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How Bill Nye Insulted NASCAR Fans About the Sport Being the "Anti-NASA" (examiner.com)
MarkWhittington writes: Bill Nye, the former science guy and current head of the Planetary Society, is very depressed about NASA and NASCAR, according to a story in Business Insider. He believes that the red-state yokels pay too much attention to NASCAR, which employs gas guzzling cars in races, and not enough to NASA, which employs cutting edge and environmentally correct technology, to explore the universe. However, it is a meme that the space agency itself once disagreed with. Indeed, NASA has suggested that the exploration of space is like NASCAR only with rocket ships instead of souped up, high powered cars
Sorry, NASCAR's not a sport.
They're eating up the author's framing as if it was literally what Nye said. What he actually said was that NASCAR should reward fuel efficiency as well as speed, as it would make a more interesting engineering problem.
Besides, everybody knows that if you're not NASCAR, you're NASCDR.
Or just abandon the thread here and go read the Arstechnica bit on this from last year:
http://arstechnica.com/cars/20...
Excerpts from the NASCAR section at the very end:
This section, like the [indycar section] that precedes it, is going to be short. That's because NASCAR, while immensely popular in the US, is about the least technology-driven form of motorsport around.
It might be easier to talk about the technology that NASCAR doesn't allow; the series is stubbornly resistant to the onward march of technology, only switching to unleaded gas in 2007 (12 years after leaded gas was banned in the US) and finally moving to electronic fuel injection in 2012, decades after carburetors vanished from our showrooms. There are no driver aids like traction control or semi-automatic paddle-shift gearboxes, and even car-to-pit telemetry is highly restricted.
And yet, you shouldn't get the impression that there aren't a lot of clever people doing a lot of clever things with those machines. To start, they've been designed to protect their drivers from the kinds of crashes that happen when dozens of cars race in packs two-, three-, or even four-wide at up to 200 mph. (That is no small feat.) It's also a highly aerodynamics-dependent racing series, which means plenty of computational fluid dynamics and wind tunnel research.
To paraphrase Mr. Nye, “You do not like what interests me, so you must be an idiot, a moron or a redneck."
Which he did not say at all. Not even close.
The "red-state yokels" quote in TFS is from the article's author, not Bill Nye.
I read TFAs and watched TFVs. Nye didn't say anything disparaging about NASCAR fans. He talked about addressing new challenges in a NASCAR setting, such as winning a race using a pre-set allotment of fuel.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
It ain't cheatn' less the rule book says it's Cheaten' . (And it's not *really* Cheaten les NASCAR catches ya.)
Look, it's generally incredibly hard to "cheat" in NASCAR on a continuing basis and get away with it. There is a reason NASCAR keeps the acceptable car design VERY simple and why they do all kinds of inspections, before, during and after the race to insure compliance with the rules. They don't always catch somebody when they are breaking the rules, but if you keep it up, eventually they will catch it.
What I find amazing is how inventive teams can be. Like putting in 100' of extra fuel line, hidden in the frame of the car to get a few extra gallons of fuel on board is a classic. Everybody is angling for that extra edge, some way to eek out a little bit of performance or shave off a 1/10th of a second a lap. They come up with some amazing tweaks at times, at least until everybody figures out the same thing or NASCAR changes their rules and inspection procedures to stop it.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Nye looked upon NASCAR and sneered, “Here I am trying to envision the smart, efficient transportation technology of tomorrow, and there is NASCAR celebrating a very old transportation technology of yesterday. You might call NASCAR the anti-NASA.”
NASCAR isn't technology-driven in the sense that sponsors don't spend countless millions customizing their cars to attempt to win races. The premise behind NASCAR is that all the racers get identical cars (there are slight tolerances allowed for variability, but the intent is to make the cars as identical as possible). The performance differences then arise entirely from the skill of each team in assessing race conditions and tuning the cars for those conditions, and the skill of the driver. In other words, NASCAR is an optimization problem, like the America's Cup. F1 and Indy car racing are about building a better engine - analogous to scientific research leading to new breakthroughs. NASCAR is about figuring out how to best tune an existing engine - analogous to engineering existing technology to solve real-world problems. Both contribute to technological progress.
I watched the video
I went to the links on the article.
The owner claims that Bill was sneering and depressed about things, and seems to have called NASCAR fans "red state yokels".
I watched the video twice - didn't have anything there on any of that, it was a rather nice conversation with Bloomberg's people about education mostly.
I asked the author of the story, if he could provide me the cites or any information regarding Nye sneering about NASCAR fans, or calling them red state yokels.
But that isn't it at all - is it Slash Dotters. Nye rubs you the wrong way because he believes in global warming, so in the truthiness bubble, he actaully did sneer at those NASCAR fans who are red State yokels. That's what will get repeated by y'all isn't it?
If you actually do read the article, what he said was an opinion, and knowing NASCAR fans myself, a fairly mild one at that.
One of the things he writes:
“There’s no reason why NASCAR couldn’t be like [NASA]: a race with rules designed to reward the coolest, most advanced vehicle technologies,”
Doesn't sound too bad now does it?
Now a more controversial matter, but hardly insulting - He speaks of making a fuel use limit - I'm not all about that, I'de sooner see them burning ally, (just my opinion) but I'm certainly not insulted.
He also notes:
“I get it. I understand the appeal of a stock car race. It’s just exciting, and I’m all for it,” he writes. “I just want NASCAR to adapt to the new mainstream. I want the circuit to produce vehicles that could compete in races anywhere in the world, and win. I want the racing series to spin off new tech that will do more with less. For me, as an American mechanical engineer, I hope NASCAR decides to look forward rather than backward.”
Amazing how those innocuous comments get turned into Sneers and calling NASCAR fans Red State Yokels.
Anyhow, here is the link to a site that isn't grinding an axe, and prefers actual quotes to made up stuff. http://www.businessinsider.com...
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.