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FEEDBACK has often wondered about the ideal musical accompaniment for
scientific experiments. A close friend, a pharmacologist, always used to
wear her Walkman while slaving over a hot pipette, and used to swear by
the music of Tom Tom Club. This not only relieved the boredom; she reckoned
the beat was such that she always managed to press her Gilson on time. Now,
at last, it looks as if the issue has surfaced in the scientific literature.

In a paper entitled ‘Fluorescence yield near edge spectroscopy of d-bonded
CO on Fe(100)’ (Surface Science, vol 224, p 375), D. J. Dwyer of the University
of Maine and others discuss the finer points of the absorption of carbon
monoxide by iron. To be honest, most of the paper is above Feedback’s head,
but there in the acknowledgments, after the thanks to the people who supplied
the funding, equipment and so on, is a statement that even we can understand:
‘We would like to thank the Rolling Stones for supplying the sound track
to the experiment’.

While we would question the researchers’ choice of music (the Stones
are getting on a bit now and some heavy metal would have been more appropriate,
surely), it’s good to see the musicians’ contribution to the process of
science being properly acknowledged. It is to be hoped that other authors
will be quick to follow the researchers’ lead.

* * *

STILL on music, DMC, the Disco Mix Club, held its annual awards ceremony
recently. Most of the awards went to the records people like to bop to.
But one of them was for the ‘best answering machine message’. It went to
a woman from the Phonogram record company, who had dubbed an apposite pop
record (‘Well leave a message, sorry you couldn’t get through . . .’) onto
her answering machine. We’re delighted to hear about the prize, but we couldn’t
help wondering. Isn’t the record industry is supposed to be against copying
discs onto tapes?

* * *

WE KNEW that deregulation of television in Britain might pose problems
for Channel 4, but we didn’t expect it to be feeling the draught so soon.
A colleague of Feedback’s recently had occasion to appear on one of the
channel’s science programmes, and was promised that his travel expenses,
a princely Pounds sterling 17.70, would be reimbursed. And so they were
– in the quaint form of postal orders, for Pounds sterling 10, Pounds sterling
5, Pounds sterling 2, 50 p and 20 p. Can it be that Channel 4’s cheque book
has been confiscated? Or is it just science coverage that is feeling the
pinch?

* * *

ENGINEERS seem to be having a hard time of it these days. Britain seems
more interested in whizz-kid financiers, recruitment is difficult and, as
always, the status of the profession remains low. Bemoaning these facts
at a meeting in London this month, Viscount Caldecote, a champion for the
engineers’ cause, recounted a tale that suggests that, in terms of status,
engineering is beyond the pale.

Caldecote explained how he had written an article on wealth-creation
for The Times. Having done so, and plugged the case for engineering throughout,
he signed the article with a flourish and proudly described himself in a
footnote as an engineer. Picture the good lord’s dismay, then, when the
article appeared, it turned out the top-people’s paper had dropped the description
of engineer and described him instead as a businessman.

* * *

TALKING of the image of engineers, we’re surprised, given its title,
that a press release from the American Society of Manufacturing Engineers
has received so little attention in the popular press: ‘SME announces 4th
International Grinding Event’. The conference, on abrasives, of course,
is Detroit, from 9-11 October.

* * *

MAURICE Goldsmith, the ubiquitous director of the International Science
Policy Foundation, who also acts as chairman of British Friends of Unesco,
had some critical words to say about Britain’s reluctance to rejoin the
UN agency when he spoke at reception this month in honour of the agency’s
director general, Spanish biochemist Frederico Mayor. Goldsmith related
how the German poet, Heinrich Heine, when asked where he would like to be
when the world came to an end, is said to have replied ‘In Britain’. And
why was that? ‘Because Britain,’ he replied, ‘is always a hundred years
behind the rest of the world.’

* * *

ANYONE thinking of deploying a cat against squirrels should be warned:
you may be putting your moggie at risk. Following our item two weeks ago,
explaining how a couple in Guildford deployed their 12-month-old cat called
Tiggy with lethal effect, we receive an urgent note from Alan Lewis of Camberwell
in London: ‘Setting your trained attack cat on invasive squirrels may not
always be a good idea. While doing geological mapping in the Malverns in
1972, I observed a cat guarding the body of a large grey squirrel. The squirrel
was certainly dead, but the cat had a profusely bleeding groove 3 centimetres
long and about 1 centimetre (that is, two squirrel incisors) wide where
it’s nose should have been. I inferred a causal connection.’ Tiggy, Lewis
suggests, may have had a lucky escape.

* * *

FEEDBACK’S award for the most interesting quote this week goes to Laboratory
Equipment, vol 26(11), for a remark attributed to Steven Goldby, president
of a company called Molecular Design: ‘Our customers in chemical and pharmaceutical
research want mission critical information systems that leverage the most
cost effective windowing workstations and networked computing environments.
Providing that architecture is driving our R&D’