As a kid, I once suggested that someone should take a flight simulator, remove the vertical axis, and make it a “paintball-like” game of running around and shooting. Lo and behold a few years later, someone releases Wolfenstein and makes a bunch of money.
I want my millions, dammit!
I loved me some Wolfenstein. Achtung!
Sometimes I feel that the need to “bust a myth” every episode is actually limiting the show. Clearly, what the guys wanted to do was to simply build a real-life Doom level. Maybe there is a way to turn that into interesting television, maybe not, but having to shoe-horn in a contrived “myth” didn’t help.
(Personally, I wanted to see more of the reverse-engineering of the real-world space into the computer, which they skimmed over in about two seconds. Maybe that’s just me, though.)
Maybe they should drop the mythbusting once in a while and just do some “build specials”, where they simply create something cool.
Tonight’s episode was a great example of some bad science. The ‘myth’ was that you could take a car and turn it into a motorcycle. They tried two designs, couldn’t get it to work and decided it was busted, totally busted. Maybe it’s possible it just needed some more tweaks?
I’ve been saying for years they should stop calling it ‘mythbusters’ and start calling it ‘watch us build something cool’. This was after the myths started getting more and more obscure and before they started just grabbing random stuff off of youtube and trying to replicate it. They would just test any ‘myth’ people sent to them on their website. It seemed like, for a while, you could say ‘I heard a myth that if you leave camera film in your car on a hot day and then drive and hit a bump it can explode’ and on the next day they’d be heating it to 150 degrees and throwing it at the wall in full safety gear or with Grant’s robot arm. Not a ‘myth’, you got trolled.
And, remember when they tried the ‘myth’ that you could unlock a car door by pushing a tennis ball against the lock cylinder. C’mon. Yes, they busted it, but it was waste of a quarter of a show. I love the show, but I hope they felt as stupid as they looked doing that one.
I know the myth was to turn the car into a two-wheeler, but they could have made something stable if they’d used the other two wheels. They could have used them as “outriggers” on their design, or they could have just turned the car into a trike in the beginning.
That’s not how science works. You devise a test, you perform the test, and you report the results as they happened. The result isn’t meant to be definitive, it’s just meant to be a factual report of what someone has done, so that others can read it and decide for themselves whether the result was conclusive or needs further research.
My issue is that their test are so incredibly un-thorough.
Here’s an example, from high school, I remember the scientific method to be PHEOC, Problem, hypothesis, experiment, observation, conclusion.
Problem: Are there manatees in the ocean?
Hypothesis: probably not. Sea Cows? Those things look photoshopped.
Experiment: We dove off the coast of New York, England, Sydney, Perth, California, Madagascar and Italy and Antarctica. From each point we took 100 divers and each one went one mile out in a different direction.
Observation: We saw no manatees:
Conclusion: Manatees do not exist and the pictures you see on the internet are fake.
That there is bad science. Or are you saying that that is how science works?
On tonight’s episode they made TWO attempts to turn a car into a motorcycle (and were very, very close on the second attempt) and called it not just busted but ‘totally busted’. IMO, that should have at least been called plausible and that maybe with some more time on their hands to tinker with the balance and some practice they could have made it work.
What they did is essentially like me saying that it’s impossible to send a man to the moon because I tried making a space rocket and I couldn’t do it, therefore, it’s impossible. Granted, that’s an extreme example, but it seems like they too often give it the old college try and call it busted without exhausting all of their options or, at the very least, admitting that maybe it’s possible that if the stars aligned it’s possible and maybe that’s what happened in that youtube clip.
I still can’t believe Kari and Tori spent all day shooting bullets and a frozen pond until they got one to spin on the ice. I honestly thought they’d fire off 40 or 50 rounds and call it busted. Something tells me they went into that myth already knowing it was possible.
I suspect that this is the answer to the equation, now that I’ve seen the episode. It’s not that they didn’t tinker with the device enough. As they said, reverse gear applied to the tire via friction isn’t going to provide enough power to keep the thing vertical, with all the weight it has. Nor would you want to ride it if it could go fast enough, since the odds of losing a limb would get pretty high.
But if you were to fashion a few outriggers, using the two other wheels or even just by rigging up some sled runners, and you would probably have a pretty workable vehicle. Between spending a week in the desert, hacking off bits to try and get the device as light as possible and perfect the balance, in the hopes that you could make a functional motorcycle, or simply adding training wheels to the side, I know which I would do when my life depended on it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the mythical “motorcycle” had four wheels.
Hm, fuck around on what might not work for a week or walk 20 km. What is the choice again? Dying from dehydration or schlepping myself to safety walking at night? I think I will go for a walk, personally.
Why would you pick a 2CV to cross the desert in anyway? This one was bogus from the start.
And I miss Kari very badly.
Actually, the ‘myth’ was that you could take a specific car (Citroen 2CV) and turn it into a motorcycle with hand tools, before dying of thirst in the desert, and drive it some useful distance without it falling over. They tried one version based on what they thought what was the most likely design, then tried again using what was claimed to be the actual design; neither was successful. I don’t see a problem here. I’m sure that with unlimited time and tools, it’s possible one could make a usable motorcycle from a 2CV, but that’s not what was being tested here.
Personally, I was a bit surprised at how close they got to a workable machine, given the constraints they were working under.
It’s not rigorous. But it’s not bad, says zombie Richard Feynman. 
(that’s one of my favorites)
They weren’t testing whether a car could be turned into a motorcycle. They were testing whether this particular story of Citroen 2CV being turned into a working motorcycle with a few simple tools under desert conditions was plausible.
El Kabong: Jinx!
…though you did beat me by 28 minutes, I did include the xkcd cartoon…
And after two attempts (and no attempt to further work their second model) they said that it was ‘totally busted’. Also, keep in mind they also said that the person who did it was a ‘genius engineer’.
So what you guys are saying is that all those articles on Emile Leray are fake, right?
Because two guys, who’s lives didn’t depend on it, couldn’t make it work in a few hours.
I never heard of Emile Leray until last night’s Mythbusters episode.
I’ve just had a quick look at some of the articles. The first two newspaper references I found were from the New York Daily News and The (UK) Daily Mail, neither of which are known as bastions of journalistic truth. Many of the rest are from car-oriented web sites and simply repeat a story from a primary source that appears to be a French 2CV magazine, apparently with no additional research done to verify the facts. All that really supports this story are these unverified articles and a few grainy photos of Mr. Leray’s machine, mostly uncredited, taken at an unknown time and place, and only showing it stationary.
I’m willing to accept from the photos I’ve seen that in 1993 Mr. Leray built…something… from bits of a 2CV, but whether he was able to make it work, or whether it actually carried him out of the Moroccan desert, is simply not supported by what I’ve seen so far.
Anyway this could all be put to rest with a simple 30-second video of Mr. Leray actually riding his contraption. Didn’t find one, but I didn’t spend a vast amount of time searching. If someone knows where to find such video, please post a link.
That is where I’m starting to get lost. I like it being just the two of them but ----- I miss the actual urban myths and the lady from the early days who would sort of explain some and where they came from.
Agreed and as was mentioned earlier, I also SO wanted them to find some way to attach the other two wheels, one on each side to stabilize it. I guess it would be a motorcycle with training wheels. I know that wasn’t what they were shooting for, but I would have liked to see it.
Running behind, so no comment on the latest show.
And yet* there are plenty of videos** on youtube showing people trying the fruit ninja thing. Clearly that has gripped enough attention to call it a myth. “Could a person really do that as quickly and easily?”
Plus, the result with the final guy was impressive, he was within 2 seconds of his original time. It would be hard to be within 2 seconds on two runs with both unencumbered. That was very counterintuitive - I was expecting maybe 6 minutes.
Fewer on air personalities. Carry on.
Yes, less narrator saves paying him as much, not showing bomb techs and the like might save them some. The big cost savings is the built team pay raises, plus the additional camera crew and shop to support them.
Interesting, hadn’t considered that.
Actually, no. Adam was brought in by Jamie because he knew he has the personality of wallpaper. The build team was originally that - a crew of workers to help build things, not really be screen personas. They got drawn onto the screen as part of the antics during the first season, and then tasked with independent tasks as part of filling camera time to make more stuff per episode/season. They weren’t really intended to be more interesting than the head duo, just more people to go along with the main duo. Notice there was only a few episodes where they got named in the years of experience count. It was catchier without amping the number using them.
Maybe it’s time they kill “Mythbusters” and replace it with a retasked build show that isn’t limited to “myths”, but rather focuses on “nerd fun” or something.
Well, it’s already confirmed that a Citroën 2CV with *four *wheels will work. That’s no myth. 
There is a new show with two guys who build shit. It’s called What Could Possibly Go Wrong. I think it’s on the Science Channel. I’ve only seen promos but the interaction between the two hosts looks stage-y and super excitedly fake. Like the build team.
I thought I would miss the build team but I’ve found the show is much improved without their over-enthusiastic and fake perkiness.