Hunting and Gathering

I vaguely remember watching these Mythbuster experiments.

Only on the internet can you read a blog article which is a reprint of a magazine article which is a summary of a television episode.

The meta, it hurts!

Um, apologies for picking on your spelling, but I think you meant to use the word 'dexterous' (or 'dextrous'; both spellings are okay). That is, unless 'dexterious' is some terrible new hybrid word that people are using.

I don't require television to be plausible. I require it to be fun to watch.

Spell Check, too many errors.

My favorite was when he magnetized a pipe by striking it against a wall. Yes, it happens. No, he did not do it correctly.

One thing to remember about McGyver is that the producers and writers tried to make everything that was explosive or potentially dangerous -not- work if tried in reality. When McGyver would create a chemical mixture to explode out of this or that trap, at least one component would always be off so that kids couldn't blow up their bedrooms at home.

:D

MacGyver really needed a cross-over with the A*Team.

I think it was in the pilot episode of the A-Team, they escaped a prison with "traaaash baaaaygs" attached to chairs, inflated with frickin' hair dryers! It was an amazing bit of TV.

My dad told me about an incident in the 1950's on an aircraft carrier where a disgruntled sailor flushed a pound of sodium metal down the toilets and blew them up, disabling them. Needless to say, the sailor was court-martialed, and my dad had a seat on the court. It seems that the key part of getting a major reaction from sodium metal and water is to constrain the reaction, much like the way that gunpowder will burn when unconstrained but explode when constrained.

The problem with Mythbusters is that they often don't think through how to really reproduce a situation and have terrible experimental procedures, such as when they used a bolt-action rifle to test the effects of blocking the barrel of a gun, rather than testing on a semi-automatic like a Colt .45 pistol (which was the original of the myth that they were trying to bust), or when they were testing whether on gets better fuel economy to driving with the windows down on a car or with the air conditioning on - they changed the conditions of the experiment halfway through on that one.

I signed the online petition to get paramount to let Mythbusters do Macguyver myths, and i'm glad i did.