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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.
From the summary, it sounds like these guys are a step removed from Jackass. But seriously, when are they going to deal with the myth that Java "is just as efficient as C++ these days"
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
Don't get me wrong, I love watching them, I just prefer to keep that squishy feeling in my heart that they really love us, and the interview they did here helped that along, with this pushing it further.
do.what.promptcmds
I have relatives in the US who recently told me about the lack of quality on the Discovery Channel. I recall watching very good shows on it around a decade or so ago. True to their name, they focused on content that most traditional channels wouldn't bother to touch.
However, what I've been hearing now is that the Discovery Channel is moving away from their specialty programming, more towards content that will appeal to a wider range of people. This change does being a decrease in quality, according to my cousins.
I think I know what they mean. Shows like American Chopper and American HotRod, which I have watched over here in the UK, are more like soap operas than educational, enlightening shows. The two or three minutes of engineering in each episode is overshadowed by 57 minutes of workplace drama and commercials.
While a show like Mythbusters isn't as bad, it still lacks the quality that previous shows on the Discovery Channel had. None of the hosts have much engineering or scientific experience, and it shows. Even watching just one episode, one will hear numerous factually incorrect statements (especially when it comes to chemistry or physics). Perhaps it is entertaining, but educational it is not.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I'm not sure, but I think the water torture myth has something to do with watching a Sports Illustrated swimsuit shoot and not getting to touch...
I've seen 3 of the 5 episodes that you've described, I'll describe what I can remember from them.
Water Torture - Chineese water torture myth. Basically the idea that if you restrain someone to a chair and constantly drip water at a slow rate (1-2 drops per second or so) it'll cause them to crack. It's an elegant torture in that all it requires is time, it's easy to set up, and you don't need an interrogator to administer it, and it's insidious in that nobody would expect that a little harmless dripping would cause to to break. They did show that the torture was effective against the myth crew in about an hour or 2, though you have to wonder how a hardened navy seal might react differently.
Otter Ping Pong - They were testing the myth that you could raise a sunken ship by pumping thousands of ping pong balls into the hull. During the myth, an otter swam down to the hull and stole a ping pong ball and started playing with it, which caused everyone to worry that it might choke on it if it tried to swallow it. The myth was eventually proved successful.
Cement Build Up - They tested the myth that the inside of a cement mixer could be cleaned of all the dried cement build up that accumulates on the inside of the drum during normal use by exploding a stick of dynamite in the drum, a much more efficient method than the usual method of having to chissel the surface by hand. The clip in the video showed a snafu that occured with the first truck when they accidentally filled it up with cement rather than just having enough for a thin coat. It lead up to a spectacular event where they blew up the enture truck with 850 pounds of TNT.
God I just love watching that cement truck explode!
If you've never seen it - dont miss it! - It's at the very end of the video
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I actually watched the water torture one, by chance. It refers to the so-called chinese water drop - a person is immobilized, and drops of water drop on the same spot on their forehead, at a rate of one drop every 2 seconds or so.
They tested it on Kari... since there's no physical torture (other than being restrained), and they were obviously going to let her go when she had enough, it's not much of an issue showing it on TV.
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If these episodes are so lost how come I have seen them all on TV?
Shit, son. This sounds like a job for the MythBusters! They could test the validity of the myth that these videos have been seen on TV before.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
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.
I thought the Plywood flight myth was concerning a man who claimed to have been blown off the roof of a building under construction (several stories high) while holding onto a sheet of plywood. As the myth goes he managed to use the plywood as a sort of parachute and floated down to the ground unharmed. The Mythbusters apprentices did the actual leg-work in breaking the myth and found that the force against the wood was too much to handle and the board continually fell out of their hands. (they set-up some rig where one of the guys held onto the board, with an anemometer and such to test various forces) They failed to take into account the sheer determination a man falling to his potential death would have in holding onto his life-saving device.
The unexamined life is not worth living
Cyric, you are terribly off base! These guys are professionals who have a huge amount of hands on experience in material science. And these guys are doing a great job of introducing the basics of expiremental method to a wide audience. Is it perfect? Of course not. But you are comparing apples and oranges. While I would certainly appreciate some in depth programs on paricular aspects of science, just becuase Mythbusters is not this, does not make it worthless. I usually watch TV to relax. If I wanted a textbook education in physics I'd take a college course, not watch Mythbusters. While the information gained from the show may often be trivial, there are nontheless a great many useful tidbits to be gained from watching. Anf these guys are funny too!
:T:R:A:N:S:
Forget Otter Ping-Ping - I want to know if Thai beaver really can shoot ping-pong balls! I knew a girl with a half-thai beaver, but I could never convince her to give it a shot, so clearly this is a job for mythbusters!
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Science in its most basic form is a system of acquiring knowledge, based on experimentation to find truth.
The mythbusters discuss the theory of the myth & then generate a hypothesis weather it is plausible or not, then conduct an experiment to find out weather their hypothesis is correct.
What is not science about that???
It may be basic science, but its still science.
From what I have seen it is getting a lot of people interested in science so that has to be good doesn't it.
As it happens, she was pretty freaked out by it, which neither she nor anyone else was really expecting. It was very unpleasant to watch, I found. :(
When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl
The cement truck was the most disappointing one in a long time. Everyone who has ever even seen explosives in action knows that you drill a hole in the material (the cemet block in this case) and drop the TNT down the hole before detonating it. They just hung a stick of dynamite above the cemet, and gave up when it didn't do anything.
Before Mythbusters, I've never wanted to reach through my TV and smack people for being so stupid. With Mythbusters, it's a regular occurance. It almost seems like they go out of their way to make their tests complete nonsense.
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With ping pong balls, you don't have to worry about the thousands of microcracks in the hull which would allow regular air to seep through. You only have to secure the hull so that there aren't any cracks bigger than 10 or 15 millimeters, since the pingpong balls make it so that you basically have air "molecules" that are ping pong ball sized and won't escape at any tiny hole.
It's not great science, but a lot of it isn't half bad. Besides which, they're usually testing fairly simple myths to see if they're plausible or not. Some stuff, like "could you raise a boat with ping-pong balls" they do. Scientific or not, that's a good, solid result. It's possible. It's really the busted myths that may or may not be accurate. To give them credit, I usually hear them say things like "for this to work you'd need this, this, this, and this to happen, and that's incredibly unlikely" or "we couldn't build a jetpack, so an average joe probably couldn't either." As for scientific or engineering background, they may not be certified or educated, but they certainly do alright. Their solutions are usually simple, and they typically work. Look at the rig they used to get those ping-pong balls down to the boat. Design me something cheaper, faster, and easier, if you can.
Also, a lot of the time they call in experts. I think that's a pretty good lesson to be teaching people, about both science and life.
When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl
In the last clip, where they were testing aperson sailing from a height using a plywood sheet, at the very end when they were trying to persuade Christine to be the third guinea pig -- I mean test pilot, you could see the show's producer push her one last time to take the leap. I think she was kidding about asking for a raise, but they abruptly cut away thereafter.
Coincidence that she's no longer seen on the show? I think not!
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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!
People keep complaining about how unscientific Mythbusters is, and I often see problems with their experiments, but personally I just like the creative ways they use their special effects skills to build test cases. It's just fun to watch, and it makes me wonder about the actual myths.
Mr. Wizard always bugged me, because it was targeted toward children as actual scientific experiments, but it was really obvious even when I was young that they just took existing facts then had these kids do rigged and generally flawed experiments to demonstrate them.
There was one that I still remember from when I was young where he had a kid test whether vision or hearing was more sensitive. They had the kid match a tone using a generator that had 1000 different tones, and was off by one. Then they had her match a shade of blue out of a range of a hundred cards. Again, she was off by one. Since 1/1000 is more exact than 1/100, obviously hearing was more sensitive.
I got really upset about that one and went huffing off to tell my mother how they didn't use an equivalent sample set or use the same gradation of sound/light frequency between the two experiments (not in so many words, of course). The way Mr Wizard told the kid that the results demonstrated her hearing was more sensitive than her vision really irked me and turned me off the show completely.
At least with the Mythbusters there's that general sense of "Huh, well this seemed to work," and they're open to retesting a theory if people call them on it. Personally I think incorrect conclusions and an open, experimental mindset are better science than established facts and weighted demonstrations. For kids these days, it's easy to look up information, but the inquisitiveness and cleverness in experimentation they demonstrate is a lot more compelling to young minds.
[insert witty quote here]
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.