New Horizons for Science

Farewell to friends -- and a love.

Download: mp3 audio [1] | webm video [2]; Watch on youtube [3]

New recording [4] 2019 at Intermezzo [5] with Rika Körte and Steven Macdonald as recording engineers: mp3 audio [4]

Goodbye my love, I leave tonight,
I know you’re in new hands,
Though I would rather follow you,
That’s not the way that this is planned,
Our destiny will now be watched
by different eyes than mine,
I wish you just the best,
be sure we’ll meet again in time.

By now you’ve found somebody else,
to watch out over you,
Every new face I see wasted here,
it’s breaking me in two,
Maybe I should stay and fight
but my heart calls me away,
To that call I must be true,
you know, that is a father’s way.

I decided long ago,
about the way I feel for you,
but it has made no difference,
they are breaking you in two,
it’s true I swore me to your side,
come sunshine or come snow,
But as your faithful friend
I know, it’s time for me to go.

So goodbye to all the friends I’ve made
I’ll never be too far,
there’s much that I have learned from you,
of gluon, mind and star,
I’m grateful for the times we spent,
and all that we’ve been through,
the place I reached today,
I reached because of you.

Goodbye my love, scientia,
should I one day return,
I’ll no longer be a funds-beggar,
and then the tide will turn,
I know you love me as a friend,
but that’s not enough for me,
your paradigms I’ll shift, and then,
we’ll have a chance, you’ll see.

Copyright © 2017 Filk by Arne Babenhauserheide, License: cc by.
Music and original lyrics: Katja Buchmüller

A Filk on the Filk Song New Horizons by Katja Buchmüller. Recorded when I played it for the SAT group [8] at IMK-ASF, KIT [9], after I signed my contract to move from science to software development .

The embedded video is compressed down to 5.6 MiB (thanks to awesome vp9 compression), so it’s suitable to be sent by email: new-horizons-for-science.webm [2]

When you send it by email, your recipients might need a web browser to play it (until desktop video players catch up with the new video codecs on the web).

For more on science, see the Science-category page [10] and especially Information challenges for scientific publishing [11], and counting scientific publications as metric for scientific quality is dumb [12], as well as propagating changes [13].

And if you enjoy this song in the EU, please tell your representatives before June 20 2018 to stop the bad parts of the copyright reform [14], so I can continue to do scientific work in my free time without having to work at a university. One major part of this is Article 13, which would require establishing upload filters for social media sites — and might have stopped me from sharing this song there, if it were the law today.

Update: We lost that in general, but legal battles [15]. There’s quite a bit of research I now cannot do while those who just don’t care continue to collect whatever they want [16]. I’m sorry for that. The EU Copyright Reform [17] threatens my ability to do research in my free time, now that I left university to offer a future for my children. So please help keeping links free (stop Article 11), data mining for independent researchers legal (stop Article 3), and automatic upload filters non-mandatory (stop Article 13).