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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!
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??
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.
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
Or, you know, bored drunk college students.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
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
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...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.
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
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
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.)
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.