Science Comedian

Guest hosting Dr. Kiki’s Science Hour with Greg Gbur

March 24th, 2011

For the next few weeks I will be guest host of Dr. Kiki’s Science Hour on Leo Laporte’s TWiT network. Dr. Kiki is out on maternity leave, having just given birth to a beautiful baby boy 20 days ago! Previous guest hosts have included Phil Plait, David Harris, and Jeri Ellsworth.

The show streams live every Thursday on TWiT at 4pm Pacific/7pm Eastern. For other time zones, do the math! You can also watch or download it later.

For first-time visitors: in addition to my science-flavored stand up comedy, I also make science videos for Time Magazine’s website. That link will send you to my vids on Time.com, or you can click the VIDEO tab above and see them on this site. Quite a variety of topics in science and science fiction. I am also a contributor to Neil de Grasse Tyson‘s radio show StarTalk Radio.

Follow me on Twitter: @sciencecomedian
Subscribe to my YouTube videos: youtube.com/sciencecomedian

“Let There Be Light!” – my first show will be about light and weird science facts. My guest is Greg Gbur, an associate professor of Physics and Optical Science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, specializing in research on theoretical classical optics. Since August of 2007 he has blogged as “Dr. SkySkull” at Skulls in the Stars, where he covers optics, the history of physics, historical weird fiction, and the interconnection of these subjects. Greg also co-founded the history of science blog carnival The Giant’s Shoulders. He has over 60 peer-reviewed publications and is the author of the upcoming textbook, “Mathematical Methods for Optical Physics and Engineering”.

– Follow Greg on Twitter: @drskyskull
– Skulls in the Stars blog
– Go directly to the Weird Science Facts category on Greg’s blog
– Greg’s recent invisibility article on Scientific American
– Read his very in-depth post The Saga of the Scientific Swindler! (1884-1891)

When the show is available, I will post the video here and perhaps some additional notes and links. Please follow me on Twitter, subscribe to my YouTube channel, and get on my Email list.

Next week my guest will be science writer extraordinaire Carl Zimmer!

Thanks for stopping by!

You got Jesus in my X-ray

March 10th, 2009

Where in the Bible does it say, when Jesus returns, he will appear as a silver Rorschach blot on a chest X-ray in a small town in Florida?

A few thoughts…

Reynaldo Farinas went to the hospital after experiencing chest pains.

Okay, no surprise there. You’d have chest pains, too, if Jesus were unexpectedly resurrected inside your chest cavity. The human chest cavity simply wasn’t designed for such a celestial homecoming.

Or was it?

If the Divine Plan is – and always was – to resurrect Jesus inside an evangelical’s chest… well, it seems like rather poor planning, doesn’t it? Not exactly Intelligent Design. In the very least, it might have been helpful – or polite – to have sent some advance notice, maybe an email – particularly to the person who was to receive such a glorious but awkward visitation.

I like when they show the man on camera and the lower-third graphic, the on-screen identifier, has his name and a short definition – the explanation for why we’re watching a video clip of him:

“Reynaldo Farinas: Sees Jesus in X-ray.”

How would you like that to be the 4-word summation of your life?

Farinas says, “This never happened to me.” I can accept that. In fact, it never happened to anyone.

But perhaps I’m being unfair, too much of a stickler for proper grammar, because what he likely meant was, “This never happened to me before,” in which case he is expressing surprise that Jesus never previously spontaneously generated inside his chest.

They show the X-ray around 25 seconds into the video clip…

But I don’t see Jesus. Do you? If anything, I just see a Grey, which is far more likely, if you think about it.

An extraterrestrial inside someone’s chest makes perfect biological sense. It requires no resurrection or Second Coming or magic of any kind – it’s simply a natural part of a metamorph’s life cycle – to incubate inside a host organism. It’s even part of (science fiction) canon – perhaps most famously in the movie Alien.

So, what we have here is nothing supernatural. This visitor is not from Heaven but merely from Zeta Reticuli. Just a friendly parasitic neighbor stopping by to gestate.

One family member says, “And I was surprised. I got goosebumps and I was like ‘Wow,’ you know? That’s unbelievable.”

Exactly.

But if you’re still curious, here are some stories of other sightings of Jesus and his mom – in flapjacks, lemons, and cheese sandwiches.