When a PhD student goes out and buys a guitar from a pawn shop at lunchtime, comes back and starts playing the blues in the lab —
someone, somewhere, is doing something wrong.-
The Scientist by Richard Grant
Raising being quoted out of context to an art form: 'awesome, but not always right'. Drinks well with scientists.
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Singing the blues
- Date:
- Saturday, 07 Jun e 2008 - 07:43 UTC
Last updated: Saturday, 07 Jun 2008 - 07:43 UTC
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Comments
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Sounds like he (it’s a ‘he’ I’m talkin’ ‘bout, right?) has the right idea. When I was doing my PhD rock’n’roll was the only thing that kept me from going dribblingly insane. I hope it was a good guitar, that’s all.
I think that is impossibly sweet. Can you make a recording for us?
Good call Jenny. I think there’s potential here…
Move over Ron Laskey.
Richard: the Ron Laskey story is great – particularly the bit about Paul Simon! But, taking my cue from Ron and, in agreement with Henry, don’t you think that the opposite conclusion could also be drawn from the data that you presented in your post?
Oh indeed Stephen. We need more datum points.
I am not sure that scientists are inherently musical, or at least have a memory for songs. At a meeting in Slovakia at Smolenice castle we had an able pianist and a group of scientists in the bar. The only song everyone could mangae was the chorus of Yellow Submarine. National groups could collectively sing together, but rarely could they manage more that the first verse and chorus.
What a superbly designed experiment, Brian.
If Ron Laskey is the best we can do, then we’ve a long way to go.
Still recovering from a gig last night, I sometimes wonder if I’m getting too old for this sort of thing. And then I read that Prince, who I’m convinced will be seen as one of the finest
statesmenperformers of this or any other century, is celebrating his 50th birthday. To think, when Amy Winehouse was my age, she’ll probably have been dead for 20 years.Brian,
at the International Summer School of Subnuclear Physics in Erice, last year, as a bunch of theoretical and experimental scientists we put together some verses on the notes of New York, New York_, re-writing it to New Quark, New SquarkQuark.pdf
That was a hit. Too bad we have not gotten a Grammy yet.
Here’s a video of the performance before t’Hooft, Higgs, Ferrara, Randall…
The video file will load up in quite some time on your PC.
I am suddenly reminded that one of the NN crew has, allegedly, a superb singing voice. I’m hoping to verify this claim in August…
I’m aware I’m coming to this late but the only thing I can see wrong with this is that the student didn’t have enough money to go out any buy a proper guitar. I am fully in favour of blues in the lab.
Although under our current lab rules you wouldn’t then be able to take the guitar back out again due to the potential for biological (not cultural) contamination. Was this the reason for going for a budget version? Or was the guitar in fact pawned by some up and coming star and the purchase, in fact, an investment?
Howard M. Shapiro was musical too. This paper was in G major:
Shapiro, HM (1977). Fluorescent dyes for differential counts by flow cytometry: does histochemistry tell us much more than cell geometry? J. Histochem. Cytochem. 25: 976-989. pdf (incl. score)
Richard didn’t say that the guitar was a bad one. For all we know it’s a cream ’62 stratocaster.
When I was a graduate student we had
So we’d alternate between Killed By Death and airs by Purcell and so on. As far as I remember we didn’t try both simultaneously.
In which case, what is the researcher doing playing it rather than cashing it in? Besides you can’t play blues on a strat.
But I’m rather dissappointed by the lack of imagination that is suggested by failing to take the opportunity to channel Hendrix playing a Bach Lute sonata
Besides you can’t play blues on a strat
Oh, Cameron, honestly. Don’t get me started.
Sorry correction: You can’t play the blues … The blues requires an old, preferably decrepit, out of tune, guitar and an empty wooden bourbon case to sit on. This was natually the image of the researcher that started this off that I had in my head.
Sounds about right, Cameron.
The blues requires an old, preferably decrepit, out of tune, guitar and an empty wooden bourbon case to sit on
Ah, the blues. Those cotton-pickin’, went-down-to-the-crossroads, sold-my-soul-to-the-devil, mah-woman-done-me-wrong, never-get-no-reproducible-results, can’t-get-no-research-grants-approved kind of blues. The genuine kind.
May I present the PhD Blues?
Unfortunately there’s no possible way I can make it to London in August, so you’ll have to wait for a live rendition. Also my singing voice is, erm, not superb.
I once did a couple of (The) Blues numbers at a birthday party. Me an’ my Tanglewood, John and his rather less ‘not superb’ singing voice, me growling vocals like a 40-a-day, bourbon-swilling Michael Franti…
I remember House of the Rising Sun , a little ditty I’d written (which was an excuse for a bad pun on St Louis being in the state of ‘Misery’) — and then it got rather silly.
You really, really don’t want to hear me sing.