The Gaming Den

I'm a crafty warm blooded male just like any other crafty warmblooded male or female who likes to watch things go Kablooeeey in the microwave or likes putting golfballs in a incredibly expensive blender and wondering if it will fuck it up.

But you know what I am not! I am not a god damned simpleton. --- Wait, let me finish before you go shred that statement to pieces.

Wiki, and several other sites such as discovery.com, and I was told brittanica's onlne website (haven't checked it out, so this could be a completely ludicrous statement) have been using Mythbuster episodes as proof to support things such as this:

"Wiki on Lava Lamps" wrote: In 2004, Phillip Quinn, a 24-year-old of Kent, Washington, was killed during an attempt to heat up a lava lamp on his kitchen stove while closely observing it from only a few feet away. The heat from the stove built up pressure in the lamp until it exploded, spraying shards of glass with enough force to pierce his chest, with one shard piercing his heart and causing fatal injuries.[7] The circumstances of his death were later repeated and confirmed in a 2006 episode of the popular science television series Mythbusters. The show also proved that even if shards of glass are not thrown with lethal velocity during such an attempt, the resulting spray of hot liquid from the lamp could easily cause severe burns to anyone nearby. The show also noted that the safety instructions clearly state that lava lamps should not be heated by any source other than the specially-designed bulbs and bases that are provided. [8]

I understand that most of these sites are just trying to provide some info or think that that Mythbusters is a great information source but what the fvck. It's a good entertainment source and they do follow things correctly to a point but they cut corners when they can't do things correctly and they don't do things with a null hypothesis and any of that shiite. It ain't a tested mark.

Mythbusters is at best science journalism. and that isn't a great compliment. I hate science journalism. THey really fvcking get shit wrong when they report things from the source.

It's supposed to be science entertainment but it's treated as actual SCIENCE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! --- Yes, I needed that many exclamation points for that. It might have been mistaken for something else otherwise.

It's fvcked up. THere isn't actual control studies done. It isn't repeated enough times for it to matter.

Not to mention the fact that confirming that it's possible for a lava lamp to kill someone isn't the same as confirming that that did happen.

Well... they don't ever actually state the fact that they're doing bullshit tests with nothing remotely scientific about them. Which probably confuses people into thinking that they do legitimate anything.

I admit that it's entertainment, but I also come down on the XKCD side of things here...

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/unscientific.png

Maxus said what I couldn't only better. And his cartoon said the rest of what he couldn't say that I couldn't say only even better.

Look there is a difference between the encouragement of people to participate in critical thinking that leads to scientific inquiry and being compared on par with the work of a 6-month research experiment that took several more months of research to set up and a few more months after to tabulate the data.

If these two are going to be looked at by the public in the same eye and are being encouraged to do so, it isn't bullshit. I can't call it bullshit. It's sad.

That is my beef.

I hate Mythbusters. Precisely because they're always claiming something can or cannot be done based on some experimentish-like action that's not the same as what they're supposedly trying to copy.

The fact that they're considered a legit source of "proof" is just pathetic.

Mythbusters is fun. And if you listen to the core duo, they readily admit they are not scientists.

And they rate things as 'confirmed, plausible, or...' And if they cannot get verification of a story - like that guy's death, it's merely plausible. Shards of glass generally don't result in death, most certainly not from penetrating your rib cage. But it has happened in the past, as any sort of shrapnel can be dangerous... Ice has pierced people, yet they were unable to duplicate it on the show. It's a range of possibilities.

The show isn't science. But it is testing and exploring the possible - like the airplane on a treadmill thing: Anyone who knew how it worked wondered why it was a question at all, but people who don't know how it works want to see it happen, be tested. And they fulfill that side of science.

On the other hand, knowing a bunch of facts from prior tests and reeling them off by rote isn't science, either. Just because I know a plane's ground speed is irrelevant to its take off - it's air speed that matters - doesn't mean that it's science to come to a conclusion. That's incomplete as well.

I think the show has gotten much better over the years with explaining how things work and making sure that the research and theorizing portions of the scientific method are shown as well.

Science isn't just Test! - it's also Build and Guess. They mostly do the Test! part, and sometimes their lack of rigor comes back and bites them in the ass.

-Crissa

Maj wrote:I hate Mythbusters. Precisely because they're always claiming something can or cannot be done based on some experimentish-like action that's not the same as what they're supposedly trying to copy.

The fact that they're considered a legit source of "proof" is just pathetic.

Indeed. They've even proved themselves wrong on a few counts (such as when they claimed it was impossible to catch an arrow, then on a later episode brought in a guy who did it)

Maj wrote:I hate Mythbusters. Precisely because they're always claiming something can or cannot be done based on some experimentish-like action that's not the same as what they're supposedly trying to copy.

This comes mostly from the fact that they're trying to "prove" negatives, saying what can't happen.

In some cases this stuff is really obscure, like a cell phone causing a fire or explosion at a gas pump. Obviously this isn't going to be a common occurrence, so just testing out the basic situation won't work. The theory basically amounts to trying to create a worst-case scenario and then a ridiculous case scenario to see what might happen. And as far as proving negatives, I'm not really sure what other method you can use.

Caedrus wrote:

Maj wrote:I hate Mythbusters. Precisely because they're always claiming something can or cannot be done based on some experimentish-like action that's not the same as what they're supposedly trying to copy.

The fact that they're considered a legit source of "proof" is just pathetic.

Indeed. They've even proved themselves wrong on a few counts (such as when they claimed it was impossible to catch an arrow, then on a later episode brought in a guy who did it)

In their defense, they were honest enough to change their minds in the face of new data, which is another basic hallmark of the scientific method.

I think a lot of the contempt for the show comes from not realizing how few Americans are really into this idea of testing your theories experimentally (even if not in *the* most rigorous manner). Getting people into the idea that testing things experimentally is good and discarding your conclusion when reality proves it wrong is a step forward.

AW wrote:I think a lot of the contempt for the show comes from not realizing how few Americans are really into this idea of testing your theories experimentally (even if not in *the* most rigorous manner). Getting people into the idea that testing things experimentally is good and discarding your conclusion when reality proves it wrong is a step forward.

There may be some truth in that.

One of my mother's mantras was "go look it up," so my siblings and I were raised with the idea that if you don't know something, you go learn about it so you're not ignorant anymore (this included doing the experiment if necessary). In my husband's family, though, rather than look things up, the parents spouted off made-up BS almost as awesome as Calvin's dad from Calvin & Hobbes. They were of the belief that if you had to look something up, that meant you were stupid. And then there are those people who believe that if you are looking something up, you are just trying to show how superior you are to them.

What's weird to me about the latter two views is that when you watch kids, they want to learn. They like finding out new & cool things. It takes effort to raise them into adults who believe that learning is a put-down. But apparently, Americans have found the way...

I think it's also a response to the American education system.

It really was organized to keep kids out of the way in a shop, when, in the old days, they'd be apprenticed to something--carving buttons or sweeping floors or running errands. Then the economic focus changed, and kids were a liability--especially with those pesky child labor laws which involved the Guv'ment coming in on their high horse and telling business owners that, no, they can't make kids stick their hand into still-running machinery.

So why not have them learn something, right?

The system, as it eventually developed, has a lot of similarities to a prison system. It's keeping them out of the way (albeit during business hours) hours). And the 'wardens' aren't required to have much interaction with the inmates. So the inmates are left to create their own barbaric little society which has harsh rules. One of those rules is that being smart or showing intelligence is bad.

So, that can really reinforce the views inherited from parents.

By the way.

Arrow catching!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-nCbJmjES4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLj8eK814o0

I love that my kids like to watch Mythbusters. Behind the entertaining explosions and Buster getting the shit beat out of him, I think they learn valuable lessons about not always believing what you here, be willing to change your mind in the face of evidence that you're wrong, and the rudiments of "generate a hypothesis then test it" piece of science.

Should it be the only source of their science knowledge? I certainly hope not! But there's definitely lessons available to them beneath the explosions. The show gives me, as a parent, a great springboard into teaching them those things. We can talk about an episode and, for example, get to the point of "admit when you're wrong" or "don't believe everything you read" pretty quickly. And all the while, they're enjoying the learning experience.