Thursday, June 29, 2006

The Elements

I came across this really fun song by Tom Lehrer about all the chemical elements known to science at that time. TL is witty, funny and incredibly well informed. Here is something I have linked from http://www.tomlehrer.org:

"... I went from adolescence to senility, trying to bypass maturity ..." - Tom Lehrer

Anyways you can listen to the flash rendition of this song here

``There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium
And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium,
And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium,
Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium
And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium
And gold, protactinium and indium and gallium (inhale)
And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium.

``There's yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium
And boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium
And strontium and silicon and silver and samarium,
And bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium and barium.

``Isn't that interesting?
I knew you would.
I hope you're all taking notes, because there's gonna be a short quiz next period.

``There's holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium
And phosphorous and francium and fluorine and terbium
And manganese and mercury, molybdinum, magnesium,
Dysprosium and scandium and cerium and cesium
And lead, praseodymium, and platinum, plutonium,
Paladium, promethium, potassium, polonium, and
Tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium, (inhale)
And cadmium and calcium and chromium and curium.

``There's sulfur, californium and fermium, berkelium
And also mendelevium, einsteinium and nobelium
And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc and rhodium
And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper,
Tungsten, tin and sodium.

``These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard,
And there may be many others but they haven't been discovered.''

Continuing from my previous post, I think I should recall this composition by the genius composer Thyagaraja:

endarO mahAnubhavulu |
antarIki vandanamu ||


(Very) Roughy translated:
There are so many great men,
I bow down to them all

I would not be able to put the greatness of this divine person in perspective, simply because I lack the depth of understanding necessary and so, here are some good paces to start
link 1
link 2

I am not trying to compare Tom Lehrer with Thyagaraja, phluease! But I just recalled 2 lines from one of the compositions of this genius just to state what I feel about great people.

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