[Publius Valerius]

A little fluff for MythBusters fans.

[Digital Sniper]

Love the Mythbusters. They have a lot of fun with none of that BS drama that most shows have these days (e.g. "Smash Lab," "Master Blasters" ad nauseum).

Every time I watch that show, I say to the family, "That's what I want to do when I grow up!" :-)

[al baby]

[DvdMom]

bump

[mvpel]

I think one of the more recent episodes we did called ''Lead Balloon'' is the best representative of what we do to date.

I was a little surprised that they didn't do the lead balloon with hydrogen, rather than helium, but as it turns out helium has about 92% of the lifting power of hydrogen, since it's the difference in density from air, not the density itself, that counts.

[Oztrich Boy]

And by the way, we have to note that we have a strict policy that any of these animals we get from the butcher, we eat. If we can't eat it, we donate it to a soup kitchen.

Just wouldn't want to be the soup kitchen that got the carcasses from the Corpse in the Corvetee segment.

[kidd]

The one myth that really surprised me was getting shot under water (from the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan). These guys showed that as little as one foot of water will stop even the most high powered rifle. The bullet simply disintegrates.

Last night they showed that you CAN chop down a tree with a machine gun. Cool.

[Vision]

Love the show.

[ItsOurTimeNow]

The chicken cannon is by far the best experiment they’ve ever done.

[Hegemony Cricket]

BFLR

[Steve Van Doorn]

I used to like that show when it first came out.

Then I realized they do NOT do their home work before starting their show.

For example: In one show they ‘busted’ a myth that fire dropping equipment could not have sucked up a scuba diver. If they just did a search on the net they would have found it was from So. California and the superscooper Bombardier 415 on a fire detail in Calabasas a few years back.

This is Superscoooper just about to fill its tanks.
They never even looked at this plane in their show as a possible source of what took place when the scuba diver was sucked up and spit out on he fire.

[Hemingway's Ghost]

Oh, I have one. It was called ''Killer Cable Snaps.'' It's the idea that if a cable gets stretched to its breaking point [say, on an aircraft carrier], that as it whips when it snaps, it can slice you in half. And to cut to the chase, we got a bunch of pigs and cables stretched to their breaking point, and the pigs weren't being sliced in half. We started the day thinking we were going to prove this, and we ended the day busting it. And I will admit that I was really hoping to see high-speed shots of cable slicing through pig carcasses, and I would have rather seen that than the dents that we ended up making in the pigs.

You mean the Navy training film about "synthetic snap-back" was total bravo sierra?

[lowbridge]

You will notice of course that “Mythbusters” has NEVER taken on the facts of Chuck Norris.

[supercat]

Sometimes the show is okay, but some of their tests are pretty silly.

In the Hindenberg show, for example, they should have done a test with a dirigible (not a balloon) made of rubber cloth and filled with pure hydrogen. Pumping hydrogen into a burning dirigible full of air is hardly the same thing.

Further, they should have undertaken some effort to determine what would be required to trigger the thermite reaction. It's not meaningful to time how long it takes for the dirigible to burn all the way, if the dirigible burns slowly for most of the time and then most of the dirigible goes up quickly.

Also, on a different show, while I was impressed with their "paper machée crossbows", a spear gun would have been a much more effective and practical weapon. Is it plausible that a convict made a crossbow out of paper machée? No, it isn't. On the other hand, it is documented that a convict did build a spear gun out of paper machée. So what's the real "myth"?