Honestly even two parties would be an improvement over what we currently have.

Some additional social constructs they may be more sentimental about: gifts, allowance, summer vacation, breakfast, lunch, dinner, doors, privacy, the internet.

The real miracle was creating chocolate chip cookies 1,908 years or so before they were invented.

Been a vegetarian for a while, but here’s a hot dog tip from my past:

Stick a skewer down the center, then use a knife and sort of barbershop pole around it. Then deep fry it. Then remove the skewer. You’ll be left with a corkscrew shaped hotdog of unparalleled crispy goodness. Maximum surface area. Nooks and crannies galore.

Though, my ideal hotdog is a classic beef dog on a classic plain bun, with boring old ketchup and mustard. I feel like the quality of the hotdog experience is more about circumstances than execution.

No.

Bach on organ in general, specifically BWV 565 reliably makes me cry. Also Max Reger’s Introduction And Passacaglia In D Minor.

And then on the other end of the spectrum, I once got some really bad news while listening to Pantera, and now I’m afraid to listen to them out of superstition. But that’s not really applicable here I suppose.

It’s so frustrating to watch this regime try to kill the messenger. They are objectively wrong about so much. And get mad at the people who “point it out”. And so attempt to muzzle people who are factually correct. Which even if successful, is just going to mean they know less and less, and are increasingly wrong. Which will make them even madder, and muzzle more. Which will make them wrong even more. And so on. It’s the stupidest feedback loop.

It’s like they can’t drive, and rather than practice and learn, and actually become better drivers, they’re trying to change the roads themselves to accommodate their shortcomings. But they’re still going to be bad at driving no matter how much they change the roads. Meanwhile the roads are getting harder to use for everyone else. It’s only a matter of time until something really important catches fire and emergency services can’t put it out because the roads are all too fucked up.

NYPD has a field office in Kfar Saba. So, possibly more pertinent than it should be.

Fair enough. It still went on for a decade though. At the end of the day, how are you going to say “no” to a cop with an assault rifle?

I’m not so sure. They had plenty of time for stop and frisk:

In 2016, a reported 12,404 stops were made under the stop-and-frisk program. The stop-and-frisk program has previously taken place on a much wider scale. Between 2003 and 2013, over 100,000 stops were made per year, with 685,724 people being stopped at the height of the program in 2011.

The program also became the subject of a racial-profiling controversy. Ninety percent of those stopped in 2017 were African-American or Latino, mostly aged 14–24. By contrast, 54.1% of the population of New York City in 2010 was African-American or Latino; however, 74.4% of individuals arrested overall were of those two racial groups.

Well Oedipus pokes his eyes out with needles, his mom hangs herself, and his father is famously murdered by his son. I don’t know who is supposed to be who in this analogy but it seems promising.

Are you for real, man? Can you really not let this go? Let me break it down for you:

I don’t think Mythbusters should have used human skulls, you disagree. That’s it. It’s that simple.

How about this: you win! You’re very smart and we’re all proud of you. There is nothing wrong with using human bones for entertainment science. Adam and Jamie are real scientists. I was wrong about everything, it just took like 5 replies for me to realize it. I promise to print out your replies so that I can study them by candle light even if my power goes out. Thank you for helping me to understand such a complicated issue.

Now leave me alone.

Hard science is science that uses systematic observation, experiments and sometimes mathematics to get knowledge. In hard science, experiments have to be reproducible (if the experiment is done a second time, it will have to produce the same results as the first time).

https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science

My opinion is that Mythbusters is not science, but science themed entertainment, and as such, does not justify the use of human remains. I further contend that they do not treat the human remains with sufficient dignity, and that their use is disrespectful.

It is also my opinion that you will continue to reply/argue with me until one of three conditions is met: 1. You continue to argue semantics until one of us expires from old age. 2. You whittle me down and I give up. 3. The actual heat death of the universe.

It’s looking like option #2 is the front runner. Because at this point I’d rather get my own skull crushed than to continue going back and forth with you.

The priority on Mythbusters is always entertainment first, not science. It’s not best practices, it’s what is visually appealing. It’s not data driven, it’s shooting schedule. The skulls are not necessary tools, they are props. Adam Savage himself states that the goal is to “replicate the circumstances, then duplicate the results”, or in other words, create a spectical. Which again, is fine, but is not hard science. If you can’t tell the difference between hard science and television I don’t know what to do for you.

But I suspect you understand this already, and are motivated more by the excitement of eliciting a response by adopting a posture of “enlightened” objectivty, blowing the minds of us lesser beings, us superstitious cave dwellers, than by legitimately considering the finer points of profiting off of human remains or the needless destruction therof.

Is the problem that they’re filming it instead of publishing the skull fracture patterns of knapped stone clubs in the journal of archeology?

The problem is that “what happens when a superhuman being with a ring on punches you in the forehead” isn’t exactly an important question to answer.

This really isn’t any worse than, say, seeing how long it takes for human remains to fully liquefy when sealed in plastic and subjected to various conditions (more importantly, the rate at which organs decay while submerged in that soup). Is it worse than melting regions of a body with acid to test a theoretical new skin-grafting technique? Flaying their skin and muscles from the bone then macerating it to a homogeneous mixture to test for microplastic distribution rates in the 35-40 Indonesian Female demographic?

Again, yes. As it is not for science, it is for entertainment. Adam and Jamie are not scientists, they are special effects artists. And they are not conducting experiments, they are staging entertainment. They are not in a lab, they are in a special effects warehouse. They are not publishing their findings to Nature, they are editing them for a television audience. Mythbusters is not hard science, it is science themed entertainment. Which is fine. But these skulls belonged to real people and there is a power dynamic involved in where they come from, and who buys them, and what they’re used for.

I don’t think it’s an “incredibly romantic” position to wonder if it’s disrespectful or scientifically necessary to wrap a human skull in pig skin and then punch it with a robotic fist until it collapses for television.

The key distinction here is your will. The will of these people is unkown. Their consent is unkown. If you’re looking at the skulls for sale on the bone room for example, they don’t even know the specific age of most of the skulls and are forced to guess within a range. If they don’t even know how old they are how can they know with any certainty the circumstances of their death? Where in the world can you just find an unclaimed skull to sell? What are the chances that these skulls aren’t the skulls of poor people, or otherwise disenfranchised people? It doesn’t take much imagination to draw the conclusion that the ethics surrounding the buying and selling of human skulls, and then destroying them for no other reason than the momentary entertainment of of the global 1% is at the very best a grey area.

They do. They even go to a specific shop in one of the episodes: The Bone Room.

The Bone Room was famous - within its niche - around the world. Featured on Mythbusters, as well as having several appearances on local news magazines, written up in articles in local and nationwide publications, and listed in guidebooks, The Bone Room was a destination for travelers and one of the must-see places for locals to bring their visiting friends and relatives.

Yet, I don’t see it posted in these comments yet.

I rewatched Mythbusters recently. It’s pretty disturbing, especially in the early seasons, how often they use actual human remains for what is essentially light entertainment. Like, they’ll destroy an actual human skull for shits and giggles. They had disproved the myth on setting off an airbag with a slim jim and firing it into the head of a would be car jacker, but still had to replicate the results, so just shot a slim jim into an actual human skull, cheering and laughing as it’s decimated. That was an actual person’s skull. How they sourced it, and where the source acquired it, who knows. I’m fairly certain there is a family somewhere though that would be mortified.