Actually, I did rather well myself this past Christmas. The nicest present
I received was a gift certificate, good at any hospital, for a lobotomy.
Rather thoughtful. Now, if I may digress momentarily from the main stream
of this evening's symposium, I'd like to sing a song which is completely
pointless, but is something which I picked up during my career as a scientist.
This may prove useful to some of you some day, perhaps, in a somewhat
bizarre set of circumstances. It's simply the names of the chemical elements,
set to a possibly recognisable tune.

[Note from Adam: It's "I am the very model of a modern major-general"
by Gilbert and Sullivan.]

There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium
And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium
And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium
Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium
And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium
And gold and protactinium and indium and gallium
And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium
There's yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium
And boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium
And strontium and silicon and silver and samarium
And bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium and barium

(Isn't that interesting? I knew you would. I hope you're all taking notes
because there's going to be a short quiz next period.)

There's holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium
And phosphorous and francium and fluorine and terbium
And manganese and mercury, molybdenum, magnesium
Dysprosium and scandium and cerium and caesium
And lead, praeseodymium and platinum, polonium
Palladium, promethium, potassium, plutonium
And tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium
And cadmium and calcium and chromium and curium
There's sulphur, californium and fermium, berkelium
And also mendelevium, einsteinium, nobelium
And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc and rhodium
And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin and sodium.
There are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard
And there may be many others but they haven't been discovered.