Well, after last week's fantastic episode, this one about cooking-related viral videos was underwhelming. I've never been a fan of their viral-video episodes, since so many of them are so obviously bogus from the start that it's kind of dishonest to even pretend there's a chance they could be valid. And the "shrimp cannon" myth was a perfect example of that. Anyone who knows the first thing about cooking knows that it takes time as well as heat -- that no matter how hot your stovetop or oven is, the effects won't be instantaneous. And too much heat will just char the exterior before it has time to conduct through to the interior. Plus there was no way that just plowing through a cloud of liquid or particles would impart an even, thorough coating on anything. I would've preferred if they'd just had Alton Brown do a cameo and deconstruct this thing with about 30 seconds of food science, then move on to a myth that was actually worth testing. Also... I hate shrimp. They look disgusting and they smell horrible. I am creeped out by any non-plant food item that looks like it did when it was alive. There were parts of this I couldn't even bring myself to look at. Sometimes I'm grateful I have such lousy vision in my left eye. I can just close my right eye and avoid seeing any disgusting details. The sword forge was cool, though. The row of sword forges was even cooler -- err, hotter. It looked like the windows of the train to Hell. Too bad they couldn't have used it for a more interesting myth. The myth about juicing a tomato with explosives was more interesting because it was actually valid. And there was some decent physics there, with the realization that the containment of the shock waves in the box was as important to the effect as the amplitude of the blast (which, come to think of it, is the exact same principle by which a microwave oven works, by concentrating the waves). But even with the ramping-up attempt in the lake (and I doubt the water was clean enough for them to actually eat or drink anything they pulled out of it), the whole thing was so simple and straightforward that it wasn't really all that interesting. They could've done both of these as mini-myths and fit one or two other myths into the episode.
Oh, ho, ho! Them's fightin' words!!! You are so dead to me now I may just have to "block" you. I could eat prawns until I likely die from the heavy metal poisoning! (That's me ascending to paradise after having that last delicious bite.) Sincerely, Bill
I can understand people who are allergic to seafood not liking shrimp. Anyone else, how can you hate shrimp?!
I'm not allergic to anything as far as I know. But when my father would cook shrimp for himself, I was disgusted by the smell. And I can't stand the way they look. Different people, different taste perceptions. That's not something that should need any further explanation. By the way, I should've mentioned -- the best thing about this episode was the high-speed photography on the explosions. The cavitation inside the cube of water was intriguing, and the ultra-high-speed of the pond explosion did a good job showing how complex it was. They really are doing some impressive stuff with their new cameras this season -- it's too bad they didn't have all this sooner.
I LOVE the hi-speed explosions! Fascinating images. And I too hate shrimp. I'm not putting a giant bug in my mouth short of post-apocalypse survival needs. As for the flash-cooking thing, my wife was shaking her head thru the whole sequence. "They need to fry in oil for a certain amount of time, period."
I appreciated her professional contributions as well, but that wasn't my underlining point. These are TV executives, and TV executives 'don't think like that' and you'd think they'd see the "value" in having a female cast member in order to lure in the drooling male viewers. Anyway, I just watched the "traincar implosion" one and thought it was quite cool. Very impressed with the full-sized tanker withstanding the pressures a near-vacuum generated, which seems counter-intuitive at fist, but then you consider the same kind of pressures (1-atmosphere vs. a vacuum) are trying to explode the rockets, shuttles, and space-stations we put into orbit and they're usually a lot "flimsier" than that railcar. So there's a lot to be said about things like structure, materials and scale. On the scale-front, instead of scaling the length of the oil-drums they should have scaled the volume of the containers they were trying to crush. Start small, like with food cans, go to the oil drums, and then some intermediate between the oil drums and the railcar. See if the change in volume/drum diameter changes things. But damn impressive the damaged car crushed.
Oh, I see. You were projecting what their thinking would be, not describing your own. Sorry for the mixup. Maybe they offered to keep her, but she refused to stay without the other two? . Right. The cylinder is a very powerful shape, especially with hemispherical endcaps. There's no point where the forces can concentrate to create unbalanced stress -- not until they dented it, anyway. And I wouldn't say it's counterintuitive, because it's basically the reverse of the various pressure cylinders we've seen on the show, where the gas pressure inside was so high that the air outside was a relative vacuum. And those didn't blow outward any more than the train car blew inward, not until some point of weakness was introduced. I suppose the oil drums were well-used and had sustained some dents here and there, so they weren't as symmetrical as the train car or a pressure cylinder. If they'd had thicker walls, maybe they would've been.
If you watch again, those 44 gallon drums they used into shop testing were nice and shiny inside - they were brand new. The differences between the drums and the rail cars a) the drums didn't have curved ends and b) the drums had those bits around the middle that are raised (so there's an indentation inside the drum that's clearly visible when they are opened) and finally the metal on the rail cars was a lot thicker.
Yeah, the drums had flat ends and the support ribs, as well as being a thinner metal and likely a "weaker" metal too. The drums are likely made of steel, the rail car probably iron or a stronger steel alloy, as well as the railcar's body being much thicker than the drums. But, I still wonder how much of it was a volume thing due to the diameter of the drum. Changing the length of it changes the volume, yes, but the diameter remains the same. Would a wider cylindrical object have been "stronger" (rounded ends or not.) It makes a fair amount of sense that every object can be crushed no matter how "strong" it is, it's just a factor of how much punishment it can take. To be completely fair, they never achieved a complete vacuum in any of the tests, even though they came very, very close. And, well, outside of some heavy-duty pumps there's no way for them to have gotten a perfect vacuum. I do wonder how much integrity the car would have kept had there been a perfect vacuum inside of it. It's also probably worth quibbling atmospheric pressure isn't a constant and it can vary as well based on atmospheric pressure. A cold day, for example, would get them different results than a hot day. A clear day vs. a rainy day. Etc. Not sure how much this would have changed things but the "myth" suggests a pretty low pressure day considering it was raining. Still a fascinating episode to watch and impressive result they achieved and I'd argue within the boundaries of "plausible" considering it's not too out-of-line to think of a damaged/abused railcar being cleaned in such a manner, sealed, and then collapsing. Oh, at one point Adam remarks at hearing the still boiling water inside of the drum. I guess we could argue that as it cooled and the pressure dropped the water would continue to boil.
"Car Destruction Special": Well, more suction and destruction, I guess. The myth about lifting a car with a vacuum cleaner was an interesting demonstration of the physics of pressure and suction. I was actually surprised it worked, since I figured the larger surface area would spread out a finite amount of suction force more thinly. I guess it's been too long since I took basic physics. As for the failure of the initial full-scale test, I don't think the problem was with the suction cups they used, but with their failure to consider that the car was front-heavy because of the engine block. That meant the front didn't lift as easily as the rest, so the car tilted forward until some of the cups pulled free. I think there were a couple of things they could've done to fix it -- they could've put weights in the trunk as a counterbalance, as is done in many Hollywood car stunts to keep cars from tipping forward, or they could've put all their suction cups on the hood and roof so that they were concentrated around the center of mass. The car-flattening thing was kind of basic, though the small-scale results were interesting. The problem is that the full-scale test went so wrong that it ended up kind of inconclusive. They don't really know a car can't be flattened with explosives, they just know they went about it wrong. There were some pretty impressive explosions, though -- maybe too impressive. They're gonna lose their deposit on those rental cars.
I just watched the cooking/viral video episode and I was instantly dubious on the "shrimp cooking" one and knew that no matter what they did it wouldn't work. Fractions of a fraction of a second isn't long enough to cook shrimp or to really even do *anything* to it. They may have been able to "bread" it on some level or another if the shrimp passed through the denser areas of the expulsions (the shrimp, for example, flew through the fine mist of the bread crumbs rather than the denser part nearer to where they were ejected.) But cooking? Microseconds in any kind of heat isn't enough. As was pointed out in the show, you can wave your hand through fire and be fine because it spends so little time in the fire. You can dip your hand into molten steel and if you're quick enough nothing will happen. It's not the heat being outputed it's the transfer of heat that matters and microseconds isn't enough time to transfer heat. The explosion "juicing" thing was more interesting. I would have liked them to split open a "juiced" tomato to see what the internal structure looked like after going through the process. Wasn't much surprised the larger scale test didn't yield any real results.
It makes sense, since pressure is defined just as force applied to a specific area P=F/A. Or in other way around, force applied by the pressure to the same area is just pressure multiplied by that area F=PA. So increasing the area, while maintaining the pressure constant, increases the force holding the car in place.
^Yup, I remember that now. I still find it surprising that one vacuum-cleaner motor's power could suffice to exert that much suction, but now that I think about it, it's really the outside atmosphere that's doing the work of holding the car in place; the vacuum cleaner is just creating a void that the outside air is trying to push its way into. Like the tank car crush, it's a demonstration of how powerful atmospheric pressure can be.
Volunteer Special: Ugh, not zombies again. It's odd that they seemed to run each test in their axe-vs.-gun thing only once. With so many random variables in how the individual "zombies" moved and attacked and how Adam or Jamie moved in response, the results could easily vary by a huge amount from trial to trial. It would take multiple tests to get any statistically meaningful data. Still, the results are consistent with what I've been told by people in the know about how bladed weapons make more sense than guns for close-quarters (melee) combat. The time needed to ready and aim a gun, or to unjam or reload it, can often be too much for a close-in situation where split-seconds count. Plus there's the risk of friendly fire. I did appreciate the Ash reference ("Groovy") in the chainsaw test. I wonder, though -- what happens when the chainsaw runs out of gas? Would it have enough fuel to last through 190 zombies? The supermarket line test was interesting. At first, the serpentine line method struck me as a novel approach, until I realized it's how things are already done at the bank, the movie theater, the DMV, the post office, etc. So the confirmation that that's actually a slower method is kind of disquieting. This was about testing whether grocery stores should change their approach to lines, but maybe they're the one kind of business that gets it right, and the others should change. Although there is the paradox of wait time vs. customer satisfaction to consider. Didn't they have a similar counterintuitive result with their airplane boarding test, where the fastest method was one of the most disliked? I initially wondered if the lack of bar-code scanners would affect the realism of the results, but since it's just comparing the times for multiple lines vs. serpentine, all that matters is that they both use the same checkout method. Although that does make me wonder if the presence of self-serve checkout lines in grocery stores improves speed and efficiency. Too bad we'll never get a revisit.