Heads up! MYTHBUSTERS season premiere tonight at 9 Eastern!

[TheMurph]

Christopher wrote:

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They had the opportunity to make this show more science-oriented by discussing the physics and engineering behind the machines, but they didn't really do anything with it.

So if Adam & Jamie (or the other Mythbusters) do create/host another show for Discovery, I hope it's more science-oriented and educational, because a show that actually lets us learn new things would be more interesting than this was.

Exactly. I was hoping that was what CR was going to be, but was left disappointed. And if they ever get tired of Mythbusters i would be happy if one or both of the Senior Busters got a more Edu Science show.

[CmdrAJD]

I watched the finale, and, as others have said, I can't say that I'll really miss the show. The relative lack of Adam and Jamie was a serious problem, and the show only seemed to perk up when they were on screen. The "host", such as he was, seemed to have almost no personality, and despite the fact that I believe Adam and Jamie said he was there as a resource, we never saw him interact with the teams except when he looked at their first link and then threw the missing link at them.

My biggest issue was with how they handled the final execution of the machines, though. The whole point of the show is to see these things work, and half the time it felt like we weren't seeing segments work or they were shot at a terrible angle. The machines are the payoff. The show crew gets to see these things being built over five days. They know where the elements are. Put in more cameras to catch it all properly and then do some editing to better show us the flow. I'd be fine if they had cut a couple of minutes of the build and instead ran through each machine twice for the viewers: once in real time and one more to really show us the flow of the machine. I doubt it's an issue now, though. I seriously can't imagine that we will see a second season.

[Redfern]

When Adam and Jamie Rigged that water heater cannon last night, I thought this was going to be the expriment that resulted in a cannon ball smashing through a couple of houses. But neither the round shot from the Civil War weapon (as a baseline test) nor their steam powered mechanism punched through 2 full "pallets".

What WERE they testing that resulted in that freak accident? I can't remember.

Sincerely,

Bill

[Christopher]

Anyway, back to Mythbusters:

Water heater cannon: At first blush, it seems surprising that the water heater cannon didn't work as well as a regular cannon, given how much power past water-heater explosions have had. But I guess they just seem that powerful compared to our expectations about what water and steam are capable of. It really shouldn't be surprising that a gunpowder cannon actually designed to be a cannon would be more powerful. Although I guess it's impressive that the water-heater cannon was even half as powerful.

And this just wasn't their day for testing, was it? First a bad heating element, then a brush fire (or was it the other way around?). Well, at least it didn't go as far awry as that other cannon myth that was in the news a while back. (EDIT: Redfern, your answer is in the link. The other Mythbuster team was testing whether other objects fired out of a cannon would have as much force as a cannonball.)


Fireworks Man: Pretty straightforward. They improved the design of the launch vehicle and got better results. Nothing surprising, so not much to say. Nice to see the legendary cement-mixer-explosion quarry again, though.


Limo tilt: How appropriate that the bird they used as a model was a Kori bustard. They should rebuild that mechanical bustard and make it their new mascot.

I think the problem with testing this myth is that the idea behind it is that the car is so precariously perched that it only takes a tiny change to send it over, whereas they have to make sure the car is just a touch less precariously perched so that it'll be stable enough that it won't go over just with a gust of wind. So I'm not sure it's really feasible to test the exact circumstances of the myth. It's the sort of thing that might be plausible with just the right incredible fluke circumstances, but that's hard to test for.


Fine motor skills with heavy machinery: I like that inversion of expectations, trying to do something very subtle with these powerful vehicles. I think they should've done the needle threading second, though, since it was a lot more impressive than the wine pouring. (Heck, I have trouble threading needles even up close with my fingers. Though I wonder how many tries it actually took.)

[davejames]

I thought this latest episode was a lot of fun. As a Burn Notice fan I got a huge kick out of seeing them tackle one of Michael's "spy tips." Hell, you could probably devote an entire season to just stuff from that show (like all the various uses he gets out of a cell phone).

As for the bullet ricochet, I'm sure they could have lucked out and hit the right spot eventually, but as they showed it would have to be a REALLY lucky shot. And at that point, you might as well try something else.

And I have to admit I expected at least SOME kind of small boost from the shockwave. Nothing like what we see in the movies of course, but at least an extra couple inches. But looks like there just isn't enough air being pushed out to get the job done.

[Trekker4747]

I don't think it so much force as it is "path of least resistence" for the shockwave to push you out of the way it has to, well, do something. It's easier for the shockwave to just move around you than it is to push you.

[Christopher]

Bouncing bullets: I'm a little surprised it even came as close to working as it did, in terms of the ricochet off the asphalt. I guess asphalt's a harder material than I figured. But I hadn't realized there was so much sturdy, bullet-resistant stuff underneath the floor of a car.

I was surprised to hear them talking about the "firewall" as part of the construction of a car. I figured that "firewall" as a computing term had to be named for something more physical, but I never would've thought it referred to a piece of a car. Although I just looked it up and apparently it's mainly used in construction to refer to a fire-resistant wall of a building. The firewall in a car is what separates the passenger compartment from the engine; is it called that because it blocks the heat from the engine, or because it provides temporary protection to the passengers if the engine catches fire?

The rig they built to get high-speed footage of bullet ricochets while the truck was in motion was pretty ingenious.


Shock wave riding: Not too surprised by the result, since I'm not sure I'd expect a shock wave to have a "pushing" effect at all. I mean, it isn't really a substance moving forward; it's just an outwardly propagating density/pressure increase in the air. It's like a wave in the ocean. If you're on a boat in the ocean and a big wave comes by, it doesn't so much push you forward as lift you up and then lower you again. The water in a wave doesn't actually move forward, just rises up and down, so an object in that water would be affected the same way. I know surfers can ride waves, but I think they already have to have built up a certain amount of speed. From the footage I've seen, if you're sitting still on a surfboard when a wave crest reaches you, you just bob up and down. So maybe surfing isn't so much about being pushed forward by a wave as it is about propelling yourself forward until you can match velocity with the wave. Ah, and the Wikipedia article on surfing bears this out. Surfers do have to match velocity with the waves before they hit, and they need to be towed by a boat to match velocity with really fast waves. So the waves aren't actually propelling the surfers at all.

So really, there's no reason this should have worked, and the Mythbusters shouldn't have been surprised by its failure. The notion that a shock wave even could push someone forward is a misunderstanding of the physics of the phenomenon. Sure, the actual expanding gases from the explosion push stuff outward -- that's how an explosion works in the first place -- but the shock wave that hit Buster isn't made of those gases; it's just a compression in the surrounding air as a consequence of the explosion. So all Buster would've felt was a temporary, sharp increase in air pressure, not an acceleration.

[Forbin]

I was surprised to hear them talking about the "firewall" as part of the construction of a car. I figured that "firewall" as a computing term had to be named for something more physical, but I never would've thought it referred to a piece of a car.

I'm surprised you didn't know the computer term came from a physical world origin! As a WWII airplane buff and son of a fighter pilot, I've been hearing the term since I was a wee lad, referring to the bulkhead that the engine is mounted to. Meant to, you guessed it, try to keep an engine fire away from the pilot and gas tank.

In fact a colloquialism for suddenly going balls-out full speed was "Firewall it!" Meaning shove the throttle lever forward toward the firewall.

[Trekker4747]

Yeah, I'd always heard of the bulkhead between the passenger compartment of the car and the engine compartment as being the "firewall."

[Christopher]

Forbin wrote:

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I'm surprised you didn't know the computer term came from a physical world origin!

Umm, I just said "I figured [it] had to be named for something more physical." Obviously something with "fire" and "wall" in the name is a metaphor based in physical things. I just didn't expect it to have anything to do with cars specifically. I was assuming something more building-related (which is its primary meaning).

[Christopher]

Well, last night's viewer letters special wasn't a complete waste, since there was a good deal of previously unseen material in it. Some of the viewer requests were rather pointless, and a couple of the segments were kind of unpleasant (the cinnamon one in particular). But the "blow up a washer and dryer" thing was made a bit less pointless by using it as a way to demonstrate the shooting process.

Some of the things here, like the van explosion test that was confirmed right off so they didn't have enough material for a full segment, reminds me of how much more flexible the show used to be in early seasons, when it generally had three or even four myths per episode instead of just two. There should still be a place for short segments like this, and not just in a once-per-season special.

Parts of this episode drove home how much the US versions of the episodes are cut down to make room for commercials. Like the way part of the "game show" segment was reduced to a montage with voiceover, which kind of defeats the purpose of it. And there was a shot in the closing montage of a horse or cow or something, under narration implying it was something from earlier in the episode, but we hadn't seen it.

[davejames]

Yeah this wasn't one of the more exciting episodes, but these guys are always fun to hang out with anyway. Especially when Tory is cracking corny jokes about Kari's melons. Lol. Would have liked to have seen more examples like the exploding van though, since they said they had many more. Even watching that one and only test was more interesting than any of the other "myths" in the episode.

And as always, I'm continually baffled at the crazy, insane things kids do nowadays either to get high or get noticed on Youtube. Whether it's chugging cinnamon, drinking hand sanitizer, inhaling bath salts, or riding on the outside of cars at full speed. I mean, seriously? WTF?

[Christopher]

^I think kids have always done crazy and dangerous things like that to show off to their friends. The only thing that's changed is that they now show off to huge numbers of strangers. Although, granted, the larger audience and the presence of so many competing stunt videos could very well be creating pressure to attempt more extreme stunts.

davejames wrote:

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Yeah this wasn't one of the more exciting episodes, but these guys are always fun to hang out with anyway. Especially when Tory is cracking corny jokes about Kari's melons. Lol.

I'd prefer to think that wasn't his intent, because that would be sexual harrassment of a coworker and it's nothing to laugh about. Certainly he was going for a cheap innuendo, but I think he was just joking with Kari as "one of the guys" rather than sexually objectifying Kari herself.

[Trekker4747]

davejames wrote:

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And as always, I'm continually baffled at the crazy, insane things kids do nowadays either to get high or get noticed on Youtube. Whether it's chugging cinnamon, drinking hand sanitizer, inhaling bath salts, or riding on the outside of cars at full speed. I mean, seriously? WTF?

What about getting "high" on Nutmeg?

Episode was interesting but not much to really dig into. I did find the chemical-van segment to be interesting and I think it could have been integrated into a mini-myth episode.

[CmdrAJD]

Most of the viewer requests did seem pointless. I also could have skipped the trivia game in favor of more of previously unseen footage like the van and the special underwear Adam made for Kari.

If you haven't seen it, Adam, Kari, Grant, and Tory took on Team Nerdist in All-Star Celebrity Bowling this week. Well worth a watch.

http://www.nerdist.com/2012/05/the-n...g-mythbusters/