From Wikipedia:
Mythbusters: "No Pain, No Gain"
- Thread starter Trekker4747
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For Mythbusters the "season" pretty much lasts all year long on and off. It's also possible there more episodes after next week's and just aren't listed yet. (I encounterd the same thing towards the end of last year.)
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I find Kari very cute in that hat.
Feh episode. Not much I want to really say about anything. Just that I'm dubious on the "cussing" thing as I fail to see how saying a "curse word" over a "normal word" would matter. I would think just venting one's anger in one way or another, no matter what they say, would be enough. I also want to say that being so strict the height of the tank is probably being a bit too precise to things. Whomever originated the story didn't have scales or other equipment around him to determine the height and could've just pulled a number out of the air. That the tank got 80 or so feet in the air should've been enough to say that someone might say "Hey! It got to 100 feet!"
^^ I was just happy they didn't give it BUSTED for the distance. They've been such sticklers on those details where people are being anecdotal, "50 feet", "100 feet", whatever.
Tory and Jamie go the distance for pain, no surprise. However, any myth I could reproduce in my home right now with about five minutes prep is not very compelling.
Did the swearing thing prove that swearing increases tolerance or repeated exposure? I'm pretty sure they all swore after first doing it with silly words.
Oh yeah, and Kari was cute in the hat.
Tory and Jamie go the distance for pain, no surprise. However, any myth I could reproduce in my home right now with about five minutes prep is not very compelling.
Did the swearing thing prove that swearing increases tolerance or repeated exposure? I'm pretty sure they all swore after first doing it with silly words.
Oh yeah, and Kari was cute in the hat.
Pain myths: An interesting set of experiments, though it hit a little close to home, since I'm in pretty severe pain lately thanks to sinus inflammation compressing a nerve.
I'd heard both the "X can tolerate more pain than Y" myths before, although I think what I read about redheads is that they're more sensitive to pain, not that they can't endure it as long. So they may have tested the wrong thing. The pain expert said that a couple of the tests, the capsaicin and electrical tests, I think, were for measuring sensitivity to pain, so maybe they should've tried those on the gingers vs. a control group of blondes and brunettes.
Okay, here we go:
So they definitely tested the wrong myth. It's not about endurance. True, one might think that being more sensitive to pain might reduce one's endurance; but, being pretty pain-sensitive myself, I've often thought that you get used to it after a while and thus learn to endure it longer. (I'm certainly finding that true of the nerve pain I've been in for the past few days. It's still quite unpleasant, but I've learned to roll with it and just keep doing what I'm doing. Still, I'm going to the doctor about it tomorrow.)
I wonder why they didn't use Kari for the redhead myth. Is her hair color not natural? (I'm refraining from the obvious wisecrack out of respect.)
The swearing result was interesting, and I liked Adam's "swear guard" gizmo, and his reason for it wasn't something that would've occurred to me.
Apparently it isn't. There's something special psychologically about curse words. They engage different parts of the brain than normal vocabulary. To wit:
So yes, the expression of anger is cathartic, but it does make a difference which words you use to express it. Swear words are more directly associated with intense emotion, neurologically and contextually. So they're a more effective trigger for the release of that emotion than neutral words would be.
At the very least, consider that in the control tests, the subjects must surely have wanted to curse (as Tory illustrated), but were holding themselves back. That inhibition would've made it harder to release their stress.
Propane tank rocket: A variation on myths they've done before, but it's interesting to see the difference made by the type of tank used. I suspect the rounder shape of the tank may have made it harder to concentrate the forces in a vertical direction and made it more likely to burst in all directions. Also, apparently the design of the valve doesn't let them just guillotine it off like Adam and Jamie did with the compressed air tank, or else I figure they would've tried that.
Grant's idea about using a mostly empty tank was a good one, and it got them the results they were looking for, mostly. And the explosions looked pretty interesting in slow motion. Speaking of which, cute touch with the action-movie slow motion and speed ramping with the gang running away from the burning shed. But why did they do it that way? Why not rig some kind of remote ignition system they could set off from the bunker?
There might've been some nearby landmark -- a tall building, a tree -- that let them estimate the height. And it's pretty easy to tell the difference between 60 feet and 150, which is 2.5 times greater. That means it's unlikely that someone who saw a tank go 60 feet up would call it 150 feet, unless they were terrible at eyeball estimates.
On the other hand, the tank certainly flew pretty far sideways. If, by some fluke, it had stayed vertical longer, maybe it could've made it. They did give this one a "Plausible" finding, after all.
I'd heard both the "X can tolerate more pain than Y" myths before, although I think what I read about redheads is that they're more sensitive to pain, not that they can't endure it as long. So they may have tested the wrong thing. The pain expert said that a couple of the tests, the capsaicin and electrical tests, I think, were for measuring sensitivity to pain, so maybe they should've tried those on the gingers vs. a control group of blondes and brunettes.
Okay, here we go:
So they definitely tested the wrong myth. It's not about endurance. True, one might think that being more sensitive to pain might reduce one's endurance; but, being pretty pain-sensitive myself, I've often thought that you get used to it after a while and thus learn to endure it longer. (I'm certainly finding that true of the nerve pain I've been in for the past few days. It's still quite unpleasant, but I've learned to roll with it and just keep doing what I'm doing. Still, I'm going to the doctor about it tomorrow.)
I wonder why they didn't use Kari for the redhead myth. Is her hair color not natural? (I'm refraining from the obvious wisecrack out of respect.)
The swearing result was interesting, and I liked Adam's "swear guard" gizmo, and his reason for it wasn't something that would've occurred to me.
Apparently it isn't. There's something special psychologically about curse words. They engage different parts of the brain than normal vocabulary. To wit:
So yes, the expression of anger is cathartic, but it does make a difference which words you use to express it. Swear words are more directly associated with intense emotion, neurologically and contextually. So they're a more effective trigger for the release of that emotion than neutral words would be.
At the very least, consider that in the control tests, the subjects must surely have wanted to curse (as Tory illustrated), but were holding themselves back. That inhibition would've made it harder to release their stress.
Propane tank rocket: A variation on myths they've done before, but it's interesting to see the difference made by the type of tank used. I suspect the rounder shape of the tank may have made it harder to concentrate the forces in a vertical direction and made it more likely to burst in all directions. Also, apparently the design of the valve doesn't let them just guillotine it off like Adam and Jamie did with the compressed air tank, or else I figure they would've tried that.
Grant's idea about using a mostly empty tank was a good one, and it got them the results they were looking for, mostly. And the explosions looked pretty interesting in slow motion. Speaking of which, cute touch with the action-movie slow motion and speed ramping with the gang running away from the burning shed. But why did they do it that way? Why not rig some kind of remote ignition system they could set off from the bunker?
There might've been some nearby landmark -- a tall building, a tree -- that let them estimate the height. And it's pretty easy to tell the difference between 60 feet and 150, which is 2.5 times greater. That means it's unlikely that someone who saw a tank go 60 feet up would call it 150 feet, unless they were terrible at eyeball estimates.
On the other hand, the tank certainly flew pretty far sideways. If, by some fluke, it had stayed vertical longer, maybe it could've made it. They did give this one a "Plausible" finding, after all.
"The axiom is 'do no harm', I can cause all the pain I want." 
sorry about the double post, I messed up my edit attempt
Of course, they probably could have just asked the researchers about the effects on men and women and the like. I'd hope they'd have tried that at some point.
Of course, they probably could have just asked the researchers about the effects on men and women and the like. I'd hope they'd have tried that at some point.
Or they could have used something simpler but just as effective, and a lot more fun. Like a whip, for instance.
I'm sure they did, but this isn't a show about the hosts asking other people about their experiments, it's a show about the hosts performing the experiments themselves. Even when they already know the actual answer according to science, they still put it to the test because that's how the show demonstrates the idea to the audience. And it's how the show fills an hour of airtime.
^^ Yeah, I know, I'm still disappointed by sticking people's arms in ice water.
I do wonder what the complete times were, they said some people went the distance, I wonder how much averages were affected by a couple of wimps or not.
I do wonder what the complete times were, they said some people went the distance, I wonder how much averages were affected by a couple of wimps or not.
^Well, that's why you want a large sample size, so that a few outliers don't skew the results unduly. The swearing test used only five test subjects, so Grant's outlier result, an improvement of something like 68%, bumped up the average by a fair degree. But with 25 subjects in each of the other groups, the statistical impact of a few outliers wouldn't be as great and the results would be more reliable.
I have a big issue with the men vs women results. They saw the averages of 100 seconds to 84 and just said it was confirmed but didn't seem to run any statistical calculations to determine whether that difference was statistically significant.
They don't show every single step of the process onscreen, particularly in the US version where it's further edited down because of commercials. I think past evidence shows that these guys know their math well enough to know how to calculate a standard deviation, and if the difference had been too small to be statistically meaningful, they probably would've said so.
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