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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."
Oh God, get that image out of my mind!
everyone's favorite Science Guy
I thought Mr. Wizard was far more popular. Most likely especially with the crowd here.
Bill Nye was the best science teacher because he was also a comedian. I remember seeing him once on some old sketch comedy show (Almost Live?) where he talked about his girlfriend from hell or something.
Incidentally, my 8th grade science teacher looked almost exactly like Bill Nye.
Thinkin' Lincoln - a web comic of presidential proportions
I gave him a copy of my TIMIT CD-ROM from the Linguistic Data Consortium, and he accepted it! No other television personality would have been likely to do that, in my estimation.
Thinking of bill "tackling sex" is just getting me all excited to!
Bill Nye the Science Guy was great. It was a lot better than listening to some old hag in class.
XeRo
There's something disturbing about the image of a pasty, thin nerd in a bow tie talking about sex.
Oh god, is that why my wife grimaces whenever we make love??
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...
It's TV. People don't want serious science, people want entertainment. There's a reason the Mythbusters blow something up each episode!
Speaking of which, I wonder how much that show's success had to do with exec's decision to bring Nye back.
Wow. Addicted clones having sex are bringing about climate change?
I can't wait for this show!
Sometimes my arms bend back.
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
Apparently it was too hard to actually link it in the post? http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.04/play.html ?pg=4
He even made the sundial used on the Mars Rovers.
PimpMyMazda.com - Crazy mods to a 2002 Mazda Protege DX.
Seemed like a pretty cool guy. Even after his speech, he asked to be part of the line where graduates walked to get their diplomas and shake hands with everybody though he was under no obligation to do so. RPI class of '99.
(And if you think this is off topic you need to check up on your Bill Nye history)
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Bill Nye has been quite active in the outreach efforts for the Mars Exploration Rovers mission. Back in the summer of 2003, at a launch party, I had the pleasure of sharing a few drinks with him on the beach one evening, and he was telling me about his ideas for this show. It sounded very cool - Mr. Nye is very insightful and is rightly concerned about a lot of these serious issues.
A side note - he really seems to hate people making a big fuss over him being "the science guy" (then again with that annoying theme song, who wouldn't?). He's just a very sharp guy who has a lot of interest in science and outreach. I think he'll be quite capable at holding the attention of adults.
Also, when he was telling me about the show, it was originally entitled "Through the Eyes of Nye," I wonder why they changed it...
I lost my respect for Bill Nye when went on a ride at Epcot called "Universe of Enegry". The ride was sponsored by Exxon, and narrated by Bill Nye and Ellen Degeneres (sp?). Anyway, it was very clear that someone at Exxon had written the script. It totally ruined Bill Nye for me.
-1 (Troll) is antihammer
For anyone interested, Bill Nye will be speaking at the Skeptics Society meeting on April 24. Details here.
Meetings are at Cal Tech (Pasadena, CA)
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
Beakman's World was more entertaining and more informative than either of those...
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Bill Nye was a bit after my time, but does anyone remember Mr. Wizard on Nickelodeon? Apparently he was around even when my parents were growing up, on NBC.
w iz/watchmrwiz.htm
Check out this site: http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/W/htmlW/watchmr
for some good history on Don Herbert, the real name of Mr. Wizard.
Here is his official page, which says Don operates the site himself! Cool.
John Susek
After seeing Bill Nye do a PBS documentary on shuttle astronauts (very well done and not over the top like science guy) as well as seeing Bill testify before Congress, I knew then that Bill deserved his own science show someday.
Way to go Bill! You've come a long way from "Speed Walker", wiggling your ass in tight shorts superhero costume for laughs on "Almost Live"
Times were different back then. No PC nonsense, and his science demonstrations were always geared to practical things of use to awkward young science fans growing up in the conformist 1950s.
Like the time Mr. Wizard showed you how to perform a prefontal lobotomy on a school bully using a #2 pencil, an American History text book, and a pipe cleaner.
The guest star / subject was "Whitey" from Leave it to Beaver. He was never the same after that. Of course, what actually slowed him down -- the operation or the home-brewed benzine-based anesthesia -- wasn't clear.
Bill spoke at my Alma Mater (RPI) years ago.
He said to remember three things if anything:
1 Use the metric system
2 Never write a memo longer than 1 page
3 Make sure you enjoy what you plan on doing for the rest of your life
Months later I saw him on a panel hosted by Bill Maher with Craig Barret, Pen and Teller, and Peggy Noonan (i think). He was complaining about internet porn affecting people's lives. People laughed, but he was totally serious.
Fascinating man. Even in my late 20's I enjoyed his show on tape as a way to decompress after a long day workin on my PHD
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
...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.
If you're looking for dry science videos, try the avgeeks . . . a collection of over 14000 dry videos like those cheesy ones made for high school students in the 60's
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?'.
Creativity abounds.
"The Knights That Say ... 'Nye'"
Pat Paulson as "Mr. Wizard", made science very enjoyable to watch.
I always thought it would be fun to take Bill Nye's brain and put it into a robot. Then take Mr. Wizard's brain and put it into another robot.
Then make them battle on the surface of some far off desert planet.
My guess is, Mr. Wizard would win, but Nye would have fresher looking moves. Nye's downfall would be in showboating it up for the crowd, while Mr. Wizard would methodically find Nye's weakness and exploit it with some obscure weapon which most of us didn't know Mr. Wizard even had.
As a prize, the Mr. Wizard robot would be able to take home Xuxa, that really odd creepy lady (who was also strangely hot) who had her own children's television program back in the day. Together they would mate, and produce an offspring which would be the future of educationally themed children's television programs for the next thousand years.
I'm not sure where I got this idea. I think it was foretold somewhere in the Book of Mormon. Or maybe it was that guy who was trying to get me to take a personality test outside the Church of Scientology on Hollywood Blvd in Los Angeles.
Either way, I'm sure it will happen, if we all wish hard enough.
The Internet is generally stupid
I've still got his voice on my answering machine! It'll be great to see him back on TV.
The other speaker at the event was Dr. Jill Tarter, Director of Research at SETI. Jodie Foster's Character in the movie, Contact, was based on Dr. Tarter. She was also a great speaker and cool to work with.
As an expecting father, this made me realize that I'd love to have the entire Bill Nye series for my kid. I loved the series while in college, and always imagined that with whatever band I'd eventually form up we'd know we'd made it when we had a song and music video on Bill Nye.
Imagine my surprise when I found out that there are no DVDs to buy of Bill Nye. For all the crap TV shows that are coming out on DVD this month, how is it possible that Bill Nye has not yet arrived on DVD?
If such a torrent link existed, now would be the time to share it, yes?
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... after the meetings about 40 of us (meetings run 300 or so, more when a big name like Nye speaks) go have dinner. The waitress always asks "are you with the Skeptics?" and the easily amused of us answer: "Maybe..."
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
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
I remember what happened the last time you said that.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.