Trace Elements
Hard 'N Phirm is a two-man band from Los Angeles behind the CPBS: Trace Elements song (YouTube). I thought the song was hilarious, so I attempted a transcription and explanation of the references (trying to make the explanations as Asimovian as I can). Thanks to my friends (and especially those in #xkcd) for helping me out. :-)
Lyrics
Alright, listen up, 'cause this is scientifical. Ya'll better drop your cerebral drawers 'cause I'm about to blow your minds.
Compound microscopes, radioactive isotopes.
Spectrometer, separate mass. Sublimation, solid to gas.
Logarithm, square the root. Chemical spill, hazmat suit.
No D's, C's, B's for me, just PhD's since I was three.Stool ain't nothin' but a pile of shit that I don't give when I analyze it.
If you want relativity, go fuck your momma at light speed.Cultured petris research disease,
sub-string theories (hypotheses).
Human nature, nomenclature, argon laser, Occam's razor.In a given system the simplest answer is usually the correct one. Asshole.
Tesla's coil thang, Steve Hawking's robot twang.
Euclid liked protractor pulls, Heisenberg's quarky principles.
Radon killed the curious Madame, Niels Bohr's faggoty atom.
I hope one day they terraform Mars so we can get fucked up in Martian bars.I'll put tits on a shark and I'll make 'em green, that's what I'll do with my hand in your genes.
And genes ain't nothin' but expressions of cells, and hydrogen sulfide makes farts smell.373 Kelvin degrees, Darwin's species, we'se chimpanzees.
Dual-core chip dip, blue screen disk slip, Pascal's tri-tip, wormhole time-rip.Yeah, that's the second reference to the film Contact, so what?
Kingdom, phylum, order, but I got no class. Well, I'll rearrange your face when I'm clonin' your ass.
And if you've got two X chromosomes I'll coat your velvety walls with all them flagellates swimmin' in my balls.Put my jism in your schism, make another organism.
Vasectomies shut down testes. Fifty CCs (fluid feces).
Kidneys expel NaCl, Alfred Nobel's TNT sells.
Mendel's green peas, heredity, teenage acne (filled like Twinkies).
You've been told down to my soul, I'm a deoxyribonucleic asshole, carrying the two.
I'm a God damned', Bunsen-burnin' son-of-a-bitch, and my chemical symbol's Fu.
References
- Drawers
- A term meaning underpants.
- Sublimation
- The process by which a substance goes directly from a solid state to a gaseous state, skipping the liquid state. The reverse is called deposition, and an example of deposition is when frost is formed.
- Stool
- Refers to human feces.
- Occam's razor
- The name given to the idea that when you have multiple explanations for the same phenomenon, and if all the explanations are otherwise equal, the one requiring the fewest presuppositions is usually the correct one.
- Protractor
- An instrument for measuring angles. It's usually in the form of a half-circle but it also exists in full-circle versions. A tractor pull is a competition where tractor drivers pull heavy objects in a dirt road, popular in rural USA.
- Heisenberg's uncertainty principle
- The observation that you can only know either the position or the momentum of a particle in space. More accurately, both the position and momentum have a probability distribution, and the more precision with which you measure one, the wider the probability distribution of the other.
- 373 Kelvin
- Water boils at approximately 373.1339 degrees Kelvin.
- Darwin's species
- In 1859, the English naturalist Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species where he explains the basis of what became his theory of evolution. The full title of the book is On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
- Kingdom, phylum, order, class
- Kingdom, phylum, order, and class are levels in the hierarchy of biological taxonomy. A species is part of a genus, which is part of a family. The rest goes order, class, phylum, kingdom, and then finally domain. For instance, humans are of the species Homo sapiens (which is Latin for 'thinking man'), in the genus Homo (which, of course, means 'man', and includes many extinct species like Homo habilis -- 'handy man' -- Homo erectus -- 'upright man' -- and Homo neanderthalensis -- the famous neanderthal). Further, humans are in the family of hominids, which means 'great apes' and includes chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. The order is primates, which is Latin and actually means 'prime' (because the primate body plan is, well, primitive) and includes also the lemurs. The class is mammalia, the mammals, and includes many, many more species. The phylum in which the human species is located is called chordata, so-named because all members of chordata possess a notochord (an embryological structure which, in vertebrates, becomes the spinal cord). The next step up the taxonomical ladder is kingdom, and humans belong to the animal kingdom, called animalia (which, as you might guess, is Latin and means 'movement') and includes every living thing capable of locomotion. Finally, humans belong to the domain of eukaryota, creatures whose cells have a nucleus (it comes from a Greek word meaning 'true nut').
- Flagellum
- A tail-like structure found on, among other things, bacteria and sperm, and is used for locomotion. The tail is free-moving in that, instead of flailing back and forth, it spins around like a wheel.
- 2, 3, 5, 7
- The beginning of the (infinite) sequence of prime numbers (numbers that are evenly divisible only by themselves and 1).
- Vasectomy
- A method of sterilization where the tube leading sperm from the scrotum to penis itself is cut.
- Dual-core
- In computers, the processor (the brain of the computer) can have several cores. Dual-core means it has two cores. Similarly, quad-core means it has four cores. Processors with multiple cores are called multi-core processors.
- Blue screen of death
- A blue screen of death (often shortened to BSoD) is an error screen that has a characteristic white text on blue background usually found in the Windows line of operating systems.
- Pascal's tri-tip
- A pun on Blaise Pascal, the 17th-century mathematician, and tri-tip, a cut of beef from the bottom sirloin.
- Fifty CCs
- CC is short for cubic centimeter (cm³), a unit of volume used in medicine. The line pairs the measurement with a gross description of the fluid.
- Alfred Nobel's TNT
- Alfred Nobel was a 19th-century chemist and inventor who made his fortune from explosives, including dynamite. He later funded the Nobel Prizes; the line plays on Nobel "selling" TNT.
- NaCl
- NaCl, sodium chloride, is common salt (the chemical symbol for sodium is Na, which is short for Natrium, the Latin name). In addition to salt, the kidneys expel other minerals.
- Deoxyribonucleic acid
- Deoxyribonucleic acid (usually abbreviated to DNA) is a long string of information located in the nucleus of every cell. DNA controls how a body grows and develops. Carrying the two puns on arithmetic (carrying a digit when adding) and, less delicately, anatomy.
- Bunsen burner
- A Bunsen burner (named after the 19th century German chemist Robert Bunsen) is a simple instrument used for heating and sterilization.