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MythBusters - The Lost Experiments
theLorax writes "From Discovery: "If you like the MythBusters here are some videos they just posted of some of the out takes and things that didn't appear on the show. Cola bits (cleaning things with cola), water torture, otter ping pong, live power lines, cement build up and plywood flight."
Here is the interview we did with these guys in December.
Most of these were shown on TV in an outtakes show they did. I love the show, but don't understand why they are saying these weren't shown before.
They used turned dry wood for the arrow shafts which has grain that is never perfectly parallel to the shaft. Back in the day of Robin Hood they would split straight green wood along the grain to produce the rough shafts and dress them afterwards, resulting in shafts with perfectly parallel wood grain. It can be done (and has been done -- ask at any archery club), just not with the items they used.
Look at the "make fire without matches" episode. Had they not known that millions of Boy Scouts had achieved it already, they would have concluded that making fire by rubbing sticks together is "busted" because they failed at every attempt even when using a power drill to drive the active stick!
For sheer magnitude, that's gotta be one of the coolest ever.
For sheer carnage, my vote still goes to the exploding whale video from the interweb. Nothing like seeing whale blubber rain down
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
They are professional special-effects guys with lots of experience. They are not engineers, they are not scientists, and they very rarely do anything that would be regarded as following the "Scientific Method".
However I'm a huge fan of the show because its bloody entertaining.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
You know, I don't especially know why, but I feel compelled to chime in here. Look, I'm 23. I've got a BA from a liberal northeastern Ivy. I like Battlestar, even if it's a little cheesy sometimes. Jeopardy tickles me too. And I've been loving the History Channel lately. Catching the Lincoln biopic after coming home late this week was probably worth my cable bill in itself--and I pay Manhattan prices for my cable.
Yet I have a Myspace profile. I'm a pretty active user, in fact. And I was raised on shows like Friends and Seinfeld. Nowadays I love catching Project Runway on Bravo--shit, I'll even watch Blind Date if I'm bored. And while I don't watch American Chopper or Mythbusters, I do think it's cool that programs like these are getting people interested in engineering and science at all. Dismissing them because they're "pop" is like lambasting Christopher Pike for not having written Ulysses: surely the point is that kids are reading. The Shakespeare can come later.
I guess I just wanted to point out that this attitude of superiority comes off a little sour. Thumbing your nose at popular culture doesn't make you better than everyone else. Not to single you out--I see this all over Slashdot.