So what? It was still interesting to see the feat reproduced on TV.
The incident taking place is one thing. What’s really bizarre is that it actually made it on the air. You’d think that someone, somewhere on the team or at Discovery would have said: “Nah, I don’t think we actually need to broadcast that. Let’s re-edit the episode”. Apparently not, though.
They said as much on the episode. They just didn’t reveal that information until the end, since otherwise it would have rendered their tests moot. It is, after all, TV. It’s a fun thing to reproduce, makes for good television, and so long as they pretend like they went into the testing without full knowledge of the realities of the matter, they have the excuse to show you that it can be done, before showing you that it really was done.
There’s a few cases where you can tell that they know what “reality” is, before heading into the myth.
For example, they had a myth that you could shoot a bullet into ice and the bullet would bounce once then land and spin like a top for a few seconds. This seems like a patently absurd myth, and yet after failing to prove it, they decide to wait six months until winter, go up into the mountains, and dig out 6 feet of snow to a frozen lake’s top layer of ice, so that they can test it again. Under the real conditions of the myth, they’re able to reproduce the top-like effect. I highly doubt that they would have gone to the effort unless they had tracked down the original source of the myth and been suitably convinced that it was a real thing.
In another case, they tested the idea that plants could sense what people were thinking and react accordingly, as testable via a polygraph machine. After getting a result which said that plants could do this, they suddenly changed their testing methodology and tried again, this time disproving the myth. It’s fairly clear that, after getting their surprise result, they had consulted with experts to figure out where they had gone wrong.
Usually, they say that they had a hypothesis and a method for testing that hypothesis. More rigorous testing could certainly be done, but it’s perfectly reasonable to display your results so long as you also display your methodology (allowing the viewer/reader to evaluate the results objectively) and so long as you don’t claim that your results are definitive. But in the cases where they know what the reality is, they are willing to go back on that and improve their tests.
For the sake of TV though, they don’t let you know that they’ve confirmed the source, until the end of the show.
I thought Kari saying “Did you see God?” as Adam looked like he wanted to kill them make her look like a c**t. At the very least edit her comment out so she doesnt look so bad.
Also, a lot of people won’t believe something just because someone with a Phd says it. It’s not till something is demonstrated that it becomes intuitively and satisfyingly believable. That’s the whole point of the show.
I don’t mind when they tackle nonmyths, or movie premises and tropes.
I kinda mind when they mangle a concept so they have something to test. Case in point: going over like a lead balloon.
They creatively interpreted the remark to mean a helium balloon where the fabric was lead foil. But that’s not what a “lead balloon” is.
You have a “helium balloon” - a membrane filled with helium.
You have a “hot air balloon” - a membrane filled with hot air.
So you have a “lead balloon” - shouldn’t that be a membrane filled with lead?
Oh, I suppose, if you want to get picky, someone can mention a mylar balloon. That’s a helium balloon that uses aluminized mylar (i.e. plastic) film. In that sense, I guess you could juxtapose that with lead balloon. But to me, that is technically a “mylar helium balloon”.
So is the saying “That went over like a lead helium balloon”? No?
Meh. Okay, we got to see them come up with an origami balloon design and construct it out of lead foil that they had to carefully handle to not get lead all over themselves, and then patch up all the holes with scotch tape. I think we disproved a lead helium balloon right there - they had to make a lead/scotch tape helium balloon.
I was still annoyed by that one.
If you polled a hundred people, a hundred of them would say that their expectation of a lead balloon is a lead envelope filled with a gas. People go based on what makes sense in context, not based on which method of phrasing has the most examples on its side.
You’ve simply over-thought this.
What **Sage Rat **said. What you are saying makes strict logical sense, Irishman, but I’d never thought that a lead balloon was anything other than a lighter-than-air-gas filled balloon with an envelope made of lead, before you pointed out the anomaly.
And then as to rigor…
It’s pretty much compulsory to link to Zombie Feynman at this point.
To me a lead balloon is supposed to be something entirely made of lead—the skin and the filling both. It’s a figure of speech for something that doesn’t have the remotest chance if flying. It’s not a myth. It’s not a movie effect. It’s simply intentional misinterpretation of a figure of speech.
So if they are going to lie about it being a myth, what else are they going to fib to us about?
Speaking for myself as soon as they said it was a “myth” they had me going WTF ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? YOU IDIOT!
I then spent the rest of the episode thinking their research people were dumber than a box of rocks.
Not exactly a way to inspire my confidence in their abilities.
Even Zombie Feynman would agree that if the experiment is flawed the results will be shit.
Too often their experiments are fatally flawed from the start.
You miss ZF’s point. That’s the first thing.
The second thing is that I hear stuff like “fatally flawed” thrown around a hellava lot about MB’s tests, but I am usually distinctly underwhelmed when I hear about these “flaws”. Yes, their tests lack rigor, and yes, they have done some tests which I think were pretty fucked. But most I think are pretty good.
Wow, I guess I’m weird then.
I always thought of a lead balloon as a solid balloon-shaped object made of lead - like an enlarged upside down fishing weight.
/hijack.
Isn’t that pretty much what I said too?
Including most PhDs. To the extent that you should believe what someone with a PhD says, it’s because that person has done tests, and is relaying the results. No tests? No science.
In addition to mylar balloons, there are also latex balloons, the standard. I have no problem with the lead balloon episode. In fact, some of the best episodes have come from the “testing the aphorism” questions, like herding cats.
The two that I can remember being most bugged by were “throws like a girl”, when they were testing if girls throw differently than boys, and they had a sample size of literally ONE for large parts of the test, and one involving building airplanes out of lead foil (might have been in the same episode as lead balloons), in which they measured how far their models glided, but did not throw them forward with the same initial velocity.
THAT level of lack of precision bugs me, but I’m not going to get all shirty and insist that no test ever demonstrates anything at all if it’s not properly fully double blinded and has proven statistical rigor and so forth.
I’m always baffled whenever I read a comment like “episode/myth X pissed me off so much that I quit watching.” Inevitably it’s an episode I particularly enjoyed.
It’s a wildly popular show, yet it still infuriates people. The old Discovery.com MB message boards were basically wall-to-wall “THEY DID IT WRONG!!!” screeching. My favorite was the “plane on a conveyor belt” thread. It was endless pages and pages of “The plane took off so therefore they screwed up the test! Do it again, you IDIOTS, and this time MAKE SURE THE FUCKING PLANE DOESN’T TAKE OFF!!!” Discovery has apparently nuked that board (wisely, I’d say) and replaced it with something more like blog comments, with no threads.
I recall them saying a myth could be real. If a real incident has evolved into myth, it’s still a myth. Lots of people don’t know the real-life origin of the lawn-chair balloon guy. I don’t feel like it was fibbing.
I’m not necessarily infuriated, but it bugs me.
I created a spinoff thread to discuss it, and not distract away from the important discussion about the shape of Kari’s butt. 