Science Comedian

Mike Brotherton and the Science Comedian

January 18th, 2009

Mike Broth­er­ton has a really nice blog post about me.  Mike is a sci­ence fic­tion writer who also hap­pens to be an asso­ciate pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­sity of Wyoming in the depart­ment of Physics and Astron­omy.  Quasars are his spe­cialty!  And there’s a lot of great con­tent in his blog.  Check it out.

I’m ecsta­tic that, of the two jokes he sin­gled out for men­tion, one is an anal­ogy that rarely gets the laugh I wish for it.  It’s about the abil­ity of a virus to take down a human.  We must out­weigh them by a fac­tor of a bil­lion or more.  It’s the ulti­mate David and Goliath…  “It’s like Luke Sky­walker tak­ing out the Death Star in a lit­tle X-Wing Fighter.”

Well, it is, isn’t it?

He also says this about the embed­ded video:

Next time I teach an intro­duc­tory sci­ence class, I’m going to show some of these. I might be able to deliver a cou­ple of the sim­pler jokes and fit them into lec­tures. I’m a good lec­turer, but not great, and wak­ing peo­ple up with a smart joke that has some real sci­ence in it isn’t pan­der­ing, it’s educating.

Too often I think thatI just get depressed about the never end­ing bat­tle with igno­rance and sci­ence illit­er­acy, with the folks who reject our best knowl­edge because it con­tra­dicts their polit­i­cal or reli­gious beliefs.  Get­ting peo­ple to laugh and want in on the joke is prob­a­bly a bet­ter method of doing some­thing other than preach­ing to the choir and bring­ing in some peo­ple who want to chuckle, too.

Thanks, Mike!

I haven’t read his two nov­els yet – Star Dragon and Spi­der Star - but they’ve been praised by David Brin and Paul Di Fil­ippo.  They are hard SF and have been com­pared to the books of Larry Niven and Robert L. For­ward.  Sounds good to me!

Science Comedy Video

August 5th, 2008

A mon­tage of some of my sci­ence com­edy rou­tines, taken mostly from two events at the Mar­ian Koshland Sci­ence Museum of the National Acad­emy of Sci­ences (in 2006 and 2007).

A cou­ple clips from my 2008 per­for­mance appear ear­lier in this blog (on cell phones and Karma) and more are com­ing soon.