Factual question about the show (rather than discussion of the show’s content) to follow, hence GQ.
Anyway, I’ve seen every episode of Mythbusters, and if my memory serves they’ve done exactly one myth that involved children: taking candy from a baby.
There are several myths involving kids/teens/babies that they could test, but for reasons that elude me they don’t.
Is this part of their stated policy of “no-no” myths that they won’t touch? I know that there a few others they refuse to do (namely supernatural/paranormal myths).
Myth Ideas that Involve Testing Babies/Teens/Children
[ul]
[li]That a mother of a newborn infant can recognize her baby (from others) by smell.[/li][li]The red Kool-Aid makes kids hyper.[/li][li]That there is a sound frequency that adults can’t hear and that teens can (and it drives them nuts; hence the use of said frequency by people who don’t want teenagers hanging around their businesses).[/li][/ul]
Well the last one isn’t a myth, it’s a simple fact. Human hearing degrades as we age and we lose sensitivity to high frequencies. The rate varies from person to person of course, but it’s common medical knowledge and I’ve observed it first hand as well.
Yeah, when I took a music theory class in college the professor played a series of tones which got higher and higher and we were to put our hands down once we could no longer hear them. Despite having a super-trained ear, his went down first, and then some of our nontraditional students, and of course us 20 year olds last.
They don’t actually limit themselves to testing “myths” in a strict sense. They test claims of all kinds, events portrayed in movies, things people have heard, or the implications of figures of speech or jokes (“like a bull in a china shop”).
By and large the myths they test do not involve test subjects, but consist of them making things or trying experiments. One reason for this probably is things that require test subjects typically need many test subjects to be statistically valid and hence are more time consuming to film.
Also and perhaps more importantly, nothing blows up so the show ends up much less interesting to watch.
Actually, the first one isn’t in question, either. Moms *do *identify their babies by smell alone, even after a single exposure post-partum. Non-moms can do it to, although they have to hold the unrelated baby a bit longer. Dads, sadly, don’t seem to have the knack (or nose) for it.
But as for the larger question, I have to agree that it’s just out of their scope of practice, so to speak. Where’s the engineering? The building stuff? The blowing up of said stuff at the end? It ain’t Mythbusters without a good 'splosion at the end.
In fact, high frequency hearing loss is an occupational hazard for many musicians, and not just rock bands. It happens among orchestral players, particularly brass players, and those that have to sit in front of them.
Speaking as someone who’s repeatedly skipped reading some responses to posts, and thus, made completely redundant posts as a result, I know where you’re coming from.
Oh yeah, I forgot that one. :smack: I remember getting a big kick out of Scotty making an analogue of the little girl for initial testing; it was a 50-pound sack of sugar onto which she’d painted a face and glued pigtails.
One of the things that’s cool about the show is seeing the team’s methodology, not just the myths. For example, on the Mythbusters message boards every now and then someone will suggest testing supposed deer-repellant whistles that mount to the front of your car. All of the self-righteous griefers on those boards will descend upon the OP like a pack of wild wolves, pointing out with righteous indignation that Consumer Reports had already de-bunked those things.
Except that readers of Consumer Reports don’t get to see the methodology that was used in testing the devices, so it would be a good test for Adam & Jamie to test for two reasons: one, we get to see them bust a myth; and two, we get to see how they do it.
When I taught Anatomy, the introduction to the sense organs started with me assembling a pure wave generator with speaker and switch. I would hide all of the apparatus behind my desk and unbeknown to my students, turn it on when the bell rang. The volume was quite loud.
The students would hear the sound…I had it at 22,000 hertz…and since it was quite piercing, would exclaim, and ask me what the noise was. I would say “what noise” and hold the speaker up to my ear. As I can’t hear anything above 8,000 hertz, it served as a good way to get the focus for the intro. They were young and I was middle aged, say 40s and 50s.
I “loved torturing” my students…and they didn’t seem to mind, actually.
They did do a whole episode on whether a free-falling skydiver hitting a see-saw with a child on the other end would launch the child up to the top of a 7-story building. However, they didn’t use a real child, just Buster’s little sister Ariel (aerial).
She did go up 130’, almost double what the myth called for. But they also determined that the sheer acceleration at the see-saw would’ve killed a human child.
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