Bill Nye is to Science as Maya Angelou was to Poetry

To them, What is "Science and Poetry" without global inequality and race? m/r

Nye Lied, I Sighed - Taki's Magazine

by John Derbyshire   May 21, 2015 

Bill Nye the Science Guy gave a commencement speech at Rutgers on Sunday. Readingthe speech left me thinking that if this is America’s designated Science Guy, I can be the nation’s designated swimsuit model.

Up to now I have had only the slightest, vaguest awareness of Bill Nye. Readers have occasionally pointed me to video clips of him in one context or another, but none made a lasting impression. What mainly registers is the bow tie, which stirs in my breast a faint, fleeting flicker of tribal solidarity: I wear bow ties, too.

Googling around I see that Nye got his epithet from the title of a TV show he hosted in the 1990s. The show was targeted at a preteen audience, aiming to show them that Science Is Fun!

Is it? Should it be? My ideal for science education would be for those who want it to prove their ardor by being kept waiting outside the monastery gates for a month, suffering stoically in rain and sleet while those inside jeer at them and dump ordure on their heads from the ramparts ... I speak as an enthusiast, a science geek from infancy.

What did the Science Guy have to say to the Rutgers graduates? Well, he warned them of the horrors of climate change, which he linked to global inequality. ...

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