I occasionally watch Mythbusters on the Discovery channel. It’s a show where they take a legend and try to recreate it. On the show I caught last night (a rerun), they were debunking three legends: does a toothbrush in the bathroom collect fecal bacteria, can you waterski behind a racing eight, and will marching in unison create a resonance that will destroy the bridge.
I was looking forward to the waterski thing since I had heard about it from all my rowing friends. It was really cool. (but a really odd choice of myth as they even admitted on the show, no one except rowers has ever even thought about waterskiing behind a racing eight)
But the bridge thing was so incredibly bad. They built a 60 foot model of a suspension bridge. But, it wasn’t really a suspension bridge. These guys obviously have no freaking idea how a suspension bridge works. (geez, that took me all of two seconds of googling) So what they really built was a lame-ass truss thing held together with welds. And they never managed to induce resonance despite trying all sorts of silly things but made the bridge fail because it was so structurally unsound.
And then they had the gall to say “oh, I think the only way a bridge would fail is if it was near capacity. I think this myth is busted.” No, it FREAKING isn’t. You guys did nothing but screw around. What about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge which collapsed loaded with only a few cars (and one unfortunate dog) and you guys even mentioned on the show?! Plus, they did the waterskiing segment at Stanford. Would it have killed them to make a short trip to Berkley (one of the top civil engineering school in the country) and ask a structural engineer about it so they could have at least built a real suspension bridge? ARGH!
So now, I’m feeling so incredibly disillusioned. I can suspend disbelief for silly movies no problem. But I expected a show on the Discovery channel to be somewhat fact checked. Are all the science shows this incredibly lame and I just don’t know any better?
Ok, no one on earth will care about this rant but me but I feel better now…
I only have one comment to your thread as an avid Discovery(and most TLC/Discovery channels) watcher. While I realize they were way off on this one(I watched this rerun on Sunday as well), one major strike out of the hundreds of almost quality “experiments” and the sheer ingenuity of those two is ok by me. Adam is certainly not a structural engineer or a bridge builder, that’s obvious to me now, but I give them a little leeway for being lame occasionally.
Why let one incident cloud your overall good picture of the series? It’s at least entertaining, if not always scientific.
Actually, the toothbrushes proved to have Coloform bacteria on them. So did their “control” group who were sealed and stored outside of the bathroom. THe Lab workers conclusion- Coloforms are endemic to human populations and generally harmless.
See that’s the problem. Here’s a segment I actually know something about (I’m a structural engineer) and they were just wrong. So now I’m wondering about all those segments I don’t know much about. Maybe they’re just as wrong; I don’t know enough about the science to know. And what about the other shows? (although most of the structures shows I’ve watched seem OK) I feel horribly naive…
Just FYI - The Discovery Channel, or the BBC, or anyone else who commissions these shows, does not do any fact-checking. That is supposed to be up to the program producer to do properly, and these folks are often freelancers who have been hired to create a particular show or series of shows. In my experience dealing with one such individual, the drive for the “true story” was rapidly replaced by “what will seem most exciting on air.” The higher-ups responsible for programming don’t seem to care as long as it attracts viewers. Disappointing but true. So Graham Hitchcock’s crap airing on The Science Channel, for example, saddens me but doesn’t surprise me. I take pretty much any “science-oriented” program I see with a grain of salt - you should too.
I love that show. (Mostly because I want their jobs.)
The science is some times sketchy, but I’ve decided in the past that the value of this show (besides entertainment) isn’t in the actual science. It’s in the fact that it shows viewers that it is possible to devise a way to test rumors/theories/ideas. To many people passively accept the validity of stuff they see on TV, read in the paper and read in emails.
They shot frozen chickens out of an airgun. Stuck dead pigs in a 'vette… and then sold it. Trained goldfish. Hell, even if the science is pure bullshit is is a lot of fun to watch.
Just a little nitpick, the failure of the Tacoma Narrows bridge wasn’t due to resonance, it was due to something called limit cycles. The real explanation for the failure can be found here
Yeah, I actually knew this but failure due to resonance is a pretty common assumption and I thought I’d give them a pass on that one (I figure they had to use it because it’s such great footage) since my disgruntlement was already long and geeky…
Actually I was thinking about starting a thread about the exact same thing, until I saw yours.
I like Mythbusters but I was highly disappointed with last night’s episode. The skiing and toothbrush myths weren’t too interesting (to me), and the bridge one was just dumb. It ticked me off that they decided the myth was busted based on their results from using a scale model of a bridge (and from what I’m hearing here, not even an accurate model). AND I was hoping Adam would go ninja on his failed bridge, but instead he just tipped it over. Lame.
It’s still an fun show, though, and one instance of sorry mythbusting won’t stop me from watching it…
Did anybody else notice they seemed to be spreading toothpaste on all of those brushes by rubbing them all on the lip of the same tube of toothpaste?? :smack:
The first segment I ever saw of Mythbusters was the faux-Golden Gate Bridge segment. When they started building that… thing, I said, “You have got to be kidding me!”
I’ll agree, it is pretty entertaining to watch, but I can’t stand watching such horrid science presented as fact, however loosely.
Let me also toss in a “bite me” to A&E for keeping the Straight Dope television show buried in its smelly little vaults. If we had SD, we wouldn’t need these yahoos.
(Hey, we should get a little blue Mike Lukas smiley!)
Maybe it was bad science-wise, but I found those little helmets with feet all stomping in unison to be really funny for some reason. (I think that’s what they were- I saw this episode a while ago.)
In any case, I try not to take the Mythbusters too seriously. It’s pretty obvious that in fact their main objective is usually to blow stuff up, and if they happen to corroborate or “bust” some myth while they’re at it, then that’s not too bad either.
what you said :smack: