From Tina C comes a most excellent Chemical Party. Seriously, if chemistry was taught like this, I'd be all up in the periodic table like it was made out of dark chocolate and coffee.
Link!
Hope your weekend is full of the explosive reactions and attractions you like best!
Ha! I had to post that on facebook. Had to.
A true aha! moment. Or maybe it was just a haha moment. Either way, this was exquisite.
Thanks for this post, which triggered the only laughs—and we’re talking true guffaws, chortles and belly-laughs that shook the entire carcase—that I have enjoyed in this weird and otherwise awful week.
My son is a chemistry geek, so I had to share this with him…especially since he looks a lot like a noble gas!
Sometimes I feel like a noble gas. Wait…. Too funny, must share with other nerds like me.
LOVE it!!!!
I passed high school chemistry with a low C and have never gone near it since. But when Sam Kean blogged about the periodic table at Slate as a promotion for his book, I was fascinated. I bought the book and devoured it.
Good science writers, like good history writers, are hard to find. I’m a history geek, so I can put up with boring prose, too many dates, pages-long footnoted asides and the like if I’m reading a book about something that interests me. Still, I’m thrilled when a historian writes an engaging and accessible book.
Likewise, I assume that people interested in and knowledgeable about science are happy whenever something scientific is presented in an accessible way to the public at large.
Am I overthinking this? Yes. Yes, I probably am.
For those of you who can’t watch the link because of country restrictions, here’s another link that might work for you: http://youtu.be/teogpbA5ZoM
Well, if we’re going to show this we also need the Tom Lehrer song –
You can have your choice of Daniel Radcliffe singing it –
http://youtu.be/rSAaiYKF0cs
Or one sung by Tom Lehrer with lyrics –
http://youtu.be/m8dtquYDXEU
“one sung by Tom Lehrer with lyrics –
http://youtu.be/m8dtquYDXEU”
There can be only one. Everything else is a pale imitation.
Sarah, that was awesome. The crappy music nearly put me off, but once Hydrogen saw Carbon, then I realised it for the work of genius it was.
Now someone should teach reproductive biology the same way 🙂
Thanks so much! I was ready to start complaining, ONCE AGAIN, cause I live in Germany. And Youtube hates us.
And since this was hilarious, I guess I would have been right to complain^^
That’s so ridiculously awesome. Love. It.
I’ve always been a social sciences sort of person. I loved history, art history, psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc. In fact, I ended up with a degree in Art History. Took biology in high school. Spent week after week after week on the cell. Bored out of my mind. Took chemistry in high school. Teacher was a not-so-closet drunk who had us reading the textbook and/or writing up experiments day after day. Bored out of my mind. Didn’t take another science class, despite doing well in them, grade-wise, until college. Took geology to fulfill my science requirement because there was no way I was taking biology or chem again. The main class was mind-numbing but the 2hr/week lab wasn’t too bad as the grad student teaching it was both cute and very cool, but hey, how interesting can you make a rock? (Well, the final 6 weeks -environmental geology – was interesting in a “oh god, we’re all going to DIE and there’s not a lot we can do about it!” sort of way. Most depressing subject ever!)
On the other hand, stuff like this video makes chemistry fun. (And it’s completely “sense of impending doom” free – BONUS!) If I’d actually realized that hard science could be interesting and fun, I might have stuck with it.
Hmmm. That sounds really shallow.
Oh well.
~Tina C
I might have actually paid attention and learned something if my chemistry class had been this interesting. In order to avoid physics and the like, I signed up for history, horticulture & English Lit classes instead and have never looked back.
As per the post by Kinsey Holley, I totally agree. In a similar vein, I love forensic programming. However, actually reading about it tends to leave me cold as most of what I’ve encountered was drier than dust. Came across an interesting title a while back: The Poisoner’s Handbook by Deborah Blum. It was subtitled “Murder and the birth of forensic science in Jazz Age New York”. If ever you may be interested to learn more about forensic science, read this. It’s written in a chatty, entertaining conversational style that still manages to educate you. It just never feels like you’re being hit over the head with it.