™ Auto Pause/Stop 0.1.0" at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-auto-pausestop/

Selected to test a Beta version of StumbleUpon, "and it filled me with ecstasy and dread."

Just woke up, at nearly 2 in the afternoon, or 14, I guess some folks might say, listening to an endless loop of all the Night Vale episodes on a old, offline Windows XP computer, the episode where Cecil gets a call from an angel, the existence of which sort of being  is not approved, though it appears in fact they do, and in that episode,  Cecil says the angel gave him a terse, mysterious answer to a question,  "And it filled me with ecstasy and dread."

I was checking the links on this site, trying to get going on blogging a bit, again,  knowing past experience suggests I won't pursue, but one never knows, maybe this will be the time I finally get going and write well enough, and often enough, to pick up a few readers, or to at least feel good about my efforts. One of the links was to StumbleUpon, an old site, that I never used a lot, but a long time ago, I did use it a little, and I did enjoy what tiny use I made of it. This was many years ago. When I clicked on it, I got a dialog box offering to let me join in a beta test of a new layout. 

Ecstasy is just what I don't feel about being given the chance to participate in a beta test of a site I don't use much. "Dread", though a bit strong,  is certainly the closer of the two feelings the angel's word filled Cecil with.. For a beta tests of a site I use a lot dread might be not be way too strong, while a chance to test  a new version of a site I haven't used for a while gives me the illusion of false hope, which will most likely resolve to, if not dread, something negative.

They are so many good words for bad emotions that come to mind when writing about new versions of software, or changes in product design, or the inevitable new war, or escalation of an old war, or news like I saw yesterday that China - the country Apple picked to make high quality devices at super low prices - has these wonderful lethal autonomous aerial vehicles, great military grade murder bots, now at low, low prices, and they're selling like hotcakes, lethal, kill at a distance, hey we're really sorry about your wedding or your hospital, whirling Frisbees of flying death.

The StumbleUpon this beta replaces is already several versions older than the one I remember. That's common, I guess, for an old person on the web, to remember, vaguely, when something first out, or when it first seemed to appear to them, which is not always when it first appeared, as one is often reminded by people who got online earlier, who can remember pre-internet bulletin boards, and they can't let you express your feelings of having old memories, because theirs are older, and better, and your memories suck compared to theirs, and they young people don't want to hear your memories either, so you end up just being quiet, and when people ask how you are, or what you've been up to, you don't know what to say.

Several hours have elapsed since I wrote the last paragraph. I got distracted by what the "s"  in theirs is for, why it can't have an apostrophe, yet needs to be there. So, to finish this post, I have to read the above, and see if I can figure out what, if any, point I had. There might not have been much of one.


Ok, after reading and editing a bit, I think I see some points

 I'm old or jaundiced enough that "new version!" doesn't give me hope, it makes me expect things will be worse.


I don't feel like people are much interested in what I have to say, also a common feeling for old people.


We humans spend a lot of effort on things of relatively little importance, but relatively little harm, like new versions of StumbleUpon, but that's a lot  better than some of what we spend resources on, like lower priced killing machines.


That's it, I'm through with this post. Going to learn some Esperanto, practice learning the names of countries and I think I'll add learning the capitals of all the counties in the world. I am trying to be able to write all the country names from scratch, no map or other help. I can find most of them on a map, given a list of names. I haven't found a game that actually has all 196 or so, the best I've found is about 160 on a quiz game. I'm also going to see if I can find a game to locate the all the elements on a blank periodic table.

Twitter's Thread Killers: See all activity on, View other replies, Show more, and Other replies to

So far as I can tell, there's not a single page in Google, Bing, or Duck Duck Go that includes all the Twitter thread killers, the labels that appear where tweets should be, that Twitter is using now because being able to chat in a coherent, organized, straightforward manner isn't what makes Twitter the most money.

Without any evidence other than timing, my suspicion is that abuse prevention is the driving force behind these coherent communication destroying techniques and the far too often appearance of their labels (link text):

"See all activity on"
"View other replies"
"Show more"
"Other replies to"
"View more in conversation →"
"This Tweet is unavailable"

Here's some Twitter users views of these thread killers:

Twitter, your web interface is killing me. Even clicking on "see all activity on this tweet" doesn't show me all replies!

— Ben (@inquiringbeard) June 26, 2015

twitter's "view other replies" thing completely botches convos and makes them unfollowable lol

— “The Booss” (@ihaveeczema) October 2, 2015

"View other replies" every other message, "Show more" at the end of the string... How about you just let me view the entire thread?

— Niko Geyer (@nikogeyer) September 23, 2015

This active thread by started by @anildash about Apple oddball vertical position for mouse charging is a great example of making following a conversation completely impossible.

I heard Apple's new Mouse used Lightning to charge & assumed it just looks like a corded mouse when plugged in. BUT. pic.twitter.com/QWtkPcGWbD

— Anil Dash (@anildash) October 14, 2015

If there's an explanation of the motivation behind these coherence destroyers in the Twitter support system, which there ought to be, along with an explanation of exactly when they are triggered, it eludes me so far.

The way Twitter is fragmenting conversation might be the stupidest thing I've seen since I started using the internet. Twitter is supposed to have world class people working for them and turn out a system that make avid users switch to a competitor, Blogger, to gripe about bad they are. It's baffling. 

I think this is an illustrative example of the saying "you get what you pay for", and how systems that are paid for by ads may end up not even being good for ads because they are so bad for the other non-ad-serving task that one tends to think, incorrectly, that they are really for. Twitter started out as a way to chat in short messages in chronological order, and long term users tend to think that's what still what it really is at heart.