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Galaxy Song - Monty Python's The Meaning of Life

3 videos recommended on HN
YouTube
Cited on HN 3 times, 2015–2024, never outright recommended score 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN people drop it as a joke in threads about stars, galaxies, and cosmic scale.

The Galaxy Song from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, a comic musical tour of the size and motion of the galaxy and our place in it.

3 jokes · Music

3 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@vacri Jun 2015 Makes a joke
on HN thread How Much Do Skyscrapers Actually Move?
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It's unbalanced forces you feel, not unbalanced acceleration per se. If you have a constant acceleration, it's because there's a consistent force on you. It's why this part of the article is wrong: > Humans are also terrible at perceiving velocity at a constant speed. [not perceiving sway] is why, when you’re traveling on a train at a steady fifty miles an hour, your body believes you might as well be sitting perfectly still. Humans in a train moving steadily are enclosed in an environment where everything is moving at the same speed as them - seats, air, everything. There are no unbalanced forces to feel in the first place. Just the same as we don't perceive the earth's movement around the sun (well, in a moving-body sense) or the sun's movement around the galaxy (which is blisteringly fast on a human scale); because our frame of reference moves with us. Of course, in the real world, trains do sway side-to-side and also up and down a little where the rails meet up (click-click click-click...), and we all feel that. But we're talking about a theory train here, and only looking at forward velocity :) Edit: Wikipedia says the sun orbits the galaxy at 220km/s. Monty Python's "Galaxy Song" says 40,000mph, which works out to 18km/s. Either way, it's pretty zippy for us humans. Galaxy Song: [this video]
@sago Oct 2019 Makes a joke
on HN thread Not long ago, the center of the Milky Way exploded
Give the (Monty) Python headline on today's HN, let me add that it's worth learning to sing [this video] I find. The exact numbers are not quite exact, although they are usually in the right ballpark. "We are 30,000 light-years from Galactic central point." But I found it so useful knowing that song over the years.
@GJim May 2024 Makes a joke
on HN thread 100k Stars
> It’s actually comforting to non-believers in a way that religion is to believers Summed up rather nicely in the Galaxy Song. [this video]

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