What result or methodology do you disagree with most?
Posted by 123mitchg@reddit | mythbusters | View on Reddit | 44 comments
There have been a few myths that were ruled busted when they should be plausible, and a few that I don’t think were adequately tested, especially in the early years. What are your biggest disagreements?
JTEngel21@reddit
They tested shooting at a merry-go-round handle to spin it with a baby on it. They built a contraption that pushed on the bottom to simulate the weight of the baby. This to me always seemed wrong because it put friction on the wheel. I felt they should've just put a weight on the top so it could still spin freely.
AdmJota@reddit
The one about cereal nutrition (is the cereal box more nutritious than the sugary cereal). They basically tested it by just measuring calories, and then claiming that having more calories was the same as being more nutritious. Which is basically exactly the opposite of the premise of the myth.
EHG500@reddit
I remember a “bulletproof pizza” myth, and they said it would take a ridiculous amount of pizza to stop a bullet. True, but there was at least one pizza chain that had pizza bags that featured an induction heated steel plate sewed into the bag to keep the pizzas hot. One or two of those bags probably could stop a bullet, if they could have gotten their hands on one.
The “rocket car” myth particularly bugged me. They strapped the “JATO” rockets to the car. Realistically, the guy probably tossed them in the trunk, nozzle sticking out the back, lid strapped down, and if it lit it would have been an early experiment in vectored thrust. It wouldn’t be in line with the center of the vehicle, as their test rigs were. It would be pushing down on the rear of the vehicle as the nozzle would be raised up on the back lip of the trunk, which their test rigs didn’t do, either. I imagine it could have pushed down the back of the vehicle, lift up the front, take off, and corkscrew (or do some sick twisted loops) off in a relatively stable manner until the rocket burned out and continued on in a unpredictable direction. They did their best to make a stable rocket, engines pushing straight along the central axis, that would travel in a strait, predictable trajectory, as their insurance would want them to do.
StillAdhesiveness528@reddit
Ax to zombie head
Ragnarsworld@reddit
An axe would be effective, but a) very tiring to swing repeatedly with enough force, and b) bladed weapons can get "stuck" on bone and then you're screwed. (In WW1, if a bayonet got stuck in a man's ribs, you put your foot on his chest and pulled the bayonet out)
wardaddyoh@reddit
No, as taught, you cocked the rifle then fired a round to break the bone and withdraw the bayonet.
Ragnarsworld@reddit
Not if you were trying to raid the trench for intel and not wanting to raise the alarm.
turtlelore2@reddit
They cant exactly test it that far. Other than shoving against the door, that whole episode was basically worthless. I understand why, cuz its zombies.
Adventurous_Fig4084@reddit
This was my thought when watching it. Adequately using an ax as a weapon involves way more than gently tapping it to someone's head. It's physically demanding and I have little doubt the ax would almost always get lodged into the head to one extent or another, which adds to the physical demand significantly I would imagine.
Ragnarsworld@reddit
A better weapon might be a pick, but even that has the potential for getting stuck.
Adventurous_Fig4084@reddit
Yeah. Either way, they're smart enough to have considered this and conveyed it to the audience.
seantabasco@reddit
Tap tap tap tap tap
jikushi@reddit
I also thought that Jamie was a bit slow with the gun, both in the first test and the revisit. That was why he lost. Maybe they should have enlisted the help of a policeman.
Adventurous_Fig4084@reddit
Yeah this was remarkably flawed
turingthecat@reddit
I herd cats very easily.
When I want to feel like Snow White, I’ll go outside for a walk at night, my two cats will follow me, and as they are sort of the bosses in our area, other cats will follow them. I once had 15 cats following after me, in two lines
techn0Hippy@reddit
Newton's cradle with massive concrete balls. They said it didn't scale. But concrete doesn't have the same properties as steel and that factor wasn't acknowledged and I was pretty shocked. I would never have thought that concrete would work anything like steel but the difference in the properties of steel vs concrete was not discussed. That was pretty lame if you ask me.
123mitchg@reddit (OP)
Agreed, this is one of the ones that prompted this post.
(Of course, five six foot wide steel balls would be unimaginably expensive)
901CountryBlumpkin69@reddit
I was pissed watching the Cessna gain lift on the “treadmill” when they tried to prove that spinning wheels generated lift.
ghotier@reddit
They did one about singers being able to break a glass with their voice. Ultimate I think they did say "plausible," but for their "most powerful voice imaginable" they got a guy whose sound was "80s rock band falsetto." So not only could he not actually sing high enough (it's almost always done by a soprano), he probably had the weakest style possible to complete the myth.
dfin25@reddit
Shooting from the hip being busted was straight bullshit. All it takes is practice.
ghotier@reddit
Right. There are videos of people who can do it.
dfin25@reddit
And at a completely unbelievable skill level.
Wahjahbvious@reddit
Rigor was never part of the show's formula. And that's okay, because it's a tv show. But it impacts a lot of their findings.
Thefirstargonaut@reddit
The few economy on those two white vans—one with windows down and one with AC. Adam and Jamie each drove them for a while to see who got better fuel economy. They added weight to account for their different weights, if I remember right. They did all these things, but they should have done one additional step. They should have swapped vans to see if their actual driving made a difference too.
I had a problem with the running vs walking while raining, but I don’t remember what my problem with that was. Maybe the sprinkler system? If I remember, I’ll come back and clarify.
turtlelore2@reddit
In later seasons they did fuel efficiency with the same cars because of that reason. Same model does not mean same mileage.
They did revisit the walking vs running with real rain and came with the opposite conclusion.
Adventurous_Fig4084@reddit
Corked bat. It's frustrating they didn't even consider the formula for kinetic energy.
Prior_Confidence4445@reddit
Tons of myths could have been busted with a little bit of math but I guess that doesn't make good tv.
Adventurous_Fig4084@reddit
I'm not saying they shouldn't do experiments. I'm saying the experiment was flawed, thus the conclusion was flawed. They could have easily swung both bats instead of just one, and they would have recorded two different speeds. Use the faster speed for the corked bat during the experiment. Ball will go farther. Narrator explains its because of the faster velocity. Boom, done.
92xSaabaru@reddit
Did they test placebo effect at all? Baseball is famously "90% mental. The other half is physical." I'd be interested to see if that affected some batters, but that would require a larger sampling of batters than would be feasible for Mythbusters.
diogenesNY@reddit
Yogi....? That you?
Adventurous_Fig4084@reddit
I mean, you could say that about literally any sport, and nearly any other activity or endeavor. Running is mental. Football is mental. Writing a novel is mental. Changing your diet is mental.
My point is that they failed to consider the formula K=1/2mv2. Or, rather, they failed to consider the exponential nature of "v" and strictly judged the myth based on the linear effects of "m".
Mesoscale92@reddit
The biggest issue was sample size, and it was so widespread that there’s no single myth to point to. They’d often have a sample size of ~5-10 tops, when the minimum to get a 95% accuracy rate is at least 30.
92xSaabaru@reddit
Yes, but they acknowledged that a lot. In the end, they were first and foremost a TV show, and it wouldn't be practical to spend that much time and money for conclusive tests. Ideally, some full-time scientists would produce studies on some of the more impactful myths, like fuel efficiency or crash safety.
I won't fault them too much when it was a meaningless myth based on a silly movie scene, unless they called it definitive with only one or two tests. Shifting into reverse to brake, for example, was called impossible because the car they'd used wouldn't allow it, but many cars do, including the driveshaft pole vault car earlier in the series. It would almost certainly still be less effective than proper braking, but they shouldn't have called it so definitively.
jghaines@reddit
They also overlooked it a lot. I don’t remember the episode, but I do remember Tory calling out “that’s significant” for a result that wasn’t.
seantabasco@reddit
I feel like there were even a few where if the mythbusters couldn’t do it themselves they called it impossible.
two_three_five_eigth@reddit
It was a TV show so more samples = less content. It was fun watching them struggle with stuff like the bungee cord fraying. Part of the fun is that some of these experiments were expensive. I’m so glad I got to see 2 semi trucks pancake a compact for science.
InevitableSolution69@reddit
Most of the science I give a pass on the basis that they were never going to have the staffing, materials, or anything close to TIME to get any better than they did. No one was going to watch seasons with only 3 myths because they actually went in depth on them.
My only real issue is how often they would call a myth busted because their results didn’t exactly match the wording of the myth they settled on testing. If something is really close then it at least deserves a plausible, because people certainly also tell less exaggerated and extreme versions of that myth.
That issue does not exist any time they were testing a specific myth or movie event btw. There they had something specific and solid to compare to, so getting close isn’t really enough.
Definitelynotagnome@reddit
A lot of times with busted myths they did try and make a scenario where the myth happened. Off the top of my head is the firecracker in a cement truck. That went obviously way further than the original myth but they did try and see what might be plausible. Overall I think it did show that some myths "as written" are busted.
Definitelynotagnome@reddit
In the Hindenburg episode, the model burned in the same amount of time as the real full sized one. It should have burned in a much shorter time based on the model size. They said the myth was confirmed when it seems to me the burn time should have been a the fractional size of the model they used.
424Impala67@reddit
Steel toed boots... it annoyed me they don't really acknowledge that the force needed to bend the steel means that your toes gonna get amputated anyway until a throw away line at the end. I don't remember them getting like an er doc to point this out, which I think would've helped bust the myth better.
ExcaliburZSH@reddit
I had an issue with some the later episodes cutting and editing that I felt left it open to clams of deceptive editing.
afs189@reddit
Catching an arrow with your bare hand. On the follow-up they said some fans told them to fire the arrow from farther away, but they weren't going to test that because it wouldn't make a difference to the speed of the arrow. They seem to not understand what the fans were saying was that the farther away the arrow is fired the more time the person would have to react to it.
Boris-_-Badenov@reddit
peeing on electric fence.
they only tested volume, not rate
RavenQuo@reddit
Weirdly, I have no issue with the final verdict but I do with the bench test for Coffin Punch.
When there was no dirt on top, just a robot in a wooden box punching the top, the board started to buckle with the first couple of blows, but didn’t make any further progress.
It looked to me like the robot was aiming for the board’s center of mass, when it should have been aiming, say, 6 inches to a foot past, or through it. My understanding of the way martial artists learn to break boards irl is by teaching themselves to think through the board, not about hitting the surface.
That added momentum works kind of like follow-through when throwing a ball: if you stop your arm right as you release, you don’t impart as much momentum as you do if your arm is still moving.
You don’t have to teach a robot to “think” through an object, but you do have to program it to pubch that way!
I have no issue with the final conclusion because you can’t punch through 6 feet of dirt. Unless your arm is more than 6 feet long.