From the same puzzle of the day desk calendar that gave us the science anagram puzzles post back in February, here’s an entry called “Abbreviated Science”!
There are six science-related1 mnemonics listed below. The actual calendar page also listed the six answers and asked you to match them up (answer = scientific field + description – e.g. for the “Every Good Boy Deserves Football” mnemonic, it would have said “Field: Music. Description: the lines of a treble staff”). However, the combined expertise of this audience should render the answers unnecessary; I got three without looking at any part of the answers (although two of them weren’t the exact mnemonics I was taught at school), and got another two once I knew which fields they were from.
As before, please submit only one answer per commenter per hour, to give people in other time zones a chance to take part!
(Also: I suspect this will be waaaaay too easy, so let’s spread it out).
Time permitting, I’ll update the post with the answers as they come in.
Have fun!
1) Big Boys Romance Our Young Girls Behind Victory Garden Walls
(Eva has it right that these are colours: Black, Brown, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet, Grey, White. But colours of what…?)
(Bob subsequently guessed the right answer – colours of resistors, in electronics, apparently)
2) Better Go Home Every Night Completely Paid
(Mod Scientist knew this one, and registered just to claim the bragging rights! It’s the nations of Central America: Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama. Not science, but I did warn you!)
3) Camels Often Sit Down Carefully; Perhaps Their Joints Creak
- geological epochs. Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous)*
4) Kings Play Chess On Fine Grained Sand
(Guess who: it’s Bob! With the Linnean hierarchy – Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species)
5) Harry He Likes Beer, But Can Not Obtain Food
(Bob: First 9 elements of the periodic table. Hydrogen, Helium, Lithium, Beryllium, Boron, Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Fluorine)
6) My Very Eager Mother Just Sewed Us New Pajamas
(Bob again: the planets of the solar system, plus poor little Pluto. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto)
1 One entry requires a rather loose definition of “science”
5 is the first N elements in the periodic table. Although I do prefer this method of remembering the elements:
Or i would if the embed worked (M@!!!!!!!). This is what I was linking to, as if you hadn’t guessed.
Right you are, Bob. Well done, go to the top of the class!
haha, I’ll read them and get the answers when others provide them. (longer way of keeping quiet and not admitting not knowing any of them 😉 )
it’s fun trying to suss them out though, thanks Cath!
No. 6 needs its pajamas removing.
(I wonder – was the IAU’s committee that decided such things stacked with Holst purists?)
Damn, got 4 as well. I wonder if I’ll be able to remember in an hour.
Yes, well, I doubt desk calendars are at the forefront of astronomy 🙂
I was taught “My Very Educated Mother Just Showed Us Nine Planets”, which I think is much better but would have been too easy for the purposes of this quiz.
p.s. Åsa, just make something up!
I’m in the same boat as Åsa on this one… so I just googled one of them just to see if I could. No disclosure, but I found this mnemonic for 3):
“Crazy Jack Tried Putting Purple Marbles Down Some Old Cows Ears.”
That crazy old Jack, eh?
Hm. Over an hour has passed.
So 4 is the levels of the Linnean hierarchy – Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species.
Just got no. 3 now, although it needs a P and N on the end according to wikipedia.
Welcome to the Bob O’Hara show, folks!
Steffi, Jack is crazy alright! He’s going backwards, too!
I think an hour’s passed. 3 is geological periods. Permian etc. but missing the paleocene and neocene (too modern for camels, presumably).
I haven’t yet worked out 1 and 2. Give me time. 🙂
As a creaking chemist I knew “Harry he liked beer”, but not the others.
Incidentally, the periodic table one goes on much further. Oddly the only other bit I can remember (apart from the bit Cath quoted) was the part following Calcium at the start of the transition metals:
Ca Sc Ti V Cr Mn
– which ran
The first one looks like it should be colours, but of what, I don’t know…
black (or brown/blue), brown (or black/blue), red, orange, yellow, green (or grey), blue (or black/brown), violet, grey (or green), white
Hmmm… Colours of the ?] in order of [?
I am not at all sure of the second-to-last one being “grey”, because intuitively it doesn’t make sense. I can see how black and white would be at the edges, but then in between they should be more “colourful”, not grey. Between violet and white should be something that looks like a very light lavender. Is very light lavender a kind of grey? Maybe.
(My preference for putting green and blue at their respective places is that green should be between blue and yellow.)
Wait. Is this the one with the very loose definition of science? Could it be… karate belts?
These are my guesses that I dismissed as being even LESS likely than karate belts:
-rainbow/wavelengths -> doesn’t make sense with black and white included in the spectrum
-something commercial, eg. the order of brand X crayons in the box when you buy them, or levels of some kind of card game or computer game
-warning system. This one was somewhat likely, because you can have colours associated with different levels, but the only two colour-coded warning systems I knew didn’t match up: terrorist threats don’t have that many colours, and hospital warnings are not rankable by order. Code blue is not generally better or worse than code red – it depends on who you are!
Am quite convinced they’re colours, though, so can only think along that line. Of course it’s possible that they’re not…
LOL @ Eva. Weren’t you saying something elsewhere about the value of being concise? 🙂
You are right that the first one is a list of colours, and you had them in the right order, but you haven’t yet guessed the field or what the coloured objects are.
Do you guys need a hint? I could tell you the fields of the remaining two, and I can also tell you that number 2 is the one that I think requires a loose definition of science.
Bob is right on the geological epochs.
Austin, I might have to look the whole thing up now – that sounds like fun! I remember my biology teacher telling us about a mnemonic she learned in university that started “Christmas in the Kremlin, with Gorbachev and Lenin”, but I can’t remember what it’s for and Google isn’t helping (the search engine, not the cat. Although Google the cat isn’t helping much either).
It’s the colours your boss goes through when he gets a particularly bad review back from a journal?
I’d be interested to see how much of the periodic table one there is.
Though I’ll have to keep quiet about the chemical elements lest I give away that as a 12 yr old I used to be able to sing this off by heart…
Austin, that’s impressive! Can you still do it?
Bob, LOL! Good guess, but it usually goes white – pink – red – purple – grey – green.
Only the first verse…
the colours couldn’t be stars, could they? Black holes, brown stars, white dwarves etc.?
I can’t think of anything else. a hint about no. 2 would be nice, too.
My biology teacher was very fond of mnemonics and other tricks which didn’t really work, and which generally took more remembering than the biology – something like distinguishing bones in the wrist, the radius and ulna, from tibia and fibula in the shin, on the basis of one of them being a shorter word, and your arm being shorter than your leg, that kind of thing. Amazed I passed my A level, actually.
But, his version of the taxonomic hierarchy has always worked for me: KP Crisps Often Feed Greedy Stomachs. (Do KP crisps even exist now?!)
All these interesting talks reminds me of some verses which he wrote to some very dear friends:
“The Liopleurodon”
Poor Liopleurodon became extinct
after being the best died of starvation
He needed to get on the continent
but time ran out when he fell from his podium
No matter said Liopleurodon evolve and other
without my big imprint, dominate the land, but it will be the salmon?
Look Lioplurodon said the salmon, do not grieve for someone relieve you, for so little there is to mourn
I bet one pounds that you will be immortal, but my days are numbered and you Liopleurodon.
Poor Liopleurodon, the brink of extinction, have stolen your food like vultures, lurking and inglorious dead but no matter
That following the evolution.
One of the few that I remember:
Wow, Oh Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me Right Now, Sweetie!
(Hint: Think Hertzsprung-Russel)
CLUES: #1 is electronics, and #2 is geography.
Tom, there’s a story about my biology teacher getting us to write our own mnemonics for the taxonomic hierarchy that deserves a post of its own!
Alejandro, thanks for sharing that!
Ken, I’m afraid I don’t know what Hertzsprung-Russel might refer to. But I’m sure someone on here will know!
I can only think that 1 is something to do with the colour codes on resistors.
Still don’t have a clue about 2. Both my parents were geography teachers, my brother a mineral processor, and I presently have an office in a physical geography department. Grrrr.
Ken, singer/physicist Diane Nalini wrote a song about that mnemonic: http://www.myspace.com/dianenalini (and that’s how I know about it)
Cath, I gave up on the colours, then looked it up, and actually was really close to it yesterday, but thought my guess (which was quite right – I thought isolation plastic around wires) was wrong because there was no ranking in it… I thought it would be similar to the “colours of crayons in a box” thing, not a standard labeling system.
GAH, typing. I meant to say “which wasn’t quite right”
Aaaaaand resistors is correct!
Bob, your family tree explains your problems with #2. You’re overthinking it. Think of geography as the term would be understood by a ten-year old… or as a category in Trivial Pursuits… no knowledge of physical geography or minerals required!
BTW is your brother a processor or a professor…?
Eva, I knew what you meant! (Unlike the time I was asked to submit a grant where the hypothesis within the abstract was missing a verb, rendering it nonsensical). And wire colours was really close – closer than karate belts 🙂
My brother now works on R&D for British passports. But he did his PhD reclaiming coal from coal tips. Ironically, his maternal grandfather had been a coal miner at Frickley pit.
Passports, eh? That’s getting closer to the kind of geography you need to think about in order to sweep this quiz.
Cath: just make something up yeah… in Swedish then?! ^^ ’cause that’s where I am heading with all these initials… surely they’d be the same… wait, no they won’t 😉
I’m happy reading all this and learn I’m sure there are lots of stuff I don’t already know.
OK, it’s been a week. Shall I just tell you the final answer?
This blog post has forced me out of years of non-registered lurking at Nature Network. You should get a bonus cheque Cath.
I believe #2 may be the nations of C. America, north to south:
Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama
Ah, the wonder of twitter! (And the power of bragging rights!)
Well done Mod Scientist, you are correct, and Bob is denied The Sweep!
So, I’ve noticed something odd.
All these English mnemonics are always sentences, like Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge and more such nonsense.
When I think of Dutch mnemonics, most of the ones I’ve learned are NOT sentences, but just strings of letters that either makes a word, or almost a word, or are otherwise (almost) pronounceable. I realized with the last answer that I know a mnemonic to remember the order of the islands in the North of Holland, but the mnemonic is just “TVTAS” (which could mean “TV bag” but that’s not really an existing thing.)
And I learned the first elements of the periodic table just as “HeLiBeBCNOF” (implying that you know Hydrogen anyway) pronounced as a made-up word. Elsewhere online I mentioned that I learned “KNAP” (“clever” or “smart”) to figure out whether the kathode or anode is the positive one.
The only actual sentence I remember learning is “Meneer Van Dalen Wacht Op Antwoord” (Mr. Van Dale is waiting for an answer) which is the order of mathematical operators in an equation if there are no parentheses to show which to do first (exponent, multiply, divide, root, add, subtract). And that’s a really famous one that almost everyone would have been taught in elementary school, and yet nobody ever uses…
I learnt the stave one as Every Good Boy Deserves Favour. Hence the Tom Stoppard play of that name. I think football must be some strange northern variant.
I hated those sentence mnemonics – I always found it harder to remember the mnemonic than the thing itself.
Eva, that’s interesting! Maybe Dutch just lends itself better to making words (or word-like entities) out of random strings of letters? I wonder what people in other countries do?
And how do you remember the planets? What does MVEMJSUN(P) sound like?!
Frank, I’ve heard “deserves fruit” as well, but us strange Northerners do seem to prefer the football one 🙂
Anatomy has a mix of both the English and Dutch varieties of mnemonics (including some that I can’t share here). There’s “To Zanzibar By Motor Car” for the branches of the facial nerve (temporal, zygomatic, buccal, marginal mandibular, cervical), and MATT for non-masticatory muscles innervated by the mandibular division of the trigeminal nerve (mylohyoid, anterior belly of the digastric, tensor veli palatini, tensor tympani). In neuroanatomy, there’s the PITTS mnemonic for the spinothalamic pathway (pain, itch, tickle, temperature, and sexual sensation). Most of the ones that are complete sentences are the ones I can’t share, and appear to date to a time when the vast majority of medical students in the US were male.
Heh – I bet they’re good ones though. Maybe you should run your own quiz and we can all try to find ways to answer without triggering the offensively phrased comment filters 🙂
I always liked OIL RIG for Oxidation Is Loss, Reduction Is Gain (of electrons). Nice and neat and easy to remember.
I can’t imagine why, but “Oh I Loathe Republican Industrial Greed” just popped into my head, when I saw OIL RIG. 😉
HAHAHA! OK, I’m using that from now on (not that I really need to know about electrons any more)
I get the impression they did not understood my poetry, here is in Spanish:
“El Liopleurodon ”
Pobre Liopleurodon se extinguió
después de haber sido el mejor, murió de inanición.
Tenía que conseguirlo en el continente
pero el tiempo se acabó, cuando el se cayó del podio.
No importa, dijo el Liopleurodon, evolucionaran otros
sin mi huella grande, dominaran la tierra, pero será el salmón?
– Dijo el salmón- puedes Lioplurodon no llorar por alguien que aliviar, por lo poco que hay que lamentar ?
Apuesto una libra de que usted será inmortal, pero mis días están contados y que Liopleurodon.
Pobre Liopleurodon, al borde de la extinción, han robado su comida como buitres al acecho y los muertos sin gloria, pero eso no es importante.
¿Que viene después de la evolución ?
Geological Epochs: (The 2nd mnemonic uses the 1st two letters of each term)
Cambrian Chief Car
Ordovician Of Orders
Silurian Staffs Sinking
Devonian Dining Despite
Carboniferous Car California
Permian Party People
Triassic Train Trading
Jurassic Just Junky
Cretaceous Crashed Crap