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MythBusters Bust House
ewhac writes "The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that the MythBusters accidentally sent a cannon ball hurtling through Dublin this afternoon, punching through a home, bouncing across a six-lane road, and ultimately coming to a rest inside a now-demolished Toyota minivan. Amazingly, there were no injuries. The ball was fired from a home-made cannon at the Alameda County Sheriff's Department bomb range, and was intended to strike a water target. Instead the ball missed the water, punched through a cinder-block wall, and skipped off the hill behind. Prior to today, the MythBusters had been shooting episodes at the bomb range for over seven years without major incident. It is not clear whether Savage/Hyneman or Belleci/Imahara/Byron were conducting the experiment."
Professionals my ass. I can do more damage than that by trying that at home, amateurs.
Being a mythbuster gets them "shoot-a-cannon-through-the-wall" privileges. :/
Some apps are WYSIWYG. Some others are WYSIWTF.
Jumping up and down, clapping his hands and giggling with glee.
One of the interns who are never visible on the mythbusters episodes probably did it. I think they just photoshop in Jamie and Adam on most episodes.
Don't try any of this at home. They're what you call "professionals".
s/[stupid comments]/[intelligent discourse]/gi
To shoot a cannon-ball from San Francisco to Dublin is quite a feat. Wait, not that Dublin?
So the cannon ball flies through the neighborhood at 4:15 PM when all the kids are coming home from school and tears through a house where the parents and kids are sleeping.
So why are they sleeping in the middle of the afternoon?
Just curious.
and still having enough force to skip across the road and bounce off a roof? You'd think that friction would have stopped it. Wonder what the stairs looked like afterwards.
Emotions! In your brain!
We were just investigating claims that the house was haunted.
By looking at the trajectory of the projectile between the entry hole in the house and the entry hole in the car, along with the complete lack of ballistic ectoplasm at the scene, I think we can conclude that myth to be busted, either by the scientific method or extreme prejudice, we aren't quite certain...
It was definitely Belleci, Imahara and Byron. They were posting all sorts of pics of it on twitter (which have since been removed.)
Having run out of myths, those at MythBusters have to broaden their definition of "busting"...
They shot a cannonball all the way from Alameda to Ireland?!? Holy shit, those guys are good!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
So... will we ever see the footage?
My bet is no... It was probably destroyed within 10 minutes of the incident.
On-site producer to camera-men: "Initiate liability protocol!"
MythBusters isn't at fault here, the Alameda County Sheriff's Department bomb range is. Its their job to ensure the safety of any tests conducted on their site. Half the time you see sheriff whats-his-name preparing the explosives and one of the MB crew pushes the button to make boom. This will probably result in a few sensationalist headlines, insurance claims and the bomb range building bigger hills out of dirt. Case closed.
I guess the NIMBY's were right... ...but anyway, the Alameda County bomb range is in a fairly populated area. I'm amazed this hasn't happened before. Here's a
map of the area.
Point A is approximately where it landed, which is not far from the park and ride I used to use. The dark brown patches to the northwest of A is where the bomb range is.
Does this sig remind you of Agatha Christie?
Here they have a story about a cannon ball destroing a car, or just damaging it, and knocking a hole in the house and they think that people want to see 2 pictures of the police telling the reports that a cannon ball knocked a hole in the house.
Who really cares about the police show us more pictures of the hole and the vehicle.
You do realize that stories are submitted well in advance of when they're actually posted, right? Sometimes DAYS in advance.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It happened yesterday. It was on local news last night
At least until they "accidentally" create a singularity that destroys half a state, and permanently alters the rules of our relative space-time.
Next time on MythBusters, were cannons really less accurate then rifled artillery? We put it to test... Oops!!!
Wikimapia says the bomb range is here
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
They could always sell the rights to Allstate for use in their Mayhem ad campaign: "I'm a cannonball"
Be careful.
First they'll build a scale model 6" high and do some "math". Then they'l knock up a 6-foot section of a life size wall and call it plausible. They'll they "upscale" things and end up building a wall around the equator and blowing it up.
It's a television show. It was probably planned WEEKS in advance.
I will believe this the minute people involved in the show are arrested and prosecuted. Until then, the safe bet is publicity stunt.
People are not arrested and prosecuted for accidents. They were at a bomb range, not recklessly firing cannon balls in the middle of residential areas. They took appropriate precautions, but shit happens, and their insurance pays for the damage.
I'd like to see them try to replicate the "myth" that a cannonball that is initially fired at a bunch of water can wind up skipping off a hill, go through a house 700 yards away, go through 6 lanes of traffic and come to rest in a car.
They probably won't be able to do it again and declare it busted.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Jamie like big boom.
I thought they conclusively demonstrated that it's plausible if not outright confirmed most of the time, it actually IS Lupus.
never mind.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
People are not arrested and prosecuted for accidents. They were at a bomb range, not recklessly firing cannon balls in the middle of residential areas. They took appropriate precautions, but shit happens, and their insurance pays for the damage.
If anything the Mythbusters are too careful. It's clear not just from their "don't try this at home" every half hour but from everything they do that they're expected to exemplify caution and thorough planning in all circumstances. And they have a big-ass staff to do it; not just the entire crew at M5 but a lot of people at their insurance company examine and clear every stunt.
No, any jury or civil judge would inevitably conclude that the Mythbusters were careful to a fault. They'd ask for a free T-shirt, tell the insurance company to pay up and the victims to quit bitching, and send Adam and Jamie on their merry way.
Dude, they were at a police bomb range, under police supervision. Nobody's getting arrested (though some wrists are going to be slapped). The biggest question is whether or not they'll be permitted to keep using the range.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Except that they always, *always*, have officials of the local emergency services and experts on hand when they do stuff like this. Pretty much once your experiment has been cleared by fire/safety, the police, and a known explosives expert you can wash your hands of criminal liability. They're still financially responsible for the damage of course, but unless this is some sort complete departure from their normal modus operandi they did more than enough due diligence to avoid criminal prosecution for gross negligence.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2011/12/06/tv-experiment-goes-awry-sends-cannonball-rocketing-through-homes/
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit!
No, obviously they didn't.
That isn't "obvious" at all, unless you have some insider information. Sometimes, even if you take all precautions that seem necessary, shit happens. The fact that something went wrong is not in itself evidence of carelessness.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
People are not arrested and prosecuted for accidents
They're talking about America, Land of the "Free", where you can be arrested and prosecuted *for crossing the road in the wrong place*!
"Appropriate precautions" doesn't mean "guarantee nothing goes wrong".
There will be investigations to make sure appropriate precautions WERE taken. Maybe they were, maybe they weren't. Certainly having video of "oh-my-god-that-was-amazing" post-oops reactions of the guests will probably prove to be problematic considering the scope of actual damage, but that doesn't by itself mean that the event wasn't being taken seriously.
That's nothing. You can be arrested for resisting arrest.
The family that cantaloupes are part of also includes pumpkins, pumpkins can weigh in excess of a ton. It makes sense to compare to a specific melon rather than all of them due to variety.
Just because you have no fucking idea of what something is doesn't mean it is the fault of the person who wrote the summary, it is the fault of the person who doesn't know what something is.
This is a website devoted to news for nerds, nerd up motherfucker.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
If my car is damaged by someone else, i don't get my insurance company involved at all. The less they know, they less likely they will raise your rates. I would only get my insurance company involved if the other party refused to pay for the damage.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
People are not arrested and prosecuted for accidents.
Want to bet?
Yes, I will bet you a large sum of money that no one will be arrested and prosecuted for this accident. How do you want to handle the wager? Some sort of escrow? How long do we have to go before you'll admit that those ne'er do well Mythbusters got away with it scott free? Because I don't want five years from now you still saying, "It's still possible that they could be arrested!"
Through the wall, off the hillside, through the house, into the minivan, nothing but net.
I don't remember which battle it was (still nursing my morning coffee), but I recall the British navy shelling an American fort in a similar situation. There was a large hill in the way and they couldn't fire directly on the fort, so they tried "skipping" cannonballs off of a hill. It worked - the cannonballs bounced off of the hill and went up and over.
I remember at least the "cannon = hill = sky high flying cannonball" part and I learned this in high school (at the latest). It kinda surprises me that no one on the entire crew (the performers or the technical folks) made this logical leap and thought "Hey, that hill there... you don't think it could...?"
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Frankly, I would consider it an honor to have my minivan crushed by a Mythbusters experiment.
I thought this as well. I'd be tempted to turn down the insurance settlement and just keep the wreckage, especially if you can keep the cannonball, too. You could probably get a LOT of money for it at auction from a fan who wants the famous Mythbusters experiment that went horribly wrong!
The person was responding to the absolute statement that "people dont get arrested for accidents" when in fact they can and do all the time.
Good-bye
Now the tone can be set by Mythbusters' actions. The right thing to do, is first, to repair the damage. Not pay for it, not file an insurance claim, but send a first class home repair crew over to make the house better than it was before. Deliver a better minivan to their driveway tonight. Next, in person apologies (and a night out or free passes to a Mythbusters shoot, their choice) by those involved, and Adam and Jamie. Explain carefully what your plans are to prevent anything like this from ever happening again. Do it fast, do it right and you come out looking good. Get the lawyers and insurance companies involved and ask the family to sign settlements and it all goes to heck in a handbasket.
A large percentage of what they do on the show is strictly for entertainment value. Many of the so-called myths they test, and the methods they devise to test them, are completely predictable by anyone with any common sense, yet they perform the "tests" anyway because they involve entertaining car wrecks, explosions, fire balls, or Adam ending up in pain and/or puking.
It's a TV show, so 100% of what they do is strictly for entertainment value. It just so happens that they've managed to capture parts of the scientific method in ways that end up being entertaining. The fact that many of their experiments are predictable isn't a mark against them, either - science is about formally testing and verifying any kind of knowledge, and sometimes, even when we think the answer is obvious, it turns out differently than we expect and we learn something from it.
Dublin?
Can they demolish the rest of the place, and then move on to Pleasanton?
I think they'd do good, were they to level everything along the 680 corridor - up to Altamont.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
No, the biggest question is that: 'Will they air the accident sequence and the resulting damage'? I REALLY think that they should, it is a good lesson as to why you do not try this stuff at home.
Why is it that most of the people that I encounter seem to have been shat from the Sphincter of Mediocrity?
I only wager it BitCoin
As teslafreak said, people are rarely ticketed/arrested for it. In my view, the law is on the books to protect drivers from legal trouble from idiot pedestrians and to attempt to protect the pedestrians from themselves. That way, when I hit you with my car because you want to cross the street NOW, you can't mindlessly sue me because you're too stupid to not jump in front of a moving car. If you were in the crosswalk, you may have a more valid case, but that's a different matter.
The confidence of ignorance will always overcome the indecision of knowledge.
I only wager it BitCoin
I only do it with monopoly money. Perhaps we can come to some sort of agreement.
Although they've since been taken down, Kari, Tory, and Grant tweeted pictures from the bomb range yesterday, including said canons. Reproduced on my blog: http://laslow.net/2011/12/07/mythbusters-and-damage-control/
No, obviously they didn't.
That isn't "obvious" at all, unless you have some insider information. Sometimes, even if you take all precautions that seem necessary, shit happens. The fact that something went wrong is not in itself evidence of carelessness.
Here's some "inside information". The Mythbusters is all about blowing shit up now. It has been for at least 3 years.
They exhibit a fundamental lack of understanding of basic physics in about 90% of the "myths" they test. And about 60% of the time I'd argue that they know they're doing something stupid and pointless, yet they pursue the obviously flawed course of action for ratings.
Even when they do something right, the last segment is always "OK, so that's busted/plausible/confirmed, but what if we use 10 times the explosives?".
The show has devolved into complete asshattery. Smashlab, in it's brief run, was far better because there were actual engineers involved doing actual thinking. But they weren't clowns so people didn't watch.
Anyone who watches Mythbusters and actually understood their high school physics class knows that the show puts zany antics first, safety second, and science fourth. Third is shitty promos for Obama and Seth Rogen's shitty movies.
What people get arrested for is negligence. Accidents, not so much.
If you're driving drunk and you get in a wreck, you were not involved in an accident because you were not exercising a standard of care that the law requires; namely, not driving whilst intoxicated. If you're texting and run over a class full of kindergartners crossing the street to the park, same thing. If you're excessively speeding and wreck, ditto. None of these are accidents, because accidents are by definition unforeseen, and most often, unpreventable.
Hitting a deer might be an accident. Colliding with a motorcycle rider who was stupidly riding in your blind spot might be an accident. A truck driver having a heart attack, dying at the wheel and dumping the toxic contents of his truck into a pristine mountain river is an accident.
Accidents usually involve some amount of civil liability, even if people are maimed or killed. Negligence involves criminal liability. Two different things. Y'all need to stop using 'accident' incorrectly. I once again propose a new word: neglident.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
Hell no! The biggest question is whether this experiment makes it to air on an episode. I wanna see the looks on their faces when that cannon ball misses everything and goes flying off into the sunset.
Then and only then do I want to know if they will be allowed to keep using the range.
...quicker, easier, more seductive the darkside is...but more powerful, it is not.
science is about formally testing and verifying any kind of knowledge, and sometimes, even when we think the answer is obvious, it turns out differently than we expect and we learn something from it.
For instance, one of my classic physics experiments in high school: We dropped two differently weighted object, using a ticker-tape mechanism to time the fall. Contrary to all expectations, the heavier object fell faster. Consistently. After basking in our moment of triumph for demolishing all understanding of gravity since Galileo, we were told to explain the difference as related to the friction of the ticker-tape.
I am officially gone from
They probably thought that the wall that the cannonball just busted right through would at least slow it down enough that the hill would help stop the cannon shots a la Duke of Wellington's reverse-slope defense.
I am officially gone from
Contrary to all expectations, the heavier object fell faster.
This is correct. It can take quite a few iterations before one has a fool proof release mechanism that does not favor the heavier object.
The TV news report says that the cannonball completely missed the water barrels and cinderblock wall that were supposed to stop its journey.
Area map. http://img401.imageshack.us/img401/9953/69353655.jpg Map of the sheriff's office, military base, bomb range and house that got hit. http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=214849410118080227465.0004b382bf3f98cc75a8d&msa=0&ll=37.728095,-121.884813&spn=0.0501,0.086002
Not particularly. I am inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt, however, and I do believe that "shit happens" is a reasonable defense. I also don't particularly appreciate the assumption that I have a bias simply because you disagree with my opinion.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Considering all the tweets and pictures emitted while on-set have been deleted, I would be surprised if the episode ever made the light of day.
I didn't say they never make mistakes, just that they do due diligence. Given the sheer number of dangerous and never before attempted things they've tried on that show over the course of its run, their safety record isn't half bad. In a ten year career with the National Guard I've probably witnessed more incidents during one weekend a month training operations than they've had in their whole run, and everything we did was according to an establish procedure we were well versed in. They do entirely different, often dangerous, things every week.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
You seem awfully angry.
The show has evolved into 5 people getting paid to blow crap up. If someone walked up to you and offered you a mind-boggling amount of money, plus side income from speaking engagement fees, etc, to set fire to things, blow stuff up, and to build and play with large and dangerous equipment, are you saying you wouldn't jump at the chance?
For 90% of the myths that they test to demonstrate a lack of understanding of basic physics, at least 90% of the myths they test would have to require such an understanding. I would submit that many of the myths they test require no such understanding, and so your statistics are called into question.
I have yet to see promos for Obama (care to link to that?), and of course they put zany antics high up on the list. It's a TV show. People skip physics class to watch TV because most people find TV more entertaining than physics class. If TV just broadcasts a physics class, people are going to change the channel. After all, the show is called Mythbusters, not Science Hour. Without ratings, the show goes away and gets replaced with another iteration of Ice Road Truckers. Which would you rather have on the air? Even Ed Murrow had to do stupid entertainment celebwatch pieces in between his good journalistic pieces in order to keep his show on the air.
As for the comment you replied to, yes shit sometimes does happen despite all best efforts to prevent shit from happening. As others have noted, this scene was undoubtedly signed off on by the fire department, the cops, the insurance underwriters, and probably ordnance/explosive experts. It isn't as though these guys wandered out and began blindly firing canons toward houses without thinking the situation through, which is what you're implying in your eagerness to crap all over the show.
"I disagree with you" does not equal "flamebait."
Resulting damage and initial part, maybe- too valuable not to. But I really think they didn't have cameras on the back side of the hill.
And they have shown that sort of footage in the past - the "instant convertable" myth (where the car doesn't stop as expected after going under the semi, launches off a berm and ends up in a ditch on the other side of the fence), they show the launch (several times - because that was cool), and more importantly, focus on the team's reactions (which were obviously unscripted "oh ****" type responses), and then show them finding the car and having "oh, this could have sucked a whole lot" type conversations. (I think one of the "don't try this at home" bits are actually in front of the car.)
I imagine they'll still use the bomb range in future - they'll just point the cannon *away* from the residential housing...
Er no. From TFA they've already had a previous incident with stray rounds from the range. Either the range is in the wrong place, or the town is in the wrong place. "Shit happens" is not good enough for sentient human beings. But alas I realize you are a "mythbusters" fan.
If you RTFA more carefully, you'd realize the stray bullet incident was from a nearby army base. Not the mythbusters, and not from this range.
Even if it had been from the same range, it makes no sense to expect that whatever procedures they corrected to prevent a second stray bullet would have been effective against a cannonball, so I don't see what your point is.
No, I would not jump at the chance to be an idiot on TV, or even pretend to be one.
And yes, they had an Obama episode. They did the "burn ships with mirrors" myth for a third time because it was Obama's favorite.
And they even got to meet him and have badly edited footage of their discussions afterward which clearly showed they didn't meet up a second time.
You clearly haven't been paying attention if you didn't hear about that one. Or the Seth Rogen episode for the Green Hornet.
And all physical experiments demand a understanding of basic physics. They often test myths that are clearly true or false to anyone who understands newton's laws. They either do it and are actually ignorant, or do it and feign ignorance for the show. Either way it's insulting, and it is by no means encouraging people to be interested in science.
An accident is a mishap which the parties involve did not intend to happen. I prefer the term "collision" because it's factual and leaves motivation and intent out of it. People are routinely arrested for things which they did not intend to do, and are often convicted of them, too.
Saying their 3rd overall priority for the entire series is a tie between Rogen and "shitty promos of Obama" based on the fact that they had *one* segment of *one* episode about Obama pretty much proves that you're irrationally attacking them because you, personally, for whatever reason, hate them.
As for them testing myths that are clearly true or false to anyone who understands Newton's laws. . What's your point? The show puts myths to the test. It wouldn't last very long if every segment was Jamie saying "Well this would be fucking obvious to you viewers if you weren't science retards."
A lot of myths are obviously bullshit to people who are well-versed in whatever subject the myth is about. The show is aiming at people who are not well-versed in those subjects, but who are interested in learning something about them (and who like something to blow up from time to time, which really is most of us ;) ). It's pretty obvious to me that if the powerful radar in the nose of an airplane, not to mention the air-to-ground phones installed in the plane, and the radios, and all the other emitting electronic devices don't screw up the instruments in the cockpit, then my cell phone certainly won't. But to people who don't have experience with radio communications, or who don't even know that airplanes have all those things installed in them, it might not be quite so clear. Doing an episode about that myth, therefore, makes sense - a lot more sense than opening and closing the segment with "Do cell phones interfere with airplanes? No. Duh."
Rather than insulting viewers by telling them that if they actually knew something they'd know the myth is BS, this show presents the information in a more entertaining and accessible way. I feel fairly safe in guessing that you'd agree with me that science education in the US is largely crap, which is why so many people fall for bullshit like life force bracelets and other stupid products. As we therefore have a large population of people who might be perfectly fine in the intelligence department, but nonetheless ignorant about aspects of science, a show that gets people interested even in a peripheral way about science or, at the very least, the scientific principle that you don't just randomly believe any crap you hear about, but test it out to see if it's plausible, is in my book a pretty good idea.
Plus, being pissed off at the 2 cohosts for not being physicists when they never claimed to be physicists, and specifically state in the intro to the show that they're movie prop makers, is kind of silly. They're two reasonably intelligent people who are very good at making custom devices and are therefore ideally suited for an "average joe wants to know about this myth" show.
I certainly don't make the claim that the Mythbuster crew is composed of scientists or that the show is about rehashing science that everyone should, according to you, already know. But Mythbusters doesn't make that claim either.
I suspect your version of the show would be very much more scientifically rigorous and educational, and thoroughly grounded in whatever discipline the myth-of-the-day required.
I also suspect that no one would watch it.
"I disagree with you" does not equal "flamebait."