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Busting the MythBusters' Yawn Experiment
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.'"
Hey, they're teaching kids to go out and prove things for themselves rather than believe them off the bat, and that's never a bad thing.
Not if you're a Creationist parent.
What exactly does this have to do with the conversation at hand?
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
Discovery the main channel is often full of this sort of stuff, but "Discovery" is actually a collection of channels. Not everyone gets all the channels, but there is also Discovery Science, Discovery Health, and the Military Channel (formerly Discovery Wings, but sadly people just weren't interested enough in general aviation so they focused on military stuff instead). Might be a few more too (I think Discovery may own The Learning Channel, but I'm not sure).
I'm not much into surgery shows, but there is a lot of that stuff on Discovery Health. Discovery Science I do indeed like a lot. All sorts of interesting shows on there, particularly on Tuesday nights which is their "space night", where all they show is astronomy related shows.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain