Bill Nye the Science Guy

Forget Barney and Teletubbies... If you want your children to grow up with an IQ, sit them down in front of this show (and watch it with them.) Makes science fun to learn. Topics range from earthquakes to atomic energy to patterns. Even played a clip of Pink Floyd on the episode about time. Written so that even adults can learn from this. "Science Rules!"

My one Bill Nye experience is negative.

I watched one episode, which had a classic science riddle: If you had a cup of coffee, and wanted to add cream (fridge-temp), but wanted to maintain the highest temperature of coffee at, say 15 minutes from now, should you add the cream now, or in 15 minutes?

The answer that Bill Nye the Science Guy gave was that you should add the cream now, because it acts like an insulator. The answer is right, but the explanation is baloney. First off, you can't call something that mixes with your thing an insulator. It's clear that whoever wrote the segment was just guessing at the explanation.

The other thing that annoyed me was that the proper answer and explanation was given by Richard Feynman. If Bill Nye the Science Guy was really a science guy, he would have known that the explanation Feynman gave; which is that the heat loss is proportional to the difference in temperature between the coffee and the environment. That is, the bigger the difference in temperature, the more energy leaks out of your coffee and into the environment. By lowering the temperature quickly by adding the cream, you lose less energy throughout the 15 minutes of waiting.

So I send them an e-mail through their website. I never got a response.