Why Bill Prady?

[Zygar]

His Big Bang Theory seemed more nerdy and less skeptical. What's his skeptical cred like?

[LadyMitris]

I love The Big Bang Theory. It's my favorite show.

You may want to take a look at these posts:

http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=3698334&postcount=84

http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=3719551&postcount=85

I've always assumed that Sheldon was a skeptic. I could be wrong, but I particularly liked this dialouge from "The Bath Item Gift Hypothesis":

Penny: Hey Sheldon, are you and Leonard putting up a Christmas tress?
Sheldon Cooper: No, because we don't celebrate the ancient pagan festival of Saturnalia.
Penny: Saturnalia?
Howard Wolowitz: Gather round, kids, it's time for Sheldon's beloved Christmas special.
Sheldon Cooper: In the pre-Christian era, as the winter solstice approached and the plants died, pagans brought evergreen boughs into their homes as an act of sympathetic magic, intended to guard the life essences of the plants until spring. This custom was later appropriated by Northern Europeans and eventually it becomes the so-called Christmas tree.

[xenubane]

I've always assumed that Sheldon was a skeptic. I could be wrong, but I particularly liked this dialouge from "The Bath Item Gift Hypothesis":

Penny: Hey Sheldon, are you and Leonard putting up a Christmas tress?
Sheldon Cooper: No, because we don't celebrate the ancient pagan festival of Saturnalia.
Penny: Saturnalia?
Howard Wolowitz: Gather round, kids, it's time for Sheldon's beloved Christmas special.
Sheldon Cooper: In the pre-Christian era, as the winter solstice approached and the plants died, pagans brought evergreen boughs into their homes as an act of sympathetic magic, intended to guard the life essences of the plants until spring. This custom was later appropriated by Northern Europeans and eventually it becomes the so-called Christmas tree.

I loved the part at the end when Sheldon gets an autograph from Lenard Nemoy lol

[The Bad Astronomer]

Bill was my decision. I saw him at Comic Con, where he was on a panel (hosted by Adam Savage) with the rest of the cast, and he was fantastic. Personable, funny, and very much one of us: a geek, a nerd, a science junkie. I want TAM to be more than *just* skepticism; I think it can be broadened to include science in general and science popularism in specific. We've had many straight science speakers, and a lot of them have done a lot of work popularizing science. I think Bill has gone along way to doing that... which is also why Jennifer Ouellette is speaking too.

[Miss_Kitt]

Is this the point in time where I draw boos by pointing out that, technically, Saturnalia was a Roman festival? And that evergreen boughs were a tradition added after the Roman holiday (and its successor, Sol Invictus) were filtered out into the barbarian reaches of northern Europe...Saturnalia was a great party, and did contribute to the traditions of the emerging Christmas holiday; but unless you're using the word "pagan" in the sense of non-Christian--rather that in the sense of animist beliefs without a formal religious structure, temples, etc.--it wasn't a pagan holiday. It was a formal Roman religious holiday, specifically celebrating Saturn.

Moments like are why I can't watch TV... Miss Kitt

[Cavemonster]

Gotta say, a lot of that show seems dedicated to making fun of Aspergers syndrome.

But, checking out IMDB, the dude did some writing for the Muppets, which is just about as cool as you can get in my book.

[UnrepentantSinner]

.--it wasn't a pagan holiday.

For modern definitions of Pagan. ;) To the early and midieval-Christians, all non-Christian religions other than Judaism were pagan. If you look where Sheldon references "Northern Europeans" he's differentiating the Norse from the Roman pagans.