Please Pass The Bunsen Burner....

  There it is, the Periodic Table of Elements.  Anyone that took Chemistry in high school will see it and groan.  Actually it is a fascinating piece of architecture when you think about it.  Everything known to Man is comprised of molecules made from these basic elements, so far.  I say that because things change, including how many elements we have discovered.  When I took high school Chemistry in 1965, there were only 104 elements, now look, there are 118.   The worse part of the class was having to memorize the valence tables, ugh, what a pain, but Mr. Trefethen was big on hydrocarbons and made us do it.  There were fun parts, however, things like making Phenolphthalein colourless by changing its pH or learning about ketones which smelled like different fruits or getting partnered with the pretty girl in class for lab.  But you always learned important stuff that would help you in life, for example, the chemical formula for table sugar was C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁ or table salt was NaCl.  And if you should happen to have a piece of pure sodium, never put it into water.  Actually there was good stuff to know; I always remembered the little ditty Do As You Oughta, Add Acid To Water.  That was helpful to know when working with car batteries or cleaning bricks.