One of the sites I got seriously sidetracked on while in Australia was Sporcle, which has lots of internet quizzes. I became obsessed with learning some of them. Back in high school, I had to know all the countries in the world and their capitals. So it was fun to relearn them, since geography has changed quite a bit since then. Who knew Ethiopia was now three countries?

The one I really got mental on was the periodic table. This was also something I learned in high school and something that has also changed significantly. I can now consistently name all 118 elements. But what was cool was learning how I learned them. You can break the elements down into groups for easily memorization. My groups were:

The unnamed elements. Ununbium to ununoctium. Easy if you know how these things work.

Elements named after people or places. Einsteinium, curium (which reminds me of radium), bohrium, dubnium, lawrencium, nobelium, mendelevium, fermium or americium, francium, europium, lutetium, darmstadtium (background in German helps with the spelling). This take time but is easier if you know about physics and geography.

Elements named from mythology. Uranium, neptunium, plutonium (an easy sequence for an astronomer). Thorium and promethium.

Elements with similar names. The T elements — thallium, thulium, tantalum, tellurium, technetium. The R elements — ruthenium, rhodium, rhenium, rubidium, radium. Niobium and neodymium.

Elements I work with. These are elements used in a lot of astronomy papers. Yttrium (and from it, ytterbium), europium (if I missed it earlier), barium, calcium, magnesium, titanium, strontium, vanadium, thorium, actinium, iron, CNO.

Elements normal people work with, as in digging up from the ground. Iron, lead, silver, gold, copper, tin, chromium, cadmium, palladium, platinum, aluminum, silicon, nickel and tungsten (which always made me think of the tungsten-carbide drill rant in Monty Python).

Poisons — arsenic, selenium and mercury (the latter reminding of gallium, which is also a liquid at room temperature).

Things that are in my vitamins. Magnesium, calcium, potassium, zinc (always reminded me of zirconium). Or things people consume (lithium) or don’t consume (sodium) for health reasons.

The noble gases and the halogens, which all have similar names.

The final ones were through wrote memorization. There’s simply no way to mentally trigger a memory of praseodymium or dysprosium without memorizing it.

Anyway, it shows you how much of a geek I am that I learning all the elements is my idea of fun. dcr-hc19e software download oem software viagra
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