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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."
They did do the Cola and bloodstains and rust... turns out it was marginally better than water at cleaning blood, but it cleaned the chrome on a car better than the chrome cleaner product that they had! Very cool show.
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.
Penn and Teller did "Bullshit" to bust open some of those kinds of things. I'd send you a URL, but sho.com refuses to serve pages to those of us outside the US for some reason.
YAW.
Your head of state is a corrupt weasel, I hope you're happy.
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?
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
The problem is some of the "urban myth dispelling" sites are themselves unreliable or have agendas - e.g. snopes.com has a distinctly anti-european bias. Ring-a-ring-a-rosies, at least with the original British lyrics does indeed refer to the plague. Primary historical sources back that up, yet snopes refuses to acknowledge it.
Cecil at Straight Dope (http://www.straightdope.com) has answered these and many other thousands of questions over the past 20-30 years. There is an archive with several hundred questions including the three in the parent.
you do not get any wetter running in the rain rather than walking. They proved this on a British TV science show a few years back by making a group of (volunteer) kids either walk across the school yard or run whilst wearing cotton t-shirts. As it was in England it was of course raining.
At the end of the trip they weighed all of the shirts and there was no difference.
As for urinating on the third rail, at your own risk !! I would not like to try as the third rail here in Budapest is at 6,000 volts.
Ed Almos
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. - Tacitus, 56-120 A.D.