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earth, fire, water, wind - it's not hard
(quokk.au)
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.

Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Why is this something widespread? I did chemistry up till A-levels and no one ever asked me to memorise the periodic table and no one gave a shit about committing it to memory. WTF is going on.
IMO, some people think that being educated means achieving mountains of rote memorization, and little else. Some of those people also become teachers.
This may also be why there's a big row every time someone changes what algorithms are taught in basic maths (in the US, anyway).