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Educators will tell you that the series of Harry Potter books hooked a generation on reading. J.K. Rowling's fantasy series captivated young readers who found the imaginative joy of immersing their minds in the pages of written words. Not since Star Trek has a television show changed as many young lives toward science. After 14 years, more than a 1,000 story-experiments, Discovery Channel has ended the Mythbusters series. It will only live on as reruns on the Science cable channel. |
cyberbarf VOLUME 15 NO. 9 EXAMINE THE NET WAY OF LIFE APRIL, 2016 ©2016 Ski Words, Cartoons & Illustrations All Rights Reserved Worldwide Distributed by pindermedia.com, inc. |
The show's foundation was cemented in the scientific methodology: take a premise, research it, build a model or experiment, test the premise, then record the results. And later in the series, if they could not duplicate the myth's results, they would ramp it up to try to get to result (which meant that the myth was busted). But what hooked viewers was the simple human trait of curiosity. Example, if you ate too much Mentos and soda pop, would your stomach explode? So the Mythbusters got a pig's stomach, rigged it to a skeleton and force fed it candy and soda and watched the reactive gas bloat the sack. To try to duplicate real world parameters, they used pig carcasses to replicate the flesh and bone of human beings in reacting to various conditions (usually bullets or sword blades.) Yes, there was a lot of destruction and mayhem on the show. And that was part of the appeal. But the lasting impact are hard wiring folks into thinking that science can be fun. Investigating nature can lead to interesting discoveries. Without a little push, many young graduates would have never gotten advanced degrees in science, chemistry or engineering. The irony is that the show hosts were not scientists. Most had worked at Industrial Light and Magic working on special effects. Heilman's business dealt with movie and TV prop production, animating machines for commercials and toy prototyping. But all the hosts had in common was the love of using their minds and hands to build things. The creative process was clear in how they solved base line issues like how much ballistic gel would mimic a human body when testing protective measures against bullets. Whether they knew it or not, Heilman and Savage were the Laurel and Hardy of the science crowd. Heilman was the stoic, detail oriented straight man. Savage was the carnival barker, gadget geek who was never at a loss of a laugh whether the filming went good or bad. But if you look at the pilot episode, both hosts were very nervous in front of the camera. It was shot like an extended home movie. But over time, the production values went up with the comfort level of the hosts in front of the camera. Everyone has a favorite episode of myth tacked by the show. The pilot started with the perfect start: the myth that a man put a JATO (a jet assist rocket) on his 1967 Chevy Impala and lit it off in the Arizona desert to reach 300 mph until he hit a bump to take flight ending in a fiery crash on a hill side. Officials in Arizona said that this event never happened. But that is what urban legends are about: fiction that has enough facts to make it believable. So the Mythbusters put rockets on top of an Impala, went to the desert and remote controlled the car from a helicopter and watched it zoom off with unbelievable acceleration. It proved that you could use rocket assist on a automobile. It did not crash, but it did not take flight as stated in the myth. This showed that the team could bring wild and crazy ideas to life on film. Another favorite was the Escape from Alcatraz show. The urban legend was that three prisoners escaped the inescapable island prison. Officials denied any escape. Only using prison materials to make a raft (inflated sewn rain coats), the Mythbusters braved the choppy and dangerous San Francisco Bay to reach shore, making the myth that three men escaped Alcatraz as plausible. Some of the myths defied common sense. Darwinism is a strong motivation for humans to do dumb things. Take the myth that a cement truck driver is trapped in traffic with a full load on concrete mix. If he does not unload it in 90 minutes, it will cure into a solid block in the roller, ruining the truck. Another cement truck myth was in order to clean the inside build up of layers of concrete, a driver used a stick of dynamite to chip off inner walls of the cement roller. The hosts thought it was impossible to use dynamite to dislodge concrete without destroying the truck. However, with a thin coat a cement on the walls and the right amount of explosive, an explosion did loosen the cement to make it a plausible alternative to manual chipping the walls. But the show finale was loading up the filled concrete truck with high powered explosives which was detonated in a quarry. The shock wave was felt by the crew more than a mile away. It was the biggest explosion the Mythbusters ever created (until the show's finale). Mythbusters also used pop culture stories and tested whether science backed up the science fiction. A prime example of this was the Star Wars reference to using a large animal as a warm shelter in a 40 below zero environment. The Tauntaun episode showed the hosts creativity of building a sub-zero environment, a realistic temperature animal including warm entrails and a realistic human analog with a working pumping heart. In the movie, Han Solo finds a injured Luke in the snow on planet Hoth. In order to keep him warm until he can build a shelter, Han slits the dying tauntan and puts Luke inside the carcass to save his life. In the experiment, the show concluded that it was possible to retain sufficient human body core temperature after 2.5 hours of extreme cold if you are sheltered in a large animal. But the creativity and out-of-box thinking took center stage on simple sounding builds. For example, people always assumed that lead balloons could never lift off the ground. However, the Mythbusters proved them wrong. Or the real crazy idea that you can use duct tape for anything: so they built a sailboat out of just tape - - - and it floated and sailed like a real boat! A lot of the stunts were extremely dangerous. Savage was submerged twice in a car to determine how to get out of it before drowning. It was one of the most frightening things he did on the show. But it was a major life lesson because he confirmed that waiting for the water pressure to equalize inside and outside the car will allow the door to open freely to escape. There is at least one story that a woman whose car skidded off the road and into a river remembered the episode so she did not panic and got out of the car to safety. There will always be a viewing audience for science programs. The most popular genre of television shows are nature documentaries. People are naturally curious about their surroundings. But the hard core science shows like the MIT engineering Olympics, BattleBots (which ABC just renewed for another series) or the Japanese robotic competitions are sporadic to annual events. Nothing beat a weekly science adventure with two amiable hosts. The show was so popular that the crew took myths on the road to do live shows. And what was unique in television, Discovery allowed the show to have a finale season to pay tribute to their best, worst and most compelling moments. It also gave them an opportunity to acknowledge their viewers' contributions to the show. In the finale, Savage drives a massive truck wedge through 14 years of Mythbuster props as a farewell salute to the fans. This is one of those shows that will linger on as a favorite memory because it answered this one, great question: CAN A SCIENCE BASED TELEVISION SHOW BE BOTH INFORMATIVE AND ENTERTAINING? CONFIRMED. |
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“Failure is always an option.” - - - Adam Savage |
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cyberbarf THE BOYS OF PLAY COMMUNITY SERVICE
The new Playboy has started off in quiet mode. It still contains the Interview segment, and a long piece of original fiction, but the rest of the standard features were condensed in both length and subject matter. Most surprisingly, the gross humor cartoons which usually were a dozen per publication are gone. Meanwhile, SI's Swimsuit issue is now its own stand-alone publication. It is all swimsuits and models. There are no sports stories. As a result, excluding advertisements, and the SI bodypaint section, the comparison is as follows: NUMBER OF PHOTOGRAPHS OF FEMALE MODELS: SI 144, Playboy 31 NUMBER OF PHOTOS OF CLOTHED MODELS: SI 92, Playboy 15 NUMBER OF PHOTOS OF CLOTHED MODELS IN PROVOCATIVE/SEXY POSES: SI 25, Playboy 3 NUMBER OF PHOTOS OF NUDE WOMEN: SI 42, Playboy 16 NUMBER OF PHOTOS OF NUDE WOMEN IN SEXUAL POSES: SI 18, Playboy 6 NUMBER OF PHOTOS OF EXPLICITLY NAKED WOMEN (UNCOVERED): SI 10, Playboy 0 PERCENTAGE OF NAKED PICTURES OF ARTISTIC NATURE: SI 33.3 %, Playboy 18.8 % PERCENTAGE OF EXPLICIT NUDITY IN NAKED PHOTOGRAPHS: SI 23.8 %, Playboy 0 BREAKDOWN OF OVERALL PHOTOGRAPHS: SI 63.9 % Clothed, 29.2 % Nude, 7 % Explicit BREAKDOWN OF OVERALL PHOTOGRAPHS: Playboy 48.4 % Clothed, 51.6 % Nude, 0 % Explicit. The Playboy cover shows a young woman giving herself an overhead selfie. The SI cover shows a topless model partially covering her breasts with her left hand. But the biggest change is that the iconic Playboy centerfold is a full clothed woman. It is an open question whether the new Playboy magazine can compete with other men's publications like Esquire, FHM, or Men's Health. But the company did say that the change did spike its website traffic by 300 percent. |
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cyberbarf THE WHETHER REPORT |
cyberbarf STATUS |
| Question: Whether American astronaut's 340 days at the International Space Station will jump start NASA manned exploration of deeper space? |
* Educated Guess * Possible * Probable * Beyond a Reasonable Doubt * Doubtful * Vapor Dream |
| Question: Whether the potential trillion dollar default of student loan debt will cripple higher education in the U.S.? |
* Educated Guess * Possible * Probable * Beyond a Reasonable Doubt * Doubtful * Vapor Dream |
| Question: Whether technology companies who support Apple encryption against FBI demands will spend more money on R&D to increase their own security protocols? |
* Educated Guess * Possible * Probable * Beyond a Reasonable Doubt * Doubtful * Vapor Dream |
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