It is Friday, and time for some fun. This time the fun is in a good cause. (Well, actually, it always is, but….)
I was touring our Senior Labs here just half a hour ago, as I’m part of a committee looking at what we’re going to do in the future with regards purchasing new equipment, syllabus issues, etc (these are instructional labs). Standard stuff of the professorial day that I won’t bore you with further.
I was wandering around looking at the equipment (I always get a bit giddy with excitement when I go into labs….I really love doing experiments and building things in general……) when my eyes fell upon a printout of a chart reminding students of the colour coding scheme for determining the properties of a resistor. For those of you who never had the pleasure of building electronic circuits, basically there are bands of colour put in given sequence on the resistor (and electronic component) that allows one to determine how much electrical resistance it has at a glance. Much better than writing numbers onto the side, or something like that, if you take into account the size of the devices, durability, etc. Each colour corresponds to a number and you can reconstruct the value of the resistance in no time, given practice.
When I was a kid, bent over a soldering iron in my room for way too many hours, I learned from a book that the way of remembering the sequence of colours (black, Brown, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet, Grey, White) was to use a mnemonic. Unfortunately the mnemonic was:
Black Boys Rape Only Young Girls But Virgins Go Without.
Sigh.
Anyway, I was excited to see that there’d been some progress, and somebody had made the effort to make a change, but then I read it:
Bad Boys Ravish Only Young Girls But Violet Gives Willingly.
Yep. A quick look on the web confirms that this is till the dominant thing being taught out there. I kid you not. 21st Century and all.
Anyway, I pointed this out to my colleagues, who said “well if you can think of a better one that is just as catchy, people will use it”. (I should point out here that all professors present were in agreement that this was not the best material to have in a modern teaching lab.)
So a deeper look on Google (ok, five minutes…..I’ve got another meeting to run t0) showed that there are some efforts out there to do better, coming up with a good mnemonic which is memorable (a bit of shock value helps) and fun, but some of the ones I found, while pretty good, fall a bit short. For example:
Black Bugs Ruined Our Young Garden But Venus Flytraps Grow Well
Big Bears Run Over Your Gladiola Bed Vexing Garden Worms
So you know what I’m going to ask, right? Can’t Cosmic Variance and its collection of clever, hip and witty readers come up with something better?
Let the games begin. And Remember, this is in a good cause, right? Once we’ve come up with good ones, let’s go tear down those posters in our own labs and corridors and replace them with the better ones (after appropriate discussion at commitee, etc, etc, of course 
).
-cvj
April 14th, 2006 at 3:46 pm
A (better) Google search turns up:
Which I think may actually have been what I was taught in A-level physics.
Also:
But I can’t resist having a go myself…
Um…
- Baked Beans Remain Optional. You Give Ben Very Gassy Wind.
- Bush Believes Righteously: Ogling Your Gay Buddy Vexes Girls/Women.
I think I’ve failed.
April 14th, 2006 at 4:21 pm
My turn:
Bad Ben Runs Over Your Garden. Vengance Grows Within.
April 14th, 2006 at 4:34 pm
Beer bellied rascals opine: your grumbling belies vast wholesomeness.
Seriously, if I’m going to remember any mnemonic, it’s going to be the most delightfully vulgar one. The first selection you post was a giggly rite of passage when I joined my AMO group in undergrad. Also, one of my most memorable physics lectures was in classical mechanics when the professor analyzed Princess Diana’s death.
April 14th, 2006 at 4:37 pm
(oops — that should be “vast, guileless wholesomeness”)
April 14th, 2006 at 4:39 pm
Big Ben Rings Or Yells, Give Democrats Virgins, Gays & Wine.
April 14th, 2006 at 4:50 pm
Ok…. good going so far…..
Remember all, they have to be useful mnemonics. This means that they are to be memorable. Much more memorable than the sequence of colours itself. So try for clever and catchy in your designs…..
cheers,
-cvj
April 14th, 2006 at 5:03 pm
I agree with Sourav…
…and I think Pacian was onto something with his ‘beans’ idea. In the interests of moving away from rape and racism, the obvious vulgar refuge is, indeed, flatulence…
Buying Big Roger’s Odious Yogurt Gives Bill Violently Grotesque Wind
April 14th, 2006 at 6:14 pm
Or, perhaps something downright creepy:
Baby Botflies Rampage On Your Guts Before Vacating Ground-Ward
April 14th, 2006 at 6:17 pm
Eh…I’m not really happy with the beginning, and maybe I can come up with something better if I give it more thought, but here’s the first thing that came to my mind:
Back Before Rain Or Your Great Big Van Gets Wet
April 14th, 2006 at 6:27 pm
Here’s another, though I think my first one was better:
Beth’s Blue Ribbon Ointment: Yellow Goo Bringing Very Good Warmth
April 14th, 2006 at 6:38 pm
Okay, this one makes very little sense, but hey, it rhymes:
Buffalo BillRoasts On Your GrillBut Van Gogh Will
April 14th, 2006 at 6:38 pm
How about something based on the bands themselves?
Bands bother, rightly, our young genius(es) because variations go wrong
April 14th, 2006 at 6:39 pm
Whoops…the line breaks disappeared between the preview and the actual post for some reason. Um…let me try that again.
Buffalo Bill
Rests On Your Grill
But Van Gogh Will
April 14th, 2006 at 7:10 pm
Bad Beer Ruined Our Youth: Grown-ups Buy Very Good Wine.
Which, of course, means the opposite of the kind that comes in boxes.
April 14th, 2006 at 9:36 pm
Interesting. I find it harder to invest time in a memnonic than learning by rote. OTOH, that type of memory probably fades more quickly.
In this case I’ve never heard of any local memnonic, probably because the largest electronic supplier prints the color code on the spine of its booklet. It’s a win-win situation to acquire a booklet for every room.
April 14th, 2006 at 9:53 pm
Big Boils Residing On Your Girlfriend’s Butt Victoriously Grow Worse
April 14th, 2006 at 10:01 pm
Isn’t this why god invented ohmmeters?
April 14th, 2006 at 11:48 pm
For what it’s worth, my freshman physics professor just told us that there was an anagram, but that it was too vulgar for civilized people to repeat. Maybe his behavior defies his conservative stereotype: he was old, white, and had a beard that rivaled Boltzmann’s (or so I imagined).
As a theorist, the only time knowing the existence of a color-coding for resistors was useful came during my oral qualifying exam. The 1 experimentalist gave me a circuit element and asked me to identify it. The 2 theorists objected saying, “He shouldn’t need to know how to do that!” Joking, I said, “Well, it can’t be a resistor because it doesn’t have any colored bands. It can’t be a capacitor because it doesn’t say X microfarads.” After some prompting, the experimentalist gave me a voltmeter and eventually got me to place it on the circuit element 2 different ways. From the fact that current only flowed 1 way, I concluded it was a diode. Then I filibustered by spouting everything I knew about semiconductors. Luckily time was up in 5 minutes (as I was running on fumes) and the experimentalist was impressed. Thank God for low expectations.
Anyone who tells you there is no bull$&!* in physics must have been exempt from oral examination (and not yet attended enough workshops/conferences).
April 15th, 2006 at 12:33 am
Kristin - I like your line of thought!
April 15th, 2006 at 12:40 am
This is what I was taught by my teacher back in India:
B.B Roy Great Britain Very Good Wife.
April 15th, 2006 at 4:39 am
A more subtle test for ‘Cosmic Variance and its collection of clever, hip and witty readers’ - who said irony was dead - how few words need one change in the offending original to render it sanitised, or at least to re-direct the full force of its offense elsewhere? Presumably one might start by turning one of the Bs to Bush
April 15th, 2006 at 7:22 pm
I don’t even build circuits, but “Better be right or your big venture goes west” stuck right in my brain. I think I’ll be using it a lot.
April 16th, 2006 at 12:16 pm
Unfortunately I read this post lately, and so I’m not sure
if anyone reads this comment, but if so, I thought one my enjoy this one that I
invented:
Black body radiation observation yielded grasping beyond violet. Great work!
It may sound not much like a mnemonic, but it’s more relevant to physics after
all, and I think it’s very easy to memorize, especially for physics students!
In Persian, we actually have some (nearly romantic) poems for it.
April 16th, 2006 at 12:20 pm
General remark:- There is no time limit to making comments on posts. They all get read by several readers, via the “recent comments” in the sidebar .
thanks for posting.
No Thread is Dead.
-cvj
April 16th, 2006 at 2:22 pm
These are great. Now I’m going to have to try and come up with one, but there have been a few that I may use. I hate the old ones.
April 17th, 2006 at 9:10 am
This one from Stephen (with typo correction) is my favourite:
Bad Ben Runs Over Your Garden. Vengeance Grows Within.
I think it’s the easiest one to remember because it’s divided into two logical parts (longer sentences are more difficult to remember) that are complete and well-constructed sentences without redundant words (redundant words and awkward sentences make it more difficult to remember), it’s a coherent narrative, it’s easy to picture the narrative, there’s a single action and consequent emotion (running over garden, vengeance) that can be easily identified with, there are a lot of poetic sound resonances (making it easier to memorize), and it’s kinda funny (depending on how you picture it).
April 17th, 2006 at 9:15 am
but this one’s still better (despite my analysis)…
Better Be Right Or Your Great Big Venture Goes West!
April 17th, 2006 at 10:28 am
Joida, I agree with your analysis that Stephen’s “BAD BEN RUNS OVER YOUR GARDEN. VENGEANCE GROWS WITHIN” is one of the best mnemonics in the bunch. Furthermore, I agree with your analysis that memory plays the most valuable role in the value of the mnemonic. However, I would like to add a modifier to Stephen’s mnemonic. I would like to modify “BAD BEN” to “BIG BEN” simply because when I think of “BIG BEN” I think of England. In turn, when I think of England, I think of beautiful English gardens. In turn, when I think of English gardens, I think of “YOUR GARDEN.”
April 17th, 2006 at 10:14 pm
Just an idea:
Bush
Boys
React
Over
Your
Gender
But
Via
Global
War
April 17th, 2006 at 10:16 pm
OR
Bush
Boys
React
Over
Your
Gender
By
Victimising
Good
Women
April 17th, 2006 at 10:20 pm
Bring
Back
Rubber
Or
Your
Gender
Bending
Vinyl
Gets
Wet
Hehe. Sorry. The words just came out of nowhere.
April 18th, 2006 at 12:56 pm
Due to its sheer relevance to physics, “BLACK BODY RADIATION” (commemt # 23) receives my vote. Please do not let “BUSH BOYS” (comment#29or#30) win another election, even if it yields a rather unflattering victory.