![[sex and science]](http://www.sunclipse.org/downloads/sexandscience3.png)
So, word on the grapevine is that Kate McAlpine, the physics communicator who created the Large Hadron Rap video, has a 13% probability of being signed to a major record label, according to the InTrade prediction market. The first question which pops to mind is, what with the music industry as it stands today, "Why in the name of the Higgs would you want to do that?"
Anyway, I've been makin a tradition of posting science-themed entertainment videos on Fridays, and somehow, I've rolled into a groove wherein the clips I post are, at least by a broad definition, musical. (This may be more user-friendly than the tradition I tried to start on my old, "indie" blog, which was to post a quantum mechanics lesson each Friday.) Wondering how long I could keep the musical aspect going, I naturally began to wonder how far I could stretch the definition of what a "science" video is. Luckily, there's room to play here. As Alan Sokal, the man whose name is now a verb, once wrote,
The word science, as commonly used, has at least four distinct meanings: it denotes an intellectual endeavor aimed at a rational understanding of the natural and social world; it denotes a corpus of currently accepted substantive knowledge; it denotes the community of scientists, with its mores and its social and economic structure; and, finally, it denotes applied science and technology.
The Large Hadron Rap hits the first three senses, but the technology it covers is just the LHC itself — technology which is pretty much wrapped up in meanings 1 through 3, as opposed to an iPod or a pacemaker or a Teflon frying pan. So, where do we look for a musical interlude which addresses this fourth aspect of science, the way applied knowledge changes our daily lives?
Enter Amanda Palmer (profile, video tube, blogotube), performing a torchy little number originally written and composed by Neil Gaiman:
"I Google You."
In the elder days when the world and we were young, only MIT students did that. Now, everyone is trapped in an MIT of the spirit.
OK, FUNNY STORY
I found a version of this performance and noted it on the ol' indie blog, whereupon Jennifer Ouellette said that her friend Peri Lyons had co-written the song with Gaiman. I was promptly abashed that I might have misattributed anything, but on a second look, Lyons herself had said that Gaiman was the lyricist, while he himself had said, "[S]he asked me last December to write a song for her one-woman show".
Whereupon, who showed up at my blag but Neil Gaiman himself, setting the issue to rest and making my poor head go all asplodey.
The Internet can be a frighteningly small place. Closer to an Aleph than a Library of Babel, if you get my drift.
(The real world can have the same problem. There's a somewhat strange story to be told about the two times I've met Neil Gaiman in person, a story which also encompasses the only spoken exchange I've ever had with Harlan Ellison. . . . One which I might regret writing about. . . . On top of that, a friend of mine — and not one of the friends who simply delights in lying — tells me that I met both Amanda Palmer and Brian Viglione at a party somewhere in Boston, but it must have been an absolutely fantastic party because I don't remember a damn thing about it. I do have a musician friend who was recruited to play bass for a band which opened for Palmer at Smith College, but I see I'm entering the territory of recursive stories, so I should stop before I plunge into an Aleph of a higher order.)
The author of Sandman and American Gods and all the rest turned out to be an astonishingly gracious person, even down in the oppressive gloom of my website's colour scheme. When I mentioned that people had been finding said website by Googling for the song lyrics, he provided them.
By dint of obsessive listening, I had put a transcript together, which turned out to be almost spot-on — I had heard "scrap of information" as "dram of information" (all that time I spent learning to mimic Elizabethan blank verse has really ruined me).
Those lyrics and Amanda Palmer are each, independently, mind-blowingly cool. With both involved, and a science fiction legend showing up to comment, my hot-swap failover mind was also blown and now I have to recover from binlogs. Sweet.
LYRICS, THEN, KINDLY PROVIDED BY LYRICIST
I Google you
late at night when I don't know what to do
I find photos
you've forgotten
you were in
put up by your friends
I Google you
when the day is done and everything is through
I read your journal
that you kept
that month in France
I've watched you dance
And I'm pleased your name is practically unique
it's only you and
a would-be PhD in Chesapeake
who writes papers on
the structure of the sun
I've read each one
I know that I
should let you fade
but there's that box
and there's your name
somehow it never makes the pain
grow less or fade or disappear
I think that I should save my soul and
I should crawl back in my hole
But it's too easy just to fold
and type your name again
I fear
I Google you
Whenever I'm alone and feeling blue
And each scrap of information
That I gather
says you've got somebody new
And it really shouldn't matter
ought to blow up my computer
but instead....
I Google you
Technology
Comments
Now you're just shamelessly trying to get Gaiman to show up in the comments again, aren't you? But a good tune is a good tune. :)
Posted by: Jennifer Ouellette | September 12, 2008 9:22 PM
I have to learn this. First, I like it. And second, the next time someone tries to make me sing karaoke with a song I've never heard and lyrics I've never seen before, I'll avert my eyes from the screen and sing "I Google You" instead. With gestures.
Posted by: Monado | September 14, 2008 8:21 PM
It's offical. I envy you to death.
*goes to manipulate Google results to say Blake=smart arse*
Posted by: Podblack | September 15, 2008 12:51 AM
Actually, I'm just shamelessly trying to redirect traffic from my old site over here, so I can reap the 22-cent financial rewards thereof. And when I saw that the video I was planning on embedding had been viewed 6,666 times, I couldn't resist.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | September 15, 2008 1:36 AM
Sweet!
Posted by: the algorithm, back from the backups | September 15, 2008 2:08 PM
Well, it worked. Or maybe I just Googled my old comments on this site... ;)
Posted by: Podblack | December 30, 2008 3:05 AM