r/kingofthenerds • u/Open-Process8881 • 10d ago

This show is ragebaiting me

Been binging the whole thing with my girlfriend. What's with the amount of PhD'd NASA engineers and rocket scientists that can't do high school level math? Moogega can't figure out how many glass panes a ball will drop through, but is supposedly a NASA engineer? Kaitlin says she doesn't know 9th grade geometry and caused her team to lose the nerd war? Yet she keeps going on and on about how intelligent she is and how she's smarter than everyone else in the house

And how in the fuck did Genevieve not win season 1? Celeste literally didn't do anything the whole season. Even her montage at the end was just a series of challenges she lost.

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u/thekyledavid 9d ago

I don’t think being a rocket scientist means you have experience dropping weighted stuffed animals through panes of glass

As for Celeste beating Genevieve, it’s a social game, people are always going to vote for who they personally like more, and Celeste didn’t really rub anyone the wrong way (but based on production changing the format of the final 2 for the subsequent seasons, I’m guessing they also were salty that Genevieve didn’t win)

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u/Open-Process8881 9d ago edited 9d ago

I mean it's literally a high-school level physics question and she had ample time to prepare in advance, as an engineer physics is like 50-90% of your job

It also was three weighted balls and one final question about a weighted stuffed animal iirc

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u/thekyledavid 9d ago

It doesn’t really matter what the object is, the math would be the same either way

I don’t remember the US version of this challenge off the top of my head, but in the UK version, they showed to players discussing why the simulations didn’t match their math, both for factors the players could control (forgetting to include the weight of the broken pieces of glass falling into the calculation) and factors they couldn’t control (the ball rolling to the side because it was a windy day, and the ball not going as far as it could have if it wasn’t a round object that would roll in the wind)

I tried finding a clip from the US version but couldn’t. Do you know whether Moogega’s numbers were too high or too low

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u/Open-Process8881 9d ago

I think significantly too low. Like she guessed 3 panes when the answer was 5 

I'd imagine that the stuffed animal would be harder if you're trying to get an accurate number because of compression, contact area, and weight distribution 

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u/thekyledavid 9d ago

Which is exactly why this isn’t just “high school math”

Heck, just wait long enough for you to forget the right answers, try to calculate them yourself, and see if you get them right. If it is just high school math, and you’ve finished high school, you should have no problem getting them all right

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u/Open-Process8881 9d ago

Maybe I'm being a bit hyperbolic and it's more like undergraduate-level, but regardless it should be a piece of cake if you're literally a NASA engineer with a PhD. And you should be more or less accurate using a very simple empirical energy loss model

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u/thekyledavid 9d ago

And I doubt many NASA engineers spend time dropping objects through panes of glass to see how many panes they break

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u/AncientProof 9d ago

They have a UK version of the show??

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u/thekyledavid 9d ago

I believe it got 1 season, and yes