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The Mismatched 'MythBusters'
biohack writes "Most fans of the MythBusters would agree that the two hosts of the show, Adam and Jamie, are 'diametrically opposed in every aspect of their lives'. The Christian Science Monitor story about the MythBusters explores the connection between the backgrounds of the hosts (who knew that Jamie had a degree in Russian literature?) and their creative differences on and off camera." From the article: "It took Hyneman a of couple years to feel comfortable talking in front of a camera, let alone to strangers on the street. 'You have to remember that I'm a guy who is happiest in a dark room just thinking,' he says. 'I'm not a sociable person. I don't like to talk.' Savage, on the other hand, is outgoing. They're clearly the Oscar and Felix of myth busting ... 'Jamie is all about total, complete, and utter control. Thinking first and then acting. Adam is about acting first and then thinking.'"
What about Keri. I want to know about my favorite Redhead......
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
If they were both the same, the show would get pretty boring.
Perhaps their opposite personalities are one reason they got gig.
Adam usually does things the long difficult way and it usually ends up in failure. Jamie's plans always seem to work and they are well constructed.
Adam makes the show watchable because his idea's and his personality make it interesting TV, while you have Jamie at the same time showing you the right way to do things.
This combination is what makes good viewing and evenly balanaced between entertainment/humor and education.
I would hate to watch the show with someone who couldn't stand up to Jamie, Adam does this well and thats why the show works so well. If Jamie was allowed complete control everytime, it would be boring.
I guess this busts the myth that they're the same person.
slow news day.
You can really feel the anti-social vibe that Jamie gives off even with a single viewing of the show. His science is stellar, but he sometimes seems to be a little too aloof.
His science is far from "stellar". Often, it's quite poor. One should never watch MythBusters for anything but its entertainment value. More often than not they completely misunderstand and incorrectly describe scientific and engineering concepts that are in reality quite simple.
Their methodologies make many professional product testers and scientists cringe. We can clearly see their mistakes, but those who don't have much scientific training may not. To take their "findings" seriously is a big mistake, but many people do it anyway.
Their show is far more educational and entertaining than most of the shit that is on TV. But the educational value it does provide is quite petty, and often quite bad, as it misinforms the viewer.
Their show is far more educational and entertaining than most of the shit that is on TV. But the educational value it does provide is quite petty, and often quite bad, as it misinforms the viewer.
But all of that is made up for when they blow up cement trucks.
A friend of mine was a PA assistant on the show at one point, and says that they actually do NOT get along very well...
I think a trip to wikipedia should dispell your ignorant view.
n itor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Science_Mo
Would you kindly mod me +1 insightful?
And not just the entertainment side, mind you. The science side also benefits from the mix of personalities.
Some problems require finesse and fine planning. Others require repeated blows with a hammer. I think that's why the producers occasionally pit Adam vs. Jamie on some myth-type task. To see which works best for a given situation: The Thinker, or the X-Factor.
It's a damn good show on a lot of levels, really.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Introvert and extravert are the most common matches. Just like Guardian/Artisan (SJ/SP). This is basic Jung (and MBTI and Keirsey...)
Seriously, this is news?
Have you read my journal today?
As soon as they start building death rays or chicken guns, that's when.
Mythbusters is science, done in a fun way. Ever watch Mr. Wizard or Bill Nye? Or Jearl Walker? That's the schtick these guys are in. Science as fun. You know, so that the next generation of kids will think science is cool and keep making/building/inventing stuff.
Science isn't just a field of study - it's also an establishment. And good PR is part of any successful establishment.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Is it any wonder, then, that Jamie would grow facial hair? It is well known that one reason people grow facial hair is to build a personal "wall" between themselves and the world. Behind this wall, they can smile, frown, grimace, snicker, and otherwise run the emotional gamut without revealing themselves to others.
Cryptonomicon - Charlene vs. Randy
[Insert pithy quote here]
The CSM is generally a high-quality paper, with well-known and unhidden biases, as pretty much everyone agrees.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
Jamie is probably borderline sociopathic
Oh please, because he doesn't like talking to people, let alone in front of the camera? That's idiotic. I hate talking to people, and I can't imagine being paid enough to talk on camera; I'm no where near a sociopath.
Of the two, I identify most with Jamie. I "get" him. Despite what the current MTV generation would have you believe, neither he nor myself have any notable mental conditions.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I'm an atheist too, but I'll be damned if the CSM isn't a good paper. You just have to ignore the last couple of pages. Yes Christian Scientists believe in crazy things, that doesn't mean that they can't hire good reporters.
Does this sig remind you of Agatha Christie?
His science is far from "stellar". Often, it's quite poor. One should never watch MythBusters for anything but its entertainment value.
Isn't it quite obvious that "entertainment value" is the primary purpose of the show? Mythbusters wasn't ever supposed to be a seriously educational show. It is interesting entertainment, like the geek equivalent to professional wrestling--just like WWE isn't real wrestling, Mythbusters isn't real science.
Their methodologies make many professional product testers and scientists cringe. We can clearly see their mistakes, but those who don't have much scientific training may not.
Well, the methodologies of professional researchers would make the average TV viewer fall asleep--even the average Discovery Channel viewer. The majority of viewers will indeed miss the flaws in their inivestigations, but it isn't hard research. For the minority who DO catch the flaws and care enough to be bothered by them write Adam and Jamie and popint out their oversights--they don't do much to hide that fact and have on occasion revisited myths.
But the educational value it does provide is quite petty, and often quite bad, as it misinforms the viewer.
Well, considering that Adam and Jamie are not acutally professional scientists or educators, but rather skilled technicians in the field of motion picture effects, I do not think most people would rely on their show for serious education purposes (though it might be great material for high school science classes for critical analysis of their investigative methods--where they go right and wrong). If someone comes away from that show unquestionably believing everything in it is completely untained, scientific conclusions then they have more to worry about than being misinformed--they need work in their skills at critical thinking.
I for one just like to watch the banter between Adam and Jamie, and seeing things explode, burn and crash. And Kari getting painted silver, and, well, being eye candy. They should hire another red-head geek-chickie...like Kate Botello perhaps.
Kari and Kate and a tub full of ballistics gel....mmmmmm.....
It's a valuable resource for stories that often won't make the mainstream press. For a news outlet it's unique in the fact that it isnt funded through advertising so outside the contempory pressures imposed on the media by big business. Thats not to say it isn't subject to other outside pressures. I often skim it for anything interesting, the religous stuff doesn't interest me but you know what there's a simple soultion don't read those articles. Even so you should be critising everything you read as news, religous dogma is the easiest stuff to spot and filter out.
If you want a true picture of the world you should be looking to as many sources as possible.
I was at a San Francisco restaurant at lunchtime waiting for a friend to arrive near the Metreon off of Market St. I needed a cigarette so I stood in the alley off of 4th St. I was just kind of lazily pacing back and forth puffing on my delicious cigarette and I turned around. Adam Savage walked by on 4th street and happened to look down the alley at me. I just said "Hey Mythbuster!" and stared at him like a stunned monkey. (It was just an odd place to see someone I had seen on TV the night before.)
He replied "How's it goin'?" And I didn't say anything. I just stood there.
I think he was referring to me in that article. People who say "Hey" and nothing else.
Not an exciting story but what the hell...
Her name is spelled Kari. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
"Who knew that Jamie had a degree in Russian literature?" During the vodka tasting episode, the announcer says that Jamie has a degree in Russian literature. (This is the myth that running cheap vodka through a filter will increase its quality to that of a high quality vodka)
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
On the other hand, if you find that their science is continually bad, perhaps you should step back for a second and re-examine your own science. I've gotten in a few arguments online where people go "The Mythbusters got it all wrong" and usually it's the case the the Mythbusters were much closer to the truth than the online folks. A good half of the time people just don't pay close enough attention and think they're testing something they're not.
For instance, earlier today I saw a guy online complain about how the busted the myth that shooting people with bullets will knock them back. He said that any police officer knows that when you shoot someone they get knocked down, but what he didn't realize was that the Mythbusters were testing if bullets could actually knock you back like in the movies (though plate glass windows, or even just literally pushing you back), not if someone shot with a bullet would fall down. I think the Mythbusters got it spot on, and they even did the math on the show to point out that the physics aren't with having a handgun bullet actually propel a person on planet Earth.
I read the internet for the articles.
Is it just me, or do these guys have the coolest jobs on the planet? Spending your time designing experiments, building stuff, and then if all else fails, blowing it up! Does it get any better than that?
You can learn a lot about a person if you just take the time to inject them with sodium pentathol
For your information here is a link to M5 Industries (Jamie Hyneman's) special effects shop: http://www.m5industries.com/ :(
And in case you were wondering they do not give tours or accept job applications.
Adam also has his own personal website: http://www.adamsavage.com/
Can anyone see these two hanging out after work? I don't think they get along very well. Adam is constantly making fun of the moustache, and Jamie obviously gets frustrated with Adam's antics.
*sigh*
/'meethayn/
/'paytnt/
methane
patent
from an Aussie dictionary. The narrator's an Aussie, using an American accent. It's not mispronunciation, it's just not the American pronunciation of those words. Patent and Methane with short vowel sounds would be considered mispronunciations here. It's an *Aussie* show, with American hosts and locations.
I wash mah-self with a rag on a stick.
Sorry,
Is it just me or is the "scientific method" these guys employ full of it.
I watched all of three shows, and each of them had incredible experimental flaws in them. If it wasn;t so long ago, I'd recount exactly the flaws I saw, but I forget.
Is it entertaining, perhaps, are they busting myths, no way.
That may be the case, but your average viewer has an even poorer concept of science, so at least its making people interested in something other that which cute intern is going to sleep with over-endowed doctor on Gray's Anatomy.
Matt (Plasma Physicist, Science Evangelist and Mythbusters Fan)
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
"PAY-TENT, PAY-TENTLY, PAY-TENTS"
= 0&y=0 I see that you say patent like, pat-ent, which is fine I guess, makes more sense from the way it's spelt. But really, the US is a treasure trove of horribly mangled english words.
That is how we say it in Australia, and it's how it's said in England, where the word comes from http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=patent&x
I happy that you at least get one example of hearing a word pronounced in a way that you don't like, we get FAR more US media here than you get Australian/English media, and we cringe A LOT!
For anyone who is even remotely interested, Kari Byron in FHM
It seems to me that when the show started Jamie and Adam had more freedom to do what they wanted.
Also it was very clear that Jamie had an introverted personality and is a smart thinking kind of guy.
Anyhow some of those originals, they spent the WHOLE EPISODE on a single myth and you got to see fascinating detail on what they were trying to do, plus I felt I was learning a little bit - not a lot but a little bit.
Now, it seems to me that with the Mythterns (Kari etc) and the amount of stuff they put in an episode it's all somewhat slickly edited for the masses.
Also the narrator, who I liked originally, he FUCKING REPEATS EVERYTHING THEY SAY! etc, there's an interview with Grant he says "Ok so we need to put the flux capacitor in Jamie's whoo hooo in order to see if X will happen" - then the goddam narrator says "Grant has just told us they need to get that flux capacitor in Jamie's whoo hoo, if he gets this right we will see if X happens"
I KNOW HE JUST TOLD ME YOU FUCKER! >:(
(He also summarises what happened 5 minutes before the commercial break for another 30 seconds after each break)
Why do they have to dumb it down for the lowest common denominator??? (sp?)
The editing makes it so that they break up the myths and split them up across the episode but I find that annoying, I want them put together like the older episodes.
What happened to us seeing Jamie and Adam in a scrap yard looking for things! Sure it's not important but it was interesting damnit.
Also, I feel Jamie is being forced to behave in a way which is not normally him, you could clearly see in around mid season 2 he was somewhat agitated at this and uncomfortable, he's coming out of his skin a little bit now.
Also Adam is NOT as stupid as he's being portrayed, he's a very cluey guy and more outgoing than Jamie but I dunno - he's been turned into the "homer" of the show.
Ultimately a lot of documentaries on discovery suck now and heck I don't even get the full range of discovery over here in Australia.
Docu's used to be slow paced, informative and somewhat quiet, mythbusters didn't exactly follow this formula since it's not a docu but it was simpler and more charming originally.
Now documentaries need to have hardcore music and cgi sections, instead of just showing what is happening or speculating on what might happen from a proffessor no no they have to render something add that boomy music, have the excitable sounding narrator go at it hardcore etc.
(Don't get me wrong, I do love stuff like megastructures and so on, but still the editing seems so damned dramatic for dopey people)
Before anyone says it, I'm 28, not 50 and I still recall the good old days of somewhat intelligent television.
What is science? The distinguishing characteristic is that it comes as close as possible to the ideal of "gather data - hypothesize - test hypothesis" feedback loop as possible. There are some additional useful criteria, like using controls, etc., but the feedback loop is the basic element of science.
By this criteria, this is nearly the most scientific show on television, and they've gotten better in the past couple of seasons too. For actually showing the scientific process, I can forgive much.
(The process may not always be perfect, but news flash: If you think every peer-reviewed study has perfect, impeccable controls and rock-solid statistics and complete coverage of the relevant topics, you're on crack. Real experiments often look uncomfortably like a Mythbusters production. No fair holding Mythbusters to semi-mythical ideals when "real" scientists generally don't make it either.)
The other aspect of science is the large body of knowledge and experience that has been built up by the human race by the repeated application of that feedback loop. Sometimes they do OK, sometimes they do poorly; the farther they stray from application of mechanical principles, the worse they tend to do. (On the other hand, they sometimes surprise me; IIRC, they pointed out that sharp pointy things attract lightning better than flat things in one of the lightning episodes, which is something I only covered in calc-based electromagnetism in college and I daresay most people have never been exposed to.)
Yes, they aren't perfect in this department. However, I'm not sure it's possible for them to be perfect. First, I've seen a lot of so-called criticisms that are more wrong than the show is, so for those people even if the show actually improved, they'll believe it's getting worse. Second, by its very nature, it covers an extremely large array of topics, and you're just not going to be able to put together a team of experts in chemistry (all kinds), physics (any kind you'd encounter in normal life), psychology (all kinds), history (all kinds, including the actual building of historical devices), and random misc. (all kinds), and still be able to afford to put it on TV.
Personally, I think they're better than nothing, and doing a decent job, all things considered.
Could they be better in theory? Certainly! Could you get much better in practice? That's much less clear. It's not fair to compare Mythbusters to the show that exists in your head that has an infinite budget and unlimited access to the best experts of all kinds. That's not an alternative.
But... Christian Science Monitor... isn't Christian Science an oxymoron?
No.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
What a load of absolute bollocks. They're just normal, average blokes with enough wit and luck to be earning good money doing what they want to do and having fun at the same time.
If the personalities they present to the camera are real, and there's no reason to think otherwise, they show just as much compassion, concern for others and acceptance of personal responsibility as anyone.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
A MB episode is 1 hour. They do these tests over a series of days. WHat do you think they do on the time they aren't taping? Do they maybe... repeat experiments? Yup, as they've publicly stated, they do. But you know what- watching them swipe 500 magnetic strips to test the eelskin wallet would have been bad TV. So they show one or two and move on to something more interesting. Showing 20 hours of tests may be more scientific, but it'd be a boring damn show. I'm happy to know that they do it and just show us representative results.
Oh, and on the Mentos episode- they did check combinations of ingredients, and specifically stated that a combo of the 3 produced the best results.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Here you go.. Red Kryptonite
oh.. here's some more..
you see where it says Media companies of Australia?
I think it's pretty obvious, btw, that Adam and Jamie are not always the best of friends. They constantly bicker when things are not going well, and there have been times when their underlying tension has put them in dangerous situations... e.g Jamie driving one of their remote controlled cars just that little bit too fast, with Adam stuck in the back. I'm sure it's all in good fun, until they blow themselves up.
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
Lots more info on the crew and their history can be found here.
Prescription glasses made of polycarbonate are fine instead. I work for an engineering department and the rule is safety glasses at all time in labs, unless you wear normal glasses. Believe me, our building manager is a stickler, he wouldn't let us do it if it weren't kosher (we are a government institution and all that).
You'll notice when there's a larger hazard they either put it behind a shield or don more protective gear. However for normal things like soldering or machining, standard glasses are fine.
Also you have to understand that OSHA regs are to protect employees from employers primarily. It's to make sure your employer can't force you to work in unsafe conditions without proper gear. They don't mandate you follow them yourself if you are self employed (which Jamie is). The reason they force OSHA stuff on us isn't because they are worried the cops will come and arrest us for not following it, but because they worried we'd get hurt and sue them and/or they'd get fined.
Adam is a props man. If you look at his credits, that's primarily what he's done. For example a number of the devices in Bicentennial man are his designs and constructions. He's not really "special effects" as most people think of it. He's done that too, but his main thing is design work. Hence, build jobs are his thing. Jamie is the gadget guy, that's what M5 is known for. Their 7-up attack machine being my favourite. When someone needs a new functional device made that hasn't existed before, Jamie is the kind of guy they seek out.
That's one of the reasons that Adam seems to be 2nd place to Jamie for a lot of the things they do is it's not his specialty. Heck, that's why they shoot the show at M5. This is the kind of stuff they do anyhow. A company approaches them and says "We want something that can do this," for example a vending machine that can attack people. They then set about scavenging that together and making it work. Mythbusters is just about applying those skills to a myth, and doing it on a more limited budget.
I personally think it's not a bad combo both personality wise and skill wise. Jamie on his own would probably make for a real boring show (he apparently had them get Adam on board for that reason) but you need someone who's got applied problem solving skills like that to make it happen. Also in addition to making the show more fun, Adam does do really well when they need some kind of setup designed and constructed.
Good Lord. Relax. Its a TV show not a doctoral thesis.
Everything about the way they produce and edit the show says edutainment. Also keep in mind each one hour show (minus commercials) covers between three to five different "myths". Their accuracy of measurement is dependent on the topic. In your example, we have a "fun" myth with low danger. Plus we have a high probablity of it looking cool on tape whether it works or not, which it probably will since the internet has several videos. I'd say "I think that was about twice as high" is a reasonable margin of error in that scenario.
Second, numbers and graphs don't mean much to most normal people. Take the "Will driving fast on a washboard make the ride smoother?" segment. They had some very good data from an accelerameter that actually had them questioning their perceptions. They also had a pyramid of wine glasses filled with water. The splashing water is easier for a normal person to translate into something they can relate to. A "horizontal acceleration of blah point blah blah m/s^2" means little, while most people have some idea the amount of force it takes to shake some water out of a glass (even if they don't know what force is).
In fact I thought they did a pretty good job of using the scientific method in that segment. When they got data they didn't expect they refined their experiment to eliminate variables and try to narrow in on what was *generally* happening.
Also I think when you hear someone mention science its usually Adam. Its safe to say that Adam doesn't always think things through. My guess is that what Adam usually means is he is *using* science, not *doing* science. Most people do not differentiate using scientific knowledge and using the scientific method. The show often uses scientific knowledge to make educated guesses about what will happen. Basically this is used to narrow "likely" outcomes. They use a fair amount of scientific knowledge for safety reasons as well. I'll even grant you that probably a good deal of the "using science" is some anonymous producer calling up a subject matter expert.
I will grant that they are taking short cuts. However, off hand I can't think of an episode where Jaime has stated that they were publishing their results in a peer reviewed journal.
That is how we say it in Australia, and it's how it's said in England, where the word comes from
;-)
Where the word comes from?!?! Words don't come from places, they come from people. There is no geographic affinity to a word any more than you would expect a child to genetically diverge from his parent merely because he moves away.
This is one of my pet peeves when discussions of "proper" English come up. The British isles do not have some kind of magic authority because of being the place where English evolved from some old Germanic dialects with a heavy influence from the Normans. That's as absurd as saying people in Africa are closer to 'original' humans because humans evolved there. Only it's more so since languages tend to change more *slowly* in colonies and such.
Wait, I have a better example for people on Slashdot: A software engineering team at company A develops a large complex system. They split, with half the team going to a start-up, company B, taking a copy of the system (let's say it's open source, so no license issues) with them. 30 years later all the people from the original team have retired and handed over their work to their respective replacements. Both companies have developed their respective copies of the system further and continue to do so though the original developers are long gone. Is the version maintained at Company A the more "correct" version merely by virtue of Company A being "where it came from"?
Specifically, in the case of English, the dialects spoken on the British isles have been very heavily influenced by the mainland European languages, which has led to e.g. the soft "r" at the end of syllables in most British dialects (Irish English is one exception). The "r" used in most American dialects (Boston being a famous exception), is actually closer to "original English", and is the way Shakespeare probably pronounced it.
That doesn't mean that one is more correct than the other since there are also examples which go the other way, it just shows how absurd it is to treat natural languages as if they had a pedigree, or as if they were the implementation of an ISO standard.
-chris
P.S. Oh, and the word 'Patent' doesn't come from England, it comes from Rome, so we should actually ask a Roman how to pronounce it, right?
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
I have a PhD in chemistry, and I have learnt stuff from mythbusters. I now know that the terminal velocity of a penny is lower than that of a human, and that high velocity rounds shatter when they are fired into water.
The show is entertaining, and has a science flavour. It is better to have light-weight science that people watch, than heavy-weight stuff that only the scientific elite understand. I see it as a kids show, meant to recruit the next generation of scientists. Sure the science is simplistic, but at least there is some science on TV.
I always got the impression that it was some sort of high-functioning autism such as Asperger syndrome but then, IANAD (...doctor)
Social withdrawal or discomfort in social situations, pedantic mannerisms, some odd habits based on views rooted in pure practicality (anyone remember that ep where his lunch was basically a sack of nutrition?), and a fairly intense engineering interest might all, when taken together, point that way.
What does it matter? He seems like a decent guy and he's certainly and entertaining presenter (on what is, essentially, an entertainment show rather than a rigorously investigated scientific journal)
Some small degree of Aspergers with a little mix of OCD fits the description perfectly. :)
:p
Social withdrawal and discomfort is a trait of both, while pedantic behavior and odd habits is a sign of OCD.
But like you said, does it really matter? I guess 4/5 of the population could be diagnosed with something if we just look close enough.
The system had the verbosity of HTML combined with all the readability of compiled assembly viewed as bitmap images
I remember that episode and it was Jamie, who grew up in a farm and knows guns, who scolded Adam for doing that. Their showing that must have been exactly for showing it's dangerous. When they do something that's truly dangerous with guns or explosives they always call an expert.
I think the most valuable lesson one gets from the Mythbusters is that one needs not be an expert to do some thinking. True, anybody could look up in a table to see how long a bullet travels in water. But how were those data obtained in the first place? That's the "scientific" value of the show. When a new field is being explored, there are no experts and one must invent new ways to test things.
Either all that or, you know, they did all that but stretching one episode to cover 24 weeks of 1 hour testing segments could get pretty boring. You know, like they already covered on the "Myths Revisited" episode. The clip show you talk about is still television, and still has to bring in ratings. They're not going to make the clip show, write off that it usually is anyway, a bunch of number crunching. People won't watch that. At least, not the majority of the audience.
I'm not claiming they're the most scientific of all...but they are pretty damn knowledgable when it comes to engineering and engineering is largely trial and error. You don't get to their level in their fields (each taking on very large clients before doing mythbusters) without acknowledging the scientific method. Unfortunately some guy in a beret comparing data sets doesn't make very entertaining television, and so that stuff either gets cut, or never filmed at all. And exploding cement trucks get put in instead.
Still, at best, I would say the Mythbusters are the Jesse James and Tuttles (OCC) of their genre...whatever it is. Sure Jesse James and the Tuttles make beautiful works of their own kind (hot rods and choppers, respectively), but their approaches are completely barbaric. Some of the best choppers take YEARS to build, and the creators never get a show. Why? Because no one wants to watch 6 years of building one bike, no matter how much they might like the show.
Indeed... he might just be *gasp* shy and anal. God forbid such people should exist and not have some sort of "condition".
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.