January 11th, 2006
Reminiscent of my Katie Melua post, I came across an old link of the same vein. Apparently Nine Million Bicycles came under attack from scientist Simon Singh, his gripe resting with these lyrics:
We are 12 billion light-years from
the edge,
That’s a guess,
No one can ever say it’s true,
But I know that I will always be
with you.
He argues that we are in fact 13.7 million light years from the edge of the observable universe and with the decimal precision it cannot be attributed as a “guess”. So he proposed to change it to:
We are 13.7 billion light-years from
the edge of the observable universe,
That’s a good estimate with
well-defined error bars,
Scientists say it’s true, but
acknowledge that it may be refined,
And with the available information, I predict that I will always be
with you.
Katie being a good sport went on the Today radio show with Singh to try out the new lyrics. Not many of the news sites I visited linked to the actual show so there it is. Also a lot of the articles made it out to be Katie’s fault–did you know that Nine Million Bicycles was actually written by Mike Batt, the writer of the Wombles theme tune?
So if the population of Beijing is 14,560,000 and the economic circumstances allow each one to…
January 12th, 2006 at 12:34 pm
Definitely made me chuckle. I think my high school mathematics teacher would love this sort of this because she also is quite interested in English (she can teach both). I remember that she always had a love for this sort of thing (in reference to the last sentence).
Pascal
January 13th, 2006 at 12:06 am
I still have to go to the record store and listen to some of her stuff…. But when can I find the time? Haha….
The gallery on my site is finally working- thanks for all of the support you gave me. It definitely caused a couple of minor “headaches” for me.