At TAM 7, My Close Personal Friend Adam Savage™ talked with Matt Welch from Reason magazine to discuss Mythbusters and skepticism. Here’s the video:
I also did a brief interview with them, and I’ll link to it once it goes live.
Tip o’ the safety goggles to Lennart Bjorksten.
If you went to BadAstronomy.com and found yourself here, never fear: the BA Blog has moved to its new home at Discover Blogs. The original BA site (with the Moon Hoax debunking and all that) is still online, too.
Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
Contact me: The Bad Astronomer "at" gmail "dot" com
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July 20th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
Your Close Personal Friend Adam Savage™ delighted me with his eloquence and insight.
July 20th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
Me two. [And I'm not yucked out by "double-dipping" or other frequently shown US food sharing any more. Hmm, wonder if that really is a good thing?]
July 20th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
Why do you trade mark that name?
July 20th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
Adam’s simulation in the vomit comet for 1/6 g walking convinced me that Apollo really was on moon, because Adam’s motions were identical to Apollo astronauts. He did an excellent job on that mythbusters show.
July 20th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
You would not believe the number of moon-landing deniers there are in the AMSAT (Amateur Radio Satellite) mailing list right now… educated people who use satellites on a regular basis who don’t believe that men walked on the moon.
Makes me want to smack some people.
July 20th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
I don’t care, I’m still yucked out by double-dipping. I don’t think regular bacteria is the question, but rather folks with mono or slimy runny nosed kids, etc. Stay away from my veggie dip!! Oh, and the banana peel thing? Pop culture (and hence the MB debunk) has it wrong: the peels in question were the discarded and rotting blackened peels of the early 20th century which DID get slimy and dangerous and DID cause people to slip and DID necessitate the passage of laws regarding their disposal (”Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World,” by Dan Koeppel). Yellow peels, though, not so much.
This is neither here nor there, really, since I still crush on the Mythbusters hardcore.
July 20th, 2009 at 5:59 pm
This reminded me that when I went to the Mythbusters site a few weeks ago, I thought I saw a banner that Kari had given birth…. but I don’t see it now….
J/P=?
July 20th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
There is a tweet here http://twitter.com/grantimahara/status/2398537776 from Grant saying she gave birth to a baby girl Stella Ruby on 28th of June, weighing 8 lb 12 oz.
July 20th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
@ 7. John Paradox
According to Wikipedia (so you know its accurate) Kari gave birth to a baby girl on June 28.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kari_byron
My favorite part of that whole interview:
“We’re getting letters from people in college saying they grew up watching MythBusters and have been inspired to go into the sciences by the show.”
That is truly amazing, way to go guys!
July 20th, 2009 at 7:08 pm
One of the best things about the show is that they sometimes revisit myths that they got wrong. I wouldn’t be surprised if they do a quickie segment on rotting banana peels at some point.
I’d really like to see them fix their bad results for cannon splinters. They didn’t seem to realize that the real cannon they used was tiny even for a fighting sloop of the era.
July 20th, 2009 at 7:28 pm
Last night, HowStuffWorks.com sent me an email with a Mythbusters video from Discovery. It showed a tipsy Adam Savage with a handful of jokes, in a bar. It’s cool to be tipsy and skeptical at the same time.
http://videos.howstuffworks.com/discovery/35095-mythbusters-mythbusters-gone-tipsy-video.htm
July 20th, 2009 at 8:06 pm
@John Paradox,
I didn’t see it on their site, but heard about it on Twitter via @grantimahara: Stella Ruby born 11:35pm 6/28/09, 42 hours of labor, weight: 8lbs 12oz. Both Kari & baby in good health. #babywatch complete!
http://twitter.com/grantimahara/status/2398537776
July 20th, 2009 at 8:18 pm
Squid: just auto-reply all with links to Phil’s debunking, and the well-done one at clavius, and even (especially?) the mythbusters episode on moon hoax debunking.
Me, I’ve had my fill of moon hoax dummies, and want nothing more to do with them.
(I’d use stronger language than in my response earlier but I’m holding to Phils’ G-Rating rules.)
July 20th, 2009 at 9:37 pm
We interviewed him too! It’s about 15 minutes into the episode, well worth checking out, the interview’s a whole 30 minutes long!
We also interviewed Phil for over an hour at TAM7. Look for it in a future episode! Phil gave a great interview. He also signed my copy of Death From the Skies. Thanks Phil!
July 20th, 2009 at 10:35 pm
Thanks to Phil Plait, Mythbusters, Snopes, and The Straight Dope, I’ve become a skeptic. So much so that when bulletins would crop up on MySpace (yeah, I still have one of those) spouting urban legends, I would do the research to debunk it.
Then I came across the MySpace group The Benevolent Bullsh*t Bulletin Busters Brigade (which would become The Benevolent Bullsh*t Bulletin Busters Brigade 2.0 ). I’d like to think that we helped to clean up valuable bulletin space for more important matters…like surveys, and stuff. I haven’t seen very many BS bulletins, but we’re still there.
Skepticism is the best tool to swat the flies of urban legends, pseudo-science, quackery, and charlatans. Let’s keep up the work.
July 20th, 2009 at 11:08 pm
@Evolving Squid : I’m NOT surprised so many amateur radio guys buy into the moon hoax BS; there is a large intersection between amateur radio enthusiasts and “the gummint black helicopters are coming to take our guns!” crowd.
July 20th, 2009 at 11:37 pm
Thanks to all who responded about Stella (Stella! for Brando fans), I don’t particularly like Twitter (or Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, etc.) because
1) I prefer to keep SOME anonymity (esp. when job hunting)
2) the ‘favorite’ website/means of updating changes more quickly than I like
3) my life isn’t all that interesting
J/P=?
July 21st, 2009 at 12:06 am
I never understood the double dipping problem. Just turn the chip around and dip the unbitten part. Of course, your hands are covered in bacteria, but I don’t think that disturbs people as much as saliva.
July 21st, 2009 at 2:42 am
Adam Savage is almost like Morgan Freeman to me, every time I hear an interview with him, I respect him a little more. I love the way he thinks, the way he supports thinking, his child-like curiosity, it’s all quite amusing and great
July 21st, 2009 at 7:12 am
I’d like to see those guys check out the veracity of ‘chickens-on-a-string’.
As the story goes, bacon fat makes its way through a chicken’s digestive tract in a matter of minutes. So, it you tie a wad of bacon fat to the end of about 25 feet of kite string, and chuck it into the chicken yard, before too long you’ve supposedly got a bunch of chickens in distress, strung together beak-to-butt.
This is reputed to make farmers very unhappy… but I guess it would be a big hit among the cow-tipping crowd.
July 21st, 2009 at 7:19 am
I just saw that Whoopi Goldberg announced the other day on The View that she thinks the landings were faked. http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1963976/moon_landing_conspiracy_theories_and.html?cat=15
The first thing that comes to mind is, “The Stupid. It BURNS!”
July 21st, 2009 at 9:32 am
The view=`The Stupid.It BURNS!`
July 21st, 2009 at 11:06 am
@ Jim,
I am surprised Phil hasn’t posted that yet. Though it might just be that around this time so many hoaxers come out that it would be lost in a sea of irrelevance.
July 23rd, 2009 at 12:26 am
Her baby was about 3.97Kg, for those people who are educated.
I learnt in Imperial measurements, but the metric system is a lot easier to calculate in a relate quantities in different areas of experience.