Mythbusters new season
 

Now that's more like it. After last seasons lackluster opener, the boys are back on track.

Using a rocket sled to demolish a car, dropping another car from 4,000 ft. Good times I tell ya, good times.

That was a GREAT episode. By far the best in a while. Among other things, they filled it with enough different myths that it severely cut the amount of stupid canned bits of bad acting, which can only be a good thing.

And the rocket sled was by far one of the coolest things I've ever seen.

For those that didn't see it, here's the rocket sled.

They could show that rocket sled footage for two hours straight and I'd watch it. Just amazing.

Happiness.

I watched it and was amazed. It was as if the car was liquified.

I love Adam's 2-stage reaction.

I just re-watched the video (thanks for the link)

The car is sitting up on a couple of concrete blocks. It's not anchored at all.

On impact, the steel plate on the sled is more than half way through the car before it's rear bumper even twitches. Wow.

That's a great example of Newton's First Law.

The very definition of the word "pulverize".

Haven't watched the full episode yet, but that video of the rocket sled sure is exciting!

Holy carp!

They are going to have trouble topping this later in the season. Amazing.

Unfortunately, the video has been removed. Hopefully TiVo caught it.

Wow, seems like Jamie's kind of an OCD Douchbag.

It was a rerun, but I just saw this: Mythbuster segment

These guys really will test anything no matter how stupid.

Stupid? That's one of my favorite segments. What an awesome, surprising result that was.

I was annoyed by the banana peel bit this week. The myth originates from depression-era when bananas were a popular, cheap snack sold on the street and city sanitation was nil. So banana peels were everywhere. And people were not wearing giant work boots with incredible traction like they kept showing Jamie wearing. I would have liked to see what would have happened if he were wearing flat-soled dress shoes.

That whole episode was stupid. Testing the validity of Seinfeld jokes? Like I said elsewhere I assume they'll shortly be examining whether it really was possible to take Henny Youngman's wife.

As for the validity of results, many of their experimental formats suck anyway (either being incomplete or not demonstrating what they say is being demonstrated) so I'm used to that. I assume they did the bananas because they just wanted to get the voiceover guy to say "super lube" a lot.

Some things they do are good and cool but anymore I find the noise ratio to be really high so don't watch much.

So far this season has been a marginal improvement in terms of painful canned banter. I don't find myself cringing quite as much.

Of course, watching is highly improved via use of TiVo so we can skip the redundancy and the "here's a clip of what we're going to show you in 2 minutes".

I wonder of that's related to why he and Adam are not friends....

Oops. The Mythbusters had a little boo-boo yesterday.
They were on the Alameda County Sheriff's Department bomb disposal range when a cannon shot went wide of the mark.

That happened about a mile from our apartment. Very exciting but the great city of Dublin, California, has successfully repelled the attacking hordes.

They have had their issues. They do a lot of their explosions here at the disposal range and we also have the Camp Parks Army Training Center here where they accidentally sent a bullet into a neighboring development a couple years ago.

What; was the whole family napping at 4:15 in the afternoon?!?

Production has been suspended. I wonder if it will survive this incident.

Tweets within a matter of moments of each other this afternoon:
Followed up three hours later by
All nicely scripted for them.

Also, there had been a Tweet a couple of days ago by Tory where he showed picture of a cannonball that he made. Not surprisingly, that Tweet is no longer up.

It's a moot point since I'm sure you're right and those were scripted but do they control their Twitter accounts or does a publicity team do it?

And this is where the term "loose cannon" comes from isn't it! Kind of puts a new perspective on it.

Damnit I bet this means the episode will never air.

Yes, they've said that they will not air any footage of the incident (don't recall if they said they'd not air the myth at all or just drop it entirely).

Tweet from Adam today:

Another Tweet from Adam:

Boo.

Hopefully it'll make its way online.

Yeah, they can make a boat load more cash by saving it for the dvd box set.

As long as no one got hurt, the production company pays for all of the damage, including a little extra for the inconvienace, I see no reason why they could not offer everyone involved a little more cash to air it.

The problem is that the bulk of the misshap didn't get filmed. In fact I bet they didn't even film the aftermath. If any of the families or owners of the damaged property filmed or photographed the damage, they could be the ones to release it.

I don't need to see the aftermath (I'm sure local news had plenty of footage of the hole in the house). I just want to see the crew's faces when sh*t goes wrong.

Yeah, and if they had continued filming while tracing where the iron cantalope visited when have been cool to see. But once they figured out what happened, I would think they shut off the cameras because they didn't know if they killed anyone or not. But I'm with you, I'd like to see the look on thier faces to the point when I suspect they turned the cameras off. That would be priceless!

Makes sense, why produce additional evidence to be subpoenaed and used against you, right?

I wonder how long is was after the shot that they figured out just how wrong that sh*t went.

I assume they would notice it missed the barrels and made a whole in the wall, but I'd guess their next thought would be to look for it imbedded in the berm behind the wall. Unless of course they had the slo-mo shot of it disappearing off into the distance....

One of my all time favorite moments on Mythbusters was the episode at a crash test site (looked like a pretty chintzy operation) when the brake system on the sled failed and the car went launching over the berm. Kari's reaction face was the most completely genuine "Oh fvck, what did we just do?!" ever on the show. Great stuff.

This video from Moonie's link has some good footage.

I loved that moment - so glad they showed that.

Wow.

Tory is totally proud of himself.

Nice followup article on Wired today.

The author makes a fair case they were closer to the houses than generally reported in the news.

Cannonballs: Size Matters

If true, it means they were firing in the direction of the closest homes.

Yeah, I was watching the video, and looking at google maps. The only way the entry point makes sense is if they were in the empty field, essentially across the street from the first house.

Still an impressive feet to blast all the way through the house, off a roof, and into a car, no matter the distance.

ETA: Actually, now looking at the pinned sequence in the link you gave, I guess the hole behind the reported is the exit hole, not entry. That makes more sense as the satellite image does appear to show what looks like a bomb range to the west.

Halfway between the two red arrows, a little below the map part shown is me. I'm almost famous!

You are in the prison?

That explains so much.

You're Santa?

And that, boys and girls is using "this stupid math homework in real life".

A real life where people shoot cannonballs in your backyard.

Well, there is that. But if a math teacher said "you will need to know [insert complicated math here] in real life to calculate how far away the cannonball was shot" I may have paid more attention.

No farther down than that. Though it is amazing how close you can live to a federal prison and have no real awareness it is there. The county jail next door is a more obvious presence.

There's a juvenile detention center near us. It's very large and very obvious. Across the way is some other facility that is clearly also some sort of jail. The only reason I know it exists is because I got turned around one day looking for the entrance to a golf course in the are (the entrance is surprisingly well hidden) and ended up at a dead end, a driveway, and a pair of very stern looking officers. "Ummm, no, this is not the golf course." I still don't know exactly what it is, it's not identified on any map I've ever seen. The only time I can actually see any part of the facility is during my bike rides, from down in the Santa Ana "River" (aka drainage channel). It's gotta be something that's pretty high security.

ETA: Heh, nevermind. That prompted me to do another round of looking, and it actually is related to the juvenile detention across the way. It's specifically their youth drug rehab facility.

I'm from Prison Town USA. And they just built a county jail next to the cemetery. So my parents have a view of the prison basketball court for eternity. I also sadly know where most of the state prisons are, a lot of people I know were guards, or their parents, so I knew from where they'd lived before.

And for an unknown reason. Maddie thinks it's funny that the big juvenile facility here is right next to Children's Hospital. I'm not sure why she thinks it is but she does.

My bro lives just across a road from a prison medical facility. Lots of cops live in his neighborhood. Pretty dang safe place :) Also keeps the sightlines nice and clear beyond his back fence, which is kind of nice.

huh. and folks give me sh!t about my neighborhood. we dont have the jails, just the released prisoners

We just have porn studios, 7-11s and a donut/liquor store.

FWIW, the episode they were filming was shown on 11/11/12. It is titled "Cannonball Chemistry." They were testing stone cannonballs vs iron. We're watching it now.

They showed the shot that went haywire (it was aimed a little too high and missed the water barrels that were meant to dampen the shot). However, they didn't show anything else from that day.

They picked up the myth a few months later.