Dirty vs. Clean Car: Interesting inconsistency in the results. The premise was that a dirty car's roughened surface would have an effect like golf ball dimples, creating vortices that would let the airflow cling to the surface better and leave a smaller wake in the back, generating less drag. Adam and Jamie made a car super-dirty and got lower mileage instead of higher, calling the myth into question. But when they literally gave the car golf-ball dimples -- first covering it with smooth clay for a control, then cutting dimples out of the clay using an ingenious, simple tool of Jamie's creation -- it got substantially better mileage with the dimples.
I'm wondering if maybe the "Anything worth doing is worth overdoing" philosophy was the problem with the dirt test. Maybe they covered the car so thoroughly in dirt that it was a relatively smooth coating and the vortices weren't formed.
But the success of the dimple effect is intriguing. I wonder if in the future we'll get cars designed with rougher surfaces for better mileage. I doubt it, though. Automakers generally care more about the appearance of good aerodynamics than the often counterintuitive reality. For instance, sportscars are designed to be long and pointy in front and thicker and rounder in the back, even though that's the reverse of the optimal aerodynamic shape (like an airplane wing), because it
looks more streamlined. And since we expect a smoother car to be more streamlined, I doubt bumpy surfaces would catch on.
I'm wondering what other means could be used to give a car a sufficiently rough surface. Maybe covering it in a plastic or nylon netting of some sort?
And I liked Adam's explanation of why the heavier clay-covered car registered the same fuel efficiency as the clean car. During acceleration, it would've had considerably lower efficiency, but while maintaining a constant velocity, it was the same. I guess that's why cars have better mileage on the highway -- more time at steady speed, less accelerating and decelerating.
Hangover myth: The myth is that mixing beer with other drinks will make for a worse hangover than beer alone. Mercifully, Kari's pregnancy means she only refereed this one, but Grant and Tory had to suffer for science. Contrary to the myth, both of them, especially Grant, were less hung over with mixed drinks than straight beer.
I suspect the reason for this is simply that they were trying to limit the variables and ensure that the boys drank the same amount of alcohol on both tests. That may be artificial. I suspect that the reason why mixing drinks is believed to be worse is that hard liquor contains more alcohol than beer, so typically, if you're not trying to limit your alcohol consumption to a fixed figure for the name of science, you'd probably just drink more alcohol in the course of a night if you were mixing beer with hard liquor, and that would give you a worse hangover. So maybe they isolated the wrong variable. Of course, that is testing the letter of the myth, but maybe in this case it's taking it too literally, overlooking an implicit step in the process of causation. It's not just "mixing drinks equals worse hangover," it's "mixing drinks typically equals more alcohol intake which equals worse hangover."
Not that I'd want to see them test it again. Tory's reckless enough when he's sober. Keep getting him drunk like that and he's gonna end up doing himself some real damage.
I'm not sure why mixing drinks would make the hangover any "better" if they still took in the same levels of alci.
That's a good question.
Wikipedia says:
In addition, it is thought that the presence of other alcohols (such as fusel oils), by-products of the alcoholic fermentation also called congeners, exaggerate many of the symptoms (congeners may also be zinc or other metals added primarily to sweet liqueurs to enhance their flavor); this probably accounts for the mitigation of the effects when distilled alcohol, particularly vodka, is consumed instead.
I'm not sure what the hard liquor was that they were drinking, but if it was distilled, it might've had fewer congeners than the beer and thus produced milder symptoms.
And hey -- we just got through a whole episode without anything blowing up! That's a nice change of pace. And nothing was tested to destruction in any other way either. The only things that got smashed were Grant and Tory. What an atypically sedate episode.
what a strange thing to test.
