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Mythbusters: "Dumpster Diving"

Trekker4747

Boldly going...
Premium Member
New episode tonight, Wikipedia lists two more episodes after this one too for this "season" though details on the myths are skimpy.

Tonight's central, titular, myth deals with surviving jumping from a building into a dumpster -as seen in many movies.
 
The commercial, which just aired a minute ago, for next week's episode, makes it look fun and interesting.

Tonight's episode has been kind of boring.
 
Aww, this is Kari's last episode before maternity leave. And we get to meet the new girl!

Dumpster diving: Wow, all this jumping onto stuff. In the tests where Adam was jumping onto their candidate materials, I'm kind of surprised he stayed on his feet all four times. He's usually clumsier than that.

This is a lot like the car/cliff myth from the other week in that it's predicated on the idea that this always works. I think the idea of a scene like this, taken individually, is that it's a very risky thing to do and the hero is lucky to survive; it's meant to be a long shot. However, I guess the point here is that the trope is used so often, with the hero almost always surviving, that it conveys the impression that this is a reliable technique.

Ahh, they turned Buster into a Borg! Poor guy had a cable stuck in his ear!

Adam's long coat was a nice touch. Very cinematic. Is that what they call a duster? But even with training, I wouldn't have wanted to do that jump without a helmet, just in case my aim was off.

I'm a bit surprised the insurance company let Adam do this, considering that they refused to let him do the Indiana Jones awning drop a couple of years back.

Okay, so they found the result plausible for jumping from a 2-story height. I would've liked to see how Buster, at least, fared from a greater height. Twenty feet is nowhere near enough to reach terminal velocity, so the impact could've been at a much higher speed.


Diving suit squeeze: Whoa, I'm glad for Kari that she didn't have to be there to witness Meat Man. Dang, the way that thing looked, it's like Tim Burton directed this episode. Well, it could've been worse; at least there weren't actual guts and blood and stuff. EDIT: Oh, wait, I spoke too soon. Ughh...

And man, that's one lucky dolphin.

I like Jessi Combs okay so far. She seems competent and fairly likeable, and is moderately cute. Her voice has a borderline-annoying quality, but nothing I can't get used to.

Great googly-moogly, that result was gruesome. Pressure can be a scary thing sometimes. I'm wondering why that doesn't happen with modern diving suits. I suspect the rigid helmet is itself the main problem, because when the compressor shuts off, that would be a big empty space at far lower pressure than its surroundings, creating a vacuum effect. In a scuba suit, without the rigid helmet, you don't get the vacuum effect. The pressure is steady across the entire body, head included.
 
The episode:

The central myth seemed like something the "junior mythbusters" should've been on, the secondary myth should've been a Jamie and Adam thing.

Anyway, the first myth didn't provide any surprising results I suspect it was possible but only if the materials inside the dumpster were soft enough and not dangerous. Kudos to J&A for testing random dumpsters to see what eas in them/if they were safe to land in. I think they helped things a bit too much with the foam dumpster but I guess they kind of had to do that.

The dive-suit myth was far more interesting and produced farily surprising results. The meat-man built by Tori though was well doen if creepy. ;)

And on Kari's replacement... I took some flack a few months ago when she was annouced. She struck me in her pictures as just being some "nerdy hot conventioanly hot chick" they picked and didn't think she could compare to Kari who's less conventionaly hot. (Her girls still looked great in this episode. Man!)

I'm still not sold on the new girl it seemed like she was "trying to hard" in this episode. I'll give her more episodes before I make any real final judgements.
 
I like Jessi Combs okay so far. She seems competent and fairly likeable, and is moderately cute. Her voice has a borderline-annoying quality, but nothing I can't get used to.

Yeah her voice was a bit annoying again not something one couldn't get used to, but it was part of what made me think she was trying too hard.

Still, I hope Kari comes back after her maternity leave. I wonder if they'll keep Jessi around too and have too chick-mythbusters, going back to the days with both Scotti and Kari.
 
Is it just me or did anyone else feel that Jessi was trying to copy Kari a bit too much instead of being herself.
 
No, I didn't think she was anything like Kari. It's not like Jessi Combs is a newcomer to TV presenting. She's been doing it for years, first as a "guest fabricator" on a TLC show called Overhaulin' and then as a regular co-host for three years on a Spike TV show called Xtreme 4x4. She's surely developed her own style by now, so there's no reason why she'd need to imitate someone else.
 
Hehe, I like it when the B-team gets the cooler myth, that result was way more impressive than most gratuitious explosions they do. ;)
 
Unless I missed it, did Meat Man have a skeleton?

Tori seemed to stuff the "organs" into the ribcage but I didn't notice any ribs or sternum or any other skeletal components. I think I recall there being bones in the limbs.
 
^Yes, Meat Man was assembled around a plastic skeleton. The skeleton was given a rather dramatic introduction with horror-movie lighting and Tory hamming it up, and then he took it into the refrigerator truck and, err, kinda literally hammed it up by sewing slabs of pork around it.
 
My favorite part was when, if you looked closely, you could see the "blood" pouring from the mouth of meat man just before the helmet filled up.

Way cool.

>urp<
 
Aww, this is Kari's last episode before maternity leave. And we get to meet the new girl!

Dumpster diving: Wow, all this jumping onto stuff. In the tests where Adam was jumping onto their candidate materials, I'm kind of surprised he stayed on his feet all four times. He's usually clumsier than that.

This is a lot like the car/cliff myth from the other week in that it's predicated on the idea that this always works. I think the idea of a scene like this, taken individually, is that it's a very risky thing to do and the hero is lucky to survive; it's meant to be a long shot. However, I guess the point here is that the trope is used so often, with the hero almost always surviving, that it conveys the impression that this is a reliable technique.

Ahh, they turned Buster into a Borg! Poor guy had a cable stuck in his ear!

Adam's long coat was a nice touch. Very cinematic. Is that what they call a duster? But even with training, I wouldn't have wanted to do that jump without a helmet, just in case my aim was off.

I'm a bit surprised the insurance company let Adam do this, considering that they refused to let him do the Indiana Jones awning drop a couple of years back.

Okay, so they found the result plausible for jumping from a 2-story height. I would've liked to see how Buster, at least, fared from a greater height. Twenty feet is nowhere near enough to reach terminal velocity, so the impact could've been at a much higher speed.


Diving suit squeeze: Whoa, I'm glad for Kari that she didn't have to be there to witness Meat Man. Dang, the way that thing looked, it's like Tim Burton directed this episode. Well, it could've been worse; at least there weren't actual guts and blood and stuff. EDIT: Oh, wait, I spoke too soon. Ughh...

And man, that's one lucky dolphin.

I like Jessi Combs okay so far. She seems competent and fairly likeable, and is moderately cute. Her voice has a borderline-annoying quality, but nothing I can't get used to.

Great googly-moogly, that result was gruesome. Pressure can be a scary thing sometimes. I'm wondering why that doesn't happen with modern diving suits. I suspect the rigid helmet is itself the main problem, because when the compressor shuts off, that would be a big empty space at far lower pressure than its surroundings, creating a vacuum effect. In a scuba suit, without the rigid helmet, you don't get the vacuum effect. The pressure is steady across the entire body, head included.
The diffrence with SCUBA is the Self Contained (the "SC" part of the acronym) aspect. SCUBA doesn't have that hose connecting the diver to the lower pressures at the water's surface. The pressure in the tank is even higher than the pressure in the water.

Either way the diver has to be careful not to return towards the surface to rapidly to prevent the same thing happening in their bodily fluids as happens in a bottle of soda when you unscrew the cap.
 
^Ahh, I see. It's not just the open space in the helmet, it's the connection to the lower pressure up top. So I was on the right track about the vacuum effect, but off about the details.
 
Here in Canada our version of Discovery Channel seems to lag behind the US version by a few weeks (or months in some cases) so it might be awhile before we start to see the Jessi episodes. And then of course they're all replayed at random after that anyway -- it's not uncommon to see a recent episode followed by one of the earlier episodes with the woman with the tattoos whose name escapes me, and then something from a year or so ago. Jessi will just get added to the mix.

I think MB missed a bet, though. Assuming (hopefully) that Kari's absence is only temporary, they should have brought in different guest stars to fill the third spot. Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs is the obvious first choice, and they could also bring in actors, people from other shows like Deadliest Catch or American Chopper, etc., as well as Jessi (who from a Google search I guess has some experience in these types of shows).

Alex
 
The "woman with tattoos" was metal work specialist Scottie Chapman who left the show some years ago.

Jessi is only a temporary replacement. Kari Byron has returned to the show already for the episodes they are currently recording.
 
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