Do Adam & Jamie of Mythbusters fame (aired on the Discovery Channel) get ALL there material from this site? Is Cecil really an amalgum of Adam & Jamie?
No and probably not, respectively.
Adam and Jaime get things wrong, or have incorrect presumptions.
To my knowledge, Cecil has never been proved definitively wrong. There’s one difference that jumps out at me.
I could be wrong, Cecil? Prolly not.
D.
I don’t know that it’s fair to say that they have incorrect presumptions. Just because they try to get something to work, and it doesn’t, doesn’t mean that they didn’t know it was unlikely to work in the first place.
As for Cecil being an amalgam of Adam and Jamie, well, Cecil has been doing this a lot longer than Mythbusters has been around.
Cecil knows all, so I’d say he’s got a lot more going on than just those two.
Mythbusters has definitely covered some of the same topics The Straight Dope has, but the Dope has been going for 32 years.
They have indeed gotten things wrong simply by not researching their subject thouroughly enough. case in point, The Chicken Gun. I know several individuals who were intimately involved from beginning to end with it.
They “Busted” the radio-via-dental work thing. Which Cecil accepts (there was a column about it) and which I have personally experienced.
One of the key “facts” they cited was that there was no way to generate enough power via saliva and metal to power a radio. I.e., these guys never heard of a crystal radio!!!
They are extremely sloppy about many, many things. They are mainly out to do gross things or blow stuff up on camera.
I think they do a pretty good job of debunking myths while producing an entertaining show – not a trvial thing. You can be incredibly accurate but not visually interesting, which is death for even a show with a sophisticated audience. I’ve been on the whole impressed.
My particular complaint – since it affects an area of my own interest – is the bit with Archimedes’ mirror. That’s the one where it was claimed that Archimedes was able to construct a large solar mirror that set fire to enemy ships. They “busted” this one, but the busting isn’t very satisfying when you consider that three other attempts to replicate this experiment (done by others, of course) succeeded.
To give them their due, Mythbusters used a fixed collection of mirrors, which is what Archimedes was said to have done (It was a later figure who was said to have used individual sokldier’s shields, each held by a soldier to independently target each ship). Even so, his method of adjusting the individual mirror components, using a screw template, was far too crude, as is evidenced by the huge size of his focal spot. That’s not altogether surprising to me – I’ve never had a laser or optical setup that was well-aligned by mechanical means alone. They always required final “tweaking” in position.
Using individual shioeld-bearers to position the mirror elements is even better, and to some Archimedes (or, more properly , Proclus, who’s supposed to have done this) is a sort of patron saint of adaptive optics, the modern method of optimizing wavefronts with deformable mirrors. At least two books on Adaptive Optics invoke this reported mirror weapon as the first recorded case of adaptive optics.
Just for the record, I think that while it was possible for this to have worked, I don’t think it likely that such a solar weapon actually was used in the ancient world. There’s no record of the best method of aligning the mirrors to thye target (not a trivial task, when you think about it) was ever used anywhere before WWII.
For what its worth, there should be a show which revisits the Archimedes’ mirror eventually. The local SF paper had an article last fall about the Mythbusters organizing a competition to make the mirror work. I presume this will be condensed into an episode eventually.
An MIT professor and his students were able to have some success with it. Here’s a site with details.
However, given how difficult it was for them to achieve even modest burning after several tries in a non-real world, lab enviroment I think its fair to say that the idea that this technique was employed successfully during a war more than 2000 years ago is busted.
At least I find it highly unlikely…
2 major differences. 
- Mythbusters is less accurate
- Their show has lasted a lot longer than Straight Dope.
Jim
Cecil would Not have red hair!
…or a walrus mustache.