actual mileage may vary

Post #266,991 by rcareaga 9/7/06 11:24:28 PM Reply	actual mileage may vary Upon further investigation it appears that the explosions were, ah, fudged. It should have been "Now imagine a small quantity of dynamite detonated in a bathtub in order to simulate the violent explosion that the cesium didn't produce." [link\|http://www.badscience.net/?p=270\|http://www.badscience.net/?p=270] cordite-ially, Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.
Post #267,016 by Ashton 9/8/06 7:23:58 AM Reply	Re: actual mileage may vary I presumed fakery re the small (shown unchopped) Rb, Cs samples; I've seen what passes for scientism on US shows. (A quicksand 'experiment' which did not demonstrate what they thought it did, comes to mind.) Guess I'm inured now to BS across the board - Muricans demand exaggeration; apparently Brits like it too. Understandable why they wouldn't explore the means for containment/enhancement. I await Fatherland Security's cancellation of HS Chem classes, in a next phase. 'Course too, the skit doesn't remotely address the suggested relative reaction-rates for the metals (it's not obvious how that relates to At. No.; I never investigated that to any precision, doubt it is anything like the implications of this skit) - but energy release certainly is proportional to surface area and other physical conditions you can control. ie you Could shape a charge to blast that tub, with any of the alkali metals. Just not the way they showed it. Maybe those clowns don't know any real chem..! If they thought they needed dynamite - they don't / or just lazy. Cthulhu forbid that a show should actually intend to Teach anything - it's soooo iinefficient in the all-MBA-all-the-time era, to learn something which you can't sell immediately. Glad there's PBS, for awhile at least. I'll report on my Rb test.. whenever.
Post #267,017 by Another Scott 9/8/06 7:33:31 AM Reply	500 error :-(. Here's another link to a debunking page. [link\|http://www.theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/AlkaliBangs/index.html\|Theodore Gray - Alkali Metal Bangs]: I have assembled this page to try to shed some light on the truth behind a recent controversy generated by the popular British television show Brainiac. A few seasons ago Brainiac broadcast an episode in which they claimed to show what happens when approximately two grams of each of the five alkali metals (lithium, sodium, potassium, rubidium, and cesium) are thrown into a tub of water. The first three were, probably, real, but the last two explosions turned out to have been completely fake. They simply put a bomb in a bathtub and blew it to bits, pretending that this was the result of two grams of rubidium. Then they did it again and pretended it was two grams of cesium. (Cesium is spelled caesium where they come from, buy lying in lying on either side of the Atlantic.) This shocking fact was revealed by reporter [link\|http://www.badscience.net/\|Ben Goldacre] in [link\|http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/badscience/story/0,,1821144,00.html\|an article] in The Guardian (a respected daily newspaper in England). The next week he followed up with further revelations about the [link\|http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/badscience/story/0,,1826518,00.html\|deplorable state of honesty at Brainiac]. (Modesty prevents me from pointing out that his second article compares my humble [link\|http://www.theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/Stories/011.2/index.html\|sodium party] most favorably to the fakers over at Brainiac.) Ted's "Sodium Release-o-tron" is a clever, er, -o-tron. I thought only [link\|http://www.walterolson.com/articles/crashtests.html\|US network TV shows] stooped to such levels. :-( Cheers, Scott.
Post #267,052 by lincoln 9/8/06 2:22:08 PM Reply	Faked or not, it still was enjoyable I'm glad to see that Europe has their own version of "Mythbusters" (who've never met a challenge that didn't require blowing something up yet). lincoln "Chicago to my mind was the only place to be. ... I above all liked the city because it was filled with people all a-bustle, and the clatter of hooves and carriages, and with delivery wagons and drays and peddlers and the boom and clank of freight trains. And when those black clouds came sailing in from the west, pouring thunderstorms upon us so that you couldn't hear the cries or curses of humankind, I liked that best of all. Chicago could stand up to the worst God had to offer. I understood why it was built--a place for trade, of course, with railroads and ships and so on, but mostly to give all of us a magnitude of defiance that is not provided by one house on the plains. And the plains is where those storms come from." -- E.L. Doctorow Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem. I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a *Citizen* of the United States. [link\|mailto:bconnors@ev1.net\|contact me]
Post #267,177 by static 9/10/06 10:44:20 PM Reply	Damn. But I guess I'm not that surprised. One of the commercial channels in Au started showing Brainiac a little while back. It got bad reviews in the local press - not mainly because of the dodgy science, but because of the glamour girls they were sexing the show up with. Contrariwise, [link\|http://sss.sbs.com.au/\|SBS] were showing MythBusters before it was cool - uncut, I believe. I don't know if the main three have tried to outbid SBS for the actual show, but a locally made science and technology show air parts of older MB episodes (one myth, usually), so I guess they tried and failed. Wade. "Insert crowbar. Apply force."

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