One of my favorite events of the year is the Mecca of nerdery, San Diego Comic Con. According to some estimates, eleventy billion geeks (actually, closer to 150,000) converge on the town every July to talk and hear from people involved in creating their favorite TV shows, movies, books, and comics. It’s a seriously huge event.
At the 2012 SDCC, I was very excited to have my friends Chris Hardwick (from Nerdist) and astronomer Neil Tyson ask me to be on a live video version of Neil’s popular radio program “Star Talk”. Also appearing was Gary “Baba Booey” Dell’Abate (from the Howard Stern show), who is a huge gadget nerd. The four of us sat in a booth on the cavernous exhibit floor of the San Diego Convention Center and talked about gizmos—the tech, the science, the silliness. It was a lot of fun, and Hardwick just put the video up:
The video is about 20 minutes long, but we actually talked for over an hour. I hope more of that goes up at some point; Chris had to leave early to go to another event (I think he was meeting up with, seriously, the cast of Doctor Who!) and Gary also had to run, so Neil and I talked astronomy and space tech for a while.
After the interview, Neil’s producer mentioned that some of the cast of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” were signing autographs at a nearby booth and wanted to meet him. Neil asked me to tag along, so we went over and met Brent Spiner, Marina Sirtis, and LeVar Burton. That’s when this happened:
Oh my.
Image credit: Phil Plait
SDCC is always amazing, and last year I had the great pleasure to moderate a panel on the Science of Science Fiction, which is becoming something of a tradition. I have every plan on doing it again this year, and when I do I’ll be sure to let everyone know here on the blog. I hope to meet a lot of BABloggees there!
