It goes to show that the mythbusters are indeed fallable and now my life shall never be the same again. Sort of...

devi (imported) wrote: Sun Dec 11, 2011 5:57 pm It goes to show that the mythbusters are indeed fallable and now my life shall never be the same again. Sort of...

As Adam himself is often fond of saying... "Failure is always an option." This one was just on a larger scale than most.

BossTamsin (imported) wrote: Sun Dec 11, 2011 6:16 pm As Adam himself is often fond of saying... "Failure is always an option." This one was just on a larger scale than most.

He was apologetic on the local TV news about it, but given his normal demeanor and personality I keep hearing him in the back of my head saying, "Woopsie!"

--LT

Sgt. Nelson missed his calling, clearly his adroit use of understatement is a gift that any political hack should have as his spokesperson.

The expression "unfortunate bounce" redefines understatement particularly after admitting that the "projectile" had missed entirely three of it's targets. Also, under those circumstances, when a cannon ball loses inertia and falls to earth, it's an easy assumption it will bounce unless it, say, goes into a pond or wet cement or picks up the seven ten split at the Dublin Bowling Alleys.

More of Sgt. Nelson, I want him to offer a calmative explanation as to a volcano eruption that wiped out native villages. ("The lava flowed down a side we hadn't expected" or a Tsunami that took out an island with it's population. (The primary wave took a tangential course we hadn't expected.) Or any election. (Voter turnout wasn't what was expected.)

I think the broader question here is which myth buster has his hand up Sgt. Nelson's ass and is working his jaw.....

The story is 2 years old and the MYTHBUSTERS have addressed what went wrong.

The cannon ball wasn't fired "Up" but rather sideways at a target backed by a hill. I used a hill behind my house as a backstop wen I used to target shoot back there. So the stray bullets would go into the hillside.

This cannon ball did bounce because when it was fired the trajectory rose above the target and the bounce took it over the top of the hill.

What wasn't known at the time (and we can debate whether the crew at Mythbusters should have known) was that over the hill was a housing development that had crept up on what was advertised as a "safe" area to fire cannons and pistols and explode things. The place wasn't as isolated as people thought.

They have since revisited the same myth but this time at a much safer and more isolated target range.

Go look for the information on the Discovery and the Mythbusters website.

They have become somewhat fond of going up to Calaveras County in the Sierra Nevada foothills to the abandoned Carson Hill open pit mine to do a lot of this. This mine is very close to where I grew up (about 30 minute drive away) and is in a rural area with a VERY small "town" on one side and simply enormous reservoir on the other side of the mountain.

The episode I remember being shot at the mine was the one that had the testing to see if a person who fell out of an aircraft and failed to have their parachute open, could land relatively unhurt if a bomb went off immediately beneath them with the resulting pressure wave softening their landing.

The mine was an excellent place to do this. Here is a link

Losethem (imported) wrote: Sat Dec 10, 2011 3:26 pm (http://maps.google.com/maps?q=

carson+hill,+ca&hl=en&ll=38.025952,-120.50427&spn=0.010176,0.01575&sll=37.269174,-119.306607&sspn=10.520741,16.12793&t=h&hnear=Carson+Hill,+California&z=16) to a satellite photo of this mine. Here is a link to a map (http://maps.google.com/maps?saddr=Barne ... &z=9&via=1) showing the distance from the range the bowling ball stunt went awry to the Carson Hill mine site between Sonora, CA and Angels Camp, CA.

They are also known to do a lot of their testing around Tracy, CA. Tracy is visible in the second map link above in the triangle making up Interstates 5, 205, and 580.

--LT