powers of ten music mix

[psocoptera]

More or less self-explanatory! Help me fill in blank spots. I know there are lots and lots of songs with numbers in them, but let's skip the 76 trombones and the 99 luftballoons. Feel free to suggest songs that are a small integer times a power of ten though. (I've broken the rule and included Seasons of Love so that I don't immediately get four comments saying "What about Seasons of Love?") Also good: any song that mentions any number larger (er, greater in value, thanks Mathemagicians) than the current largest number mentioned. (Currently to beat: one billion.) I'll try to edit this post to add things to the list (assuming people actually come up with stuff.) The number does not have to be in the title, those are just what I came up with most easily.

1: One, U2
1-10: Come When I Call You, Klezmatics
10:
50: Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover, Paul Simon; 50 Miles To Detroit, Whit Hill
100: 100 Ways, JC Chasez
500: 500 Miles, Proclaimers
1000: 1000 Open Doors, Susan Levine
2000: Two Thousand Years, Billy Joel
10,000: 10,000 Promises, Backstreet Boys
20,000-40,000: Texarkana, REM
100,000: 100,000 Fireflies, Magnetic Fields
525,600: Seasons of Love, Rent
1,000,000: If I Had $1000000, Barenaked Ladies
10,000,000:
20,000,000: Twenty Million Reasons, Susan Levine
100,000,000:
1,000,000,000: Billion Dollar Babies, Alice Cooper
10,000,000,000:

Comments

[jere7my.livejournal.com]

20% Amnesia by Elvis Costello
200 More Miles by Cowboy Junkies
300 M.P.H. Torrential Outpour Blues by the White Stripes
And 100,000,000 is mentioned in Johnny Cash's When the Man Comes Around ("One hundred million angels singin'").

[glassonion]

I'd suggest OK Go's "A Million Ways" as an alternative to BNL. Ooh, or iTunes suggests that "I Need Mercy (a Million Times a Day)" song (see SDME 4.6). But i admit to being a little overexposed to the BNL track, so i like alternatives sometimes.

There's an Indigo Girls song, "You and me of the 10,000 wars", off _Nomads, Indians, Saints_. November Project, "A Thousand Days". Hmm, "The Body Electric" is just binary (or morse?), not actually a large number, right?

[cereph.livejournal.com]

ah, you beat me to the Ok Go song.

[amyprime.livejournal.com]

I don't suppose Square One songs count.

[rebeccapaul.livejournal.com]

I asked my father (who has thought about number songs before), and he had this to add:


3/5 of a mile in 10 seconds -- Jefferson Airplane
Happenings Ten Years Ago Time Ago -- Yardbirds
20th Century Fox -- Doors
30 Days -- Chuck Berry
40 Days -- Gram Parsons and the Fallen Angels (actually the same song as 30 Days)
100 Years from Now -- Byrds
I Never Thought I'd Get to Be 100 -- Moody Blues
Woman of a 1,000 Years -- Fleetwood Mac
2,000 Light Years from Home -- Rolling Stones
22,000 Days -- Moody Blues
40,000 Headmen -- Traffic
I Never Thought I'd Get to Be 1,000,000 -- Moody Blues


Enjoy!

[belecrivain.livejournal.com]

"Ten Thousand Angels," Mindy McCready (sic?)
"100 Miles and Runnin'," N.W.A.
"Sixty Minute Man," The Dominoes

[cereph.livejournal.com]

From Monty Python's "Meaning of Life" the Galaxy song has:

nine hundred
a million
forty thousand
a hundred billion
a hundred thousand
sixteen thousand
three thousand
thirty thousand
two hundred million
one of millions of billions
Twelve million

[grr-plus1.livejournal.com]

In the millions category: From "Why does the sun shine?" by Lou Singer and Hy Zaret, 1959 & then TMBG in the early 90's.
"At a temperature of millions of degrees".
- and-
"The sun is large...
If the sun were hollow, a million Earth's would fit inside
And yet, it is only a middle size star"

-and

"The sun is far away...
About 93,000,000 miles away
And that's why it looks so small"

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

And from "What Is The Milky Way?", from the same record, variously "billions of stars", "billions of galaxies", "a million light years", and "a billion light years".

It doesn't quite fit, but I'll also take the opportunity to mention Kenny Young and the Eggplants' "186,000 Miles A Second".

some oldies

[eastgategirl.livejournal.com]

How about Route 66? Part of the lyrics are:

Get your kicks on route sixty-six.

It winds from chicago to la,
More than two thousand miles along the way.


And Honey Bun from South Pacific:

A hundred and one pounds of fun,
That's my little honey bun!
Get a load of honey bun tonight.

I'm speakin' of my Sweetie Pie,
Only sixty inches high,
Ev'ry inch is packed with dynamite!


There are lots, but maybe my favorite is Tom Lehrer's New Math:
(For those who don't want to read the lyrics, here's an animated version with Tom Lehrer at the piano singing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXx2VVSWDMo)

Now remember how we used to do that. three from two is nine; carry the one, and
if you're under 35 or went to a private school you say seven from three is six,
but if you're over 35 and went to a public school you say eight from four is
six; carry the one so we have 169, but in the new approach, as you know, the
important thing is to understand what you're doing rather than to get the right
answer. Here's how they do it now.

You can't take three from two,
Two is less than three,
So you look at the four in the tens place.
Now that's really four tens,
So you make it three tens,
Regroup, and you change a ten to ten ones,
And you add them to the two and get twelve,
And you take away three, that's nine.
Is that clear?

Now instead of four in the tens place
You've got three,
'Cause you added one,
That is to say, ten, to the two,
But you can't take seven from three,
So you look in the hundreds place.

From the three you then use one
To make ten ones...
(And you know why four plus minus one
Plus ten is fourteen minus one?
'Cause addition is commutative, right.)
And so you have thirteen tens,
And you take away seven,
And that leaves five...

Well, six actually.
But the idea is the important thing.

Now go back to the hundreds place,
And you're left with two.
And you take away one from two,
And that leaves...?

Everybody get one?
Not bad for the first day!

Hooray for new math,
New-hoo-hoo-math,
It won't do you a bit of good to review math.
It's so simple,
So very simple,
That only a child can do it!
Now that actually is not the answer that I had in mind, because the book that I
got this problem out of wants you to do it in base eight. But don't panic. Base
eight is just like base ten really - if you're missing two fingers. Shall we
have a go at it? Hang on.

You can't take three from two,
Two is less than three,
So you look at the four in the eights place.
Now that's really four eights,
So you make it three eights,
Regroup, and you change an eight to eight ones,
And you add them to the two,
and you get one-two base eight,
Which is ten base ten,
And you take away three, that's seven.

Now instead of four in the eights place
You've got three,
'Cause you added one,
That is to say, eight, to the two,
But you can't take seven from three,
So you look at the sixty-fours.

"Sixty-four? How did sixty-four get into it?" I hear you cry.
Well, sixty-four is eight squared, don't you see?
(Well, you ask a silly question, and you get a silly answer.)

From the three you then use one
To make eight ones,
And you add those ones to the three,
And you get one-three base eight,
Or, in other words,
In base ten you have eleven,
And you take away seven,
And seven from eleven is four.
Now go back to the sixty-fours,
And you're left with two,
And you take away one from two,
And that leaves...?

Now, let's not always see the same hands.
One, that's right!
Whoever got one can stay after the show and clean the erasers.

Hooray for new math,
New-hoo-hoo-math,
It won't do you a bit of good to review math.
It's so simple,
So very simple,
That only a child can do it!

[sofer.livejournal.com]

Weirdly, I can only think of songs for 1,000:

Future Bible Heroes "1000 lovers in a day"
Wolfgang Press "A girl like you" (the lyrics are 'a girl like you deserves to be kissed 1,000 times')
They Might Be Giants "1,000 years old"

Also, The Scarborough Settler's Lament has the lyrics "...and I awoke in Canada 3,000 miles from home."