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Sad news from Variety today, the next season of Mythbusters will be the last.
"'Mythbusters' is — and will always be — an incredibly important part of Discovery's history," said Rich Ross, group president of Discovery Channel, Animal Planet and Science Channel. "Adam and Jamie are enormous talents who have brought learning and science to the forefront of this network, and their legacy will continue to live on over at Science Channel. The 'Mythbusters' library will be moving over to Discovery's sister network in 2016, where I know audiences new and old alike will be able to experience and learn with Adam and Jamie and the rest of the 'Mythbusters' family."
I guess we'll just have to try it at home now.
[Ed: Headline updated, show was not "canceled".]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday October 23 2015, @09:09PM
See, I always thought that missed the point.
The real point of Mythbusters, I always thought, was to basically say "The way you know for certain whether an idea works is to test it," and to show that that approach to thinking about life could even be rather fun (because who doesn't like explosions?). That concept is the very core of science, and even if their tests weren't anything approaching "rigorous" they were demonstrating the mindset.
And I think it's important that nobody on the show really had scientific credentials, because it also demonstrates that you don't need to have credentials to do science. For example, Yuji Hyakutake was a complete amateur who discovered 2 comets because he was really interested in searching for them. Sure, I'm not going to just trust your results, but amateurs may well pick something up that the professionals missed. And more to the point, as long as they're keeping everyone safe there's very little harm in trying.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday October 23 2015, @09:22PM
Exactly: except it got to the point where they sometimes seemed to just give up after a bit and go to the explosion...
"Maybe busted (which means we couldn't really care to test it further), now lets go blow it up!!! WOO HOO!"
It looked to me like if they really were interested, they'd bust the hell out of it to see which way the hammer fell: if not, they'd half-heart it, then explosions.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 23 2015, @09:53PM
Maybe that is supposed to be the spirit of it, but from that standpoint it was horribly executed, particularly in the later shows. They would design some sort of "experiment" and the "results" would be marginal one way or another. This was particularly true when they split the show and gave the other three their own "myth" to investigate. The spirit of building something and trying it out is there, but the process of drawing conclusions or data analysis was pretty shoddy.
(Score: 1) by deadstick on Friday October 23 2015, @11:52PM
For example, Yuji Hyakutake was a complete amateur who discovered 2 comets because he was really interested in searching for them.
Amateurs have been players in comet discovery for a long time. It's labor-intensive and can be done with moderate-priced equipment, so it's not a priority for funded observatories.