Chemist Porn

Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements is as close to porn for chemists as it gets. Each element is treated to a section on its name, cosmic qualities, human uses, foods containing it, medical uses, history, uses in war, economic value, environmental impact, main properties and curious trivia. My only lament is that there isn't a diagram of the element showing the electron configuration and shell structure nor is it as lick-a-licious as smell-o-mints, but that is just a nit in such a fine work. In the introduction the author quotes a song written and sung by Tom Lehrer [ an mp3 version is also available ] to the tune of "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General" from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance:

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 and protactinium and indium and gallium,
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.

There's holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium,
And phosphorous and fancium and flourine and terbium,
And manganese and mercury, molybdenum, magnesium,
Dysprosium and scandium and cerium and cesium,
And lead, praseodymium and platinum, plutonium,
Palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium,
And tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium,
And cadmium and calcium and chromium and curium.

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

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