Heads up! MYTHBUSTERS season premiere tonight at 9 Eastern!

[Trekker4747]

Forbin wrote:

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What's not to love?

Not very much but somehow every week I find more.

[Lonemagpie]

Lonemagpie wrote:

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As for the "in kendo the first person to move will lose" thing. Speaking from experience in a variety of sword arts, this is definitely at least semi-true - it depends, however, on the two combatants being equally matched. Obviously an experienced combatant will beat a newbie even if he moves first. But I can certainly attest to the fact that if two equally matched kenjutsu-ka (or similar) duel, the one who moves first almost always loses. Partly because he's more likely to leave himself open in some way during the attack, and also because those arts, being arts, are taught in a way that emphasises reaction and countering, so it's second nature for the participants to respond a stimulus rather than as a first-strike.

If you put a good practitioner of Iai-do against him, OTOH, you're more likely to see the odds even out, or actually go the other way, as that's all about making a first-strike draw, rather than responding to a combat stimulus.

I wonder when the UK will be getting these episodes?

Ah, we just had this episode this week - they're going for headshots from chudan no kamae, which isn't what I expected - but they really need to re-do it with freer options on stances and moves than just the one.

[the G-man]

Lately, for anyone who's interested, Adam's been writing a lot for Wired magazine.

[Christopher]

So nobody's posting thoughts on the new episodes? This week was the Halloween special, and it was a mixed bag. The first myth, testing whether infrasound could induce anxiety and the perception of a place being haunted, was really badly handled. Adam even admitted a source of bias in their experimental design -- that maybe their volunteers were picking the first of the four cabins as the creepiest because of the novelty of the experience -- but they just shrugged it off rather than trying to fix the problem. They should've done more to balance out other differences and sources of bias -- put the infrasound on a different cabin each time, had the volunteers go through the cabins in different orders, had identical chairs in each, etc. But they didn't even bother. Really, really sloppy experimental design. The science has really gone downhill on this show.

I didn't much care for the Fear Factor quality of the "smell of fear" experiment, but since it served a purpose, it didn't feel as gratuitous. Interesting that there was a difference detectable to an expert, but I wish they'd explained what caused fear sweat to smell different from exertion sweat, what the biochemical or hormonal difference was. Another way the science is slipping: they don't put as much effort into explaining the causes and mechanisms behind things.

I liked the animated Scooby-Doo pastiche they did, with Tory as Shaggy, Grant as Fred, Kari as Daphne, and Buster as a ghost. But why was Grant wearing a shirt and tie instead of a sweater and ascot?

The body-moving test gave surprising results. For years I've been watching the Mythbusters struggle to move and carry Buster around, so I would've thought they'd have similar difficulty with this SynDaver(TM). Maybe the SynDaver being lighter, only 150 pounds, made it easier. Or maybe it was because it was more flexible than Buster or a ballistics-gel dummy, making it easier to maneuver.

Anyway, the SynDaver is a pretty cool human analog, and I expect we'll see more of them on the show in the future. I wonder if there's a version that comes with skin.

One thing I question is the premise of the myth. Is it really true that movies tend to show body-moving as an easy thing to do? I'm sure I've seen a number of instances of characters struggling with the dead weight.

[Trekker4747]

Usually you've been the one to express your thoughts on the episodes/where they went wrong/etc. I didn't want to steal your thunder or anything, nor do I think I could present as much intriguing thought into their experiments.

I haven't watched tonight's yet, but the previous episodes have been pretty decent.

I do think they were a bit... "off base" in saying Cameron was "wrong" in the Jack/Rose Titanic ending. Jamie and Adam were only able to "survive" because they had the ingenuity and thought to strap the lifebelt to the debris. The situation Jack and Rose were under was somewhat different. Consider that it was 2AM when Jack and Rose went into the water so they were doubtlessly tired from being up for so long, tired from the running and such they've been doing all night, not to mention the very frigid waters would likely make it hard for them to manipulate the lifebelt and debris to make it slightly more buoyant.

Also wonder how well testing hypothermia rig they made translates to the real world. Water is more efficient and the transference of heat energy than air. You feel cold in water than you do in similar temperature air because water is a better conductor of heat. So I would think surviving hypothermia in air would be a lot more likely than becoming deathly hypothermic in water than they indicated in the episode. I'm just not clear on how their rig worked on making the dummy "generate its own heat" like the human body does.

The balloon drop myth was interesting, but didn't produce anything too surprising. In the "Aftershow" they indicated it's just plain easier to crash cars in this manner (dropping them as opposed to using a crash test track) but I think the visuals lose something in the process.

The wave trench was interesting from Jamie and Adam's experiments. (Love the large-scale office-toy rig Adam built.)

The "Cliffhanger" myth, again, nothing too surprising there.

And I can't quite remember what other myths we've had since the show came back. I remember the rocket surfboard, nothing to say there, and there's one other one just not springing to mind.

And, I think Kari and the producers are just really toying with us now.



I mean, come ON. They HAD to know how this would be taken.

[Forbin]

They missed a bet in the smell of fear segment. A dog! Especially since the most common cliche I know of is to keep calm when faced with a dangerous animal because "they can smell fear on you!"

[Forbin]

^There's a loving sequence of stills from that Kari balloon sequence at www.zodcaps.com.

[Christopher]

Circus Peanut wrote:

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I'm just not clear on how their rig worked on making the dummy "generate its own heat" like the human body does.

As I recall, there was water being heated externally and then fed through the tubing into the dummy's body. So kinda like a dialysis machine, except with a heater instead of a filter.

Forbin wrote:

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They missed a bet in the smell of fear segment. A dog! Especially since the most common cliche I know of is to keep calm when faced with a dangerous animal because "they can smell fear on you!"

But how's the dog going to tell you whether it detects fear or not?

[Trekker4747]

Christopher wrote:

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As I recall, there was water being heated externally and then fed through the tubing into the dummy's body. So kinda like a dialysis machine, except with a heater instead of a filter.

Ah, okay.

Just watched the episode:

I agree with Christopher the problems with the "sound of fear" test didn't seem to be tweaked out. I would have expected them to mix it up a bit to rule out any "bias" in the order of the cabins. Or keep them in the same cabin, turn the sound on at some random interval during the course of a 10 minutes or so and have their test subject under various forms of surveillance to see if anything in them changed when the "fear sound" was started. (Like heart rate, respiration, body temperature, etc.)

The "smell of fear" I'm doubtful on. I'd even quibble that the expert sniffer during the first test may have been mostly right out of just pure luck of the numbers or out of it not being an entirely "blind" test. She knew there was something she was supposed to sense differently. The fact that their larger test with the 20-some samples was a failure for her should have busted the myth right there. (I might also quibble there's a difference between be "afraid" due to a phobia or being crawled on by "creepy" animals and "fear." Does a person really react the same way to a personal phobia or discomfort the same way as they would, say, walking through a dark alley in the inner city, or through a supposedly "haunted" house?

Moving the body? A 150-lb weight is pretty damn light in body form. Both Jamie and Adam we could argue are "average" sized and they're knocking on 200 IIRC. I'll take them for their word that the body was correctly weighted to a real human, I just think that short of the body being a slightly larger than average sized female, 150lbs is way too light.

The grave-digging one was on their almost a stinger so a non-subject. Hell, the history of murders can tell you that for the most part burying a body is very hard since most desperate criminals not in organized crime hardly bother with digging much more than a ditch they can sorta lay the body in.

Kari is Hot.

[SynDaver Labs]

The SynDaver Synthetic Human that was used on tonight's Mythbusters episode was our standard female unit. It includes all muscles, bones, and organs present in normal human anatomy and it is correctly weighted for it's build and height (5ft 4in).

We do indeed make versions with skin but the show producers thought the body would perhaps be disturbing to viewers with the skin and fat installed.

[Christopher]

^Thanks for posting. But isn't 150 pounds a bit high for a typical 5'4" female? I'm a 5'10" male and I weighed around 150 in my prime, sometimes less.

[SynDaver Labs]

Depends on her bone structure and body type I suppose. In the case of our female SynDaver we could have made her lighter or heavier by altering her muscularity and / or fat content - but we did not shoot for a particular weight when we designed her - that's just how it came out.

[Trekker4747]

150 sounds a bit right for "slightly above average" female.

[LitmusDragon]

I've missed these threads but have been too lazy to start my own. I haven't seen the new episode yet due to TWD and Dexter but once I do I'll be checking back.

[Trekker4747]

Christopher wrote:

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I liked the animated Scooby-Doo pastiche they did, with Tory as Shaggy, Grant as Fred, Kari as Daphne, and Buster as a ghost. But why was Grant wearing a shirt and tie instead of a sweater and ascot?

On those lines, I'm guessing to make the animations look as little as possible like Scooby Doo. Tori's "Shaggy" look was only vaguely Shaggy-like, same with Kari's Daphne look. They were similar-enough looking to get the reference across but different enough to not be a direct rip-off.