by Bill Nye
All the more reason to get our kids exposed to science and primed to carry out their own explosive acts of progress. My parents were a bit angry with me about the cigarettes, but they understood what I was up to, probably even more than I understood it myself. By the age of 12, I had picked up enough about the health hazards of smoking that I knew what was at stake. I wanted my parents to live. That I got joy out of blowing stuff up was one thing, but that I did it out of love was another, bigger thing. I see the same scenario happening all the time now: children nudging their parents to recycle, to stop using plastic bags, to cut down on waste, and to learn about making the world a better place for the future. They are working with a potent mix of idealism and personal concern that looks very familiar to me.
High-quality science education is therefore a doubly powerful formula for change. In the fairly obvious ways, it gives the next generation the information and the critical-thinking tools that are essential to rational decision-making; it inspires data-driven leaps of youthful imagination, whether or not the kids end up in overtly scientific careers. But in the less obvious style of my explosive cigarette escapade, it also empowers them to act as behind-the-lines agents of change.
By their very nature, kids are more open to new ways of doing things than their parents are. They are energetic and, for better or worse, they can be relentless. With some early-stage everything-all-at-once training, we can push more of that energy to the “better” side of things. I’m not talking about whining and screaming. I’m talking about the kind of persuasion that is much more effective when it comes from inside the home, just as happened to me with my parents.
Don’t underestimate the power of family bonds. Every generation wants to make a better world for their kids, but every generation also needs kids to keep them honest. If we want to change the behavior of people, convince their kids why it’s so important for their parents to do the right thing. With our kids, I believe we can get humankind to a better place. If young people embrace evolution and connect the fundamental idea in life science with the mutation of pathogenic bacteria and viruses, vaccinations will be universally accepted; public health will improve. If we can get young people to understand and engage in affecting climate change, older generations will likely do a much better job preserving Earth and its ecosystems.
Of course, young people are not the only ones who can evaluate evidence and work for a better world. We should all try to hold on to the energy and enthusiasm of youth. At all ages, we should aspire to our own little explosive acts of progress and constructive defiance. Let’s go!
CHAPTER 7
Ned and the “THANKS” Sign
Although he loved driving, my dad, Ned, was not an especially good driver. To be honest, he was at times an actively bad driver. He would pull into traffic too abruptly and burden the guy or gal behind him to slow down to avoid a collision. Or he would veer into another driver’s lane and remark, “He can see me,” trusting that the other driver would take action. All good and charmingly old-fashioned, I suppose—unless the other driver didn’t see him. Nowadays, the other driver seems to see you less and less, due to texting and apps and all the other distractions on our ubiquitous mobile phones. (This may change with smartphone-summoned drivers and the driverless vehicles of the near future.)
I should be thankful that those things didn’t exist when I was a kid. I can only imagine how unfocused my dad would have been. Don’t get me wrong; he wasn’t dreaming up ways to play games or chat with faraway friends. He was continually checking his compass and his altimeter—yes, an altimeter that would report his height above sea level (a bit of info that amazed me as a kid). He was also something of an amateur inventor. Combining his fascination with gadgets, his proclivity toward politeness, and his frequent inattention to events on the road, my dad spent a lot of time thinking about ways to communicate with other drivers. Like a true nerd, my dad was concerned with ways to add to the greater good. Decades before anyone used the term “road rage,” he recognized the dangerous consequences of driving while angry. And in his inimitable do-it-yourself style, he decided to do something about it. He was DIY before DIY was a thing.
My father’s solution was the automotive THANKS sign: a message board to let himself be heard by other drivers when he could not actually be heard. It was more than a concept. My brother and I rigged it up, following our father’s specifications. My father was fully capable of measuring the sign; fitting the die-cut letters carefully with a ruler, onionskin paper, and glue; and so on, but he had other things in mind. Making the sign became a project to occupy his sons in a family activity that spoke not only to the technical challenges but also to the greater lessons of courtesy, cooperation, and over-the-road efficiency. Earlier I mentioned family bonds. My dad was very clued in to that, or those. So my brother and I, according to his instructions, attached a hinged piece of Masonite board to the rear deck of our dad’s Renault 16; mounted a screw eye in the ceiling headliner; and ran a length of fishing line from the sign to the rearview mirror up front. I even attached a little rawhide strip at the end of the line to give the driver a better grip.
Here’s how it worked. Let’s say my dad had changed lanes without signaling, or pulled right in front of another vehicle while leaving just enough space for the other driver to avoid him. To express his appreciation for the other driver’s defensive reactions, he would pull a cord attached to the rearview mirror and a sign with 6-inch-tall letters would flip up on his car’s rear deck. The word displayed was a simple “THANKS.” Then the driver behind him, instead of being furious with my father’s irresponsible behavior, might feel great about himself or herself: “Wow, how thoughtful of that driver I almost rear-ended! He is thanking me. And my word, I must certainly be a courteous driver myself for having let this guy whip in front of me.”
On second thought, it’s possible my father wasn’t really all that bad a driver. My brain may be selectively holding onto the memories of times when I felt like our lives were hanging in the balance, or when a sudden stop smashed my 4-year-old nose against the steering wheel. But the thing I know for sure is that Ned Nye had a deep idea that if we all cooperated rather than competed for space on our nation’s streets, traffic flow would be a little better for everyone. Today, you have a smidge of control over traffic by planning your trip through Google Maps, Apple Maps, or Waze (or whatever new software emerges between my writing this and your reading it), which take congestion into consideration when recommending a route. Tomorrow, your car may have an autopilot that communicates with other cars to adjust speed or switch roads to optimize traffic flow. Long ago, my dad had the idea of achieving the same goal not through technology alone, but with a lovely combination of human compassion and technology—namely, a sign on a string.
The THANKS sign worked beautifully. People behind us really did acknowledge my father’s cleverness and good intentions, if not his sons’ craftsmanship. After my father unexpectedly slammed on the brakes in front of someone, he’d flip the sign, and most of the time, the other driver would give a return beep-beep or a flash-flash of his or her headlights. When we received some acknowledgement of our good manners after each THANKS-sign deployment, a happy conversation broke out in our car. “Wasn’t that great? He got it. He tooted his horn at us.” (Aren’t we clever, etc.) Maybe that was part of my dad’s master plan all along. Either way, the sign worked well enough that I’m still admiring it in a circumspect kinda way. I like to think that it really was a meaningful step in the long march to optimize traffic flow.
A few years later, my brother went off to college. I worked alone rigging up a similar THANKS system in the two of my father’s cars that came after that Renault. By modern standards, the engineering process was crude and cumbersome. Just the idea of drilling holes in your car is way out of most of our experiences. If signs such as this were to be created today, they’d probably be electronic, perhaps using a nice bright LED display. They would be wired or Bluetooth-connected, no fishing
line needed. Such a thing could be rigged up to work like a news reader’s or stage lecturer’s teleprompter. With a system like this, the words would be configured in mirror text and projected from the car’s horizontal rear deck up onto the sloping rear window, which would be half-metalized to display the words for other drivers to read while allowing a clear view out from inside the car. It would loosely resemble a commercial head-up display, but reversed to aim outward at other drivers. Wait a moment—I have to head out to my workshop . . .
So what if time has completely passed my dad’s technology? The notion that you could improve the world by providing a readable thank-you message everywhere you went still strikes me as pretty cool. I admired my dad for thinking in terms of solutions to real-world problems. I admired him, too, for not just dreaming the idea but for actually building it and using it. Better yet, for getting us to make it.
With Ned Nye, those kinds of ideas just kept coming. He had another obviously brilliant (?) invention to improve auto safety: the pedestrian horn, a gentler alternative to the regular heart-attack-loud auto horn. Over the years, we owned two separate French-built Renault 16 automobiles. (Ned repected the innovation found in foreign cars at the time. Though having been a prisoner of war, he was not much for Japanese cars of any kind.) My father had me mount a bicycle horn, which in the invention’s first manifestation was battery powered, under the hood of the car. The horn was activated using what would have been the handlebar button if the horn were mounted on a bike. My father hung the button from the choke knob (intake airflow choke? older reference; it’s technical—don’t worry about it).
When he was concerned that a pedestrian was crossing in front of him without looking, my father could press the button and alert the person. The resulting toot was loud enough to draw attention but soft enough that other drivers would either not notice or realize that the sound was not intended for their ears. Like the THANKS sign, the pedestrian horn was an attempt to do a lot with a little. Using what I learned in physics class, I rigged up a voltage divider circuit to power it. Batteries in those little horns go dead fast. It really was fun.
These inventions were my dad’s way of pushing back against our more negative impulses, encouraging all of us to cut one another a little slack; he demonstrated this to the people he communicated with, and even more so with his family by involving us in the creative process. By doing so, we make the world slightly more efficient and distinctly less stressful.
Such a system is needed more today than ever, given the proclivity of modern pedestrians to cross the street while looking straight down at their mobile phones. In Pasadena, California, the city has placed durable stickers on the pavement right by the curb in crosswalks. The stickers say, “Look Up.” I personally believe they should be interpreted to scream: “LOOK UP! Now!!” My dad may have been a calmer man than I. He was a homespun innovator doing what he could to make people a little calmer, a little more efficient, and a little nicer. The sign and the horn were chipping away at the discourteousy [sic] he saw spreading around him. Ned’s solutions seemed odd at the time and, I’ll admit, they still seem a bit eccentric today. No investors ever came clamoring to mass-produce either of them. In their own ways, though, they did change the world, at least for me. As far as I’m concerned, nearly 5 decades after Ned was thinking about ways to make the world safer for pedestrians, the rest of us are still catching up. Some modern cars come with both a loud horn and a soft horn.
What I got out of these experiences, constructing and using my dad’s oddball inventions, was an appreciation for his strong belief in respecting others. It is almost instinctive to feel like you have a right to be belligerent when another driver cuts in front of you, compelling you to stomp on the brakes. It is all too easy to cut loose with unprintable obscenities when a pedestrian steps off the curb a little later than he or she should have, forcing you to wait to make your right (or in some countries, left) turn, or to stomp on the brakes again to avoid a collision. It’s tempting to jam your horn aggressively when a driver in front of you put on his or her left turn signal a few moments after the light turns green. No point in denying it: You have transgressed in these ways, countless times. I’ll confess right here, I have, too. And yes, I realize that you, like every single one of us, is a self-evaluated above-average driver. Nevertheless, I strongly suspect you have screwed up from time to time.
The current trend in automotive engineering is to reduce traffic accidents by taking control away from the driver. That’s one way of eliminating the unruly human element, and I expect it will yield huge benefits—saving lives and freeing up personal time. I’ll have a lot more to say about that a little later on. (I hope you keep reading.) My father had a more modest goal. He wanted to make a better human driver, a kinder and gentler person who is more in control of the emotional and safety experience of being on the road.
Wait—that’s not a more modest goal; it’s an even grander one. I mean, it’s huge. It’s a very everything-all-at-once kind of goal, in fact. Acknowledging and getting past the minor mistakes we all make from time to time, whether we are driving or walking, encourages us to focus more on the big picture of collective action and collective responsibility. The automobile as we know it could not exist without a whole system of rules and standards that we all agree on. Some of them are so ubiquitous that we rarely even think about them: stop signs, traffic signals, lane markings, and so on. Some of them are more explicit, like safety standards or the EPA emissions rules that keep our urban air breathable.
In a way, my dad was getting at some of the most fundamental questions about technology: What is it for? Whom should it benefit? What responsibilities do we take on by creating it? The THANKS sign was one small expression of his answer. Technology should improve the way we live—make it happier, safer, calmer, more productive—and it should benefit anyone who is exposed to it. Which is to say, in principle, everyone. Those may seem like obvious ideas, but look around and see how often they are put into practice. Many people and corporations create things without seriously considering their impact, or they willingly accept that some innovations will benefit only a lucky few and might even have a negative impact on the rest. They fail what I will humbly call “The Ned Nye Test.”
Even if we decide to put computers in charge of every car and truck, and even if the whole system works flawlessly without the need to flash a single sign, my dad’s sense of collective responsibility will remain just as important. We’ll still have to maintain the roads and bridges. People will keep changing and moving, and we’ll have to build new infrastructure and develop new types of transit to match up with those changes. Doing all that requires taxes, an effective government, and an involved public. As the saying goes, “the most important government position is ‘citizen.’” To many of us, these aren’t glamorous things—and let’s be honest, neither was my dad’s floppy sign—but they are essential. They are part of an unspoken pact we all make to be kind to each other, to accept some responsibility in exchange for promoting the greater good.
When we keep that pact, we make progress. When we break that pact, things get ugly. Progress is not just about building more stuff: taller buildings, longer bridges, faster computers. It is about harnessing science and technology to make people’s lives better. It is about using human ingenuity to overcome the limitations of the world around us. One of those limitations is human nature itself. We can be petty, competitive, and vain—or we can be generous, collaborative, and insightfully honest. It’s up to us to choose progress (the real kind of progress) and strive toward it in all our actions, big and small.
That, in the end, is what I think my dad’s THANKS sign was really all about. It’s something we should all be flashing to one another, all the time.
CHAPTER 8
Why the Bow Tie?
As I walk through life, I often look down at people’s shoes. No disrespect intended. I’m not trying to avoid eye contact with you. I’m paying attention to the imperfections in t
he world and looking for ways to help fix a few of them. You see, shoelaces are not just shoelaces when you view them through the filter of everything all at once. They are the raw material of knots, and knots are the embodiment of mathematical beauty; mathematical beauty is a fabulously useful tool for rational problem solving; and rational problem solving is, of course, the most powerful tool for changing the world. In my Nye’s-eye view of the world, tying a well-crafted knot is like a personal promise to engage in that whole glorious process. I often have three such knots with me: two on my shoes and one around my neck in the form of my beloved bow tie. But when I look at the knots all around me—well, it’s troubling. There’s a lot of work to be done.
Try looking down yourself, and what do you see? Around half of the people I meet tie their shoes with bow knots that are prone to coming untied from the day-to-day flexing inherent in walking. These bow knotters often compensate by tying their laces with doubled knots, piling one asymmetrical knot upon the other in a desperate bid to keep it together—or worse, they repeatedly walk with loose laces dragging. It doesn’t have to be this way. With a little more thought and attention, you can bring inspirational order to what may seem like one of the most mundane objects in your daily life. Plus, your shoes will fit better and stay tied.
Let’s start with a simple experiment we can do together, right here and right now, using only the loosened laces on your shoe. Begin by tying one of the most useful of all knots, the square knot. It’s also called a “reef knot,” as it was and is, from time to time, used to reduce the sail area of a sail on a boat, to reef the sail in a storm or strong wind.