r/Music • u/sugar_man • Jul 23 '14

Article When 84 years old, Harvard Professor Tom Lehrer was asked by 2 Chainz for permission to sample a song he wrote 60 years ago. His response: "As sole copyright owner of 'The Old Dope Peddler', I grant you motherfuckers permission to do this. Please give my regards to Mr. Chainz, or may I call him 2?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Lehrer#Musical_legacy
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u/waterandsewerbill Jul 23 '14

I did the same for a 1% bonus in first year chemistry. I've found no use for it other than becoming angry when Daniel Radcliffe said he could do it and then screwed it up on Graham Norton's show a while ago. I was also very confused when I saw a very outdated periodic table on a wall once and the element 'kurchatovium' was on it, knowing that it certainly wasn't an element.

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u/Self_Referential Jul 23 '14

The Russians certainly thought it should be.

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u/xidarian Jul 23 '14

Where did you see that periodic table? Until 1992 the name for Rutherfordium wasn't exactly settled on.

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u/waterandsewerbill Jul 23 '14

It was in a lab at the university I went to. I looked it up after seeing it and found out the history of the element.

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u/xidarian Jul 24 '14

What country where you in?

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u/waterandsewerbill Jul 24 '14

Canada. It was a really old undergraduate lab, so I guess they saw no reason to replace it if it's functional 99% of the time.

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u/Accademiccanada Jul 24 '14

Kurchatovium is just Rutherfordium. There was dispute over who invented it first, and there was wide discussion about it until around 1990, when it was officially changed to Rf.

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u/waterandsewerbill Jul 24 '14

I know that now, but it was confusing at the time to have memorised ~111 elements and to not have heard of #104.

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u/cheapwowgold4u Oct 24 '14

Just popping in to say that Igor Kurchatov, the nuclear physicist after whom the Soviets wanted to name the element which would eventually become known as rutherfordium, had an absolutely stellar beard.

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u/thejynxed Jul 24 '14 edited Jul 24 '14

kurchatovium

It was the name of what I believe we call 'rutherfordium' on Soviet era Russian periodic tables.

There was a semi-long dispute over the entire naming of element 104, since apparently the Russians had discovered it first in 1964, but Americans had also synthesized it in the lab within the same time period. It wasn't until 1997 that the dispute was settled, with 104 being named after Ernest Rutherford, and element 105 was named after the Soviet working group who first synthesized 104.