Kind of a surprising result -- all the videos they tested seem to have been more or less authentic, even if a couple of them misrepresented their content a little. (Well, except for the cut myth about the onion powering an iPod, which is on the website. That one's totally bogus.)
Water-jet car: I'm not surprised they had to take the engine out. Looking at the web video, the car does seem to be moving as if it's abnormally light. The degree of stability they got is impressive; I guess with that many vectors of thrust, the varying horizontal components sort of average out. The main thing that bugged me was how much water they wasted to test this thing. Isn't that sort of environmentally irresponsible in California these days?
"Fainting" goats: This is kind of creepy. I took the advice of the onscreen banner and went to Howstuffworks.com to read up on myotonic goats (I was expecting some kind of MB tie-in link on their page, but I had to look up the topic myself). I was wondering where the survival benefit could be in this paralytic response to danger. Turns out it's actually a congenital disease, one that would quickly be bred out of them in the wild, but humans deliberately breed this variety of goat for the condition. This is partly just for sick amusement (although it doesn't hurt them), but it also makes them more manageable and easier to confine. And at times in the past, they were mixed with herds of sheep and such on the range to serve as, literally, sacrificial goats for the predators to take while the rest of the herd got away.
Kari's "flashing" gag was silly. Obviously she had clothes on under there, and there was no actual experimental point, since nobody'd think for a minute that that would make any difference to the goats. It was just a bit of staged comedy that served no purpose except maybe as a bit of titillation. And just seeing shoulders isn't all that titillating.
"Invisible water": When I saw this in the promos, it only took me a few moments' thought to figure out that it had to be a clear, heavier-than-air gas. Still a pretty clever trick, though.
Adam's explanation about helium altering the voice wasn't complete. It's not just that the speed of sound is higher, it's that the resonant frequencies in the vocal column are proportional to the speed of sound. So I guess when helium is inhaled, the vocal tract resonates with the higher harmonics of the vocal cords and amplifies those instead of the lower ones. Or something like that.
Sawdust cannon: I'm not surprised it worked, since I know sawdust is flammable (indeed, most fine particulates are potentially explosive due to the high surface area). But I'm still a little unsure that the viral-video cannon didn't have a little extra help. In the Mythbusters' cannons, there was a delay of a second or so before the conflagration started (presumably the mix of fuel, air, and ignition source had to get just right first), and the flame started at the top of the column (and didn't extend down very far with the sawdust). In the video, the flame began almost immediately after firing and came from the lower part of the cloud. And it looked more flashy and cinematic than the MBs' sawdust eruption. I suppose it could just be a matter of the precise amount of sawdust, intensity of flame, air pressure, etc., but I do wonder if maybe the video's cannon had an extra pyrotechnic ingredient in the mix.
What I don't get is the comment about it, or the invisible water video, maybe being CGI. The Mythbusters are FX artists; they must know that CGI isn't that real-looking most of the time, and certainly can't simulate a fireball with anywhere near that level of realism. Definitely not on the budget of one of these video-makers. It just annoys me so much that people have come to treat "CGI" as synonymous with "special effects" as though it were the only FX technology in existence. Now even people in the FX industry, people who should know better, are perpetuating that.
And I must confess: I saw the Rubik's Cube video on the Discovery site last week and didn't catch on that it was run in reverse. I wondered if there was some trick to it, but I didn't think of that. Usually I'm good at catching on to such a thing, but I guess the footage was too sped-up. And I've seen Rubik's Cube solvers do some pretty impressive tricks with them, so I figured it was within the realm of possibility that someone could do one blindfolded if he had a photographic memory of its starting configuration. And come on, it's Jamie Hyneman -- you kind of expect him to have superpowers.
Water-jet car: I'm not surprised they had to take the engine out. Looking at the web video, the car does seem to be moving as if it's abnormally light. The degree of stability they got is impressive; I guess with that many vectors of thrust, the varying horizontal components sort of average out. The main thing that bugged me was how much water they wasted to test this thing. Isn't that sort of environmentally irresponsible in California these days?
"Fainting" goats: This is kind of creepy. I took the advice of the onscreen banner and went to Howstuffworks.com to read up on myotonic goats (I was expecting some kind of MB tie-in link on their page, but I had to look up the topic myself). I was wondering where the survival benefit could be in this paralytic response to danger. Turns out it's actually a congenital disease, one that would quickly be bred out of them in the wild, but humans deliberately breed this variety of goat for the condition. This is partly just for sick amusement (although it doesn't hurt them), but it also makes them more manageable and easier to confine. And at times in the past, they were mixed with herds of sheep and such on the range to serve as, literally, sacrificial goats for the predators to take while the rest of the herd got away.
Kari's "flashing" gag was silly. Obviously she had clothes on under there, and there was no actual experimental point, since nobody'd think for a minute that that would make any difference to the goats. It was just a bit of staged comedy that served no purpose except maybe as a bit of titillation. And just seeing shoulders isn't all that titillating.
"Invisible water": When I saw this in the promos, it only took me a few moments' thought to figure out that it had to be a clear, heavier-than-air gas. Still a pretty clever trick, though.
Adam's explanation about helium altering the voice wasn't complete. It's not just that the speed of sound is higher, it's that the resonant frequencies in the vocal column are proportional to the speed of sound. So I guess when helium is inhaled, the vocal tract resonates with the higher harmonics of the vocal cords and amplifies those instead of the lower ones. Or something like that.
Sawdust cannon: I'm not surprised it worked, since I know sawdust is flammable (indeed, most fine particulates are potentially explosive due to the high surface area). But I'm still a little unsure that the viral-video cannon didn't have a little extra help. In the Mythbusters' cannons, there was a delay of a second or so before the conflagration started (presumably the mix of fuel, air, and ignition source had to get just right first), and the flame started at the top of the column (and didn't extend down very far with the sawdust). In the video, the flame began almost immediately after firing and came from the lower part of the cloud. And it looked more flashy and cinematic than the MBs' sawdust eruption. I suppose it could just be a matter of the precise amount of sawdust, intensity of flame, air pressure, etc., but I do wonder if maybe the video's cannon had an extra pyrotechnic ingredient in the mix.
What I don't get is the comment about it, or the invisible water video, maybe being CGI. The Mythbusters are FX artists; they must know that CGI isn't that real-looking most of the time, and certainly can't simulate a fireball with anywhere near that level of realism. Definitely not on the budget of one of these video-makers. It just annoys me so much that people have come to treat "CGI" as synonymous with "special effects" as though it were the only FX technology in existence. Now even people in the FX industry, people who should know better, are perpetuating that.
And I must confess: I saw the Rubik's Cube video on the Discovery site last week and didn't catch on that it was run in reverse. I wondered if there was some trick to it, but I didn't think of that. Usually I'm good at catching on to such a thing, but I guess the footage was too sped-up. And I've seen Rubik's Cube solvers do some pretty impressive tricks with them, so I figured it was within the realm of possibility that someone could do one blindfolded if he had a photographic memory of its starting configuration. And come on, it's Jamie Hyneman -- you kind of expect him to have superpowers.
