I have been having a clearout this weekend and found a pile of last year’s Christmas Cards on a shelf. (I am talking 2006 here..) Now one weird thing about being Head of School is that I get a whole bunch of scientific-corporate xmas cards. I get a card from two different bits of ESO, one from JAC, one from the Principal, one from companies I bought a lot of computers from, and this year even one from AWE (don’t ask). But some cards from 2006 suddenly seemed evocative of a lost era – the last ever card from CCLRC, and the last ever card from PPARC. The latter says “Five Supernovas, Four Ghostly Neutrinos, Three Solar Orbiters, Two Sub-atomic particles, ONE BIG BANG”. I get the joke, but it doesn’t scan, and it doesn’t quite make sense ..
But saddest all is my card from the Gemini Observatory. It says “Best Wishes for a Season of Universal Understanding”.
Yeah, right.
The e-Astronomer 
THREE Solar Orbiters!!!??? Can we still hold STFC to that? It’s the only item of the five that looks like a policy statement.
Alec – it was the four neutrinos that impressed me. Surely there are only three ? The entire Standard Model is wrong. Nobel Prize on the way I guess. That will make DIUS take notice !
Was the 4th neutrino the sterile neutrino?
And that was PPARC, who it turns out were pretty good with numbers.
the neutrinos passed me by, Andy. I assumed that was a count rate rather than a number of flavours. Four counts per annum is about right for those experiments, isn’t it?
I guess four solar orbiters was just a step too far.