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MythBusters - Who Ya Gonna Call?
An anonymous reader writes "The currently-airing Discovery Channel show MythBusters has been profiled in a Newsweek article. Basically, the show takes two former Hollywood effects designers as they set out to prove or disprove various folklore myths that have come about over the years, such as the actual effect of a poppy-seed bagel on a drug test, or what effect a penny dropped from the Empire State Building observation deck will have on a human at ground level."
Glad to see them get press.
Might not be the best, or most factual show on TV, but it's sure entertaining.
Pretty Pictures!
I wonder if there is any way of "busting" urban myths. Even after I send people to various urban legend sites to combat the more annoying email variety, it seems some people are just credulous or just want a good story to tell. I suspect that the reality of it is irrelevant, and busted or not, the same stories with be with us for a very long time.
Sig under construction since 1998.
They will explore whether or not a webserver can melt as a result of something called "The Slashdot effect".
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
Maybe when they get done debunkning all of the ULs you can find on Snopes, they can turn their crosshairs on huckster quackery such as cell-phone radiation shield stickers, magnet therapy bracelets and all the other crap that shows up on late-night infomercials.
THAT'S what I'd do to improve humanity.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
It's one of my favorite shows. Three thumbs up on the TiVo. For those interested here is a list of some of the topics they covered.
1. coke's ability to remove blood stains/rust/etc
2. do piercing's make you more susceptible to lightening
3. ice bullets (CIA myth)
4. the JADO rocket on the car in the desert
5. the weather balloon lawn chair story
6. running in the rain keeps you drier then walking
7. eel skin wallets erase credit cards
8. smoking on the toliet can kill ya
9. poppy seeds can make you test positive on a drug test
10. peeing on the third rail will kill ya
11. tree canon
12. ways to beat a breathalyzer
13. dropping a hammer in the water before you fall in will break your fall
14. penny off the empire state building
15. exploding cdrom drivers
16. breast implants explode in airplanes
anyway - good show... no answers listed - watch the show to find out.
Vint Cerf told me that Al Gore was in fact the strongest early supporter of making the old ArpaNet into the public utility we call the Internet. Without Gore's technical understanding and power in the U.S. Congress, it would have taken much longer.
For those who can remember back that far, there were many ArpaNet users who did now want the system open to the public. There was intense opposition to making the system open to commercial interests, too. Al Gore was a true visionary, in this case.
"15. exploding cdrom drivers"
That is why I use a special version of WinZip that includes a reinformed titanium shell for my file downloads. You never known when one of these might detonate inside the modem or at the wall phone-plug outlet.
I'm sure glad the RIAA has not discovered exploding files. It could escalate their war against p2p to a new level.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
P.S. - Running in the rain will make you wetter than walking. Just use common sense. You are running right in to the rain from the side, without reducing the amount falling on your head in any way.
"Vint Cerf told me that Al Gore was in fact the strongest early supporter of making the old ArpaNet into the public utility we call the Internet."
Cerf is either wrong, or you are misquoting him. The Internet had been in existence for a few years, under the name of Internet, by the time Gore first got to Congress and got involved in its funding.
He was a visionary in expanding the Internet, but he certainly did not create it (or take the initiative in creating it.
Is it also news to you that Lindbergh did not invent the airplane and Henry Ford did not invent the automobile? Bill Gates did not invent the GUI either, by the way.
of course al gore invented the internet. it's all based on al-gore-ithms, right?
[yes, that sound you hear is indeed millions of slashdotters groaning over a bad pun]
basically, they modified a rifle to fire a penny at about the same speed a penny would be falling at after traveling the 80 or so stories, factoring in updraft and the like. they then took small sections of sidewalk concrete and asphalt, along with a human skull embedded in balistics gel, and then fired the gun at all three multiple times.
oh, you say you want to know what happened during those shots? go find out yourself! you know how to use google, right?
I had a CD explode in the drive before. It apparently had a miniscule crack (in the CD), and I guess when it was spinning in the drive at full speed, the centrifugal force just made it blow apart. Sounded like a gunshot. Scared the crap out of me. I'll never use those crappy generic CD-Rs again.
When I called up Dell support the guy scratched his head at first but then when he talked to other ppl he said a few others had gotten similar calls. His support advice:
Here is the official site for the show. There are a few fan sites that are navigable off of the main site too.
It's quite and entertaining and informative show, and should definately be Tivo'd (since, you know, we're all out on Friday nights).
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
When they checked out the "Buried Alive!" urban legends by burying one in a metal coffin to see how long the air lasted, they didn't have all the information they needed.
The funeral home was happy to sell them a metal coffin but didn't tell them they bury coffins inside a concrete burial vault.
When the Mythbusters dumped several tons of dirt on the coffin with the tester inside the coffin began to collapse from the load.
They never did explain why they had that problem - A modern coffin can't be - and isn't buried by itself.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
I don't know why that myth doesn't go away. He didn't say it. This is the first time I've heard this myth as being as CNN interview. Funny how these stories grow and grow.
17. Profit!!!!
You can buy the DVD here
www.straightdope.com
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
If the Discovery show piqued your interest in busting commonly-held myths, check out www.snopes.com It analyses the truth behind those stories you always hear about Disney putting "SEX" in its movies, Richard Gere becoming involved with a gerbil, and other urban legends.
...the myth that Slashdotters can't get laid.
And more importantly, how are they going to test it?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Do you get wetter walking or running from point A to B in the rain? OK, let's make some key assumptions:
The amount of rain falling is constant and is equal between point A and B. Wind is not a factor. Assume that the rain drops are at critical velocity. You move through the path at a constant velocity.
Now, imagine freezing time - with all of the raindrops fixed in place. The rain that would hit you in 3s is maybe 100 feet up, while the the rain that hits you in 6 sec is 200 feet up. So, you simply convert the amount of time it takes to traverse A to B, and convert that to the vertical distance of the rain drops that would hit you when you get to point B. Then, you can simply use C^2 = A^2 + B^2, where A is the path length and B corresponds to the amount of time (rain height). So minimizing the C, total path length in the rain reduces how wet you get. Even if you moved at near-infinite speed, you would still get wet in the rain, but not as wet as someone who never moved.
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
I've been watching this show for awhile now and I think it's great. It's funny, it's some-what factional, and it's fun. I hope this won't turn into a short-lived series on Discovery, like most of the other primetime shows they air.
Fortress of Insanity
Blogzine
I was suprised to see them having very scientific mind when the first time I watched the show. They usually try different versions of the same experiment, varrying only small parameters to see how that parameter effects the results. Two thumps up !!!!
I've never heard of the show until today, but it sounds cool. I'm especially interesting in the tree cannon, since my roommate made a sort of tree missile using six or seven sticks of dynamite and a ~60 ft doug fir (ahh...to be young and stupid in rural Montana), and I've heard of Survival Research Lab's Pitching Machine which chucks 6 ft long 2x4's up to 800 feet, but a tree cannon sounds like something different. Unfortunately a brief googling didn't seem to turn up anything.
Unfortunately, the tree cannon is not as really exciting as you probably expect. It's a cannon barrel built out of a tree -- not a device that shoots tree trunks some ungodly distance.
The myth says that long ago, some town in Hungary at odds with a neighboring town built a cannon out of a tree overnight to shoot at their enemy; however, when they fired it, the cannon exploded killing half of their own town.
The show involves the guys building a tree cannon and some ammo using nothing but tools available at the time set in the myth. (except they discover the drilling would have taken far longer than a day as told in the story -- they end up using a power drill to speed the process)
Anyway, the cannon ends up working really well, so they declare the story implausable especially considering the impossible one day construction time. As they often do, they then go way overboard in an attempt to make the story true at any cost -- they dump 5lbs of gunpowder in the thing and plug up the end with aluminum and blow it all to hell.
Sorry for revealing the entire "plot", but they show clips throughout the whole thing -- the show isn't exactly unpredictable, but it's great fun to watch! Check it out.
"Actually, although it may have been a misstatement, it is grounded in some truth. Certainly, the internet as we have come to know it did not exist at that time."
So? The internet as we know it did not exist before Spamford Wallace started to spam it. Or before Berners-Lee gave us the WWW. Or before the first banner ad appeared.
No, these guys and Gore influenced the internet after it was created, but none of them created it.
"Then why can't you understand that Al Gore didn't claim to invent the internet"
Actually, he did make this claim. He used the word "Create" which means the same as the word "invent" in this context. And his claim was certainly false, either way.
Just like if you paint a house crimson, you have painted it red. His statement was false: since he had nothing to do with is invention/creation. Check the years. The Internet had been created years before Gore got to congress.
""During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet," Gore said"
Read by a normal person, one with out the word parsing ability of Clinton and/or Karl Rove, that looks like he is taking credit for "creating the Internet".
Many technically oriented people think of the Internet as a technical achievement. Gore thought of it as a political achievement. His achievement was to make it a public utility. This seems obvious now. It wasn't then. At the time, other political leaders were technically clueless.
No. Groundbreaking for the stadium at the Meadowlands (Giants Stadium) was in 1972, and Hoffa disappeared in the summer of '75. By then the stadium was not far from completion; the foundations had been laid long before.
However, the nearby New Jersey Turnpike is paved with concrete, and elevated portions of it are continually being resurfaced to deal with the effects of East Coast winters. Most people I knew when I was growing up in that area who had an opinion on the subject considered the Turnpike to be the most likely resting place for Hoffa.
And the brethren went away edified.
Informative? Yet the post doesn't INFORM the OP of the results? You, moderator, are a pure, unadulterated FUCKHEAD crack smoker.