The Official a2k Mythbusters' Adoration Society

@tsarstepan,

Weird thing, asians usually look younger than europeans, I'v been told that is' due to higher lvls of skin grease.

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Stupid fuckin' show.

@Setanta,

You have to appreciate their simple, yet effective ways ofcollecting and analyzing data. Obviously they have a fixation with bowing stuff up "real good", but if it proves a point (or disproves the proverb) .
I think its creative. Course there are a number of newer shows that take mythbusters and go a few steps further.

May the Giants choke

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I started to lose interest after Willie Mays went back to New York, although i was glad to see him on the "Miracle Mets."

While "he blowed up, he blowed up real good" is a laudable form of entertainment, they often make pronouncements based on shoddy or out of scale experiments. The thing about splinter damage from cannon was a good example. They used nine pounders as an example. For whatever one may allege about the armament of pirate ships (and they usually relied on boardig, not gun fire), warships used nine pounders for bow or stern chasers--the intent was to disable the ship so that one could catch it or get away from it. The standard armament of frigates were 12, 18 or 24 pounders--and the splinter damage they could do was certainly greater than a nine pounder could do. The standard armament of line of battle ships (fourth rate and above) were 24, 32 or even 48 pounder, 32 pound being the most common. A 32 pound solid shot hitting a 26" oak hull could easily produce lethal splinters.

They also did a bullshit show on Archimedes defensive devices to protect Syracuse from the Romans. That show made me wary of them. The one about splinter damage lead me to believe that they are mostly full of ****, and don't know what the hell they're on about most of the time.

Nevertheless, long live "he blowed up, he blowed up real good!"

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the redhead was on Opie & Anthony yesterday, i've never seen the show (MB) but the interview was pretty good, she's pretty cool, and apparently very pretty in person

Tsar, you can get the interview on Audible if your interested, i'm not sure the rest of the show will be to your liking though

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@djjd62,

O&A also had one of the ice road truckers guys on yesterday

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@Setanta,

They test existing myths and they use physics ,I dont think that the veracity of the history is ever the point. Ive only seen them nmake minor mistakes and those were mostly to bring the audience along.(Like the time they were testing whether centripital force coulld make a childs swing go around the entire carriage.
If the archimedes show was about the Mirrors starting a fire" they did arrive at the formula for a parabola by trial and error.(They focused the mirrors onto a single point and were able to measure the additive photo energy and then(i believe) Grant calculated the focus and did arrive at Snells law (although theyd idnt use the term.

I think that this show is the best way to teach kids some concepts of physics. (Whenever they create a cannon, they always calculate the force s involved by using their Rube Goldberg instruments. ANy kid, with an interest in physics would do well to watch the show and then he or she could understand the process by which experimentation goes forward. Lotsa times you dont have a clear idea what to do so you start with just measuring velocities and distances and overpressures.

Ya gotta be able to become a kid when you watch the show. I always like the series of shows where they "got it wrong" where serious scientists write in and remind them that they failed to account for major forces. SO, they often do the whole thing over again. Thats the way science often works.

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@farmerman,

I can see that aspect of it, and i'll bet it is popular with kids. But often they simply have problems of scale. Making a model of Da Vinci's devices, for example, doesn't take into account the problem that his devices would not have functioned if built full size with the materials technology available in his day. (I'm not saying they did that--i saw someone on television doing that, but i don't know if it were them or not.)

But for kids, and for demonstration of experimental methods? Yeah, i could see that.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

I can see that aspect of it, and i'll bet it is popular with kids. But often they simply have problems of scale. Making a model of Da Vinci's devices, for example, doesn't take into account the problem that his devices would not have functioned if built full size with the materials technology available in his day. (I'm not saying they did that--i saw someone on television doing that, but i don't know if it were them or not.)

But for kids, and for demonstration of experimental methods? Yeah, i could see that.

They usually limit themselves to the devices and materials available at the time. The other day I saw one for a 'civil-war era rocket,' in which they only used stuff that was freely available back then. Sometimes that's pretty frustrating for them.

I think that the show has become a LOT better since they decided to move to a 'we will get a result' formula. If a myth doesn't do what it's supposed to, they try and figure out what WOULD do it - so whenever they are trying to blow stuff up, there's always an explosion at the end, even if they have to set off a brick of C4 to do it. Makes for better endings for the show, less letdowns when they simply fail.

Some of their experiments, the physics are simple but it's baffling in real-life to see, such as the strength of two interlaced phone books - you can't pull them apart with trucks!

Cycloptichorn

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@Cycloptichorn,

Yeah, but i was talking about scale. You can build Da Vinci's tank, for example, in a scale model, and it's just hunnky-dory. But try building it to a size which would accomodate men and horses, and it's too heavy to work, and so heavy it would destroy itself.

I didn't see the one about rockets--i don't watch it any longer. But as for rockets in the 19th century, they must not have done their research. The Brits fought the Indians of Mysore in the early 19th century, and the Indians used rockets against them. So some joker named Congreve in England worked on the design, and the Brits used Congreve rockets by land and by sea for quite a while thereafter, beginning with the Second Coalition war with Napoleon. They fell into disuse, though, as infantry weapons got more accurate at longer ranges, and the nickel finally dropped for the opponents of Napoleon and they began making and using more effective field artillery. But rockets in the 19th century? That ought to have been a no brainer.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

Yeah, but i was talking about scale. You can build Da Vinci's tank, for example, in a scale model, and it's just hunnky-dory. But try building it to a size which would accommodate men and horses, and it's too heavy to work, and so heavy it would destroy itself.

Yah, they usually go for small-scale experiments in the lab (just to see if it's viable) and then a full-scale one later in the show. And often the small-scale works and the larger one just doesn't, for the reason you say here.

Quote:

I didn't see the one about rockets--i don't watch it any longer. But as for rockets in the 19th century, they must not have done their research. The Brits fought the Indians of Mysore in the early 19th century, and the Indians used rockets against them. So some joker named Congreve in England worked on the design, and the Brits used Congreve rockets by land and by sea for quite a while thereafter, beginning with the Second Coalition war with Napoleon. They fell into disuse, though, as infantry weapons got more accurate at longer ranges, and the nickel finally dropped for the opponents of Napoleon and they began making and using more effective field artillery. But rockets in the 19th century? That ought to have been a no brainer.

Sure, but the myth was that a rocket was actually used in the Civil war that went almost 100 miles and killed a guy. They found that the rocket was perfectly likely but the claims of distance were obviously mythical.

I do like the fact that they are generally skeptical - they won't label something 'confirmed' unless it absolutely, totally works. And they use 'plausible' a lot, to say that something MIGHT work, but it's so highly unlikely that the conditions would be exact, they can't quite call it true.

Cycloptichorn

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@farmerman,

farmerman wrote:

I think its creative. Course there are a number of newer shows that take mythbusters and go a few steps further.

Relevant namedropping is allowed in this thread FM.

What shows? Are they any good?

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@tsarstepan,

tsarstepan wrote:

farmerman wrote:

I think its creative. Course there are a number of newer shows that take mythbusters and go a few steps further.

Relevant namedropping is allowed in this thread FM.

What shows? Are they any good?

Nope.

Cycloptichorn

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@djjd62,

djjd62 wrote:

the redhead was on Opie & Anthony yesterday, i've never seen the show (MB) but the interview was pretty good, she's pretty cool, and apparently very pretty in person

Tsar, you can get the interview on Audible if your interested, i'm not sure the rest of the show will be to your liking though

1
Kari Byron? Very Happy

Smart and beautiful and witty and confident and geeky! So dreamy! Very Happy

Thanks DJ. I'll give the interview a listen.

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Quote:

MythBuster Kari Byron Visits PopMech Offices (With Video!)
Fresh off the USA Science and Engineering Festival, MythBuster Kari Byron stopped by the Popular Mechanics offices last week to talk about her new Science Channel show, Head Rush, and told us what we can expect from upcoming episodes of MythBusters, airing Wednesday at 9 pm on the Discovery Channel.

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Makes you kind of bad for Buster's daughter, doesn't it?

Episode 120: Seesaw Saga
Air Date: May 20, 2009
http://mythbustersresults.com/seesaw-saga

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Iyaz Akhtar interviews Mystbusters' great Grant Imahara
http://twit.tv/show/triangulation/121

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