The **** hitting the fan: Not a pleasant subject, but I guess a reasonable thing to test -- and thank goodness they devised a hygienic substitute for the real thing so that I didn't have to avert my eyes or squint for too much of the segment. They dragged it out too long, though. The principle of the idiom was confirmed pretty much right away, so it was too nitpicky to insist on the parameter of universal coverage.
The landmark event here, though, is that for once, Jamie actually failed to keep his white shirt clean.
Cold feet: Worst. Myth. Ever. Who would've thought a myth about excrement would be the more palatable one? This one was stupid from the word go. "Getting cold feet" is clearly a metaphor if there ever was one. My assumption was that it referred to testing the water with a foot, finding it too cold, and changing your mind about going for a swim. The etymology sites suggest a different origin, though. It seems to have first been used in German in the context of someone backing out of a card game because he had cold feet, i.e. was broke and had lousy (or no) shoes. Or it could refer to soldiers using frostbitten feet as an excuse to get out of battle.
In any case, it's absurdly literal-minded to assume the saying refers to a belief that people's feet actually grow cold in response to fear. And the way they defined the parameters of the test was just bizarre. It's not about your feet getting cold while you're experiencing something terrifying. It's about backing out of something before you get into it because you've had second thoughts. It's fear, yes, but it's an anticipatory fear, not a fear of something in progress.
So the method they used -- subjecting each member of the Junior Mythbusters to their worst fear -- was pointless and sadistic. They were being cruel to each other for no legitimate reason.
Worse, their methodology completely sucked. They had no controls of any kind, nothing to compare their results against. They measured whether the foot temperature dropped during the test, but didn't do any comparisons or controls to let them assess why that was happening. They made noises about it being because of the fight-or-flight response taking blood away from the extremities, but they didn't test that by measuring whether the hands got colder too. And who's to say that Kari's and Grant's feet didn't get colder over the course of the test simply because they were barefoot? Those sensors were measuring skin temperature, not internal temperature, or else those readings in the 80s and 70s would've been fatal. Tory was barefoot in an enclosed cockpit, without a lot of places for his body heat to escape, but Grant and Kari were in a big open shop with a concrete floor beneath their feet. They should've done a control to see what happened to their foot temperature without the Fear Factor stuff, just with them calmly sitting barefoot in the same conditions for a while.
So all in all, nothing about this was handled right, and the results were deeply unpleasant. In fact, one could rightly say this whole episode was full of... well, you know.
The landmark event here, though, is that for once, Jamie actually failed to keep his white shirt clean.
Cold feet: Worst. Myth. Ever. Who would've thought a myth about excrement would be the more palatable one? This one was stupid from the word go. "Getting cold feet" is clearly a metaphor if there ever was one. My assumption was that it referred to testing the water with a foot, finding it too cold, and changing your mind about going for a swim. The etymology sites suggest a different origin, though. It seems to have first been used in German in the context of someone backing out of a card game because he had cold feet, i.e. was broke and had lousy (or no) shoes. Or it could refer to soldiers using frostbitten feet as an excuse to get out of battle.
In any case, it's absurdly literal-minded to assume the saying refers to a belief that people's feet actually grow cold in response to fear. And the way they defined the parameters of the test was just bizarre. It's not about your feet getting cold while you're experiencing something terrifying. It's about backing out of something before you get into it because you've had second thoughts. It's fear, yes, but it's an anticipatory fear, not a fear of something in progress.
So the method they used -- subjecting each member of the Junior Mythbusters to their worst fear -- was pointless and sadistic. They were being cruel to each other for no legitimate reason.
Worse, their methodology completely sucked. They had no controls of any kind, nothing to compare their results against. They measured whether the foot temperature dropped during the test, but didn't do any comparisons or controls to let them assess why that was happening. They made noises about it being because of the fight-or-flight response taking blood away from the extremities, but they didn't test that by measuring whether the hands got colder too. And who's to say that Kari's and Grant's feet didn't get colder over the course of the test simply because they were barefoot? Those sensors were measuring skin temperature, not internal temperature, or else those readings in the 80s and 70s would've been fatal. Tory was barefoot in an enclosed cockpit, without a lot of places for his body heat to escape, but Grant and Kari were in a big open shop with a concrete floor beneath their feet. They should've done a control to see what happened to their foot temperature without the Fear Factor stuff, just with them calmly sitting barefoot in the same conditions for a while.
So all in all, nothing about this was handled right, and the results were deeply unpleasant. In fact, one could rightly say this whole episode was full of... well, you know.
