Some of you might have seen Monty Pythons Meaning fo Life. In that movie, a song is sung that is about the universe. It's known as the galaxy song:

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
(written by Eric Idle)

I'm just wondering, is this song correct in its...measurements?

Not too bad - they are perfectly reasonable rounded-off values. (As in just how many hundred billion stars we think are in the Milky Way, or how thick the galactic bulge and disk should be called for fuzzy structures). I have on occasion gotten students' attention during class reviews by actually singing it. Bought the DVD, viewed the song in "context", and discovered that I really do not want to show the accompanying video in a classroom...

The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum has that song playing as part of one of its exhibits.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Haha, yeah I would imagine that wouldn't go over too well with any school board.

you could always just fast forward past that part to the song and ask the students to ignore the screams of agony in the background for a bit ;-)

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Cold be hand and heart and bone
Cold be travellers far from home
They do not see what lies ahead
When sun has failed and moon is dead

Yeah the Monty Pythons crew is great.

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The question isn't "what are we gonna do", the question is "what aren't we going to do."

I AM A GOLDEN GOD- Robert Plant, Led Zeppelin

My grad advisor shows it in every undergrad class he teaches, but he makes sure to mute the screen during the naughty part. He also gives an extra credit assignment two find the two errors (of more than a factor of two) in the song. I still need to point out to him that there is only one, since he seems to have mistranscribed a line.

- and what, pray tell, are the errors, kind sir?

*drumroll*

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go n tell yer master we been charged by gawd with a sacred quest, mk ?
don't worry so

Well, Spacedog, I thought about that when I first posted and decided against posting them. The reason is that I don't want a student assigned this as a problem to (espcially in my advisor's class) to come find it here. They need to do a little work for it, IMO. Unfortunately, that means that you guys need to work a little for it, too. However, I'm sure an evening of googling will give you the anwer to your question. I should also note that I only think there's one error in the song (there could be more, up to 4, I think, depending on which numbers you accept).

Sorry to disappoint, but I see this as potentially being like giving a student who posts the answers to their homework question.

pity about the last line, as I could have culled the astronomical sites to creater our own video.

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