When Life Tears Bill Nye’s Quadricep, Bill Nye Puts On a Robot Suit and Exits Reality TV to the…

When Life Tears Bill Nye’s Quadricep, Bill Nye Puts On a Robot Suit and Exits Reality TV to the Tune of “Get Lucky”

Bill Nye was eliminated after this performance. Three cheers for Bill Nye and his voting hashtag, #hotknowledge.

A few words about William Sanford Nye, one of my favorite humans! At Cornell, he was a student of Carl Sagan’s. Both his parents have crazy WWII stories; his father Ned was a Japanese prison of war whose four years without electricity led him to become obsessed with sundials, and his mother Jacqueline was an elite codebreaker who sounds like a true boss:

“She taught me how to cook,” [Bill Nye said], “and how to make the famous family salad dressing that her grandmother taught her to make, which was pure chemistry. She taught me how to sew, even. To this day, I still own a sewing machine. And to this day, I can still hear her chanting in my ear: Sit up straight! Shoulders back! Now train, train, train! Do it till you get it right!”

Nye got in front of the camera a bit while making training videos as an engineer for Boeing (he also applied to be an astronaut every few years, but kept getting rejected), but really entered the biz when he won a Steve Martin lookalike contest and started doing stand-up. He deliberately targeted his TV show at children under age 10, because of studies showing that “10 is as old as you can be to get excited about anything.” To honor his father, he helped put two “MarsDials” on both the Spirit and Opportunity Rovers, and he has a patent pending for a new and improved toe shoe for ballerinas.