I was actually surprised by that one. I figured they would rip pretty quickly, but since I’ve never been neat a ski lift I had no idea the slope wasn’t steep enough to get them to move.
I’m sorry I insulted your intelligence, but I was just speaking to the topic at hand. You want a hug?
Some of the conversation seems ad-libbed, but with a set-up. However, some in the past didn’t. I remember the killer quicksand myth where Adam and Jamie couldn’t agree how to fill a water tank, had argument and seemed genuinely upset with each other.
The one I remember is when they tested to see what a plane would do taking off on a treadmill. With even the slightest bit of rational thought, everyone (with the bizarre exception of the pilot doing the flying) must have known exactly how that was going to turn out. Jamie, if memory serves, actually said as much after the experiment was over, saying something to the effect of “of course we knew that…”. It was a very clear example to me of a premise that didn’t really need testing, but made for great viewing anyway in the way that they tested it.
While I, too, thought it should be clear that the plane would be able to take off, that particular myth was the topic of a HUGE ‘debate’ that raged across the internet, including on this very message board. There were a LARGE number of people who didn’t think the plane would be able to take off from a treadmill.
No, no, you do a small-scale test first. The explosives come at the end, but be sure to show preview explosions before and after every commercial break.
There are still people who think that way, even after the test on the show. Something about the wheels still being able to get traction through the canvas or some stupidity.
Well, I do know bullets can ricochet off steel. A problem with Mythbusters is they will do ten trials and then say a one-in-a-thousand event can’t happen.
For the viewers at home unfamiliar with the lingo of the show, this is a woosh, where one of the presenters intentionally states a misconception in order for the other to immediately clear it up and say that that isn’t what we’re testing.
But here’s how we will do it - first, we’ll get some explosives.
No, no, no. First you conduct a small-scale test. Then you conduct a larger test and find some way to get a robot involved. Perhaps a crash test dummy or a ballistics gel dummy as well.
Then you trot out the explosives.
You’re testing that stapler myth again, aren’t you?
Sure they can, but that wasn’t the myth. The ricochet myth was that bullet could ricochet off of three steel girders or plates, would/could turn 45 degrees each time, to return and hit the shooter. Simply not possible, since a HUGE amount of energy is lost with each impact (as became painfully obvious on the high-speed footage). There was little argument that in many cases the bullet was still lethal after the first and even the second bounce.
FWIW, I totally Ralphie’d myself with a BB gun when I was a kid. A straight back into my eye ricochet, from shooting at a round metal pole from about 40 feet away. When I think of the odds of bouncing a round ball straight back at the source from a round pole…but I guess that’s what you might expect from a dead-center “good” shot. But no way it would’ve even reached me if it bounced at an angle off the pole, off the side of the house, and then in my direction.
Wait, what exactly happened?
I keep thinking it’s maybe some hybrid of Mythbusters & The Man Show.
This made me guffaw in my cubicle.
Not that the sequence is faked, but the general “Gee I don’t know what’ll happen if a bullet hit the steel platings, let’s try it out and see what happen!” and the surprise/astonishment expressed when “gosh, the bullet shattered!”
shrug It’d be rather dull to watch if they were just like, “Alright well this is dumb.”, for everything.
I must have missed the ricochet show, so I don’t know what the myth was. I do know that a ricocheting bullet fragment can come back to hurt the shooter. It happened to my boss. In addition to his boss job, he was a part time county cop, and he was required to re-qualify with his sidearm periodically.
He was doing that when a piece of his bullet came back to hit him in the hand. He wore a big bandage for a week, and he took a lot of ribbing about it, including getting him some Kevlar gloves from the crib.
It’s difficult or impossible to use a treadmill to keep a plane from moving forward, and when it moves forward it does take off.
Or, if you meant the other half of the quote (about it being popular): They said at the time that this (plane on a treadmill) was the most-requested myth they every got. And frankly, doing the experiment did absolutely nothing to convince the naysayers, judging from the continued activity.
You can join in the fun and argue about it yourself, either at the Mythbuster’s forums (359 pages(!) of fun!) or here, a mere 8 pages recently, or the historic meta thread. (Hint: A plane with it’s brakes on can’t take off, but that’s both not very interesting, and can’t be simulated with treadmill.)