acapellascience
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2020–2025
4:00 · 10M views · Jun 9, 2017
A Capella Science parody of Ed Sheeran's Shape of You, rewritten about molecular bonding and orbitals and sung a cappella.
HN mentions it as an enjoyable science parody song, one of a set of A Capella Science videos.
4 comments from Hacker News
Yup, DNA turned out to not merely be a sequence of triplets telling a dumb matter printer which hard-coded proteins to make - at least according to what little I understand of evolutionary developmental biology[0], DNA is much more like procedural generation in gamedev or demoscene. That is, there's plenty of recipes for various structures and body parts, and then there's lots of DNA that's responsible for conditionally enabling or disabling or modulating those recipes, depending on more DNA that controls when and where and how much to enable them, and then more - a complex network of logic . -- [0] - Didn't get much further than this four-minute intro to the field, but it is a good intro : [LINK] . (EDIT: It's actually the second part of a trio, that starts with a four-minute bottom-up overview of organic chemistry[1], and ends on a three-minute intro to nanotechnology[2]. I recommend the series together for how well it frames humans in relation to other life and universe as a whole.) [1] - this video [2] - [LINK]
Thanks! That was pretty good...gonna see what else he has :-D ok - I have no idea what he's talking about, but both my girlfriend and I loved the ones we listened to :-D (1)(2) Thanks again! 1) [LINK] 2) this video
This good quote can be interpreted better by realizing that those two groups are not mutually exclusive. There is sufficient poetry, beauty, romance, and love in medicine, law, business, and engineering. I just finished watching Manolis Kellis explain [0] how computational biology is transforming our understanding of the human genome and changing how we treat diseases. Who will argue that this is not a gripping story of how humanity has risen in it's ability to understand how the world works and consequently to control it. This exciting adventure has both passion in the seekers and beauty in what they have found. And of course there are endless songs (e.g., [1][2]) already written about this noble pursuit. [0] "Decoding a Genomic Revolution: Manolis Kellis at TEDxCambridge" [LINK] [1] "The Molecular Shape of You (Ed Sheeran Parody)" this video [2] "A Capella Science - Rolling in the Higgs (Adele Parody)" [LINK]
It's good that it's a purely syntactic collection. Viewed semantically, the "cement of society" produces a strange image, as if a single event could, once set in a given form, hold society together forever and ever thereafter. I think society is held together by a process, not an event, so what could the "X of society" be in that case? "The covalent (primary) as well as van der Waals and hydrogen bonds (secondary) of society" makes for a rather unwieldy metaphor. If I ever put together a Humanistpunk band, it'll be called "The Cement Trucks of Society"... Bonus clip: this video (TIL feltpunk is a thing.)