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

The Entrie Crew

[sycodon]

Hope they bring them back for the finale.

Re:The Entrie Crew

[OzPeter]

+1.

One thing is bugging me... 2,950 experiments would be an average of 11 experiments per episode... I don't quite remember there being that many.

Maybe you should do some research and report back on how many experiments actually made it to air. After all you wouldn't want this myth of 11 experiments per show to go untested.

Re:The Entrie Crew

[mspohr]

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

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

[Garfong]

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)

They also forced the women to throw with the opposite hand. They were trying to control for difference in training between men & women. The full conclusion was the average man can throw better than the average woman, the raw talent of the average men and average women is the same. But a multi-part conclusion like that doesn't really fit well into the Confirmed/Plausible/Busted format they use.

Re:no wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny how people are on the internet are quick to dump on them for doing more harm than good at teaching science, let the vast majority of scientists, science educators, and science outreach people I've talked to think that Mythbusters does much more good than harm. They and I have seen many direct examples of children and adults that have a more experiment based approach to learning things about the world. I've seen it motivate kids to participating in projects, sometimes without even the extra push of being for a class or science fair, learn a lot and they are full of drive and questions about how to do things the right way in far more detail than the light approaches taken by something formatted for TV. The show has been on long enough now, I've seen engineering and science college students that were partially inspired by seeing the show when they were younger.

There are a few people who get a very superficial view of science from the show. But in my experience, those people weren't getting anything from more detailed oriented documentaries and material out there already too. Hell, look at all of the people on Slashdot who learn science in half-ass manners from TV show documentaries and pop-sci, yet will comment with confidence on subjects while getting things wrong if they actually took time to read something as simple as a Wikipedia article on the topic they talk about. Speaking of which, considering how many science articles you post to with something completely wrong at such a basic level, maybe you have some experience with what constitutes a failed science education...

Re:no wonder

[radish]

I disagree - the last season with just the two of them has been a great return to form. You know, actually doing science, actually showing the build process and failures as well as successes. As much as I liked the three other hosts (and I did like them) they were a distraction and devolved the show into the quest for larger explosions.

Re:no wonder

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

(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.

parallels with industry

[dwywit]

I guess the cut-back-on-staff-to-improve-profitibility(ratings) experiment didn't work.

I would have moved the other three into a different field, maybe a travelling show, visiting schools to do cool science stuff - fewer explosions, sure, but maybe some rocketry +GoPro, or weather balloons. Lots of room for building stuff out of silicone/gelatine, dropping buster onto various surfaces with sensor experiments designed by the students.

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

[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.

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:Mythbusters Died When...

[Irate Engineer]

Feh...

Kari never toted natural hair color.

Wait...Kari had hair? I wasn't looking at the top of her head apparently.

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.

Law enforcement bias

[eutychus]

Another huge issue is their close ties to law enforcement and the resulting biased conclusions.

Drug dogs

Or polygraphs...

Or traffic/speed cameras...

Re:Mythbusters Died When...

[RubberDogBone]

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.

Re:Exit while you're ahead

[Hognoxious]

That'd make a great finale - test whether it actually is possible to jump over a shark.