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.'"

Comments

no wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what they get after firing Kari and company.

Re:no wonder

[hambone142]

They've run out of material. Additionally, they seem to pick the outcome prior to conducting their experiments. Cases in point: Women vs. men throwing a baseball (forced men to throw with opposite hand) and recently, blowing a boat out of water and not checking to see what really happened to it.

The worst was whether or not a stone kicked by a lawnmower would have the same power as a .357 magnum pistol round. They replaced the 5 HP lawnmower engine with an electric motor that was over 20 HP and completely ignored the difference in horsepower.

Quasi scientific buffoons.

Re:no wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

They ran out of meaningful myths a looooong time ago; it's been all movie myths and "shit some dude on the internet said" myths for ages. Even they haven't really been taking it that seriously; they often just make a semi-serious attempt at busting the myth, and then it's like "fuck it, let's blow some shit up." Once upon a time, it was a good show, but it's way past time to put it out of its misery.

Re:no wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a buffoon as well.
The horsepower doesn't matter so long as the blade RPM is the same. All more HP does is allow the blade to accelerate to its maximum velocity faster.
The inertia of the blade far outweighs the inertia of the motor rotor so there goes that argument as well.
The question is what is the velocity of the tip of the blade and how much of that velocity is transmitted to the projectile.
Since Ke=0.5 * mv^2 it's easy to figure out the results.
Now I'll be the first to say that the Mythbusters do crummy science but your complaints are just as ignorant.

Re:no wonder

[Cramer]

Partially correct... TORQUE is the key figure they (and you) missed. HP is, indeed, irrelevant. Speed of the blade and torque of the power source are the key metrics. You're only factoring for "impulse energy". This isn't a perfectly elastic collision -- the blade doesn't stop and the rock fly away. The blade continues to spin, pushing against the rock. That energy comes from torque, not HP.

(Torque creates acceleration. HP is what maintains speed.)

People need more science

[rmdingler]

Any show that taught science to the masses through a clever delivery venue would be missed dearly,

but these folks really delivered, often in an entertaining enough fashion that people might forget they were learning something, too.

Re:People need more science

[thegarbz]

Any show that taught science to the masses through a clever delivery venue would be missed dearly,

Fortunately we won't miss them then. Actually that's not fair. The show did hopefully give masses an increased interest in science, but I would caution anyone who would consider anything the mythbusters as "science". They got lucky sometimes, but other times their experiments were faulty, missed the point, mostly they lacked a control, and they had little or no control over environmental variables that quite frequently they got their answer quite. Great for entertainment value, not so good when someone uses "but mythbusters proved..." as an argument rebuttal.

That is preaching false science.

Re:People need more science

[Ogive17]

They were not doing experiences in order to submit papers to academic journals. It was a television show meant to entertain an audience.

No, it was not perfect science. It has been a few years since I have watched but from what I remember, each episode would have one main myth they were testing. If it was statistics based, they would almost always have a baseline to compare results to. If it was event based, they would do their best to replicate the conditions of the myth before they switched gears and simply tried to figure out how to replicate the results.

Trial and error is science.

Mythbusters Died When...

[Irate Engineer]

...they cut Kari Bryon.

All the explosions in the world didn't fix the lack of girl-next-door fun-n-curvy hotness that was Kerri. She was hot even when prego.

Re:Mythbusters Died When...

[gangien]

She also had zero scientific background

I think that's part of the point of the show. That you don't need to have a fancy degree and spend years in college to think critically and figure something out.

Re:Still going, eh?

[elrous0]

Be glad you missed the last few seasons.

Will Be Missed

[Thelasko]

I'm going to miss Mythbusters. My biggest complaint is that I can never find the show on TV. It seemed to be on all of the time when it first started. Now it airs during some secret time slot that moves constantly. That usually indicates a series will soon end.

Re:The Entrie Crew

[mspohr]

The entire series was: How many ways can you blow up something?