BeigeJournal

The last Mythbusters, in which an electric car motor was attached to washing machine parts in order to spin a crash test dummy up to high speed, was one of the most hilarious things I’ve ever seen. That was fantastic. The dog-pee collection was fairly hilarious, too. It does go to show just how much effort is required to make a myth that lame (and implausible) interesting, but Adam and Jamie are up to it.

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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.

There is a nice article on MSNBC about the Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters, entitled “Dumb Stunts, Smart Show: Cable’s ‘Mythbusters’ = ‘Jackass’ + ‘Nova’,” which I think is a nifty description of the show. The show draws about a million viewers, so I guess I’m not the only person who likes it.

The general geekiness of the hosts and their vast collection of geek toys—Machine tools! Ballistic gelatin! High speed cameras! A battered crash-test dummy! A big pile of junk! (as Thomas Edison supposedly said, “To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk”)—is certainly a draw to geeky types. (Actually, the junk seems to be organized in hundreds of neatly labeled boxes.) Certainly the scene in the airline toilet suction myth show where they admire the fine, aerospace-quality welds on the borrowed airliner toilet is a wonderful example of their somewhat unusual take on life. “Wow, look at those welds!” “After we finished admiring the toilet….”

I certainly enjoy watching them blow stuff up. If the myth test doesn’t blow it up, they’ll put in the extra effort to make it go boom. A few extra pound of gunpowder is sure to work.

Anything resembling critical thinking on TV is always welcome. If you pick goofy topics you can make entertaining TV out of it.

You can search BeigeJournal for more Mythbusters entries.