So why am I bothering to start a thread for what was basically just a clip show? Because it actually did reveal some interesting new info about Mythbusters history. I think I'd heard the story about how M5 got its name, though I don't think I'd heard that Adam was responsible. And I didn't know about how they spun off M6 and then M7 as the junior Mythbusters' shop. I love it that the locations special included two locations, M6 and the town near that quarry, that the Mythbusters got kicked out of/banned from due to the disruptions they caused.
It's also nice to have confirmation of what I figured all along, that their two myths set in Africa, the shark myth and the elephant/mouse myth, were shot on the same trip despite being a number of episodes apart. But I didn't know the elephant myth was an impromptu backup plan when a hurricane disrupted the shark myth. It's cool that it got such a striking result.
And it's a shame that after 7 years, Jamie still hasn't found that handcrafted cannonball he lost at Alameda. I hope he stumbles across it sometime. Though I wonder if some obsessive fan already found it and took it home. (Though maybe it's not as easy as that to get into the naval yard.)
And I've heard those big crane thingies likened to Empire Strikes Back AT-ATs before, but is it true what Adam claimed, that the ones at Alameda were the direct inspiration for the AT-ATs?
It's interesting that they admitted that the setup of the "Presidential Challenge" episode -- the implication that it was President Obama's idea to test Archimedes' death ray a third time -- was bogus and that it was really the producers' idea to revisit. But it's nice to get a good explanation for why they went back to that well a third time: they wanted to do it full-scale as Archimedes proposed.
This time it's relevant to mention Penn and Teller Tell a Lie in the Mythbusters thread, because I not only identified the lie correctly for the second week in a row, I identified it because of Mythbusters. They busted the thing about tattoos in MRI machines years ago. And I guess the Discovery Channel audience remembered that, because something like 83% of the live voters pegged the tattoo-removal story as the lie with nothing else getting more than single digits, the most lopsided voting result ever for the show. (Plus I recognized that the alleged tattoo-removal device was just a defibrillator paddle, and I knew that "electromagnetic resonance paddle" was just technobabble. And they overplayed the "hurts like hell" claim. Now that I think about it, why would anyone go through that when we already have laser removal for tattoos?) Plus most of the other claims were stuff I'd actually heard of, like the echolocation and the "musical" road (and good grief, did they ever get the tune wrong, but I guess they were limited to the car's overtone series and had to approximate it), or stuff that just made physical sense, like the centrifugal force during a barrel roll or the effect of liquid nitrogen on metal. Plus the linen armor thing was like the paper armor myth that the Mythbusters confirmed not long ago. So the only thing here that was new to me was the snail thing, and that seemed more plausible than the tattoo thing. It's actually pretty interesting.
It's also nice to have confirmation of what I figured all along, that their two myths set in Africa, the shark myth and the elephant/mouse myth, were shot on the same trip despite being a number of episodes apart. But I didn't know the elephant myth was an impromptu backup plan when a hurricane disrupted the shark myth. It's cool that it got such a striking result.
And it's a shame that after 7 years, Jamie still hasn't found that handcrafted cannonball he lost at Alameda. I hope he stumbles across it sometime. Though I wonder if some obsessive fan already found it and took it home. (Though maybe it's not as easy as that to get into the naval yard.)
And I've heard those big crane thingies likened to Empire Strikes Back AT-ATs before, but is it true what Adam claimed, that the ones at Alameda were the direct inspiration for the AT-ATs?
It's interesting that they admitted that the setup of the "Presidential Challenge" episode -- the implication that it was President Obama's idea to test Archimedes' death ray a third time -- was bogus and that it was really the producers' idea to revisit. But it's nice to get a good explanation for why they went back to that well a third time: they wanted to do it full-scale as Archimedes proposed.
This time it's relevant to mention Penn and Teller Tell a Lie in the Mythbusters thread, because I not only identified the lie correctly for the second week in a row, I identified it because of Mythbusters. They busted the thing about tattoos in MRI machines years ago. And I guess the Discovery Channel audience remembered that, because something like 83% of the live voters pegged the tattoo-removal story as the lie with nothing else getting more than single digits, the most lopsided voting result ever for the show. (Plus I recognized that the alleged tattoo-removal device was just a defibrillator paddle, and I knew that "electromagnetic resonance paddle" was just technobabble. And they overplayed the "hurts like hell" claim. Now that I think about it, why would anyone go through that when we already have laser removal for tattoos?) Plus most of the other claims were stuff I'd actually heard of, like the echolocation and the "musical" road (and good grief, did they ever get the tune wrong, but I guess they were limited to the car's overtone series and had to approximate it), or stuff that just made physical sense, like the centrifugal force during a barrel roll or the effect of liquid nitrogen on metal. Plus the linen armor thing was like the paper armor myth that the Mythbusters confirmed not long ago. So the only thing here that was new to me was the snail thing, and that seemed more plausible than the tattoo thing. It's actually pretty interesting.
