I miss these guys
(midwest.social)
Stamets
TumblrI think the framing as "myths" also helped the show. The experimental result was generally either wonder ("oh wow, it's really true!") or self-satisfaction ("we proved wrong something that Other People actually think!"); good outcomes either way. It helped keep the audience happy regardless of the experimental result, and made them feel like something was actually accomplished that they could relate to. Sure, you can get some of that with other popsci shows, but the demos/experiments are often presented as a known answer with low stakes, leaving it harder to connect to a "so, what?"
Growth mindset. Brilliant and fun scientists, too. But if you're interested in adopting their mindset for yourself, just in every day life, look up fixed and growth mindset.
Re: the elephant cowering from mice, if I recall correctly, they determined that if the elephant even noticed the mouse, it would tread more carefully in order to avoid harming it. Not that it was afraid of the mouse.
Adam just brought that one up in one of his public Q&A's on youtube in the past week or two. They hid the mouse under break away poo and when the poo opened they got spooked, so they tried it another way where nothing looked like it moved and they still responded but it was more not to squish it.
Hyneman's take was that the elephant appeared downright scared of the mouse.
https://youtu.be/GTuS1ISYEak
Yeah it was something along those lines.
They were speechless when the first elephant turned away, which is a pretty strange reaction for that crew. Makes me chuckle just thinking about it. They were completely floored, you can almost hear what they were thinking: "This is a dumb myth and why are we wasting our time.... .... .... what just happened?"
One of my favorites was when they were testing something about poison ivy.
They assumed that they could just rub it on themselves, but eventually they had to test every member of the cast and crew, and they only found one person who actually had a reaction to poison ivy!
I talk about that episode all the time. Its not actually a problem for most people. But those who are allergic to it, its awful.
I came here to make a reference to that episode and I'm happy to see that you beat me to it. As someone who also isn't allergic to poison ivy (and to whom people react with surprise when they learn it), it was extra funny to me.
I wasn't allergic for many, many years - at least, I assume I was exposed to it over those decades, but I never got it. But, in the last two years, I've gotten it twice.
So, I would say: Be very careful even though you aren't currently allergic.
Also, for anyone who has gotten it, this stuff (or equivalent) seems to work pretty well, as long as you do it right. It doesn't clear it up immediately, but it definitely knocks it down some. It's not cheap, but poison ivy irritation sucks.
I am horribly allergic to poison ivy, my ER doctor said the only worse case they had seen than mine was from someone who burned it in a bonfire and walked through the smoke, and I only had it rubbed on my pillow by terrible people.
As someone that has their skin rip open profusely from touching the stuff... Dawn dish soap, wash liberally, dry with paper towels or a towel you wash with all your clothes in hot water immediately after.
Then aluminum acetate dressings or similar astringent to pull out the weeping and cool the blisters. Don't use antihistamine creams if you have open wounds, it will mess you up, stick with zinc oxide (calamine) and oatmeal baths to counter the drying.
Good advice, I assume. From what I understand, most soaps do not really do much to remove the chemical that irritates the skin and causes the rash, but I shouldn't be surprised that Dawn would help.
In my case, the first time, I never saw it. The second time, I saw it and thought I was being careful (gloves) but still managed to get it on my arms. So my issue seems to be knowing WHEN I need to treat as though I've touched it.
Yeah, if I thought I even was near it, I know my timer is ticking, basically 40 minutes to get the oils off and clean up and I can minimize the impact to maybe a blister or 2 from some missed oil, it spreads really easily. And if you wipe it off while washing can be still spread.
Dawn is basically the king of oil removers, though you can also use alcohol wipes actually but you need to dispose of them faster than just showering with dish soap. Way cheaper than the branded stuff and usually on hand just missing moisturizing oils.
I would rather be needlessly clean and needing to moisturize than have poison ivy. But sometimes it just happens anyways.
Adam is still on YT. He basically chats to a camera in his shop, answering fan questions. It’s chill and Adam is likeable, so there is that. No build this and turn one 2x4 into $4k nonsense. No terrible commercial jingle or elevator level “music” either. He occasionally offers life advice. But it’s not exciting or exploratory like mythbustera.
He also makes stuff, on camera, often trying and learning new techniques in the process. And failing, and learning from those failures, and teaching the viewers in the process.
Or brings in prop experts and shows off their goodies.
Or invites other crafty youtubers to promote them and learn more about whatever they specialise in.
It is pretty experimental.
His sheer glee when Evan and Katelyn revealed to him the wonders of modern UV-set resin, for instance, was wonderful and contagious. You could see the wheels turning on his head thinking about the things he could use it for.
Kari and Tory also have a podcast now called Mythfits
Whereas Grant is off doing something else
RIP
Busting the ultimate myth...
For real though, I get the same visceral awareness of mortality every time I think about Grant
yeah, every time I watch reruns and he's there, It's so bittersweet because he's so fucking likeable.
I like Adam but he keeps saying something that rubs me the wrong way. He consistently says that Jamie was never the butt of the joke and he didn't make fun of Jamie in a cruel way.
Meanwhile I was re-watching Mythbusters at the same time and Jamie repeatedly saying, on camera, that he is actively bothered by certain mocking jokes that Adam would make and he wishes he would stop it but he won't.
Felt really strange hearing Adam say that minutes after I finished an episode where Jamie was genuinely bothered.
Tbf Jamie apparently also acted a bit differently off camera according to several of the cast members, I've seen them say that while Adam was usually the rash and reckless one on camera it was usually Jamie who made a lot of reckless decisions behind the scenes. We don't really know the whole story of their relationship really and Jamie doesn't have any interest in talking about it anyway these days
“Reckless” seems on character for the guy who welded blades to a wok, set it on top of a lawnmower engine, and sicced the thing onto other robot wars competitors (and accidentally the public), earning a co-championship in exchange for removing it from the competition and keeping it as far away as possible...
From one perspective I can see how Adam would honestly say he never "meant it like that", but he does seem a little stubborn and boomerish in that aging gen-x sort of way that tends to miss the point.
I feel like Jamie and Adam are both like the fun uncle who can be too much, but you don't ever get too annoyed with, in very different ways.
Answering fan questions is only maybe 1/3 of the stuff Adam does. He's a full-blown maker Youtuber, building projects.
He’s pleasant. Possibly even in that Levar Burton, Bob Ross category or life.
Alligators absolutely will chase you. Saying they won't is dangerous.
Yes they're lazy any don't just do it willy nilly and it's uncommon as they'd rather swim away or something but it absolutely happens. Source: grew up in that part of the South with redneck dumbasses everywhere and have seen it and the results from failing to get away.
So, is straight or zigzag better for running from them?
Straight. Gators top out about 9-10 miles per hour but they can't maintain it long at all and that's at their absolute fastest. Run straight away from them and you'll likely put enough distance to be fine.
Oh. They can also climb trees, which is the other method of escape sometimes suggested so ignore that one too. They're not the quickest and it's more common with baby gators, but they absolutely can get up in that tree with you if they choose to.
Thanks!
I just came here to say this. Anyone thinking otherwise could end up in mortal peril.
I still to this day cant encounter a duck without saying "Quack damn you" or be inside some sort of mask or small space and say "I like it in here its private"
I can't get my ducks to stop quacking lol
I particularly enjoyed watching them fail to get skunks to spray them to test anti-stink myths.
The skunk generally doesn't want to spray. It takes time for the skunk to make it and will generally only use it if it feels like its in serious danger.
I was out riding my bike once at night and I saw a skunk in front of me. I braked as hard as I could. I managed to stop about a meter from it. Little one hissed and I grabbed my bike and crossed the street.
Anyway, I figure anything you could do to convince a skunk to spray you would border on/straight up be animal abuse.
::: spoiler Killjoy stuff
There was one episode that was a killjoy that always stuck with me: they test the 'Chinese water torture' on Carrie she crashes out after a few mins(iirc) of it and is clearly genuinely upset and crying, I can't believe they decided to air that and wonder if she had the ability to veto it being shown
Adam's sister's allegations against him were also troubling, but idk the truth of them since his other siblings supported him and it was setteled
Firing Carrie, Toni and Grant because of contract negotiations was also fucked
Loved it as a kid, and the experiments themselves are still fun and entertaining but knowing some of the behind the scenes stuff, like what I just listed and finding out Jaime and Adam don't like each other makes you view the on-screen interactions between hosts in a different light and pick up-on the 'fakeness'
I was going to recommend the British show Brainiac as a good alternative that focuses more on experiments and less on reality tv style stuff, but I haven't seen it for over a decade so not sure if holds up, and seems they've had their own controversies with faking experiments
And not really the same type of show closer to Robot Wars but Scrapheap challenge always scratched my 'people wielding things together to make cool shit' itch as a kid :::
The greatest myth was 'Could Jamie's white shirt actually get dirty?'
I will say, at least in the early episodes, they used a ton of human remains. Call me old fashioned, but I'm not sure it was a respectful to punch actual human skulls until they crumble for pure entertainment and the sale of ad time.
If my skull getting punched until it's dust is what it takes to get even one American to get interested in science I would consider it an honor.
Presumably after you're done using it.
Either is fine
Human remains are not humans. I think we obsess way too much about what happens after a human dies, mostly due to historical reasons (i.e. it makes sense to be afraid of dead bodies or consider them sacred, because interacting with them could make you sick).
If you make sure that the remains are not identifiable to anyone, why not use them for anything you like?
If anything I am more annoyed that at some point they stopped bothering about only buying corpses of pigs which died from natural reasons, and started supporting the meat industry more directly by buying from the regular butchers/supermarket. Even then, I'm only very slightly annoyed.
I would be so stoked if I donated my body to science and my body went to the Mythbusters crew instead of the united States military
They used a lot of ballistic gel people and the crash test dummy (Buster). Don't remember any real human remains. Fake bones are cheaper and easier to get, i dont think using real human remains was within their purview.
They used ballistic gelatine dummies for a while, then decided that they weren't a good model of most injuries, so had an episode where they designed a new dummy by buying human bones and breaking them to see how much force they could take, then picked out a material with similar properties (which surprisingly ended up being wood), and from then on, built fake skeletons to put in the gelatine dummies.
IIRC, the bones were bought from a shop that just sold human bones. They'd ended up there nominally because their previous owners' wills had permitted it. E.g. lots of people want their skull to be used in productions of Hamlet, so drama groups often end up owning real skulls. I'm not sure whether Mythbusters was buying things from a general-use shelf or if they counted as medical science due to doing some kind of experiment - the US military counts even if they're just using corpses for target practice.
Publicly recorded data about the properties of bones just seems like science to me. Science exists outside of corporations and universities. I'd be happy if my remains were that useful to mythbusters.
I'm almost positive I remember that episode where they made the new dummy and they used pig bones lol.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2F-XVXJI7Vk
8min in they test a human femur
I stand corrected I don't remember that at all. Pretty wild they just went to store that sold human bones. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that's a thing.
I don't think this is really an excuse, but compared to a lot of other terrible things the US does to human remains, it's not as bad. Like, at least it didn't benefit the US military.
Yeah, but their experiments were often very flawed. I remember they'd do things like take the myth literally instead of the spirit of what it meant, or their experiment setup didn't match the actual myth. It was fun, and they had a great attitude, but it annoyed the hell out of me whenever people would reference these psuedo experiments and claim something was now "proven". It was especially egregious when they tried to prove negatives("this can't happen").
They themselves have said that Mythbusters wasn't actual sound science, it was first and foremost a show made for entertainment but it still showed a respect for scientific method and curiosity that is very rare to see
Yeah I think the actual experiments were for fun first and foremost, accuracy or integrity were second to that. But in general the idea of testing your existing beliefs and biases via an experiment, and changing your opinion when it turns out to be wrong, was really quite important and profound for the general public.
Oh I agree. I just hated how the general public ran with it like it was hard science. All the people downvoting me don't seem to remember the years of "well myth busters proved this" as the closing argument of so many discussions. Also I find it ironic that the responses are "well it made people think more critically and question things" and here I am thinking critically about their experiments and I'm donvotted to hell 😂
