Let's blow up this joint!...
...so:
...and now, the one you've heard about, the one you've been waiting for! The quarterback of questions, the King Kong of knowledge, the duke of discovery, the giant-est of scientists, the Elvis of experimentation, the B-man himself...ladies and gentlemen, we give you the one and only...
Me! Beakman! And you've just broken into Beakman's World!
...and with that rousing intro (just to please two South Pole penguins who just wanna keep their feet warm), a scientific phenomenon was born. Not since Mr. Wizard has there been such a charismatic, creative, and downright fun teevee scientist. This green-lab-coat-clad man with the hair like that guy from Seinfeld was about to turn the entire edutainment genre on its beak!
This, friends, is the very first episode of Beakman's World, originally aired on a fledgling cable channel called TLC (before it became a secondary home-improvement and style channel) in September of 1992. Yes, it's 15 years ago this month. You can tell this is the pilot episode with a coupla things. 1 is, of course, an introduction. We get introductions of the players (Josie, the pushy but lovely young lab assistant, and Lester, the down on his luck former Shakespearean actor who's forced to don a rat suit and be a literal lab rat), the segments (Beakmania! Try and stump me...if you can), and...the penguins? Two, because of that introduction...Beakmania doesn't get a proper intro (thus, I use the introduction of the show this week). Third...the robotic bumpers are different from what we come to know and love...still robotic, but different robotic. And finally...it's really, really subdued.
However, it is Beakman, and he has questions to answer, so let's break in!
Rain: Our first question comes to us from Alan Baker of Englewood, Colorado. He asks...where does a poodle go after it rains? To the dog house? Oh, wait...puddle. Where does a puddle go after it rains? Well, first we need a puddle. Well, ya shoulda thoughta that before the show...now, a little bottle of water, a bit of dirt (not the dirty dirt, but the clean dirt), and a little bit o' gum later, we have a puddle! Now, where does it go? For that, I need a light...no, a mud light! Now, the mud light is the sun...and it warms the puddle up. And when the puddle warms up, the water evaporates. It disappears, right? Uhm, no, because...EVERYTHING GOES SOMEWHERE! Just 'cuz you can't see the water as a gas doesn't mean it's not there! It's just water vapor, and it's rising up into the atmosphere. When it gets up there, it's cool enough that it condenses back into liquid water...very little drops that can stay suspended in the air. When this happens, it's called a cloud. That big white fluffy cloud is full of little drops of water called droplets. Those big gray clouds are full of full drops of water that are about to be too heavy to stay suspended. Thus, they fall down to the earth as rain. The rain falls to the ground, and some of it forms a puddle. That puddle will evaporate when the sun comes out, going up into the air as water vapor, condensing into clouds, falls back as rain, and so on, and so on, and so on. This is called the water cycle, and it, of course, is a pretty important part of nature!
Beakmania!!!: You wheel, I'll deal! Now, let's peel! Question: What's the most remarkable fish? Answer: Well, that's subject to interpretation, but the plaice fish is pretty remarkable. It can change its coloring to match the patterns of stuff around it. It's so good at this, it can even take the pattern of a black and white checkerboard! Question: Which bird lays the biggest egg? Answer: The ostrich...which can lay eggs so big it could feed 12 people! Question: How many hamburgers can you get from a cow? Answer: None...that's where the milk comes from! But a single head of cattle provides enough ground beef for about 400 quarter pounders. Question: How much ice is there on Antarctica? ...Herb's letter, no doubt...Answer: There's enough ice at the South Pole to raise the water level of the oceans 200 feet, and bury a quarter of the land in water.
Question: Is it true that all things fall at the same rate? Answer: Well, let's find out...and say hey to the first famous dead guy, Galileo! The man who invented the make-far-away-things-look-closer-thingy. Of course, it's better known today as the telescope. And, he proved by getting up on a leaning tower that two things will fall at the same rate, regardless of their weight! To prove it, let's take this piece of paper and this eggplant...no, not an plant with eggs on it, an eggplant!...and drop 'em from the highest heights of the studi--er, Information Center! And...what's this? The eggplant hits first? Well, I guess that disproves that...waidaminnit! That's not just gravity...that's air resistance! Because the piece of paper was so flat, air resistance was able to hold it up, and slow down its descent! Think about it. Without air resistance, you couldn't go skydiving, because your parachute wouldn't work! But, if we roll that piece of paper into a ball, we'll find that it hits the ground at the same time as the egg plant...and not make near as big a mess!
Volcanoes: Colleen Kaner of Stowe, Vermont, wants to know all about volcanoes! VOLCANOES?!?! RUN FOR THE HILLS! AAAAAAAAAAAAH!!! ...Okay, now that we've worked up a good panic, let's learn about volcanoes, some of the most destructive forces on earth! And we don't know too much about them, because if the earth were an apple...we've only explored the skin of it. Many people once thought that volcanoes started at the core of the earth...but we know now that they start much farther up. In fact, it's pretty close to the crust of the earth! The crust is that outer skin of the earth about 20 miles deep. Under that is a layer of liquid metal called the mantle. Trapped in between some parts of the crust and mantle are little pockets of molten rock called magma, along with a lot of gases that heat up. When the gases heat up, they spread out, and the pressure builds and builds and builds until the magma comes up through a crack in the crust! It can come out in a trickle, or it can spew forth in gigantic fountains of lava (what magma is called on the surface). Either way, it's called an eruption, and that lava hardens around the eruption to form the mountain of rock known as a volcano. It's sorta like this pie we got at the Vesuvius bakery. The cherry filling is the magma, the pie crust is the earth's crust, and the gases are the gases which build up until the pie erupts! KABOOM!!! Wow...pie really does go on forever! ...eh...
So, where's the biggest volcano on earth? Mauna Loa on the big island...of Hawaii! It's the biggest thing on the island...and even scarier...it's still active! So watch out for the lava flows!
And there it is, the first ever dose of Beak for the masses! And that's it for me today!
...and now, the one you've heard about, the one you've been waiting for! The quarterback of questions, the King Kong of knowledge, the duke of discovery, the giant-est of scientists, the Elvis of experimentation, the B-man himself...ladies and gentlemen, we give you the one and only...
Me! Beakman! And you've just broken into Beakman's World!
...and with that rousing intro (just to please two South Pole penguins who just wanna keep their feet warm), a scientific phenomenon was born. Not since Mr. Wizard has there been such a charismatic, creative, and downright fun teevee scientist. This green-lab-coat-clad man with the hair like that guy from Seinfeld was about to turn the entire edutainment genre on its beak!
This, friends, is the very first episode of Beakman's World, originally aired on a fledgling cable channel called TLC (before it became a secondary home-improvement and style channel) in September of 1992. Yes, it's 15 years ago this month. You can tell this is the pilot episode with a coupla things. 1 is, of course, an introduction. We get introductions of the players (Josie, the pushy but lovely young lab assistant, and Lester, the down on his luck former Shakespearean actor who's forced to don a rat suit and be a literal lab rat), the segments (Beakmania! Try and stump me...if you can), and...the penguins? Two, because of that introduction...Beakmania doesn't get a proper intro (thus, I use the introduction of the show this week). Third...the robotic bumpers are different from what we come to know and love...still robotic, but different robotic. And finally...it's really, really subdued.
However, it is Beakman, and he has questions to answer, so let's break in!
Rain: Our first question comes to us from Alan Baker of Englewood, Colorado. He asks...where does a poodle go after it rains? To the dog house? Oh, wait...puddle. Where does a puddle go after it rains? Well, first we need a puddle. Well, ya shoulda thoughta that before the show...now, a little bottle of water, a bit of dirt (not the dirty dirt, but the clean dirt), and a little bit o' gum later, we have a puddle! Now, where does it go? For that, I need a light...no, a mud light! Now, the mud light is the sun...and it warms the puddle up. And when the puddle warms up, the water evaporates. It disappears, right? Uhm, no, because...EVERYTHING GOES SOMEWHERE! Just 'cuz you can't see the water as a gas doesn't mean it's not there! It's just water vapor, and it's rising up into the atmosphere. When it gets up there, it's cool enough that it condenses back into liquid water...very little drops that can stay suspended in the air. When this happens, it's called a cloud. That big white fluffy cloud is full of little drops of water called droplets. Those big gray clouds are full of full drops of water that are about to be too heavy to stay suspended. Thus, they fall down to the earth as rain. The rain falls to the ground, and some of it forms a puddle. That puddle will evaporate when the sun comes out, going up into the air as water vapor, condensing into clouds, falls back as rain, and so on, and so on, and so on. This is called the water cycle, and it, of course, is a pretty important part of nature!
Beakmania!!!: You wheel, I'll deal! Now, let's peel! Question: What's the most remarkable fish? Answer: Well, that's subject to interpretation, but the plaice fish is pretty remarkable. It can change its coloring to match the patterns of stuff around it. It's so good at this, it can even take the pattern of a black and white checkerboard! Question: Which bird lays the biggest egg? Answer: The ostrich...which can lay eggs so big it could feed 12 people! Question: How many hamburgers can you get from a cow? Answer: None...that's where the milk comes from! But a single head of cattle provides enough ground beef for about 400 quarter pounders. Question: How much ice is there on Antarctica? ...Herb's letter, no doubt...Answer: There's enough ice at the South Pole to raise the water level of the oceans 200 feet, and bury a quarter of the land in water.
Question: Is it true that all things fall at the same rate? Answer: Well, let's find out...and say hey to the first famous dead guy, Galileo! The man who invented the make-far-away-things-look-closer-thingy. Of course, it's better known today as the telescope. And, he proved by getting up on a leaning tower that two things will fall at the same rate, regardless of their weight! To prove it, let's take this piece of paper and this eggplant...no, not an plant with eggs on it, an eggplant!...and drop 'em from the highest heights of the studi--er, Information Center! And...what's this? The eggplant hits first? Well, I guess that disproves that...waidaminnit! That's not just gravity...that's air resistance! Because the piece of paper was so flat, air resistance was able to hold it up, and slow down its descent! Think about it. Without air resistance, you couldn't go skydiving, because your parachute wouldn't work! But, if we roll that piece of paper into a ball, we'll find that it hits the ground at the same time as the egg plant...and not make near as big a mess!
Volcanoes: Colleen Kaner of Stowe, Vermont, wants to know all about volcanoes! VOLCANOES?!?! RUN FOR THE HILLS! AAAAAAAAAAAAH!!! ...Okay, now that we've worked up a good panic, let's learn about volcanoes, some of the most destructive forces on earth! And we don't know too much about them, because if the earth were an apple...we've only explored the skin of it. Many people once thought that volcanoes started at the core of the earth...but we know now that they start much farther up. In fact, it's pretty close to the crust of the earth! The crust is that outer skin of the earth about 20 miles deep. Under that is a layer of liquid metal called the mantle. Trapped in between some parts of the crust and mantle are little pockets of molten rock called magma, along with a lot of gases that heat up. When the gases heat up, they spread out, and the pressure builds and builds and builds until the magma comes up through a crack in the crust! It can come out in a trickle, or it can spew forth in gigantic fountains of lava (what magma is called on the surface). Either way, it's called an eruption, and that lava hardens around the eruption to form the mountain of rock known as a volcano. It's sorta like this pie we got at the Vesuvius bakery. The cherry filling is the magma, the pie crust is the earth's crust, and the gases are the gases which build up until the pie erupts! KABOOM!!! Wow...pie really does go on forever! ...eh...
So, where's the biggest volcano on earth? Mauna Loa on the big island...of Hawaii! It's the biggest thing on the island...and even scarier...it's still active! So watch out for the lava flows!
And there it is, the first ever dose of Beak for the masses! And that's it for me today!