Singing the blues

20 Responses to Singing the blues

1. Henry Gee says:

   7 June 2008 at 07:49

   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.
2. Jennifer Rohn says:

   7 June 2008 at 07:59

   I think that is impossibly sweet. Can you make a recording for us?
3. Richard P. Grant says:

   7 June 2008 at 08:29

   Good call Jenny. I think there’s potential here…
   Move over Ron Laskey.
4. Stephen Curry says:

   7 June 2008 at 09:24

   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?
5. Richard P. Grant says:

   7 June 2008 at 09:30

   Oh indeed Stephen. We need more datum points.
6. Brian Derby says:

   7 June 2008 at 12:43

   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.
7. Richard P. Grant says:

   7 June 2008 at 12:45

   What a superbly designed experiment, Brian.
8. Henry Gee says:

   7 June 2008 at 13:57

   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 statesmen performers 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.
9. Massimo Pinto says:

   7 June 2008 at 14:37

   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 Squark
   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.
10. Richard P. Grant says:

    8 June 2008 at 00:21

    bq. If Ron Laskey is the best we can do, then we’ve a long way to go.
    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…
11. Cameron Neylon says:

    8 June 2008 at 09:43

    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?
12. Bob O'Hara says:

    8 June 2008 at 16:56

    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)
13. Henry Gee says:

    8 June 2008 at 19:16

    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

    a battered cassette player which would player either Led Zeppelin or Motorhead;

    a lute, which one of my colleagues could play expertly well.

    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.
14. Cameron Neylon says:

    8 June 2008 at 20:10

    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
15. Henry Gee says:

    8 June 2008 at 22:02

    Besides you can’t play blues on a strat
    Oh, Cameron, honestly. Don’t get me started.
16. Cameron Neylon says:

    9 June 2008 at 09:17

    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.
17. Richard P. Grant says:

    9 June 2008 at 09:26

    Sounds about right, Cameron.
18. Henry Gee says:

    9 June 2008 at 09:45

    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.
19. Cath Ennis says:

    10 June 2008 at 00:34

    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.
20. Richard P. Grant says:

    10 June 2008 at 23:51

    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.

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