Bill Nye

About

Bill Nye is an American science educator, best known as the host of the children’s educational television show Bill Nye the Science Guy which aired on PBS from 1993 – 1998.

Online History

Bill Nye launched his personal homepage^[13] on July 9th, 1996. His Facebook fan page^[17] was created on December 4th, 2008 and has since attracted more than 1.3 million fans. He joined YouTube^[14] in April 2009, where he has uploaded 26 videos, accrued nearly 15,000 subscribers and gained more than 3.6 million views, averaging more than 278,000 views per day as of September 2013. Nye also maintains an active Twitter^[15] account where he has more than 930,000 followers. In June 2013, Nye participated in an Ask Me Anything thread on Reddit, which gained 58,904 upvotes, 3,257 points overall and 8,076 comments prior to being archived.

Related Memes

Bill Nye the Science Guy Remixes

Bill Nye the Science Guy Remixes are a series of remix songs based on the theme song from his PBS television show. They often appear as recut music videos featuring footage from other memorable television shows, movies or video games. Though clips from the song were used in YTMND sites as early as May 2004, the first full-length remix of the song was posted via YouTube on January 7th, 2006, which infused hardcore techno beats into the theme (shown below).

@Bill_Nye_Tho

@Bill_Nye_Tho was a novelty Twitter account based on Nye’s persona that launched in early 2012. The tweets were mostly about science factoids, but from the perspective of a person who was stoned. On July 17th, a corresponding single topic Tumblr^[1] for the Twitter account was created to archive the tweets. Five days later, 20 of these tweets were curated into a listicle on Buzzfeed.^[2] In August, more of @Bill_Nye_tho’s tweets were featured on The Chive.^[3]

However, the account was suspended in September 2012, following a temporary suspension that July. At the time of the suspension, @Bill_Nye_tho had attracted nearly 200,000 followers^[4] and was gaining between 2,000 – 3,000 retweets per update.^[5] It was revealed that month the account was run by Laughspin writer Lucas Gardner^[6] who told Betabeat^[7] that he had no intention in pursuing the account again after its second suspension. As of September 2013, the account is still suspended, despite a Change.org petition^[8] to save it. While many of @Bill_Nye_tho’s original tweets have been archived on Favstar.fm^[9] and Tumblr^[10], a Facebook fan page^[11] and secondary Twitter account^[12] attempt to keep the joke alive, gaining more than 60,000 likes and 15,000 followers respectively as of September 2013.

Personal Life

Bill Nye was born in Washington D.C. on November 27th, 1955. He studied mechanical engineering at Cornell University, where he took classes with Carl Sagan. He then spent time working at Boeing in Seattle before getting a recurring spot on a local sketch comedy show where he earned the nickname “Bill Nye the Science Guy” after correcting the host’s pronunciation of “gigawatt.” The success of his local segment led to 100 episodes of his science-themed show on PBS in the 1990s. He has dedicated the rest of his career to educational entertainment and science work. As of September 2013, he resides in Los Angeles and is an avid swing dancer. In September 2013, he announced that he would be joining the cast of the 17th season of Dancing With the Stars.^[18]