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Mythbusters: "Hidden Nasties"
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Soda cans and rats: Not much to say beyond: Ick. And I'm glad it was debunked and gotten out of the way so handily. Coulda done without a couple of the visuals, though.
Relative filth: They already did a myth like this once, a few years ago. I think they compared the toilet seat to the floor and found it was significantly cleaner.
Anyway, the results aren't that surprising. I mean, the part of the body that the seat actually touches doesn't normally come into contact with anywhere near as many surfaces as one's hands do. And the kitchen sponge result is a well-known fact -- all the pores retain moisture and make them a breeding ground for germs, so you're supposed to either sterilize or replace them every couple of weeks. I've heard some people rest them in a dilute bleach solution between uses.
And what do you know? Lucre actually is filthy! Paper money was the germiest thing they tested after the sponge. Not surprising, since it goes through many hands and is relatively porous. I imagine credit cards are cleaner -- at least in a literal sense.
Car skip: Okay, Jessi said she studied the Cannonball Run 3 scene repeatedly in slow motion, but she didn't mention the one detail that I caught the second time through: it looked to me like there were a couple of low, submerged ramps spaced out in the pond, and that those were what enabled the car to appear to "skip." Right after each landing, there was another ramp to send it upward again. And the lake was probably very shallow anyway. So I knew there was no way this was going to work for real.
And the results and Grant's analysis sort of bore that out. He called it bouncing on a submerged platform, but I could still see a couple of things pretty clearly sticking out of the water.
One thing I didn't predict, but should have from past experience, was the car flipping forward. Once that happened, I remembered that (as we've seen in past myths) real cars are front-heavy and tend to tilt forward when jumping or falling unless they're specially weighted (as Grant then said).
I'm surprised how much the weight of the toy car had to be reduced to match the proportional weight of the real Lamborghini. I would've expected the real car to be proportionally heavier, but I guess the toy car was radio-controlled and had a lot more internal machinery than the toy cars I've had experience with. Also I guess sportscars need to be light. I'm wondering if the toy car was front-weighted like a real one, though.
It's really ironic that they failed to achieve the results of the stunt when replicating the stunt's faked setup but succeeded when doing it more naturally. The filmmakers probably went to a lot of trouble they didn't need to go to. In fact, I'd call that a Confirmed or at least Plausible rather than Busted, because what was being tested was the purported situation depicted in the film, not the stagecraft (in this case the ramp, among other things) used to execute it.
It's definitely a don't-try-this-at-home scenario, though. The car came down pretty hard when it reached land, and one of its impacts knocked Tory's "nose cone" clear off. The occupant of the car might be somewhat the worse for wear as well.
Did that second car have its engine in the back? That probably helped, since it wasn't front-heavy.
This was the first episode where Jessi was really featured -- she presented the myth, and kind of took the lead since cars are her specialty. And both her appealing and unappealing qualities were more in evidence. She came off pretty well for the most part, and she was in her element with the car stuff, and she was fairly likeable when she wasn't doing the "talk to the camera" bits. But her voice is a little annoying, her delivery a little too hyper, her speech a little too Valley-Girl.
Good news for fans awaiting the "Arena" Gorn cannon myth: there was a glimpse of Jessi and Grant in Trek uniforms in the opening credits to this one, and later an ad saying that there are two more episodes this season, airing on Mondays starting December 28. So the Gorn episode will probably be one of those.
Relative filth: They already did a myth like this once, a few years ago. I think they compared the toilet seat to the floor and found it was significantly cleaner.
Anyway, the results aren't that surprising. I mean, the part of the body that the seat actually touches doesn't normally come into contact with anywhere near as many surfaces as one's hands do. And the kitchen sponge result is a well-known fact -- all the pores retain moisture and make them a breeding ground for germs, so you're supposed to either sterilize or replace them every couple of weeks. I've heard some people rest them in a dilute bleach solution between uses.
And what do you know? Lucre actually is filthy! Paper money was the germiest thing they tested after the sponge. Not surprising, since it goes through many hands and is relatively porous. I imagine credit cards are cleaner -- at least in a literal sense.
Car skip: Okay, Jessi said she studied the Cannonball Run 3 scene repeatedly in slow motion, but she didn't mention the one detail that I caught the second time through: it looked to me like there were a couple of low, submerged ramps spaced out in the pond, and that those were what enabled the car to appear to "skip." Right after each landing, there was another ramp to send it upward again. And the lake was probably very shallow anyway. So I knew there was no way this was going to work for real.
And the results and Grant's analysis sort of bore that out. He called it bouncing on a submerged platform, but I could still see a couple of things pretty clearly sticking out of the water.
One thing I didn't predict, but should have from past experience, was the car flipping forward. Once that happened, I remembered that (as we've seen in past myths) real cars are front-heavy and tend to tilt forward when jumping or falling unless they're specially weighted (as Grant then said).
I'm surprised how much the weight of the toy car had to be reduced to match the proportional weight of the real Lamborghini. I would've expected the real car to be proportionally heavier, but I guess the toy car was radio-controlled and had a lot more internal machinery than the toy cars I've had experience with. Also I guess sportscars need to be light. I'm wondering if the toy car was front-weighted like a real one, though.
It's really ironic that they failed to achieve the results of the stunt when replicating the stunt's faked setup but succeeded when doing it more naturally. The filmmakers probably went to a lot of trouble they didn't need to go to. In fact, I'd call that a Confirmed or at least Plausible rather than Busted, because what was being tested was the purported situation depicted in the film, not the stagecraft (in this case the ramp, among other things) used to execute it.
It's definitely a don't-try-this-at-home scenario, though. The car came down pretty hard when it reached land, and one of its impacts knocked Tory's "nose cone" clear off. The occupant of the car might be somewhat the worse for wear as well.
Did that second car have its engine in the back? That probably helped, since it wasn't front-heavy.
This was the first episode where Jessi was really featured -- she presented the myth, and kind of took the lead since cars are her specialty. And both her appealing and unappealing qualities were more in evidence. She came off pretty well for the most part, and she was in her element with the car stuff, and she was fairly likeable when she wasn't doing the "talk to the camera" bits. But her voice is a little annoying, her delivery a little too hyper, her speech a little too Valley-Girl.
Good news for fans awaiting the "Arena" Gorn cannon myth: there was a glimpse of Jessi and Grant in Trek uniforms in the opening credits to this one, and later an ad saying that there are two more episodes this season, airing on Mondays starting December 28. So the Gorn episode will probably be one of those.
Very good episode.
First of all, the opening credits showed Grant, Tory and Jessie in Star Trek uniforms, and Mythbusters goes on a one-week hiatus next week before this "season's" final two episodes air on the last Monday in 2009 and the first Monday in Janauary -preusmably one of them will include the Gorn Cannon myth.
The episode itself, easily one of their better ones.
Jamie and Adam tested two different microboal myths. The first one being that there's rat-urine on soda cans, and that that rat urine could be harmful.
They took a "control" sample size of 100 soda cans, sterilized them, and then exposed them to rats to get a "control" of what rat urine looks like under a black-light and to later test. They then bought 100 "random" soda cans froma round the city and tested those.
The results, in the end, found no harmful bacteria on the soda cans and absolutely no rat-urine components.
One thing I wish they had tested is if rat urine is "harmful." I've always heard and been told that urine -at least human urine- is mostly sterile as our kidneys make for pretty damn good filters. So even if they DID fid rat urine on the cans I wonder if it would've been possible to get sick from it?
The other myth they tested was comparing how "dirty" everyday objects were (hotel room remote, kitchen sponge, light switch, keyboard, cell phone) compared to a toilet seat. (The myth being that the toilet seat would be far cleaner than any of these other objects.)
It's no surprise that the toilet seat contained the fewest number of bacteria and was on the lower end of "harmful" bacteria. First of all, toilet seats are cleaned fairly reguarly. Secondly people usualy clean their asses at the very least once a week, thirdly your ass is just skin. The most bacteria-ridden object they found was the sponge which, again, is little surprise. It's exposed to nasty shit all of the time and being damp certainly does it no favors. I've seen it reccomended to nuke your sponge for a few seconds to "sterilize" it.
The "Junior Mythbusters", again, got the far more entertaining myth with duplicating a scene from one of the Cannonball Run movies, the one where fleeing fromt he cops one of the Cannonballers skips his Lamborghini Countach across a pond like a stone.
They first tested it by duplicating the circumstances in the movie (more on that in a bit) by running a car of similar demensions and weight distribution to the Lamborghini at 50 miles an hour (what they estimated its speed to be from studying the movie) and then ramping it across a "pond" of similar size they built. The result? Glorious, but not sucessful.
They then tried to "duplicate the result" first by doing some tests in small-scale and then taking it to full scale. The only major thing they changed was removing the ramp (as it was suggested was there in the movie.) Jessie also gave the car a NOS system to amp up itse speed. The result? Glorious. The car skipped their man-made pond to the other side and weathered the experience well.
I've not much to say on this myth other than it was pretty awesome (both the crash result and the sucessful result) and it's impressive that the barely modified car skipped the pond.
My only issue with their first test is the estimated speed. While it's true the car was only going 50 miles an hour for the movie-stunt it's a fairly well-known fact that movie stunts are done at fairly slow speeds for numerous reasons, the biggest of which being safety. So while the car may have "in reality" been traveling at 50, in the context of the movie it may have supposed to of been traveling faster. Granted, even if it was it seemed that the ramp was more of a hinderance to skipping than a help. Which makes sense, the skipping works at a shallow angle. Something that ramp couldn't provide.
Jessie has grown on me more, she seems to have very laudable mechanic skill (she installed the NOS system into their car) and this episode seemed to suggest Grant was a bit more adept at the remote contolled car (at 100 miles an hour no-less) without any apparent POV system than he was with the bus last week. (Granted, controling a car is a lot different than controling a bus.)
All-and-all a good episode.
I think both cars were the same model and had rear-engines (with some enigine components under the front-hood. I think the first car went into a nose-dive because of gravity, the ramp gave it so much air it pretty much had no choice but to dip and it didn't dip based on weight but on aerodynamics.
Since, at the very least, both were sports cars much like the falling car beating the ground-car myth they'd be balanced for the best performance.
I agree on your comments re:Jessi/y that her speech is a little too hyper/valley-girl like. When she was doing the "blueprint"/rap sessions she seemed a little bit better than when she was talking to the camera to introduce a segment of the myth.
Last week, though, when she was explaining that they were testing the "movie myth" and not re-creating a stunt she seemed a little more at-east with the camera.
First of all, the opening credits showed Grant, Tory and Jessie in Star Trek uniforms, and Mythbusters goes on a one-week hiatus next week before this "season's" final two episodes air on the last Monday in 2009 and the first Monday in Janauary -preusmably one of them will include the Gorn Cannon myth.
The episode itself, easily one of their better ones.
Jamie and Adam tested two different microboal myths. The first one being that there's rat-urine on soda cans, and that that rat urine could be harmful.
They took a "control" sample size of 100 soda cans, sterilized them, and then exposed them to rats to get a "control" of what rat urine looks like under a black-light and to later test. They then bought 100 "random" soda cans froma round the city and tested those.
The results, in the end, found no harmful bacteria on the soda cans and absolutely no rat-urine components.
One thing I wish they had tested is if rat urine is "harmful." I've always heard and been told that urine -at least human urine- is mostly sterile as our kidneys make for pretty damn good filters. So even if they DID fid rat urine on the cans I wonder if it would've been possible to get sick from it?
The other myth they tested was comparing how "dirty" everyday objects were (hotel room remote, kitchen sponge, light switch, keyboard, cell phone) compared to a toilet seat. (The myth being that the toilet seat would be far cleaner than any of these other objects.)
It's no surprise that the toilet seat contained the fewest number of bacteria and was on the lower end of "harmful" bacteria. First of all, toilet seats are cleaned fairly reguarly. Secondly people usualy clean their asses at the very least once a week, thirdly your ass is just skin. The most bacteria-ridden object they found was the sponge which, again, is little surprise. It's exposed to nasty shit all of the time and being damp certainly does it no favors. I've seen it reccomended to nuke your sponge for a few seconds to "sterilize" it.
The "Junior Mythbusters", again, got the far more entertaining myth with duplicating a scene from one of the Cannonball Run movies, the one where fleeing fromt he cops one of the Cannonballers skips his Lamborghini Countach across a pond like a stone.
They first tested it by duplicating the circumstances in the movie (more on that in a bit) by running a car of similar demensions and weight distribution to the Lamborghini at 50 miles an hour (what they estimated its speed to be from studying the movie) and then ramping it across a "pond" of similar size they built. The result? Glorious, but not sucessful.
They then tried to "duplicate the result" first by doing some tests in small-scale and then taking it to full scale. The only major thing they changed was removing the ramp (as it was suggested was there in the movie.) Jessie also gave the car a NOS system to amp up itse speed. The result? Glorious. The car skipped their man-made pond to the other side and weathered the experience well.
I've not much to say on this myth other than it was pretty awesome (both the crash result and the sucessful result) and it's impressive that the barely modified car skipped the pond.
My only issue with their first test is the estimated speed. While it's true the car was only going 50 miles an hour for the movie-stunt it's a fairly well-known fact that movie stunts are done at fairly slow speeds for numerous reasons, the biggest of which being safety. So while the car may have "in reality" been traveling at 50, in the context of the movie it may have supposed to of been traveling faster. Granted, even if it was it seemed that the ramp was more of a hinderance to skipping than a help. Which makes sense, the skipping works at a shallow angle. Something that ramp couldn't provide.
Jessie has grown on me more, she seems to have very laudable mechanic skill (she installed the NOS system into their car) and this episode seemed to suggest Grant was a bit more adept at the remote contolled car (at 100 miles an hour no-less) without any apparent POV system than he was with the bus last week. (Granted, controling a car is a lot different than controling a bus.)
All-and-all a good episode.
I think both cars were the same model and had rear-engines (with some enigine components under the front-hood. I think the first car went into a nose-dive because of gravity, the ramp gave it so much air it pretty much had no choice but to dip and it didn't dip based on weight but on aerodynamics.
Since, at the very least, both were sports cars much like the falling car beating the ground-car myth they'd be balanced for the best performance.
I agree on your comments re:Jessi/y that her speech is a little too hyper/valley-girl like. When she was doing the "blueprint"/rap sessions she seemed a little bit better than when she was talking to the camera to introduce a segment of the myth.
Last week, though, when she was explaining that they were testing the "movie myth" and not re-creating a stunt she seemed a little more at-east with the camera.
^Since NOS is short for the brand name "Nitrous Oxide Systems," saying "NOS system" is kind of redundant. Like a "PIN number."
We all seem to have different ideas of what is part of the myth and what isn't it seems.
Those cars looked like Pontiac Fieros to me which I believe are considered "mid-engine" cars. Definitely the highlight myth IMO.
I was shocked that there was a Cannonball Run 3, I grew up watching the first two and had never heard of this.
Those cars looked like Pontiac Fieros to me which I believe are considered "mid-engine" cars. Definitely the highlight myth IMO.
I was shocked that there was a Cannonball Run 3, I grew up watching the first two and had never heard of this.
It was released in the US as Speed Zone! According to IMDb, Cannonball Run III was its working title and its Canadian title. It's known in Australia (where Mythbusters is produced) as Cannonball Fever. That's probably why Jessi referred to "the Cannonball series" rather than "the Cannonball Run series," and was vague about the title of this particular movie.
^^ Aahh, I have heard of Speed Zone. I could've sworn the film clip was labelled as "Cannonball Run 3" but maybe I'm twisting Jessi saying something about "third Cannonball movie" or something.
Well, at the very least, both cars had the air-intake in the back as both cars had a "snorkel" attached to them that came out the back of the car.
The clips were, indeed, labled as being "Cannonball Run Three."
It was labelled as "Cannonball Run III/Speed Zone."
The car didn't sink three feet. If it had hit the ground it would've reacted a lot more to hitting a more solid surface.
No, in the slow-motion replay, the car can clearly be seen angling back upward and planing up out of the water, as though the depression in the water was itself functioning as a ramp. It was a legitimate skip.
No. Not at all. But I'll take Jessi in one.
Her bangs, or lack of, kind of bother me but I agree. I'm glad we finally got some confirmation of that though I missed it in the credits because I usually skip them because sometimes they spoil some of the episode for me.
I doubt we'll see Kari until next "season" whenever that starts. (Probably in late Spring, after the next two episodes.)
i think its time i throw out the sponge
