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Mythbusters Ending After Next Season (ew.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Entertainment Weekly is just one of many reporting that next season will be the last for the long-running show Mythbusters. EW reports: "The pioneering reality series, one of cable's longest-running shows, will stage its final gonzo experiment during next year's 14th season after 248 episodes and 2,950 experiments. But there is some upside: Stars Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman have secretly known the end was coming all year and have been crafting an explosive final run for the seven-time Emmy-nominated series. 'It was my greatest fear that Mythbusters would just stop and we wouldn't be able to do proper final episodes,' Savage tells EW. 'So whether it's myths about human behavior or car stories or explosion stories, we tried to find the most awesome example of each category and build on our past history.'"
Wow, I've not seen a recent episode in a little while, but I didn't realize they had canned Kari and presumable her other two male cohorts....
Hell, SHE was one of the primary reasons I watched the show in the first place...she had a "geek" hot thing going on.....even after being preggers.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
To be fair, a lot of the experiments done in the name of the show never actually made it to the show; in the later seasons they often gave a shout-out to the Mythbusters website so you could check out additional content that would otherwise have been left on the cutting room floor.
I'd also imagine that there were ones where they'd done the entire experiment and just simply found it to not be interesting enough to air.
Kari was hired to work as a sculptor and model maker and artist in the M5 business and was already working there. She happened to be around when the TV series pilot episodes needed help, but she was an M5 employee and wasn't officially added to the show cast until later.
People who work for M5 do not automatically work for the show. They have always been separate.
Sig for hire.
(Torque creates acceleration. HP is what maintains speed.)
Not really. Power (weather measured in HP or Watts) for a rotating machine is simply the torque multiplied by the angular velocity. So while you need torque to accelerate e.g. a car, you can't say that "horse power" maintains speed. In fact, it's torque that maintains speed as well. You need enough output torque that when its converted to a force at the wheel/road surface, that force is sufficient to overcome the force due to other losses (wind resistance, or work due to going up hill). Of course, going up a hill your engine/motor's power output better be greater than the work you're doing, otherwise you've made a perpetum mobile
Now, the main problem with the lawn mower example is that the torque curves, i.e. torque as a function of angular velocity ("revs") is very different between an electric motor and an internal combustion engine. (Indeed, that's why many internal combustion engines has an electric motor to start it). So you'd have to compare the torque curves at the precise operating (speed/load) where the stone was hit.
Without doing the math, my feeling is that if you did so, you'd come up with the answer that it didn't matter anyway. The collision between a small, relatively speaking light and hard, stone and the fairly heavy, also hard, steel rotor of a lawn mower with substantial inertia, is as near to the idealistic elastic collision as dammit. I'd be very surprised if the rotor had time to lose enough angular momentum that the difference in torque curves between the electric motor and an ICE one would make enough of a difference in the outcome of the experiment to dominate other sources of error in the setup. Note that of course, it's the difference in torque characteristics, i.e. the speed with which the motor/engine can change its output given a change in load that's the determining factor. At the steady state, a rotor spinning at the same speed will have the same absolute torque driving it, just balancing out losses from friction. If it were otherwise the blade wouldn't rotate with a steady RPM, it would instead rev up or down. So it's not the torque of the power source per se that's the difference, but rather "on demand" torque often called, acceleration torque, given changing conditions.
Stefan Axelsson