Mythbusters 7x05 "Swimming in Syrup" - Discuss and Grade

[Chaos Descending]

Although as I said above, I think the part about hitting two targets is busted on conservation-of-momentum grounds.

Conservation of momentum does not mean that the bullet's pieces have to continue in the same direction that the original whole bullet was traveling. It simply means that the vector sum of the momenta of the fragments has to equal the vector momentum of the original bullet. It's quite possible for one object to split in two that follow two different trajectories.

 

[Christopher]

Although as I said above, I think the part about hitting two targets is busted on conservation-of-momentum grounds.

Conservation of momentum does not mean that the bullet's pieces have to continue in the same direction that the original whole bullet was traveling. It simply means that the vector sum of the momenta of the fragments has to equal the vector momentum of the original bullet. It's quite possible for one object to split in two that follow two different trajectories.

Yes, obviously. My point is that it would require some kind of lateral acceleration to impart a sufficient perpendicular vector to the bullet halves. They did appear to receive a slight lateral acceleration from hitting the edges of the axe blade, but it wasn't sufficient to deflect them significantly from their previous vector. The shape of the axe was not adequate to achieve the kind of deflection that the myth implied.

 

[Chaos Descending]

Yes, obviously. My point is that it would require some kind of lateral acceleration to impart a sufficient perpendicular vector to the bullet halves. They did appear to receive a slight lateral acceleration from hitting the edges of the axe blade, but it wasn't sufficient to deflect them significantly from their previous vector. The shape of the axe was not adequate to achieve the kind of deflection that the myth implied.

Ok, well THAT's a different issue. I was envisioning a normal chopping axe in which there is a significant angle to the sides of the axe blade. I guess that wasn't what they used.

 

[Christopher]

^Revisit!

 

[Brent]

this episode sucked, sorry guys, it was un-interesting, are they running out of ideas?

btw, i wish they had actually swam in REAL pancake syrup, i mean, come on, that's what the myth was, that's what everyone wanted to see, they dropped the ball

all this show does anymore is blow stuff up

 

[Hermiod]

I haven't been able to see this yet. Hopefully I'll be able to within the next few days.

 

[Christopher]

btw, i wish they had actually swam in REAL pancake syrup, i mean, come on, that's what the myth was, that's what everyone wanted to see, they dropped the ball

Guar gum is cheaper to use. According to Wikipedia, "Guar gum is economical because it has almost 8 times the water-thickening potency of cornstarch - only a very small quantity is needed for producing sufficient viscosity."

Besides, it's irrelevant whether they used actual maple syrup, because the myth was about viscosity in general, whether the increased traction that would result from swimming in a high-viscosity liquid would cancel out the increased drag. The exact chemical composition of the liquid didn't matter so long as it was more viscous than water.

 

[Brent]

now here is something cool the mythbusters should test

http://www.dailymotion.com/relevanc...odhh_pop-corn-telephone-portable-microon_news

 

[Christopher]

^Oh, that old hoax? Microwaving food with a cell phone? Total BS. The microwaves given off by a cell phone are of lower energy than what a microwave oven uses, and microwaves are only effective at heating food if they're confined within a cavity (recall how the Mythbusters totally failed to thaw a turkey using a naval vessel's radar dish).

I suppose it would be good to see the Mythbusters tackle it, though, just to show how foolish the notion is. Like the way they debunked the thing about cell phones blowing up gas stations. It's amazing how many paranoid myths there are out there about cell phones. I mean, they're basically just fancy 2-way radios, but people are terrified of them as if they were some mysterious alien technology.

 

[Trekker4747]

The Mythbusters tackled a whole mess of microwave myths in the first season. Jamie even took the magnetrons out of several microwaves, put them all in one "case" pointed at a glass of water to see if he could super-heat the water in seconds.

It didn't work.

Microwaves (the band of the EM spectrum, not the machines) are very, very directional. Your Microwave Oven has a fan in it that the microwaves bounce off of to scatter them around the cooking space of your microwave. Your microwave also emits them running at 120V and at around 1000W.

If your cellphone emitted anywhere near that it'd cook your brain. Nevermind testing it on an egg.

The few volts of battery power your phone runs off of just isn't powerful enough and the frequency of the microwaves given off by your phone aren't high enough either to effect an egg at all.

And Christopher can probably correct me if I'm wrong on this, but shooting 100 10W phones (number out of my ass) at something isn't the same as shooting that something with a 1000W magnetron out of a microwave.

I don't believe microwaves "stack" like that. If it did, I would think all of the microwaves from the thousands of cellphones and radios in use in the city would be cooking people left and right.

 

[Christopher]

^Good point. People who fear that cell phones will cook their brains if they use them too much are unaware that we're totally immersed in a soup of microwave emissions everywhere we go in the modern world. It's just radio, though, low-energy EM radiation, and quite harmless unless it's concentrated in the right way by an oven designed for that purpose. As for the fear that it can cause cancer, that's ridiculous. It's not ionizing radiation; it's too low in energy and too large in wavelength to knock atoms out of DNA molecules and cause mutations. If ionizing radiation is like getting hit with a bullet, microwaves are like getting hit with a weather balloon.

 

[Trekker4747]

^Good point. People who fear that cell phones will cook their brains if they use them too much are unaware that we're totally immersed in a soup of microwave emissions everywhere we go in the modern world. It's just radio, though, low-energy EM radiation, and quite harmless unless it's concentrated in the right way by an oven designed for that purpose. As for the fear that it can cause cancer, that's ridiculous. It's not ionizing radiation; it's too low in energy and too large in wavelength to knock atoms out of DNA molecules and cause mutations. If ionizing radiation is like getting hit with a bullet, microwaves are like getting hit with a weather balloon.

Exactly. I tried explaining that to my mom once. "Microwaves can't get in your DNA and knock of electrons. Thus they can't cause cancer."