Last night Colbert performed a hilarious experiment in honour of Mr. Wizard’s passing. He sucked an egg into a bottle by first putting a piece of burning newspaper inside. Colbert explains that the smoke rises to heaven to alert god about the fire, who subsequently forces the egg inside to put it out.

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colbert, nostalgia, science | 1 Comment »

I have a morbid habit of following any link which mentions the name of anyone I know. Sort of an interweb version of the old Jewish geography game (Oh, you’re from New York….do you know X?). Needless to say, after the jump I nearly always find that the subject is not in fact the person I know, but some more illustrious individual who happens to have the same name.

So this morning I saw a headline from Rule The Web which mentioned a Mark Hurst. And hey, I knew Mark Hurst from my class at Ben Franklin High School in NOLA. True to my pattern (but sensing the coming disappointment) I followed the link. To my shock after the jump I was greeted by a headshot of the exact man, Mark Hurst.

Seems Mark is now the head of a cool outfit called Good Experience. I went to the website and played some of Mark’s games, and they were really, really good. No surprise, as I remember Mark as the mastermind of an inspired pencil and paper robot hunt game which briefly consumed Franklin’s nerdier segment. I believe the game was named MITCon (Update: Mark points out the name was actually Mitcron). It was named after Mark, who was known in those days as Mit (his intended destination) .

Mark is gonna be on a web radio today. Check it out. Congratulations Mark!

nostalgia, New Orleans | 2 Comments »

I read on BoingBoing this morning that my old pal Mr. Wizard has passed away. Jer and I used to watch Mr. Wizard quite often, and it was just a great show. The experiments were always exciting, but the thing that made the show different from anything I’ve seen since were the descriptions he gave to the kids. Nothing was ever glitzed up or oversimplified; all questions were answered with straight, correct talk. When Jacob asks me science questions, I often find myself patterning my answers similarly, sometimes even stopping to think “What would Mr. Wizard say?”. It’s sad that he died, but even more sad for me that his show is not in syndication, and that none of the current kids’ science offerings come close to this level of quality.

Link to the BoingBoing post

Link to the L.A. Times obituary

Update: Wired is running Mr. Wizard’s last interview 

nostalgia, science, kids | No Comments »