Busting the MythBusters' Yawn Experiment 397
markmcb writes "Most everyone knows and loves the MythBusters, two guys who attempt to set the story straight on things people just take for granted. Well, maybe everyone except Brandon Hansen, who has offered them a taste of their own medicine as he busts the MythBusters' improper use of statistics in their experiment to determine whether yawning is contagious. While the article maintains that the contagion of yawns is still a possibility, Hansen is clearly giving the MythBusters no credit for proving such a claim, 'not with a correlation coefficient of .045835.'"
Mythbusters is not scientific (Score:5, Interesting)
Sometimes they don't things more than once (even when required), other times they don't adequately recreate the conditions of the "myth."
The show is entertaining as hell, and sometimes they do conclusively prove things.
Yawning *is* contagious (Score:4, Interesting)
-Ted
Re:well... truthfully... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Science (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course that's not to say there isn't room for more demanding science shows on television, and you cite a good example, because whether TV forces you to think or not is purely down to the quality of the programming. There is a serious issue in terms of the bias TV has towards undemanding entertainment, but where should the blame lie? Ultimately the people behind these stations are trying to make money, and they do that by giving people what they want (or what they think they want). We've created a monster.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes it fucking well is a bad thing when they don't teach you how to do it. They're teaching skepticism but then they're teaching hillbilly scientific practice instead of logic and the scientific method. The result is you get a bunch of kids who are rude, and think they know everything just because they can provide a counter-argument backed up with nothing but the shoddiest proof. That is very much a bad thing.
The Mythbusters basically piss on the scientific method in every show, drawing wild conclusions from a single lll thought out experiment, often with no controls (or weak ones), and often testing a single instance or brand and then generalising for all of that type of product.
Another poster put it correctly. People watch because they blow shit up, which is fine as far as entertainment goes. However no other show presents bad pseudo-science as science and fucks up the minds of kids who then think they understand science, when at best they understand skepticism.
Every time I've said this here I've been modded down but fuck it, it needs to be said.
Re:well... truthfully... (Score:2, Interesting)
While I was in NZ I had some pretty big rifles (not a
But as others have said. If you watch for science then you are the fool. But it would be nice if they didn't claim to be so accurate (implied anyway.)
Re:Well... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's only a good thing if they're first taught how to think critically and how to prove things. Too much of people "going out and proving things for themselves" involves three steps;
1/ Whoah! This is very complicated! It would take years of study to fully understand it.
2/ Screw that, I'm just going to apply my in depth knowledge of what looks right, and what seems to me to be common sense. That'll do just as well, be a whole lot easier and won't involve me admitting I'm out of my depth.
3/ My conclusion are in, can be summed up in one easy paragraph, and are just as valid as the guys who've spent 30 years studying the subject.
Re:Not quite, OmniNerd (Score:3, Interesting)
That doesn't mean that the Ministers are running around getting under-age girls pregnant, but rather that during the drought people turned to "simple pleasures" and sought spiritual easing of their hardships. Often a high correlation implies nothing about causation, but rather that two statistics are simply measuring the same thing.
The other thing I taught my students was that in most cases, Fischer's r is simply a tool used to apply for grant money, and should be regarded as an exploratory tool unless you're damn sure that you have a solid experimental design.
Re:well... truthfully... (Score:3, Interesting)
Now consider the increased impact on a bullet the higher the velocity. It isn't difficult to understand that the faster the bullet is traveling, the greater the damage to the bullet. Further common sense would tell us that the shape of the bullet would matter too. The sharper the point in the end, the better it should be able to enter the water without damage.
Scientifically, it's all about viscosity. Water has a high enough viscosity so that at great speeds it can be frighteningly destructive. You can cut through steel plates with a stream of water thin enough and at a high enough velocity. Bullets hitting water is the reverse scenario, but the ability to do damage is still the same, it just isn't concentrated like it would be with a stream of water.
Re:TV is entertainment, not science (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Well... (Score:5, Interesting)
At the very least, scientific TV shows encourage people to learn more about science and the scientific method.
Carl Sagan taught me more about science with his Cosmos series (that has stuck with me) than any government school ever did. When I heard about this search engine named "Google" back on Slashdot so many years ago, I can still remember thinking back to the Cosmos episode where Sagan was talking about large numbers, like googol and googolplex. To see him try to roll out a piece of paper not with a googolplex of numbers on it, but merely the standard notation of googolplex (1 followed by a googol zeroes), it sticks with you. And on the smaller scale, to watch him place a drop of oil on a lake, and come back an hour later to explain that the entire surface of the lake now had a microscopic layer of oil across the entire surface. Or to demonstrate Einstein's theories of gravity with a stretchy sheet of material and some heavy balls of different sizes. Or demonstrating the 4th dimension by showing a "shadow" of a 4th dimensional item as a 3 dimensional item, much as we can see the shadow of a 3 dimensional item drawn on paper. I haven't seen Cosmos in a decade, and can still remember things he talked about.
This is something government schools rarely ever do, unless you happen to be assigned to the one-in-a-million inspirational teacher.
Another example -- planet earth, now running on Discovery HD Theatre. An absolutely stunning piece of scientifically interesting video.