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."

Comments

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[Fux the Penguin]

I've watched this show several times and I can't wait to see the one about the penny dropped off the skyscraper. I sent them an email, though, and asked them to answer these if they ever get around to it:

• Do you get wetter running or walking in the rain?
  
• Just how dangerous is it to answer the call of nature on the electrified third rail of a train track?
  
• Is cola really able to remove bloodstains and clean rust?

Maybe...

[Asprin]

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.

Re:Maybe...

[stefanlasiewski]

The Amazing Randi, along with Penn and Teller and a host of other illusionists, have actually has done a couple of shows debunking certain quackeries and paranormal happenings.

They mostly focus on psychic tricks and illusions-- showing tricks on how it is to get information on your dead relatives, by using selective questions and special wording, watching for you to react to certain words, etc.

Their philosophy is that it's OK when everyone involved knows that the trick is for entertainment. The line is crossed when people start taking it seriously, and start paying large sums of money for quackery.

Randi has even appeared on some popular kids science shows such as Bill Nye the Science guy where he'll take a horoscope, seperate each sign and the associated "fortune", mix them up, and then paste one sign to an unrelated fortune, so that the sign Aries actually has the fotune for "Taurus", etc.

He then has audience members read the fotunes, and guages their reaction. "Gosh, that fortune sounds just like my brother, who is an Aries", when in fact it's just a fortune from another randomly selected sign. The fortunes are all so generic that they work for just about everyone, at about any point in your life.

This stuff is mostly focused at kids, but it's a great science lesson.

Exploding CD rom drives

[BeatdownGeek]

I didn't see the episode so I'm not sure exactly what this was explaining... If it was talking about CDs exploding in the drive I can vouch for that.

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:

"Open the drive tray and shake the computer until all the bits of CD come out. It should be fine; they're pretty sturdy."

Re:They were almost really buried alive

[Geraden]

I saw this, and was very displeased that they took Jamie's safety so casually. Just a little bit of research would have led them to the concrete vault information.

Shows that even though they take pains to try to ensure realism, even they can mess up sometimes!