Thursday, February 18, 2010

Mythbusters

Have you heard about Mythbusters?

It's been on the Discovery channel for several years now. I had heard about it awhile back, but we don't get those fancy cable stations, so I had never seen it. That was until we got Netflix and I started watching streaming episodes of Mythbusters online. The show is a blast. Sometimes literally.

As you can tell by the name, the premise of the show is that they take "myths" or sayings, or stories, or historical things and they put to the test whether it could actually be done, or if it was just a tall tale, or a lie. Some of the myths are fairly well known, others more obscure. Some of the ways they come up with to prove or disprove the myths are pretty cool too. The two main mythbusters are Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman. Their backgrounds are in special effects and props for movies, so they have the ability to create very inventive contraptions and things to test all of these myths.

I'm not sure what season of the show I'm watching. It's called the 4th collection. I think in the first few seasons it was just Adam and Jamie, but now they've got another three mythbusters, the build team, that tackles myths separately, sometimes together with, the main two guys. I've watched a few of the episodes where it was just the two main guys and I have to say that I enjoy watching the ones with both teams more. They get to tackle more myths in each episode that way, the personalities and interactions of the different mythbusters is very entertaining.

Adam is the goofy, fun, try anything guy. Jamie is the straight man, rarely laughing and just being very practical about it. But both of them are fairly ingenious at testing all of the myths they come up with. They often start with models and small scale tests before ramping it up to a full scale test.

Here are some examples of the things they test:
  • Can an airplane achieve lift off from a conveyor belt?
  • Can you really build an airplane out of bamboo like MacGuyver did?
  • Are the gadgets that Batman uses actually possible?
  • Some of the viral videos on the internet are pretty crazy, but are they true?
  • Could cockroaches actually survive a nuclear blast?
  • Can you really drive a car up in to a semi trailer while both of you are driving 55mph?
And that's just stuff from the 4th collection. There are three other collections to go through, plus some specials. I saw one episode where they went to Arcatraz and reenacted the escape of the only three prisoners ever to escape from the prison.

Anyway, if you're a geek like me, and into science at all, you might like Mythbusters. Check it out on Netflix or watch it on the Discovery channel. You'll be glad you did.

2 comments:

Jen said...

You should watch the alaska episode. They tackle crashing a car into a moose and whether its better to go fast or slow down. Can a stick of dynamite blow a hole through the ice and sink a SUV and "cabin fever". Pretty funny. Miss you brudder.

T.J. said...

Ooh, when did they do the Alaska episode? I'll have to look for that one today.