I wish more people in general would be OK with being wrong. Noone ever learned something new without knowing they’d been wrong
Just because no one else has said, Adam has been involved in EFF for a long time. EEF Podcast episode with him in it:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/04/podcast-episode-making-hope-adam-savage
Which delights me as he’s more mainstream and so wakes people up to things like the Right To Repair movement.
I miss Mythbusters so much.
It’s amazing to me that Discovery hasn’t tried to bring Mythbusters back. Instead they double down on Ancient Aliens and Pawnstars garbage.
Yeah its a real monkeys paw situation too. Will they be able to catch that same lightning in a jar again without the same cast?
Real Science attracts smart people who want to learn a thing or two about the world, Fake Science attracts the kind of gullible kooks you can sell snake oil and orgonite devices to… and I say this as someone who “wants to believe”
Same reason why scam e-mails and telemarketers intentionally leave big gaping holes in their stories while using dozens of spelling errors. If you’re the kind of person who can notice things like that, you’re too smart to buy what they’re selling.
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Being able to separate your ego and desire to be right from the learning process is such an important skill.
I remember being stubborn, being proved wrong, continuing to be stubborn, and being proved wrong even harder, in front of others.
It’s such a pathetic and embarrassing feeling to be that wrong.
I don’t want to be wrong a moment longer than I need to be.
There’s no shame in being corrected, but there is in holding on to shit ideas.
This is the right attitude more people should have. But all too often, when people are proven wrong, they genuinely believe that it must be the other person/group, because they cannot accept the emotional consequences of being wrong.
I know that I’ve had a hard time learning this because growing up I was never held to account for my actions on an emotional level. It was the 80s and 90s, and adults at that time would either shrug it off, or go straight to the nuclear punishment of corporal punishment. Never once would they sit down and talk to you about why what you did was wrong and how to do it better next time. I, anecdotally, believe that a lot of genx suffer this same way. They simply haven’t learned that there is a better way.
Well, talking to kids and explaining things to them takes time, and it’s basically work. How inconvenient.
Also, you have to know what a better way to handle a situation is. If someone’s the type of person who hits a kid for misbehavior, maybe they don’t know how to do better.
My husband and I are in our mid thirties, and are actively holding off on kids until we feel like we’ve gotten better at managing our emotions. Our parents had kids much earlier, and ended up exercising their emotional dysfunction on small children
I could be completely wrong, but my life experience so far suggests that the best way to get better at something is to put yourself into situations where you have to actually practice the skill. I’ve been fostering cats and kittens for a few years, and I think it has really pushed me to learn how to manage my emotions better.
We’re doing all sorts of things to get better at it 😊
It’s amazing how social norms have changed.
I’ve got a two year old, who drives me absolutely insane sometimes. I think if I grew up in my parents culture, where it was acceptable to smack kids or shout at them, I probably would.
That’s a horrible thing to say, but I’m glad I’m aware of the fact that it’s counter-productive. I’m almost jealous of my child, to know they’ve got someone like me as a father, as opposed to my father.
Or at least use classical conditioning to associate the I’m wrong feeling with the impending new cool facts feeling.
The Elephant and Mice episode was so wild, because if I remember correctly, the elephant didn’t act afraid of the mouse, it acted afraid it would step on and harm the mouse; as if the elephant had a basic understanding and concern for the wellbeing of another creature conspicuously lacking in many human beasts
Yep. Elephants are wonderfully kind creatures. With my very limited understanding of elephant body language, it didn’t look like an ‘oh no, im scared’ it was more ‘oh hey little guy, didn’t see ya there. ill get outta your way.’
Just smart as hell. This video makes me wonder if elephants legit have a sense of humor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VOvEFHDOaU
Animal behavior can be difficult to interpret (and even when descriptions come from experts, I often find myself asking “yeah, but how do we really know that?”), but this looks very close to being like someone who’s known for lighthearted pranks.
I WANT to believe this but I’ve seen too many elephant videos that turned out to be just elephants trained to do a quirky thing for tourists and there’s someone off camera subtly directing them.
Oh my goooooood. This is so delightful, you can almost see the smirk. Thank you for sharing. <3
It’s amazing how intelligent and emotionally mature elephants are. It’s not wonder why people were willing to believe that “Elephants have a moon religion!” line for so long, it seems believable with how often elephants seem to act like chonky humans with a trunk instead of arms.
If we would, we would be all vegan.
This is why most skepticism based programs don’t work, and Mythbusters did.
They didn’t try to be smug about it, they didn’t belittle people who believed in the myths, they never brought religion and politics into it, and the biggest pitfall they avoided: They never pretended that the “science was settled” and that they “already knew everything”, they simply did the research and went where the data took them.
Too many skepticism based programs seem to think the scientific method is running into a church, yelling “FAKE!”, and then running outside to hurl insults at passersby.
Mythbusters didn’t do that, they skipped the dogma and went straight to the science.
Also, most of the myths weren’t “serious”- it wasn’t like they were debunking flat earth or something.
I hate that debunking flat earth is now seen as serious rather than a 5th grade science experiment.
True enough.
I mostly watch that one guy on YT for his dog…
it wasn’t like they were debunking flat earth or something
Though you could do that. And with equipment and a type of experiment that would make sense on their show. The experiment conducted at the very end of the documentary Behind the Curve is perfect. Great big lasers, a simple and easy-to-visualise pass condition. If they had wanted to, they absolutely could have done it.
I mean, yes.
but their myths generally didn’t piss surprisingly large segments of the population off. it was more… the urban legends that gave them an excuse to blow stuff up, shoot stuff, or otherwise crash stuff; all in slow motion.
Sometimes they called stuff busted because they couldn’t personally do it though, even though the myth involved elite athletics. I was pretty stoked when they brought in an actual ninja to test if ninjas can grab arrows out of the air. The guy actually did catch some arrows, which was quite amazing.
Yeah… There are many pitfalls to doing a Skepticism based program, sadly one of the few Mythbusters DIDN’T avoid was “Well I can’t personally do it, so it’s impossible for everyone!”
“Could the DOOM marine actually carry all those weapons while running around?” - Adam and Jamie couldn’t manage it, but they brought in someone who could.
Man i should rewatch the whole thing. I only watched few of the earlier seasons, totally missed this one.
Ha! That was fun.
I thought you were joking till I clicked the link.
Which was ridiculous considering they’re a couple of science nerds with no physical aptitude at all. LOL. They nailed the science stuff though.
I liked the one where they tested it you could stop a sword by slapping your palms together to stop the swing like in ninja movies They actually built a machine with rubber hands to simulate it. Long and short of it … No you can’t
But maybe… JK. The strength required to do that would be inhuman.
Yeah, one that I always think of is the see-saw one where a sky diver’s parachute failed so he aimed for a see-saw with a girl sitting on one end which resulted in the girl launched shot upwards and then landing safely on top of a building.
Their first test used basically a metal plank on a fulcrum and the forces did more to bend the plank than they did to launch the girl and she didn’t get high enough.
Their second attempt used a see-saw that was built using suspension bridge tech to essentially make it instructable, resulting in fatal forces from the launch. At this point, they called it busted.
But I see two unrealistic extremes where reality would exist somewhere in the middle where see-saws are designed to not break easily but not to the point of being indestructible and there might be a sweet spot where the forces are high enough to launch girl several stories up but not high enough that she dies from the forces.
Also, for the bull in a china shop one, I’m guessing that saying resulted from a bull ending up inside a china shop during a running of the bulls event, where stress would be high and there wouldn’t be an easy and obvious path out on the other side, plus maybe a shopkeeper suddenly trying to get it out in a panic. I think that would get the expected result, especially after a few shelves have broken and each step makes more broken sounds.
If you want to accelerate a person to “fly high into the air” speed over a distance of a see saw’s arc is going to kill the person. There is no sweet spot
It doesn’t matter how you run because ALLIGATORS WON’T CHASE YOU.
I used to live in Florida on the edge of a big lake where my landlord had carved out a lagoon that mama gators used to hatch their broods, so there would often be between 50 and 100 little alligators chilling out in my backyard sunning themselves. For fun I would try to sneak up on one of them and poke it on the head just to watch it and all the others scatter into the lagoon. Everybody I told about this thought I was absolutely batshit crazy, but I knew that at the time there had been something like 5 alligator attacks on humans in Florida since the 1940s, always on little children playing in water (I was obviously a little child mentally but physically I was a 200-pound adult man). So I knew I wasn’t risking life or limb doing this. For the record, my sneaking up technique was to stand stock still and only move a step or two towards the gator whenever the wind blew; it seems that the gators just took me for a swaying branch and ignored me.
What made me stop doing this was one day I happened to look down at what I thought was a big log and realized that it was actually the mama gator, about 12’ long from tip to tail and probably 2’ in diameter at her midsection. I was fairly confident that she wouldn’t attack me on land either - but not that confident.
Ive told people this many times, we need to create more room for failure. From school, to jobs, to building businesses, to loans, to health.
If we can try something because if we fail we can try something else, we would find a hell of a lot more to care about in this world.
And the most important thing we would care more about is ourselves
Science and academia, too. There’s way too few papers being published about failed experimemts. “I thought A, so I did B in order to achieve C, but it didn’t work out because of D.” is a very useful result.
Oh is it better to separate school from science and academia. Thank you, noted
I cannot agree enough with this statement and especially love your closing. We definitely don’t tend to be able to take enough time to really care for ourselves and try and fail at new things.
Oh thank you very much
My favorite is the fan mounted to the boat blowing the sail causing the boat to move. I mean there are a shitload more experiments in fun episodes that are far better and more entertaining, but this one is my favorite because it flies in the face of logic. It shouldn’t work. My brain rejects the possibility. But physics and fluid flow work otherwise and I found it pointlessly infuriating only because I’d been unassailable in my confidence that it couldn’t possibly work. Yet there it is with a perfectly logical explanation. I still find it irritating even if I accept the reality of it. (Episode 165 if anyone’s wondering)
That said, I still follow Adam on various platforms. That enthusiasm and joy of discovery is all still there, along with some maturity and some life observations. Literally the only celebrity figure I follow.
It make me really sad when I learned that James and Adam were not friend.
James said their relationship doesn’t really extend beyond the show.
That’s fine and I think its pretty much the perfect example of a solid professional relationship (no need to be buddies or “like a family”) and what greatness can be achieved when you work with same endgame in mind. They may have disagreed plenty but only because they wanted to achieve the best outcomes possible.
While they are not friends, if you follow Adam on youtube, you’ll realize there is a huge amount of mutual respect between the two, even to this day.
My favorite is planes on a treadmill.
Mostly because fans still argue about it and it’s hit the point they had to ban PoaT comments.
Which is insane as it’s not that difficult to understand. When a plane is on the ground, its gear/wheels will roll at ground speed, but the wings provide lift at airspeed.
If the ground is being moved under the plane (as on a treadmill,) the wheels will just roll faster.
Sure they’re not zero friction and some of that needs to be overcome; but this is something encountered on a daily basis all across the world- or rather, the opposite.
If the wind is coming from ahead, its airspeed is increased and the plane needs a lower ground speed to get into the air where if the wind is coming from behind, then they need more.
(This is why carriers set course into the wind when launching jets,)
At no point is ground speed and airspeed necessarily the same (i suppose you could have a calm day, but most days, the wind is blowing at least some.)
Plane on a treadmill always seems so obvious to me. Planes don’t have power connected to their wheels. Put a plane on a dynamometer and crank the engine up as fast as it will go, and the wheels will still not spin. At the same time, water planes use pontoons and are still able to take off just fine.
The question I have is, can a plane take off with a tailwind that matches the speed that the propeller is pushing out.
Which is insane as it’s not that difficult to understand
I found it hard to understand because neither they nor any of the other sources I’ve seen explaining this even attempted to answer what I thought was an incredibly obvious question: at what point does this become true? A stationary aeroplane on a treadmill will obviously move with the treadmill. I assume an aeroplane moving at like 1 km/h still gets pulled backward by the treadmill. At what point does the transition occur, and what does that transition process look like? Why can’t a treadmill prevent the plane from taking off by pulling it backwards by never letting it start getting forward motion? Where does the lift come from?
I can understand how a treadmill doesn’t stop a plane that’s already moving, but how does it get lift if it is prevented from accelerating from 0 to 1 km/h of ground speed (relative to the real ground—relative to the ground it experiences, it is moving forward at the same speed as the treadmill is moving backward), since until it starts getting lift, airspeed and ground speed are surely effectively equal (wind being too small of a factor)?
The point it occurs at is when the plane uses the air to propel itself.
A stationary aeroplane on a treadmill will obviously move with the treadmill. I assume an aeroplane moving at like 1 km/h still gets pulled backward by the treadmill.
so, every wheel or ball or any other kind of rolling-thing has rolling resistance, which is how we sum up the total drag on the system. A steel ball bearing on a steel plate will have a significantly lower rolling resistance than, say, a steel cube on that same plate. Tires have some- but not a lot- of rolling resistance.
You can see that in a car, just put it into neutral and watch as you slow down, even on flat ground. Plane wheels also have rolling resistance. it’s just the way our world works. But it’s generally ignored because it’s hard to model perfectly and in any case pretty negligible relative to the amount of acceleration being put out by modern aircraft engines.
A treadmill will only push an aircraft or whatever else along, with an acceleration that is equal to, or lower, than the rolling resistance. If you try to accelerate the plane faster, it’ll ‘slip’, and the plane will remain largely stationary- like the dishes in the tablecloth trick (if you want to try that at home… make sure the tablecloth doesn’t have a hem, heh.)
But, keep in mind you’re thinking about the plane relative to either the ground, or the treadmill’s belt.
the plane’s wings and it’s engines are ‘thinking’ about the plane relative to the air it’s moving through. It’s the airspeed that generates the lift, and the engine isn’t coupled to the wheels, they’re just rolling along doing their thing. (aircraft engines work by taking a volume of air and accelerating it. newton’s equal-and-opposite does the rest.)
Oh wow thank you. This is genuinely excellent and immensely helpful. I think this bit:
A treadmill will only push an aircraft or whatever else along, with an acceleration that is equal to, or lower, than the rolling resistance. If you try to accelerate the plane faster, it’ll ‘slip’
As well as this video that I found where a pilot explains how under specific but unrealistic conditions you could construct a treadmill that does indeed prevent an aeroplane from taking off,
Really helped solidify my understanding of the problem. So you end up with a situation where the wheels are going to be slipping, just like the slippage created when your hand pushes a toy car on a treadmill.
Thanks!
So, another way to think about it is with Kites.
The air flows around it the same way it would any other kind of aircraft, though they have effectively zero ground speed.
They do differ in that, being tethered, they’re pulled through the air, with the wind providing the energy to stay up.
But they’re still moving through the air, and the airfoils are inducing drag to convert some of that energy into lift.
In both cases, the important speed is relative to the air, not the ground and not the treadmill. The wheels might impart some drag while they’re on the ground, but they’re never going to impart enough to overpower the engines- 747s typically take off at about 75% of their rated take off power, which means a longer take off roll, but less wear and tear.
The key insight is that the force a plane uses to move is independent of the ground, because planes push on the air, not the ground.
Imagine you put a ball on a treadmill and turn it on, what happens? The ball starts to spin and move with the treadmill. Now take your hand and push the ball backwards against the motion of the treadmill, and the ball easily moves in that direction. The force your hand put on the ball is exactly what planes do, since they push on something other than the ground (the treadmill) they have no problem moving, no matter how fast the treadmill is moving.
Plane on a treadmill is really interesting because if you understand how planes work its so obvious what will happen you don’t need to test it. Planes move on the ground by running their engines, which push against the air, the wheels provide zero motive force. It’s also why planes need tugs to move away from the gate, you can’t run the engines in reverse. Planes are not cars, but people tend to assume the thing they don’t understand works like the thing they do understand, and refuse to believe their hasty assumption is wrong even when told directly their hasty assumption is wrong.
You actually can run the engines in reverse. They have thrust reversers. There’s very good reasons that they do not reverse the plane from the stand using the engines, but it is possible.
my criticism of PoaT actually has to do with the scale model they used to prove it.
scale aircraft have ridiculous power-to-weight ratios
but that’s just me being a stickler.
I miss Mythbusters. These days, the closest thing is Maker youtube channels like Failed Mythbuster Allen Pan, Simone Gertz, William Osman, StyroPyro, ElectroBoom, Stuff Made Here.
Sometimes there’s a twitch stream of random mythbusters episodes. It’s so fun.
I wish they came back :/
I still wanted them to see how much dynamite it would take to remove a dead whale.
