Every so often you get ambushed by a song that you really, really were not expecting.
When I went to Scotland in June, Continental Airlines celebrated the arrival of my flight in Edinburgh by playing Madonna’s “La Isla Bonita.” It was like, “Welcome to Scotland — here’s a song about how much fun you’d be having if you were in Latin America right now.”
A more recent example occurred today, when I centrifuged my bacterial cell cultures in order to separate the cells from the medium in which they were growing. The centrifuge, a Sorvall RC-6, punctuated the completion of the spin with a quick verse of My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean.
It’s cool to have a centrifuge so enamored of its work that it sings to you. But couldn’t it offer a ditty more relevant to the task at hand? Perhaps these lyrics, set to the same tune, would work better:
My microbes lie in a vast ocean —
A broth that is known as LB.
To harvest my cells from the ocean,
I spin them at ten thousand g.*Spin down, spin down,
Spin down my microbes for me, for me.
Spin down, spin down,
Spin down my microbes for me.[*that is, a relative centrifugal force of 10,000 times the gravitational constant, g]
My Track Record 
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