Names and faces

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

— Bill Nye, a mechanical engineer and star of the popular 1990s TV show Bill Nye The Science Guy, has waded into the evolution debate with an online video that urges parents not to pass their religious based doubts about evolution on to their children. “The Earth is not 6,000 or 10,000 years old,” Nye said in an interview with The Associated Press, citing scientists’ estimates that it is about 4.5 billion years old. “It’s not. And if that conflicts with your beliefs, I strongly feel you should question your beliefs.” Nye, 56, also decried efforts in recent years by lawmakers and school boards in some states to present Bible stories as an alternative to evolution in public schools. “If we raise a generation of students who don’t believe in the process of science, who think everything that we’ve come to know about nature and the universe can be dismissed by a few sentences translated into English from some ancient text, you’re not going to continue to innovate,” Nye said in a wide-ranging telephone interview. Posted by Big Think, an online knowledge forum, the clip went viral and has 4.6 million views on YouTube. It has garnered 182,000 comments from critics and supporters. It drew the ire of the creationism group Answers in Genesis, which built a biblically based Creation Museum in Kentucky that teaches the stories of the Old Testament. The group produced a response video featuring two scientists who say the Bible has the true account of Earth’s origins, and that “children should be exposed to both ideas concerning our past.”

Magician-daredevil David Blaine is returning to New York City on Oct. 5 for a three-day, three-night stunt called “Electrified: One Million Volts Always On.” It will be streamed live. A trailer for the stunt shows the 39-year-old endurance artist wearing a futuristic-looking bodysuit in between two conductors. Blaine’s last stunt was hanging upside down without a net high over New York’s Central Park for 60 hours in 2008. But the grand finale of the “Dive of Death” stunt didn’t go according to plan. His other stunts include holding his breath underwater for 17 minutes and 4 seconds, being buried alive for a week in a see-through coffin and being encased in a block of ice for 63 hours.

Front Section, Pages 2 on 09/25/2012