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MYTHBUSTERS 2015 Season Thread

Well, the point of the test was not to compare driving while on the phone to driving while not on the phone. It was to compare holding the phone to hands-free phone use. It's already known that talking on the phone while driving can be distracting; the Mythbusters showed a decade ago that it's as bad as driving drunk. All they were testing here was whether hands-free phone use was any safer than holding the phone, and it wasn't.
 
One thing that annoyed me is the lack of a control test in the driving simulator. They set up a difficult course with things like bicyclists merging into you. There was only one successful run in each test. That's (arguably) more difficult than the real world. We don't know how many people would have failed the simulator without being distracted.

Those kind of simulators are always flawed because they always seem to provide the ultimate worse-case scenario. I mean, if you're driving down the street -distracted or not- and some idiot on a bicycle rides right in front of you without *himself* looking can you really be blamed for that?

On the reverse-driving technique. I thought about trying it out myself but in an open space without any obstacles that I'd have to avoid. My car has a back-up camera which is already placed on the center-line of the car and does provide quite a bit of help when it comes to backing in to a parking space. But I don't rely on it because a)I don't back-in to spots all that often and b)I'm more comfortable looking with my own eyes.

I'm not sure how it'd be confusing on which way to turn the wheel to make a turn, the wheel. It's more-or-less still going to be same. The direction you turn the wheel is going to be the direction the car goes in. It's just that facing forward turning the wheel left makes the car turn right when facing backwards. But if you align your thought with what's happening it shouldn't be hard to think of the "turning the wheel left" is actually "turning the wheel right."
 
Those kind of simulators are always flawed because they always seem to provide the ultimate worse-case scenario. I mean, if you're driving down the street -distracted or not- and some idiot on a bicycle rides right in front of you without *himself* looking can you really be blamed for that?

As my father put it, the first rule of defensive driving is to assume everyone else on the road is an idiot. Being ready to react to the stupid and reckless things done by other drivers is a basic driving skill.



I'm not sure how it'd be confusing on which way to turn the wheel to make a turn, the wheel. It's more-or-less still going to be same. The direction you turn the wheel is going to be the direction the car goes in. It's just that facing forward turning the wheel left makes the car turn right when facing backwards. But if you align your thought with what's happening it shouldn't be hard to think of the "turning the wheel left" is actually "turning the wheel right."

Sure, but I don't have enough experience with going backward to internalize that. It's something I generally prefer to avoid. I've never gotten the hang of parallel parking by backing into a space, or perpendicular parking either (if that's even what you call it). Yesterday, I was in a very tightly packed parking lot and I tried to do a reverse 90-degree turn into a narrow space between two cars, but I've never done that before, so I had no idea how to do it right; I just gave up, backed up, and turned into the space nose-first like I usually do, hoping that I'd be able to get out somehow later. (Fortunately, when it was time to leave, the van on my left had been replaced by another one that wasn't parked so close to my car and was angled in a way that made it fairly easy for me to maneuver out of the space.)
 
I found lack of money helps with parallel parking technique. When I went to college years ago I had no money to feed the meters and there were only a small number of close spots along the street which were always in contention. Also because I had no money my ancient car didn't have power steering and it took eight full rotations of the wheel between full left and full right. By the time I finished I was damned good at parallel parking.
 
Art school was a great training ground for parking - we had 50 parking spaces and 150 students. After the spaces were all taken the rest of the kids parked creatively in the middle of the lot. Then if anybody had to get out, you combed the school for "Who owns the orange Gremlin? The Blue MG?", got them to move and create a channel, then snaked out yourself.
 
Man, these guys really liked Breaking Bad, didn't they? I'm familiar with Jonathan Banks, but not with his character on that show, so his segments were wasted on me.

Not a big fan of gun myths, but the testing was kind of interesting. The ease of shooting through walls was surprising at first, but not when I thought about it. Being able to track movement based on intermittent visual cues is a basic human ability, probably evolved for hunting or predator evasion, or maybe even going back to when our ancestors swung through forest canopies. Today, it's probably used in a lot of contexts like sports, driving, etc. I discovered ages ago that I could toss a ball in the air, close my eyes the instant it began to descend, and reliably catch it, or at least touch it, without looking. And if I can do that, just about anyone can. The brain's good at that kind of prediction.

The other myth was so ridiculous on the face of it that it hardly seemed worth busting. I looked up the movie, and apparently it's a comedy, so I presume the scene in question was meant to be ridiculous. (Although it says that the guy's fingers were broken, so maybe the Mythbusters should've taken that into account in their grip-strength calibrations.) Nothing really surprising or interesting here. Mainly I just wonder why Jamie went to all the trouble to carve the metal fingers with skinlike texture if he was just going to put a leather glove over them anyway.
 
Man, these guys really liked Breaking Bad, didn't they? I'm familiar with Jonathan Banks, but not with his character on that show, so his segments were wasted on me.

Not a big fan of gun myths, but the testing was kind of interesting. The ease of shooting through walls was surprising at first, but not when I thought about it. Being able to track movement based on intermittent visual cues is a basic human ability, probably evolved for hunting or predator evasion, or maybe even going back to when our ancestors swung through forest canopies. Today, it's probably used in a lot of contexts like sports, driving, etc. I discovered ages ago that I could toss a ball in the air, close my eyes the instant it began to descend, and reliably catch it, or at least touch it, without looking. And if I can do that, just about anyone can. The brain's good at that kind of prediction.

The other myth was so ridiculous on the face of it that it hardly seemed worth busting. I looked up the movie, and apparently it's a comedy, so I presume the scene in question was meant to be ridiculous. (Although it says that the guy's fingers were broken, so maybe the Mythbusters should've taken that into account in their grip-strength calibrations.) Nothing really surprising or interesting here. Mainly I just wonder why Jamie went to all the trouble to carve the metal fingers with skinlike texture if he was just going to put a leather glove over them anyway.

If it's worth doing, it's worth over-doing. ;)

The hand in the flame "myth" seemed familiar to me. Trying to think what movie it was in, but I also thought it was something they had tested before. But, yeah, no surprises there. Without the barrel there'd be nothing to contain or direct the fired shot.

I enjoyed "Mike" from Breaking Bad/Saul's appearance here. It was pretty fun. Wish he could have been involved more.

The myth on tracking was interesting but also not too surprising overall, I guess.
 
I'd always suspected Jamie was a robot!

They did test the bullet-out-of-the-gun myth before. Kari and the boys tested it by putting a .22 in a small oven or a microwave. The bullet didn't even penetrate the glass.

This is something gun people have known since the brass cartridge was invented and someone tossed one in a fire. Without being encased in a gun's chamber and/or barrel, the brass explodes and the bullet just pops out. I'm VERY surprised it penetrated the ballistics gel! 120fps isn't much. That's less than half a BB gun's muzzle velocity.

When they held the cartridges in the fire, I was wondering why they took the powder out - use a regular blank, in other words. Surely the fire would set the powder off before the primer, which is made to be hard to set off with anything but a firing pin strike.

Firing thru a wall - like they say, it depends on the wall. I once had a negligent discharge (that's what she said!) and fired a .45 hollowpoint into a lathe an plaster wall with a stucco coating. It made a divot, bounced off, and just sort of rolled to a stop across the room! Which, btw, confirms that hollowpoints are designed to dump all their energy into the target via expansion.
 
My thing is I *swear* I've seen that clip before on the testing of the firing from the fire, and I've never seen that movie.

AH! I found it: From an old "web series" called "Reel Physics."

LINK
 
Another viewer suggestions/mini-myths special tonight.

In the golf myth, it was fun to see Adam and Jamie playing golf without a clue what they were doing. I'm actually surprised that the video golf did Jamie as little good as it did. I was figuring it'd be like training in a flight simulator, that it would actually give useful experience. But on reflection, I guess that it's meant to be more recreational, so it makes things easier on the player -- like Jamie's observation about how it's nearly impossible to miss the ball in the computer game. So maybe it provides more an illusion of training than the real thing. Still, I would've thought it would at least give Jamie some understanding of the basic principles of golf that would allow an improvement over just cluelessly wandering through a golf course.

Nothing much to say about the tire caltrop/"tack" myth, which was pretty straightforward. Just that I appreciate the explanation about why the tetrahedral shape keeps one point upward. I think I mentioned that in my comments on the episode.

Not much to say about the gun-reloading myth either, since it turned out so plausible. Except I think I heard recently that professional soldiers or whatever tend to reload their guns before they run out of ammo, whenever there's a lull in the shooting and they get a chance, in order to minimize the odds that they'll run out. That's something you never see in TV/movies. Although I guess it has little to do with this myth.

On the grenade myth, I'm not sure Adam's results really debunk the TV episode, because he was relaxed and unconcerned, while the woman in the show was terrified for her life and those of her kids. So she would've been far more tense and quicker to become exhausted, and thus it's plausible that she would've cramped more and sooner. And maybe she was too panicked to think of alternative ways of holding the grenade's "spoon" shut. So I'd still call that one plausible.

The main odd thing about the grenade myth was that Adam claimed not to know what Jamie's surprise would be, even though the mortar filled with green paint was clearly visible at the other end of the wire the grenade was attached to.
 
The opening sequence depicting the numerous phone calls, faxes, on-line forum posts and e-mails and finally the impassioned fans at the door... I pretended they were clamoring for the return of Kary, Grant and Tory! ;)

Sincerely,

Bill
 
That's probably it. I've not checked my DVR since I tried watching Mythbusters a little after 7 last-night to allow for fast-forwarding commercials and it wasn't there. I couldn't be arsed to seek-out the channel in the guide to see if it was on later because, frankly, that didn't occur to me. I went to my recordings, no new/current recording for Mythbusters and I just assumed it went back into another mid-season hiatus.


I'd argue that moving in such a manner usually can be trouble when it comes to ratings and such as if a show isn't on when it's supposed to be you lose viewership. But in this day age our DVRs pretty much do it all for us.

Checking my DVR's recordings with my phone just now (yes the TV is right there but I've got a DVD in right now and I don't feel like switching inputs and all of that) it looks like it did catch it last night at 8.

Okay, I'll give it a watch tomorrow night or something.
 
All those people clamoring for re-dos, and they only did 3? :borg:

The pistol mag-change sequence was pretty pointless. Hit Youtube and search for action shooting competition videos and you'll see guys who can swap out a mag in an eyeblink. The right way is to hit the release button while reaching for your reload, and let the spent mag fall out via gravity as you're bringing the fresh one up to the gun. I'm out of practice, but I used to be pretty quick at it.

There are even some guys who can reload a revolver (using a speed loader) as fast as a semi-auto.

A quick search found these guys:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jft2Bj_dJCg

Of course, if you're Jerry Miculek, fugeddaboudit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChSazF41q-s
 
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