This guy is like the anti-Bill Nye. He doesn't want to share his joy of science with you, he doesn't want to educate, he just wants to correct you with some stupid ass analogy. Insufferable. No one asked, Neil.
I remember seeing some clip where he schooled a batista about some whipped cream that's melted. Niel, they are just trying to get through their day while not making enough money. They don't need a thermodynamics lessons in the middle of the shift.
Maybe he's trying to do some deadpan humor. I say obvious shit like this to my daughter all the time. Like the thing he's "correcting" here is that metaphors shouldn't be taken literally. It's so obvious that I have to conclude there's a high chance he's just trying to do a self-parody here.
I know someone who got to interview him once. He spent the whole time complaining about how he never wanted to be a celebrity and just wanted to do the science part of the job and that he hated having to do interviews and talk to the public.
They wound up obviously having no good material from the interview and didn't have anything to run. It was a very "don't meet your heroes" moment for my friend.
But yeah, according to himself, he DOESN'T want to share science or educate. It's a burden to him.
It's amazing how far this guy got as a complete hack. The way people turned on him wasn't triggered by some dark secret being revealed. Everybody just had their own moment of thinking "wait a second, is this person actually a huge dipshit? Oh my god he is." I never saw conversations about it or any kind of viral anti NDT sentiment spreading around. It's just a conclusion everyone reached by themselves. It's like he had some kind of spell on everyone and ran out of mana around 2015 or so.
Just picture this man staring at himself in the mirror, chuckling silently as he imagines kissing himself, then pulling out his phone to tweet this...five goddamn times.
Sure, but what do his dumb tweets have to do with that?
Also, some of the allegations are very, very dumb.
"Sexual misconduct" because he moved a bit of her T-shirt on her shoulder as she was showing Neil her tattoo? Stupid.
Another saying Neil was making sexual advances to her after she went up to his apartment alone for a drink. You don't say??
From the apparent quotes, he was utterly polite about it all, he didn't throw himself at her.
I'm no NGT fan. My comment was a jab at his fanbase being similar to Elmo's. He's a pop-culture scientist, yet everyone acts like he's the stupidest Mensa member, when he doesn't even qualify.
Actually, it's not a leap because it's neither upwards or forwards.
The orbit is already ahead of our count so we add a day is moving us backwards along the orbital count.
If we removed a day then that missing day would be a leap day as we leap over it to the next day in the calendar.
So really this is the non-leap since we're counting it, it's all the other years that don't have a 29th that are leap years because we're leaping over the 29th day of February.
He could have posted something about how the universe doesn't fit our preconceived ideas and how this day is an example of that and that this means you should dig deeper to get to the truth because it's usually a lot more complex than what it seems.
That's exactly what he's trying to do. He likes to poke holes at commonly accepted things in an attempt to make people think about stuff that they don't normally think about and make them ask why more often. This is a good thing. Unfortunately, it just comes across as annoying to a lot of people.
Once I started to see more of him in unscripted interactions, I lost all respect for him.
He's so pedantic and has a lot less substance than you'd think... He knows a lot about astrophysics, but his explanations are a lot more shallow than similar science communicators
Turns out, it was the voice - the way he speaks with this sense of wonder really draws you in. Seeing him talk to other scientists, he just AMOGs them into their place without really understanding what they're saying... But their scientists, so many of them just sit there confused about why he's being so pedantic about something they didn't say
I feel like in the future, a highly valued skill for anyone in a public facing role is gonna be learning to get off of Twitter/Microblogs.
How many people have ruined their own reputations by just giving the internet a constant stream of their inane thoughts? Regardless of if they deserve it or not.