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The Science Guy Returns
hende_jman writes "When I was in high school, the dry science videos that I watched in my classes made me miss the silly and sometimes irreverent Bill Nye the Science Guy. So I was excited to read in the latest issue of Wired that everyone's favorite Science Guy is coming out with a new show, The Eyes of Nye where he tackles some more serious issues like addiction, sex, cloning, and climate change."
everyone's favorite Science Guy
I thought Mr. Wizard was far more popular. Most likely especially with the crowd here.
Bill Nye the Science Guy was great. It was a lot better than listening to some old hag in class.
XeRo
I loved that show when it was on. Just comical. Even my parents found it amusing to watch. It was educational while very entertaining with it's bizarre humor.
Bill Nye is drab and boring by comparison. Then again, what do you expect from Disney...
Don Herbert -- still alive and functioning enough to have done a pretty fun interview last year -- hasn't been on the air on a regular basis for a couple of decades, so only a portion of /.ers will remember him.
/.ers watched Bill Nye.
OTOH, chances are both young and old
Stefan
...that I donated $50 to my local PBS station. Growing up watching this show proved to be far more valuable than most "dull" classroom environments i've encountered. I learned the order of the planets and newton's laws of physics when I was 10 years old because of this show. It made "understanding" what we were learning actually fun and now that I have a 5 year old daughter, I'm glad he's back into educating and hopefully making learning fun again.
Theories are a part of science . . . theories with significant evidence are accepted as likely to be true. Others with less evidence are perhaps somewhat debatable. This is all part of the Scientific Method
If you would rather have children watch science shows that eshew theory, there would be precious little science in the show. . . it would be a show about facts. And facts aren't science . . . Science is analysis, postulating theories, experimentation, drawing conclusions, verifying results, and other skills that require higher level thinking skills.
I commend Bill Nye for showing children theory and higher level thinking skills . . . but perhaps you would rather that he simply go over multiplication tables and other "facts" on his show . . .
Geeks, nerds, come together...Beakman and Bill Nye were both cool science shows only we dorks watched while everyone else played with their Power Rangers.
Come on now people.
The ultimate TV science guy was Professor Julius Sumner Miller.
He was a wild haired, wild eyed scientist whose catchphrase was 'Why is it so?'.
The term 'scientist' is a generic term. Nye is pretty well educated and a smart man, he does know alot about he talks about, he does not have what he said fed to him from someone else. However you want to define the term, Nye isn't just a dumb jock wearing a lab coat, he teaches valid scientific concepts, methods, and principles. Nye isn't your college physics professor, he is the guy who gets young kids to see what science is and sparks interests among them, many of whom have chosen to pursue careers in science, because of Nye. (I don't mean to diminish the accomplishments of others in this regard, but we're talking about Nye here).
The sad thing is that if the the person who strarted this thread had his way, science would probably be even more of an obscure field than it is. The irony is delicious but sad.
The pledging group was also less likely to use condoms during their first sexual experience or get tested for STDs, the researchers found.
This is one of those sad realities that you see day in and day out, even with otherwise well balanced people. If there is an activity that you swear off, and promise never to do, invariably it will be done and it will be done irresponsibly. The people in college who really burned out their brains on drugs were the ones in High School who swore they would never do any. The people didn't use condoms were the ones who swore they would never have premarital sex. By swearing off an activity, these people weren't mentally prepared to engage in the activity in a rational fashion. When people fall off the wagon, they fall hard.
To pull this back towards topic, hopefully this is the kind of controversial reasearch that Bill Nye will tackle. Hopefully, politics be damned, he will show that schools which teach abstinence-only sexual education have significantly higher rates of teenage pregnancy than districts with real sexual education courses, even accounting for things like income disparity and location. Or even that 50% of high school students are already sexually active, and educational programs should be tailored to this fact. Of course, it might be stepping over the line to point out that the bible belt has the highest rates of teenage pregnancy, higher than the hedonistic blue states, but no fact should be too controversial for Bill Nye.
Please, please let no fact be too controversial for Bill Nye. Please tell me he doesn't have to cut a story on life forms in aquatic thermal vents because it makes passing reference to evolution.
The ______ Agenda
Heh, I was just thinking about Bill Nye earlier today... For some reason the opening song poped into my head. I was thinking that it's too bad that kids don't have any fun and inteligent shows on anymore.
Anyway, Bill Nye rocks.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
From my experience, that's not exactly true. I swore off drugs, and never "burned out my brain" in college. There have been other things that I have, to one degree or another, sworn off. The ones I have later actually done I did with caution, not irresponsibly, and never over-did to the point of causing a problem. I have also seen this in other people, so I know it's not just me who is like this.
On the other hand, I (and those others I mention) have generally sworn something off based on our own decisions, after considering actually doing it. Among those I have seen who swore something off because they were told to do it, your scenario is much more likely.
The problem is not the insistence that you will not do something so much as having that decision forced on you. If you decide upon such a thing yourself, that generally means you have considered the information and are aware of the risks involved, as well as the possible precautions to be taken if you are involved in the activity. Those who have such things forced upon them are generally lacking in the basic knowledge of what you can do to be safe while doing that activity - after all, if you tell someone they will never, never be allowed to do something, why would you bother to tell them how to do it safely? (Yes, logically you should - but the situations we are talking about are generally forced by people who are are not looking at things logically, but rather as a matter of dogma.)
Very true. I should have made that distinction.
However, the distinction does become a bit finer. It's not just a question of whether the decision was forced on the person, but how the person came to that decision. If a person decides not to do, say, LSD because they've done a thorough investigation of the effects of LSD, they know the rate of people who become insane on it, they know how situations can turn bad and how to deal with them, and the risk just isn't worth the payoff, then they are making a quite informed decision, and have enough information at their fingertips that if they do decide to indulge one day they're not going to do so while driving a car in a foreign country on a raised highway. On the other hand, another person may have simply heard that LSD is bad for you, used that as a weight in their decision making process, and come to the conclusion that drugs are bad 'mkay and that they are going to never do drugs. It's not just personal choice, it's the degree of knowledge people have about these things. To make an accurate choice, some people gain quite a strong working knowledge of the process, and that serves them quite well.
But to a lot of people, making a decision is the end of the knowledge gathering process. Do say "I will never have sex," is to say "I will never have to learn about having sex, because I'm not going to have it." Even if they come to the decision on their own, and even if that decision isn't as hollow as some of the examples I've used so far, to a lot of people that's the end of the learning process. I can tell you that the early-withdrawl method gives you zero protection against STD's, but is that common knowledge amongst people who aren't planning on having sex? If they were thorough in their investigative process before making their decision, some of they may. If they were like so many people and based their decision on what little data was presented to them, then no. Both of these people have made their own decisions, and both think that decision is based on the facts of the subject, but one of them may do something really stupid when they're put in a human situation and decide to explore.
And sex is, of course, a bit different than drugs (I probably shouldn't have generalized as much as I did), because everyone has sex at some point in their lives. Saying that you're not going to have sex is like saying you're not going to eat: it's a basic human drive, and everyone does it. People can be drug-free, and apparently 50% of Americans manage that for their entire lives. But almost nobody dies a virgin. And almost nobody gets married a virgin either, ensuring that nearly everybody who makes an "Abstinence before marriage" pledge will either change their minds or fall off the wagon. Either way, no good will come of their pledge.
The ______ Agenda
That's actually a pretty funny script in a mild sort of way. Thanks for the link.
You know what else is funny? How some people are so totally opposed to business in any form. They're always talking about the big evil corporations ruining everything for everyone, yet they don't ever seem to offer a realistic alternative, other than to substitute a big evil government for the big evil corporations through some sort of (usually violent) revolution.
And you know what else is funny? There are other people who hate government programs that help those in need, because each individual should be responsible for himself, and helping people only encourages irresponsibility. And at the same time as they laud this responsibility, they just cream their undies over this huge corporations that act irresponsibly, because the leaders of these companies have "responsibilities to the share holders." And apparently the buck stops there, because shareholders don't seem to be accountable to anyone, so long as they pay their capital gains taxes, although it looks like their gonna get out of that one, too.
It's a funny world we live in.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
because everyone has sex at some point in their lives
You must be new here
Bill Nye sent his PC in for service and called the company for an update, where we worked at the time. She was pleasant with him and he was a real ass, calling her a bitch because his notebook wasn't ready yet. If you think the regular customer is unreasonable, the famous ones can be real turds.