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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.'"
Hope they bring them back for the finale.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
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.
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...
Another huge issue is their close ties to law enforcement and the resulting biased conclusions.
Drug dogs
Or polygraphs...
Or traffic/speed cameras...