New Horizons for Science

Farewell to friends -- and a love.

Download: mp3 audio | webm video; Watch on youtube

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

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 at IMK-ASF, KIT, 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

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 and especially Information challenges for scientific publishing, and counting scientific publications as metric for scientific quality is dumb, as well as propagating changes.

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, 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. There’s quite a bit of research I now cannot do while those who just don’t care continue to collect whatever they want. I’m sorry for that. The EU Copyright Reform 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).