The other aspect which was disconcerting was that I was given very little time to make the calculations.

Oh well, I did it mostly for fun anyway… I will try anything once.

I thought it was pretty funny, myself.

For today, I’m going to let I Postdoc, therefore I am voice my complaints for me:
What bothers me, is that both journalists and the public seem to be so much more interested in, ahem, improbable science than in the usual garden variety.
Via Doug …

ONCE curiosity got the better of me and I watched it, and it happened to be the beer crushing episode. Being buffered I fast forwarded through most of it, stopping just to hear the “manswers”, but I don’t recall anything about BA in there. I’m pretty sure I would have noticed / remembered, unless my eyes didn’t pick it up at 3X speed.

-j

Dioesn’t really fit here but was watching clips last night from the AliG show where he interviewed Buzz Aldrin. Pretty funny when he started to ask about the conspiracy theorists who don’t believe (and you could see Aldrin’s adrenaline start to pump) the moon really exists! Aldrin had the weirdest look on his face because he was SO not expecting THAT.

Don’t know if it’s on you-tube but it’s pretty funny and not very long.

Also told a weird moon joke I had never heard before.

The only thing good they ever did was air unedited Ren & Stimpy episodes.

Anyway… I should stop babbling now. Just thought you’d like to know a bit more of the background to the story. You should also know that contributors all routinely sign releases for this type of shoot. Only courtesy requires them to show you what they’ve done with your image and your words…. nothing else. But let me again say that I think that good trust relationships can and should be built between scientists and film makers if we are truly going to reach new audiences….

Best,

-cvj

I was hoping that nobody would see this show…

I agree, it is pretty awful. Did they have to use that blaring voice, and put shots of half-naked women in every segment? At the same time, I must confess to appearing in maybe three or four segments of that show. Part of the problem is that they are very unscrupulous editors, and also at the time they shot a lot of those segments, they did not really know what the show was going to be -Spike did not make it; a production company made if on their behalf and they were making it up as they went along (with, I suspect, confusing instructions from Spike about what they wanted).

I am pretty sure that many of the people who appeared – myself included – were not aware of quite how low the show would stoop in its attempt to hit the lowest common denominator. I suspect that the original concept of the show was such that the program makers did not know either…. there was a lot of clever and deceptive editing in post production. We were simply told it was a comedy variety show, and on Spike. It would be a show about answers to questions that “guys” ask. I therefore knew that going in it would be a bit of a frat-boy atmosphere, but was willing to take a bit of a risk for the sake of seeing some science show up in an unusual setting, and to an audience who might not bother to think about science at all.

Unfortunately, most of the stuff has been cut to pieces in the editing room, most of the science cut out, and contributors’ sentences interspersed with shots of half-naked women, and the science segments interspersed with dubious pieces about how to get “something extra” behind the curtains in your massage parlour.

For example, I did a long and fun explanation of the forces involved in crushing a beer can for them. We did an experiment, measuring the weight required, and compared it to results of a computation I did on the board, etc, etc…. – all to camera. None of that appeared. Just some quick cuts and then lots of shots of women with increasingly large breasts. Did I know that the can discussion was relevant to a woman crushing a can with her breasts? Yes I did, but I made it clear that I wanted to have nothing to do with that part. I would answer the physics question about how much weight you’d have to stack on a typical beer can to have it collapse, and what the issues were. Sadly, they cut all that out and just went on and on about the breasts, and cut back and forth between me and the breast stuff, including having me say at the end that it looks very painful (indeed it does, and indeed I did say that).

On a segment where I was talking about why vending machines topple over so easily, I said (with the aid of diagrams, discussion of center of mass, and a scale model, etc) that it was because it is top-heavy. At this point they randomly cut to a woman with large breasts. Irrelevant and annoying. The entire logic of the explanation was sacrificed, and they just cut to me at the end pushing over a vending machine onto a crash test dummy. This was fun, but they cut out my step by step explanation during the push, of the point at which it overbalances and why… Annoying. Could have been a fun segment.

On another segment, they go me to discuss the issues surrounding why a hardened steel sword cuts a speeding bullet in half. Opportunity to get a discussion going about materials science – I went for it. Surprisingly, they left a lot of that in the actual piece, and no women with breasts were featured. However, they wanted me to say that the sword was “stronger than a bullet”, and I said (with all due respect) that it was a rather meaningless statement, and preferred to stick to the facts of what actually can happen. Watch the piece though, and at the end, you’ll hear my voice saying it – but you don’t see my face at that point. Draw your own conclusions about what happened there.

It’s a bit of a shame that they did this, since I think that the actual idea of the show (scientists coming in to answer questions about everyday stuff in a magazine format) was a good one. I think that Spike probably saw a lot of the finished pieces and made them recut it as a bawdy trashy show. This may also explain why they delayed launching it by six months after having originally announced it was to debut in the Spring.

It also betrayed the trust of a lot of contributors who want to help in the public understanding of science. I must say at this point that I would not want people (other scientists) put off by this… Please take opportunities to do this type of outreach – contributing to programs and talking with journalists and even entertainers about science. I’d say that there are more and more good program makers out there who want to work with scientists to make better and better science shows. Every now and again there’ll be setbacks like this, but I think that the gradient is positive. I for one will keep trying, as I think that the overall gain is of high value. Check my blog Asymptotia for more discussion of this, and also for descriptions of other shows being made that are done right. Hmm… I should probably turn this into a post over there now it has got so long… sorry Phil!

Cheers,

-cvj

I genuinely feel sorry for you if you were in any way associated with that show. Hopefully it isn’t true. The people who find your blog from that place will only dumb down the quality of the comments here. And that wouldn’t be good, seeing as how I dumb it down quite enough with this.

Far as I’m concerned, the only worthwhile shows aired on Spike are ST: TNG and ST: VGR.