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How Bill Nye Insulted NASCAR Fans About the Sport Being the "Anti-NASA" (examiner.com)

Posted by samzenpus on from the more-honey-less-vinegar dept.

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

14 of 387 comments (clear)

  1. yawn by FatAlb3rt · · Score: 5, Funny

    Nye.jump(shark);

    1. Re:yawn by Darinbob · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So he's a snob for pointing out massive errors performed by snobbish Hollywood writers who are too important to open up a "physics for dumbasses" book?

      Hollywood these days is full of the most ridiculous plot elements, stupid science, illogical economics, implausible motivations, and it's gone way beyond the point where you can just ignore it all because of suspension of disbelief. Even the Walking Dead is more believable than your typical AAA movie release.

  2. In other words... by XxtraLarGe · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "People who don't like what I like are stupid." NASCAR is probably the most science/engineering oriented sport out there. Every variable is a factor from length, slope, temperature & curvature of track, weather conditions, in addition to the thousands of variables that go into the car itself. Pit stops including how much fuel & # of tires to change are all very accurately calculated to gain an advantage on their competitors. If anything NASCAR could be used to encourage scientific & engineering education.

    --
    Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
    1. Re:In other words... by markdavis · · Score: 5, Insightful

      >"NASCAR is probably the most science/engineering oriented sport out there."

      No, you are thinking of real racing, like Formula One :)

    2. Re:In other words... by sycodon · · Score: 4, Funny

      Oh boy, here we go...

      --
      When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
    3. Re:In other words... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      No, in real racing you constantly change the rules to disallow superior technology, so that no real technical progress can be made. Like Formula One :)

    4. Re:In other words... by rwa2 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    5. Re:In other words... by Solandri · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    6. Re:In other words... by Shinobi · · Score: 4, Interesting

      "An engine needs very advanced designs and lubricants to sustain that for 3-4 hours."

      Awwww, how cute... Now go watch the 24 hour races like for example Le Mans 24 hours. No engine repairs or engine swaps allowed during the race, yet the top class averages over 300km/h over the 24h race, including pit stops, yellow flags/code 60's, safety cars(on a 13km+ track no less!), on a track that has much greater wear and tear on engine, gearbox, brakes etc, since it's not an oval.

  3. The real insult by sh00z · · Score: 4, Informative

    Sorry, NASCAR's not a sport.

  4. Paraphrasing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    To paraphrase Mr. Nye, “You do not like what interests me, so you must be an idiot, a moron or a redneck."

  5. Bill Nye PR Fail by Irate+Engineer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If Bill Nye actually visited pit row in a NASCAR race he'd see that there is a hell of a lot of applied science being employed to eek out a bit more performance and mileage out of these vehicles. It isn't a drag strip - stopping for gas in NASCAR costs time and position and the teams would love to run the whole race without pitting. There are a lot of brains behind NASCAR.

    A lot of performance improvement applied to commercial vehicles comes from NASCAR, believe it or not. You need to look past the BMC-drinking fans in the crowd that are there for the crashes and actually see what is happening in the pits.

    Bill, just a reminder, you don't get racing fans to embrace science by calling them illiterate, shit-beer-drinking rednecks. You do this by showing where science is applied in things that they already love, and let their interest take off from there. I am a proponent of science too, and you don't help the cause by being an elitist prick in a bowtie.

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  6. Sure are a lot of morons in this thread by 0xdeadbeef · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  7. For what its worth by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 5, Informative
    I went to the article.

    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...

    --
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