bud❤

You know, that Mythbusters post legitimately changed my life. Before seeing it, I had exponentially more guilt and stress about not being able to sleep, which of course, further exacerbated my inability to sleep.

Now, every time I wake up about three am, knowing I have to get up at 6.45, instead of stressing and panicking about how my day is going to be sleep deprived and miserable, I just tell myself 'Time to activate Mythbusters Protocol' and lie there with my eyes closed safe in the knowledge that I am measurably reducing later feelings of exhaustion.

And when this happens, about 70% of the time the reduction of guilt and stress means I actually do fall back asleep, so all in all instead of getting only three or four hours sleep, I get five to six and a half.

Which y'know, major improvement in health and energy.

On a related note, that post also opened up the world of naps for me. I used to think that napping was mostly pointless for me, because I'm pretty much incapable of falling fully asleep in the middle of the day. But when I redefined naps to include "lying down with my eyes shut for an hour," even if I just spent the whole time brainstorming fanfiction, that was often enough to get me from "exhausted and running on 4 hours of sleep" to energized and refreshed

The post (?) as found on Reddit with bonus explanatory Reddit comment.

I will be 70 years old and I still will never have gotten over the time the Mythbusters used a rocket powered steel wall to - and I use this word as literally as possible - vaporize an entire car into red mist

https://youtu.be/Nl8xTqTUGCY

If you haven’t seen this episode of Mythbusters I feel so bad for you because “What car?” remains to this day as a defining moment of my adolescence and my entire life

That was a near-religious experience 

I made a gif of it for those of you who cant watch the video in your country. Or if you know you just want to stare at it mesmerized like me

it fucking sublimated!

mythbusters was so good because it wasn't a killjoy show. they didn't just say "see, it doesn't work" and leave it there

whenever they find that the stunt doesn't work as portrayed in the movie, they immediately ask "what would it take to make this happen?"

“we know it takes this amount of explosives to work, but what if we doubled it anyway?”

Some myths I'll always remember:

* Are elephants scared of mice? (They only did that because they were in Africa and had access to elephants.)

* Will a bull run amok in a china shop?

* Is it better to run zig-zag or straight when chased by an alligator?

I love these because NONE of them turned out the way they expected. They went into all three with pre-conceived ideas of how it would go, and each time they "failed." Elephants WILL cower from mice. A bull moves very gingerly through a china shop. It doesn't matter how you run because ALLIGATORS WON'T CHASE YOU.

And each time, they reacted with just... pure glee. "Holy shit, we were wrong! Oh my god! This is great! We were so wrong!"

And that, to me, is what science is. Being excited about being wrong because either way it's information.

I think what made the Mythbusters special was this: of course they would always ask, and test, “could the circumstances of the myth produce the described result?” but they ALSO always took the extra step to “under what circumstances, no matter how extreme, could the described result be achieved? ” and it was fucking spectacular every time

I remember them testing the myth that having a lot of piercings would make you more susceptible to lightning strikes and by the time they actually got that result they had a dummy with a doorknob as a tongue piercing

Mythbusters Physics: Relative Velocity

The Mythbusters tested what would happen if a ball was shot at 60 mph off the back of a truck travelling at 60 mph to see what would happen.

It became a perfect example of the relative nature of physics - showing that velocity can vectorially add together. 60 mph in one direction cancels the 60 mph in the other, meaning a net velocity of zero.

thanks, you discovered vectors. Fuck me sideways this is dumb

Yup, everyone has the same level of knowledge as you. There’s no one to learn anything from this.

Just to add, before the Mythbusters did this it was purely a thought experiment and had never been empirically tested at that point. So you are seeing in those two gifs the first actually test of that hypothesis since it had been proposed back in Newtons time.

As an astrophysicist I’d like to apologize for @surrenderless rude ass comment. We’re not all pretentious and like they said above, this was the first time this was ever tested. Imagine being so pretentious to something more profound like the double slit experiment.

what i love about mythbusters is that once they bust a myth they manipulate their variables until something finally explodes bc we all know why you’re really watching this show