President Obama To Appear On Mythbusters

Muondecay writes "President Obama will be featured in the December 8th MythBusters episode, 'Archimedes Solar Ray,' during which he will challenge Adam and Jamie to revisit an ancient and somewhat controversial myth: Did Greek scientist and polymath Archimedes set fire to an invading Roman fleet using only mirrors and the reflected rays of the sun during the Siege of Syracuse? This is part of a White House effort to highlight the importance of science education."

Comments

Really?

[orphiuchus]

I don't really have a problem with the president appearing on random TV shows a few times during their term, but I would really like Obama to spend less time being cool and more time fixing shit.

Re:Really?

[CannonballHead]

How to be a good supporter of your candidate:

When a president you like is in office and doesn't do "enough," you claim that the President doesn't really have a lot of power and is more of a figurehead, like royalty.

When a president you dislike is in office and doesn't do "enough," you claim that the President should be doing more.

When a president you like is out of office, you blame everything that went wrong in his term on Congress.

When a president you dislike is out of office, you blame everything that went wrong in his term on him.

When a president you like is in office and something bad is happening (e.g., the economy), you blame it on the previous administration, because economic problems take a while to develop.

When a president you dislike is in office and something bad is happening (e.g., the economy), you blame it on the current President or the previous Congress.

Re:Really?

[vlm]

It's not like there's a lot he can actually DO.

As commander in chief of the armed forces, he can force a couple million personnel to do certain things. They dance to his drum (just as I had to follow Army orders in the early 90s)

He could theoretically order that the concentration camp in Guantanamo bay be closed, or order all the troops out of the mideast, or order Iran's nuke facilities to be destroyed, or order troops posted on the Mexico border, or ...

Claiming the commander of the worlds largest, most expensive, and most powerful military is powerless is a wee bit ingenuous.

Re:Really?

[Quiet_Desperation]

and more time fixing shit.

This. Right here. This is the problem. Everyone sitting around waiting for Uncle Sam/Samantha to "fix" things.

Yeah, good luck with that.

Re:They've already busted that twice now

[Pojut]

My favorite part was how people were (rightly) criticizing him for being such a media whore, when the conservative savior of 2008 Sarah Palin has a freakin' TV show .

Re:They've already busted that twice now

[master0ne]

I think this is more of a "media event" to promote sciences and education more than trying to prove anything. When the goverment wants to prove something, they dont turn to Adam and Jamie, they hire scietists with billion dollar budgets and secret labs. This is more just the president trying to get more kids involved in science/history etc.... i doubt he even thinks their orignal conclusion was wrong, just wanted a intresting "Myth" for the duo to revisit that might turn a few heads. Take this for what it is.... a attempt to revive education in the american youth.

Re:They've already busted that twice now

[h4rr4r]

And she is unable to mention one magazine she reads. How they could be proud of such a moron I will never understand.

Truth, myth and how they blend into one.

[SmallFurryCreature]

Say this battle happened. How do we know for certain? Because X number of people wrote about it or wrote about people having told them about it or having being told about people who heard it from others. If X is large enough, we accept it as fact. If not, well then it becomes myth or religion.

Now, imagine a battle. Ships are going to attack an harbor. Ships ain't easily destroyed by the weapons of the age and worse, if you can hit them, they can hit you. They might be unable to hide, but neither can you, you are on the walls of the defences and the enemy knows this.

So, how can you protect your archers from their archers? Blinding light? Pose them beside mirrors and the enemy can't see them. Simple trick if you think about it. With this blinding light, you can fire countless arrows, even heavy slow ones like fire-arrows and aim at ease.

How would such a tactic, written down by someone who didn't understand and heard it from someone else be recorded?

The mighty ships sailed at the harbour and a blinding light erupted from the walls and one by one the mighty ships were set on fire and sunk.

Death ray is born. Nothing more then smoke and mirrors.

THAT is what disappoints me about the Myth Busters. They far to often examine only part of a myth or add their own elements, the worsed of it being "well we two couldn't do it, so no-one could". Well, I doubt the myth busters could put a man on the moon. So the moon landings are a myth?

Take the pycrete "myth". Why the paper substitution? THAT is not what the myth is about. And I still don't know how such a ship could have set sail. After all I presumed WW2 admirals were smart enough to ask "won't it melt". So why wouldn't it have melted?

Or the Jaws myth. "We are going to examine wether a very large movie monster can ram a ship, but we are going to use a smaller shark because sharks ain't that large in real life..." No shit sherlock. And sharks also don't ram ships in real life.

What next, I am going to test if my cat likes tuna by feeding it dog shit. If it doesn't like that that proofs it doesn't like tuna?

As for the movie myths. Can a pen explode, kill a room of baddies but leave the hero intact... NO. If you think James Bond has myths, you REALLY need to get out more.

The program was okay but has rapidly gone in the general direction of Discovery. Here is a hint. Gay fat guys building bling-bling bikes is NOT science. Mind you, they can go lower. Cakes? Tatoo shops? Why not just relabel it Oprahs Channel and be done with it.

So cool, they are once again going to proof a couple of overweight Americans can't build something that is highly unlike to have ever existed and if it did, not have been able to destroy and entire fleet before the soldiers landed (or swam ashore) and destroyed it. That is supposed to encourage Americans back to science? Fat chance.

We know what Americans think about science. We can see it in the nose-dive the science content on Myth-busters has taken. Unless it goes boom, not intrested. Note the increasing lack of myths that do not go boom.

Re:Truth, myth and how they blend into one.

[demonbug]

So, how can you protect your archers from their archers? Blinding light? Pose them beside mirrors and the enemy can't see them. Simple trick if you think about it. With this blinding light, you can fire countless arrows, even heavy slow ones like fire-arrows and aim at ease.

How would such a tactic, written down by someone who didn't understand and heard it from someone else be recorded?

The mighty ships sailed at the harbour and a blinding light erupted from the walls and one by one the mighty ships were set on fire and sunk.

Death ray is born. Nothing more then smoke and mirrors.

THAT is what disappoints me about the Myth Busters. They far to often examine only part of a myth or add their own elements, the worsed of it being "well we two couldn't do it, so no-one could". Well, I doubt the myth busters could put a man on the moon. So the moon landings are a myth?

I agree that Mythbusters often doesn't exhaustively test myths, but that generally isn't realistic. You have to set some boundaries and often make some assumptions in order to come up with a testable hypothesis.

Take your hypothetical interpretation of the Death Ray myth - if you are going to start coming up with hypothetical ways that the myth may have come into being, then there is simply no way to test them all. Maybe it was a sunny day, and light was reflecting off the shields of the city's defenders. In a completely unrelated event, someone in one of the ships dropped an oil lamp and started a fire. If the ships were closely grouped, and it was a windy day, numerous ships could be consumed in such a fire; some dude watching interpreted the fire as the result of the reflected light, and recorded it as such. Is it possible? Absolutely. But that isn't what the myth says. And there are innumerable other potential explanations, none of which really have any bearing on what they are doing.

They are testing the myth, not (usually) what potential events may have caused the event that gave birth to the myth. In this case, the myth is that Archimedes developed a weapon using focused light to start fires on attacking ships. That is all they were testing - not trying to figure out what might have happened, but trying to determine whether the myth, as recorded, is plausible. In order to do that, they have to make some assumptions to narrow the test - try to stick to materials that would have been available at the time, etc.

Now, I often take issue with their test methods and interpretations, but on the whole I think they do a reasonable job of taking a myth, defining what aspect of the myth it is that they are testing, and then devising different tests and quantifying the results. It is a fair balance of entertainment and genuine testing to find out neat stuff; while I (and probably most Slashdot readers) would like them to be a little more rigorous and at least acknowledge shortcomings in their tests, it would be very easy to get bogged down in details ("rigor" in the oblig. xkcd) and then instead of Mythbusters you would have the Televised Transactions of the American Society of Materials Engineering, Physics, and History, and all of five people would still be interested in watching.

Re:Science?

[Carik]

Their science isn't always perfect, no. But their overall methodology is pretty decent.

Step 1) Define the question.
Step 2) Make a guess as to what will happen.
Step 3) Design a test to confirm or deny your guess.
Step 4) Try the test and see what happens.
Step 5) If the producers have given you enough money, and your first test didn't work, repeat until you get an actual result.

Sure, it's not perfect, but they do push the idea of forming a hypothesis and testing it, rather than just assuming that common wisdom is true. Which is, when you get right down to it, the essence of science.

(That said, they have been slipping the last few seasons... they've fallen a little to much into "We have lots of money, we can just add dynamite!" territory, and a little too little into "Hey, let's show the math to explain this weird thing we just found.")

Re:Incidentally

[schon]

Why is math education important in public schools?

The vast majority of students will not be mathematicians or accountants, and will not have any opportunity to reinforce the information they learn, and hence will forget it all by the time they are 20.

--OR--

Why is english education important in public schools?

The vast majority of students will not be writers, and will not have any opportunity to reinforce the information they learn, and hence will forget it all by the time they are 20.

--OR--

Why is history education important in public schools?

The vast majority of students will not be historians, and will not have any opportunity to reinforce the information they learn, and hence will forget it all by the time they are 20.

--OR--

Why is physical education important in public schools?

The vast majority of students will not be althletes, and will not have any opportunity to reinforce the information they learn, and hence will forget it all by the time they are 20.

You can apply this argument to pretty much every school subject - so your question is really "why do we send children to school"?

Re:Mythbusters does science?

[Galaga88]

Really? Because I'm pretty sure they follow a fair approximation of the scientific method.

1. Define the question (Can you destroy ships using an Archimedes style death-ray?)
2. Gather information and resources (They look up how he theoretically did it.)
3. Form hypothesis (Reflective shields using ancient construction materials are (in)sufficient to focus light to function as a death ray.)
4. Perform experiment and collect data (They build a giant death ray and try to burn up a ship.)
5. Analyze data (Did the ship burn? Which parts burned? Which parts didn't? Did the mirrors act as expected?)
6. Interpret data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting point for a new hypothesis (The heat simply built up too slowly to set the ship on fire effectively. Smaller scale reproductions showed that further tests could be warranted.)
7. Publish results (Tune into Discovery HD next week at xxx o'clock.)
8. Retest (Their second and third goes at the myth.)

Looks like a textbook example of the scientific method to me.

Re:They've already busted that twice now

[drakaan]

I don't know if it's possible to burn nearly 10 years of positive karma in one post, but this appears to be the thread to attempt it on, so here goes...

I have never before seen such a complete orgasmic crap-fest of bashing a single person in one place as I have with Palin in this comment thread.

I get that people believe she is stupid (arguable). I get that people loathe her because she's conservative (fine). I get that people believe that not being fully-credentialed with a degree means that you have no intelligence (patently untrue).

What I don't get is how this circle-jerk of "dude, I hate her TOO!" is not as evidently moronic to the people participating in it as it should be.

Don't like stupid people? Cool...fine. Think Palin's stupid? Okie-dokie. Feel the need to be the 12,000th slashdotter to note her perceived ignorance in the same frigging thread? You fail it.

Let me be clear, I don't expect people to rally around me, here, but I caught myself saying "seriously?" so many times while looking for actual discussion of the president appearing on Mythbusters that I had to share my irritation.

As a side-note, "Flamebait" is the appropriate down-mod for a statement that you feel will draw a largely negative response because of its content. "Troll" is for when someone says something unkind or untrue in order to drum up a disagreement.

Re:They've already busted that twice now

[Bananenrepublik]

I've never understood the Palin hatedom. She seems fairly representative of the mainstream of the American right - do people really hate their neighbors so much?

Two points:

• most people don't like to be reminded how stupid their peers really are
• most people have neighbors that understand that they are not suited for the office of POTUS

Re:Troll?!

[Low Ranked Craig]

Spoken like someone who gets their news from CNN and Comedy Central. The real issues haven't changed under Obama. Gitmo? check, wiretaps? check, coming out against a lawsuit against a Bush AG? check, poor fiscal policies? checkerino.

It's exceptionally easy to take the party line on this. For example, that Obama inherited Bushes' economy and that the wars started under Bush were the primary economic problems. Unfortunately that's not the whole, or even half the story. Speaking of economics, you should read Times list of the 25 people responsible. It's a very objective view of what happened, and guess what? The Democrats were at fault just as much as the Republicans, of course if you listen to Jon Stewart it was all Bushes fault, and if you listen to Limbaugh it was all Clinton's fault. I can't paste into the comments go just google "Time 25 people financial crisis".

I also love you sentiment that the republicans should go along and not block things, even when it is becoming apparent that currently the majority of people want to stop a lot of the things that are currently happening. Just go to any major polling site and read the pols... I suppose that if a Democratic congress were blocking a Republican President you'd suggest that they were simply acting on principal?

I stand by my original statement: they all suck, and that includes Obama