BeigeJournal

The Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters has apparently been a big ratings success, by the standards of semi-educational cable TV. The success apparently brought a bigger budget, since they seem to be taking on bigger projects. Like pressurizing an old DC-9 airliner and blowing holes in it to see what happens. I’ve got a fairly firm grip on reality even though I have seen most of the James Bond films, but I did find it interesting that a bullet through the window, at 8 PSI, just put a small hole in the window without failing the whole window. I’m not surprised that plywood is not very good as a material for airliner windows, being both a bit weak for the job and rather hard to see through, though opacity would be useful to bomber crews during a nuclear war. Even the bomber crews wanted to be able to see out sometimes, however.

I do have the suspicion that the people at the bone yard thought that this was a cool project, and probably some of them always wanted to try it, if only somehow they could.

I like the show. The myths to bust do seem to be chosen more for good TV than anything else, which is certainly understandable. However silly the topics occasionally are, I’m delighted to see a show with people asking if the strange things people claim happened are really possible and trying to find out by experiment.

You can search BeigeJournal for more Mythbusters entries.