What in the world is wrong with me

[GamerExpress]

Do you need a silencer if you are going to shoot a mime?

If you tied buttered toast to the back of a cat and dropped it from a height, what would happen?

 

[bandana163]

The snowman always kills with a chainsaw.

 

[geno]

Little bo-peep rode her llamah to new heights last wednesday

 

[NiKeFiDO]

buttered toast on cat?

 

[RandomFool]

Originally posted by: NiKeFiDO
buttered toast on cat?

butter toast has been proven to always land with the buttered side down

 

[FoBoT]

Originally posted by: RandomFool

Originally posted by: NiKeFiDO
buttered toast on cat?

butter toast has been proven to always land with the buttered side down

myth busters did that one

Episode 28: Is Yawning Contagious?
Using a specially fabricated chamber complete with two-way mirror and a hidden camera, Kari, Scottie and Tory set out to see whether a yawn, like a cold, truly can be caught. Next on the docket: Does toast really fall buttered-side down? Jamie and Adam are on the case, each building a rig to simulate toast being dropped from the dining room table. Finally, the whole team tests the myth that a toy car can beat a real car (in this case, a Dodge Viper) in a gravity slope race.
premiere: March 9, 2005

http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/technology/mythbusters-toast

However, when they drop the toast from a two-story building (27'5") and find that the dry toast side X lands up 26 out of 48 drops (54%) and the buttered side X lands up 29 out of 48 drops (60%), Jamie posits that the 6% discrepancy is because he could see that the buttered side had a concave impression, and like a leaf, the convex non-buttered side tended to fall face down. Adam concludes, "if you really want to ensure, in general, you're toast landing buttered side up or down, we can tell you, you should butter with a good vigor and that the resultant bowl will make your toast generally fall butter side up." However, though he "generally" qualified his statement, strictly speaking, it is not statistically supported and when Jamie is offering a mechanism for a perceived statistical finding, he is premature. (However, if he is offering a simple observation, that's all it is.)

In this case, the null hypothesis is that the difference between the dry 54% and the buttered 60% is just due to chance. (Or, if we were to repeat the experiment, it's probable that a similar skew would happen.) The alternate theory is that there is some causal mechanism (i.e. the bowl shaped impression) that affects the outcome. If we can show that there is a low probability of repeating the experiment and observing a similar significance of difference (6%), that implies support for the alternative hypothesis. Unfortunately, neither test alone is statistically significant. For example, the probability of getting 29 out of 48 drops buttered side up even on a fair coin is 8.5 %.

z = (observed - expected) / StandardError
z = (29 - 24) / Sqrt(48)*Sqrt(.5*.5) = 1.445
=> P = 8.5%

The random chance of getting 26 buttered side up his 27%.

The probability that the difference between getting 26 in the "dry" control case, and 29 in the buttered case also is 27% and not significant.

z = (observed - expected) / StandardErrorofDifference
z= ((60%-54%) - 0%) / Sqrt((SEdry)^2 + (SEbuttered)^2)
z=6% / Sqrt(7.19^2 + 7.07^2)% = .5950
=> P = 27%

 

[MX2]

Bah...both thoughts are stolen. You know you didnt come up with those on your own.

 

[RandomFool]

Originally posted by: FoBoT

Originally posted by: RandomFool

Originally posted by: NiKeFiDO
buttered toast on cat?

butter toast has been proven to always land with the buttered side down

myth busters did that one

Episode 28: Is Yawning Contagious?
Using a specially fabricated chamber complete with two-way mirror and a hidden camera, Kari, Scottie and Tory set out to see whether a yawn, like a cold, truly can be caught. Next on the docket: Does toast really fall buttered-side down? Jamie and Adam are on the case, each building a rig to simulate toast being dropped from the dining room table. Finally, the whole team tests the myth that a toy car can beat a real car (in this case, a Dodge Viper) in a gravity slope race.
premiere: March 9, 2005

http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/technology/mythbusters-toast

However, when they drop the toast from a two-story building (27'5") and find that the dry toast side X lands up 26 out of 48 drops (54%) and the buttered side X lands up 29 out of 48 drops (60%), Jamie posits that the 6% discrepancy is because he could see that the buttered side had a concave impression, and like a leaf, the convex non-buttered side tended to fall face down. Adam concludes, "if you really want to ensure, in general, you're toast landing buttered side up or down, we can tell you, you should butter with a good vigor and that the resultant bowl will make your toast generally fall butter side up." However, though he "generally" qualified his statement, strictly speaking, it is not statistically supported and when Jamie is offering a mechanism for a perceived statistical finding, he is premature. (However, if he is offering a simple observation, that's all it is.)

In this case, the null hypothesis is that the difference between the dry 54% and the buttered 60% is just due to chance. (Or, if we were to repeat the experiment, it's probable that a similar skew would happen.) The alternate theory is that there is some causal mechanism (i.e. the bowl shaped impression) that affects the outcome. If we can show that there is a low probability of repeating the experiment and observing a similar significance of difference (6%), that implies support for the alternative hypothesis. Unfortunately, neither test alone is statistically significant. For example, the probability of getting 29 out of 48 drops buttered side up even on a fair coin is 8.5 %.

z = (observed - expected) / StandardError
z = (29 - 24) / Sqrt(48)*Sqrt(.5*.5) = 1.445
=> P = 8.5%

The random chance of getting 26 buttered side up his 27%.

The probability that the difference between getting 26 in the "dry" control case, and 29 in the buttered case also is 27% and not significant.

z = (observed - expected) / StandardErrorofDifference
z= ((60%-54%) - 0%) / Sqrt((SEdry)^2 + (SEbuttered)^2)
z=6% / Sqrt(7.19^2 + 7.07^2)% = .5950
=> P = 27%

whoa! so maybe not...

 

[wasserkool]

yoooooo buddddyyy...watcha u smoking man??? wanna share with the rest of us??

must be some really powerful shyte

 

[FoBoT]

yeah, basically the side toast lands on is random 50-50

unless someone is willing to reproduce the type of tests the myth busters did but on a scale large enough to be statistically accuarate. i am not sure how large that is, but my wild guess is that since political polls always use 3000-5000 people, you need to test about that same amount of toasts to get a large enough sample

 

[Anubis]

Originally posted by: RandomFool

Originally posted by: NiKeFiDO
buttered toast on cat?

butter toast has been proven to always land with the buttered side down

you missed that joke didnt you, it involved putting buttered toast on a cat because cats always land on their fee and wheterver the arguement for the toast was, it would make the cat hover

 

[HumblePie]

LOL, the whole idea with the buttered toast is that the butter is suppose to make 1 side "weigh" more then the other. It does in a way, but it also changes the fulcrum as well which makes the toast balanced again. Unless you significantly change the shape of the bread to change the fulcrum in a different way, like making it concave/convex on one side or another, then it's still a 50/50 chance that it will land heads or tails.

Think of it this way. If you have a quarter it has a 50/50 chance of being heads or tails right? Now, superglue another quarter so that it looks like you have one quarter twice as thick with both a tails and heads end (the glued part is heads of one quarter glued to the tails of the other). This isn't changing the fulcrum, just making it fatter. So, which side will it land on more often now that the quarter is twice as thick? answer, neither, it's still 50/50. Same thing with buttering toast, you are only making the toast thicker. The fulcrum of revolution when it falls through the air hasn't changed at all.


The reason why this myth started is because of the standard height of a table, and the fact that most people lay buttered toast with butter side up. Why is that significant? Well when you push toast off the edge of a table, it rarely has time to complete a full revolution. It always gets halfway before hitting the ground. If it was buttered side up, and only turns halfway on the fall down, then it will be butter side down.

 

[GamerExpress]

Originally posted by: Anubis

Originally posted by: RandomFool

Originally posted by: NiKeFiDO
buttered toast on cat?

butter toast has been proven to always land with the buttered side down

you missed that joke didnt you, it involved putting buttered toast on a cat because cats always land on their fee and wheterver the arguement for the toast was, it would make the cat hover

exactly my good man.

 

[MichaelD]

Yeargh!

 

[Juice Box]

Originally posted by: GamerExpress

Originally posted by: Anubis

Originally posted by: RandomFool

Originally posted by: NiKeFiDO
buttered toast on cat?

butter toast has been proven to always land with the buttered side down

you missed that joke didnt you, it involved putting buttered toast on a cat because cats always land on their fee and wheterver the arguement for the toast was, it would make the cat hover

exactly my good man.

there were plans on using these hovering cats to construct some sort of hovering monorail system IIRC

 

[GamerExpress]

Originally posted by: Juice Box

Originally posted by: GamerExpress

Originally posted by: Anubis

Originally posted by: RandomFool

Originally posted by: NiKeFiDO
buttered toast on cat?

butter toast has been proven to always land with the buttered side down

you missed that joke didnt you, it involved putting buttered toast on a cat because cats always land on their fee and wheterver the arguement for the toast was, it would make the cat hover

exactly my good man.

there were plans on using these hovering cats to construct some sort of hovering monorail system IIRC

Pics?