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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.
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.
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.
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
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.)
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.