R.I.P. Mr. Wizard.

[superluser]

I used to love watching Mr. Wizard as a kid.

Unfortunately, Don Herbert has taken on life's greatest experiment.

Anybody got any good Mr. Wizard stories?

[Netami]

Never heard of the man, hmm... Seems like an old-school Bill Nye.

[bill]

I thought he was already dead.

[Boog]

Man, our children's show hosts are dropping left and right. Sounds like the guy had a good show too. Curse my childhood occurring in the wrong time period!

*removes hat, moment of silence, all that good stuff*

[Zedd]

Ah the man taught me many things, He even taught me how to make cold fusion with mainly things at home!

[Alondro]

Well, 89, that's a pretty good run.  Let's face it, all of us who recall these shows are OLD now too!  And soon the worms will be eating us too... unless we mutate into energy beings... not that I've found out how to do that by sacrificing fae souls...  

Of course, some species of whales can live for nearly 200 years (Yahoo article about harpoon head from circa 1890 found in whale recently slaughtered by evil primitive Alaskans!  Give em smallpox-infected blankets!  )

[Toric]

Oh man, I remember Mr. Wizard. Netami's right, he was an older, quieter Bill Nye the Science Guy. And I've been positive since the Science Guy show first aired that Bill Nye was the man who performed all of the outdoor experiments on the Mr. Wizard show.

Mr. Wizard and Beakman's World were the two shows that gave me my weekly fix of science as a kid. And as awesome as a regular character that's a guy dressed as a lab rat is, Beakman's World didn't hold a candle to Mr. Wizard in my opinion.

[superluser]

Oh man, I remember Mr. Wizard. Netami's right, he was an older, quieter Bill Nye the Science Guy. And I've been positive since the Science Guy show first aired that Bill Nye was the man who performed all of the outdoor experiments on the Mr. Wizard show.

I don't think that Bill Nye had anything to do with Mr. Wizard.

Anyways, Bill Nye tried to make science fun by adding in all sorts of fun stuff on top of the science, whereas Mr. Wizard just did the science, figuring that that would be fun enough.  And it was.

I remember he once did an experiment on suction where he hooked a vacuum up to a long tube and tried to suck liquid from a glass three stories up.  It failed, which was pretty much what he was trying to prove.

[thegayhare]

Odly I remember that one too superluser

[Darkmoon]

I remember that one too. Man, it's been a while since I thought about Mr. Wizard...

FYI, if you wanna talk about potentially long lives, last I had read, Great White Sharks are effectively immortal. Their bodies (including their brains) don't wear down, and they have few natural predators. Only other Great White Sharks.

[Alondro]

I remember that one too. Man, it's been a while since I thought about Mr. Wizard...

FYI, if you wanna talk about potentially long lives, last I had read, Great White Sharks are effectively immortal. Their bodies (including their brains) don't wear down, and they have few natural predators. Only other Great White Sharks.

And if we REALLY want to get down to it, you could say bacteria are immortal because they never really die, they just keep dividing and dividing and mutating and dividing.  Here we see a bacteria after more mutation: 

As far as mammals go, humans had the record for proven, recorded lifespan until it was proven how old whales can be.