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Blowing things up in the name of science
Sep. 3rd, 2008 10:31 amThis week, Gaia Epicus is busting the myth that the Norwegians are only good at black and death metal...
Mythbusters is actually one of the very few programmes that I find myself actually watching sometimes now, as I think it's the nearest thing that the Americans have to Top Gear, sharing the theme of things being set on fire, launched via rockets or just blown up by people who are theoretically old enough to know better. A large amount of its content is inspired by people on its forum, who ask questions like "If an HGV had a burst tyre when you were riding next to it on a motorcycle, would it kill you?" - except they use different words because they're not British - and the best ones are responded to by devoting a programme section to setting up such a scenario, which in this case would involve a ballistics gel dummy, firing a lump of rubber at it and seeing if it really does knock its head clean off.
What's interesting recently, though, is that they seem to be starting to explore more, well, serious myths... there was a recent episode where they examined the enormous conspiracy theories perpetuated by the kind of people that comment on Youtube about how NASA might have just faked the whole moon landing. To be fair the lander does look a bit like it was made out of tin foil on Blue Peter these days, but my view is that if you want to expend so much energy picking apart one of your species' greatest achievements in increasingly unlikely ways then you obviously weren't hugged enough when you were growing up. The programme showed exactly how each commonly mentioned piece of evidence that pointed to the landings being "fake" were in fact perfectly physically possible, if sometimes only in a vaccuum.
Of course, the programme's usually not exactly scientific nature means that no one can take all this too seriously, and it's certainly too much to hope for that this will shut the Internet up anyway - but I know Adam Savage has said that among the things he really wants to "bust" are scientology and creationism, so there's room for them to get into vast amounts more trouble yet should anyone ever let them do it.
And I think that lookalike of him above might just an unfortunate angle of the light on his shiny head, but either way it still isn't nearly as worrying as Jamie Hyneman's striking resemblance to Doctor Robotnik.
Mythbusters is actually one of the very few programmes that I find myself actually watching sometimes now, as I think it's the nearest thing that the Americans have to Top Gear, sharing the theme of things being set on fire, launched via rockets or just blown up by people who are theoretically old enough to know better. A large amount of its content is inspired by people on its forum, who ask questions like "If an HGV had a burst tyre when you were riding next to it on a motorcycle, would it kill you?" - except they use different words because they're not British - and the best ones are responded to by devoting a programme section to setting up such a scenario, which in this case would involve a ballistics gel dummy, firing a lump of rubber at it and seeing if it really does knock its head clean off.
What's interesting recently, though, is that they seem to be starting to explore more, well, serious myths... there was a recent episode where they examined the enormous conspiracy theories perpetuated by the kind of people that comment on Youtube about how NASA might have just faked the whole moon landing. To be fair the lander does look a bit like it was made out of tin foil on Blue Peter these days, but my view is that if you want to expend so much energy picking apart one of your species' greatest achievements in increasingly unlikely ways then you obviously weren't hugged enough when you were growing up. The programme showed exactly how each commonly mentioned piece of evidence that pointed to the landings being "fake" were in fact perfectly physically possible, if sometimes only in a vaccuum.
Of course, the programme's usually not exactly scientific nature means that no one can take all this too seriously, and it's certainly too much to hope for that this will shut the Internet up anyway - but I know Adam Savage has said that among the things he really wants to "bust" are scientology and creationism, so there's room for them to get into vast amounts more trouble yet should anyone ever let them do it.
And I think that lookalike of him above might just an unfortunate angle of the light on his shiny head, but either way it still isn't nearly as worrying as Jamie Hyneman's striking resemblance to Doctor Robotnik.
