Blue Collar Scientist

I meant to post about this days ago - and I did, sort of, scheduling a post in the queue to appear a few hours after I’d written it, to kind of smooth out the blog traffic. But I made a mistake and somehow scheduled it for the wrong month, and didn’t notice that it hadn’t appeared. Mea culpa. So here it is, hopefully better late than never:

The Skeptologists was announced, as far as I know, at TAM 5.5. It’s a proposed TV show, the pilot was recently shot, and it features a bunch of accomplished skeptics and cool people. I’m guessing - I have no inside information - that it is going to be a rational approach to the ghost hunting, conspiracy-theorizing, metaphysical crap-umentary shows that have been hitting the television in such profusion lately.

Head over to Phil Plait’s blog for a teaser trailer of the pilot, and take note of the letter there from the director:

Raise your voice! Let it be known that it’s time for a TV series that focuses on the real, the intelligent and important advances in science, critical thinking and skepticism. The Skeptologists will be pitched to major networks soon, and we want to give the programming executives a sense of what kind of support they can received if they invest in a TV series of this kind.

We have started an email campaign to have fans of the show write-in in support of this show idea and let us know why you would watch a show about critical thinking, science and skepticism! We will compile the emails and present to the executives along with our all-star cast, entertaining pilot program and solid production background to seal a great TV deal to give the Skeptics of the world a show they can stand behind, and be proud of!

Take a moment, and send a brief email to skeptologists@newrule.com. You email will be collected and will help support the show.

Do it!

The BCS will be interviewed for a television news-magazine show on Monday, or possibly Tuesday. The topic will be evolution, which is outside my field of expertise¹, but that never stopped me from shooting off my mouth before. Fortunately I’m at least quite well-read on the topic and am known in the market it will be airing as a science educator/popularizer type person.

Since I know a little about what is coming down the pike, I’m preparing for it. I’ve worked up some talking points, because I know TV is brutal about keeping the word count down and the clarity as high as possible. I’ve been practicing in front of a camera to work on looking at least vaguely competent and likable. I’ll have some time to do a couple of mock interviews with others posing as hostile interviewers². I lack any media training, but that doesn’t mean I have to go in without any clue.

If any readers happen to have any advice to offer, please shoot me an e-mail or comment here. Hopefully I can get a copy of the interview and post it after it is all over, and we can all do a post-mortem.

1. I’ve noticed there is very little demand on television for experts on the application of simplified heuristics approximating Hamiltonian paths as applied to astronomical search order algorithms that are optimized to instrument-imposed overhead limitations. But I can’t imagine why. [↩]
2. Or at least “hard hitting” ones, although if this journalist actually takes a swing at me I’d be quite surprised. [↩]