The reddit community smyths recuts the show to eliminate all the redundant bullshit and streamlines it down by a good 30% usually.
I reject my reality and substitute yours.
Better to do two myths in a taut 30 minutes than three in a padded hour.
That’s almost certainly the reason for the muddy, drawn-out format. And a good part of the reason so many formerly excellent “science” and “history” channels have devolved from old-Nat-Geo standards to… pap. Muddy, drawn-out, overhyped pap.
Yeah, it was obvious when teh let the build team go. Their contracts only went on for a couple more years, if I remember correctly. Unless the show picked up steam among the new Discovery Channel audience, it wasn’t going to survive.
The old audience gets their edutainment* online.
[sup]*Firefox says that’s a real word![/sup]
Can you expand on this? Because what it sounds like you’re saying is totally wrong, I’m pretty sure.
An object in a ballistic arc - be it an arrow, a bullet, a missile or a kid launched with a teeter-totter - has a moment of zero momentum at the top of the arc, from where it accelerates back down to the ground. Done correctly, the kid would be moving at no more than a few feet per second when he hits the roof. That’s the complete opposite of his or the adult’s speed from jumping off that roof.
See: “catch an egg on a plate.”
Despite any scientific failings it was an entertaining show, and perfectly suited for complaints from the SDMB. They did some things right, and their attempts to reproduce mythological results by any means possible were very creative.
I gather the assumption that sudden acceleration from 0 to X meters/sec (X being sufficient velocity to lift a child three stories) is as damaging as sudden deceleration from X to 0 (the effect of falling three stories and hitting the ground).
In a “spherical chicken in a vacuum” sense, I guess this is true.
Actually, it wouldn’t.
Imagine a rifle bullet. 24" to accelerate to 3,000 ft/sec. Yet hitting a wall it will decelerate in the length of the bullet.
This should be true, but because the deceleration is spread over the duration of time from the top of the see-saw to the ground, not just the instantaneous impact with the ground, it isn’t a (complete) given that the girl would go splat. Theoretically, you could make a see-saw with a long enough run and appropriate amount of weight on the other end to decelerate the person at a reasonable G.
I really wished that they’d gone down to a single myth. After cutting away the build team, they had the opportunity to give us more detail on the build process and research behind everything. But instead they made Jamie and (particularly) Adam stretch to cover more myths per episode, which has meant that they’ve cut out the small scale experiments - which was the principal thing that Adam and Jamie’s segments had over the build team’s in terms of quality and interest. It’s degraded the whole show to the level of the build team.
And particularly with having long ago run out of proper myths to test, trying to pack on more than one at a time just doesn’t seem reasonable. Even if the selection sucks, you’re still better to choose the less lame myths than grab all that you can.
I imagine that the show would have ended anyways, but I do feel like they missed their one chance to bring it back to a new high after they sacked the build team.
If you saw it one the web, it must be true. 
Hence the “spherical chicken” comment, invoking an idealized physics problem that uses instant velocity changes, perfectly inelastic collisions and negligible friction.
I had all but forgotten about that incident. It really surprised me when he said that because he is a sharp individual and this particular topic is often covered in freshman physics lectures.
One gaffe out of hundreds of hours of TV, compared to the countless gaffes I commit on a daily basis, so I let it slide.
A child falling onto a teeter-totter will do the same amount of damage (to the child and to the playground equipment) as the child being launched to that height from the teeter-totter, regardless of the shape of the chickens. Air resistance could in principle be relevant, but that would actually make the fall more benign than the launch.
For a real-life counter-example, though, I’m sure one can easily find acrobat acts in which a performer jumps down on one end of a see-saw and launches another (presumably smaller) performer ~30 feet into the air to land safely on a stack of chairs. This doesn’t strike me as nearly as damaging to the smaller performer as a 30-foot fall would be.
I said they would do the same amount of damage. I didn’t say what that amount of damage would be, because that would depend on details of the setup that I don’t know. But if the setup in the acrobatic act is safe, then the reverse stunt would also be safe. Remember, it’s not the fall that kills you; it’s the sudden stop at the end, and in the reverse setup, the stop wouldn’t be sudden.
The human cannonball comes to mind.
There was one early episode in which they tried to figure out if a bundle of helium balloons could indeed carry away a small child.
They did a good scientific analysis and figured out how much weight each balloon could carry and then made up a bundle strong enough to life a child but then figured out the problem was the strings wouldn’t handle the stress or something so they said yes, it could work but no, they doubt it was practical.
Speaking of the B team, their was one episode called “Do pretty girls fart?” where they had this model wear some sort of fart detecting underwear and the B team girl asked why she had not been selected to be the test subject and Adam and Ryan refused to answer.