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Comment by sumitgt | Hacker News Reader

Same here. Watched this show with my dad (who is an Engineer). Ended up becoming an Engineer myself.

I credit this show and MythBusters for pushing me into Science and Tech.

As much as I watch and enjoy Mythbusters, I rarely come out of watching that show feeling like I really learned something new or am particularly more knowledgable on a subject.

Mythbusters is fun and entertaining, Mayday is educational and entertaining.

> Mythbusters, I rarely come out of watching that show feeling like I really learned something

The earliest episodes were more scientific and educational. They spent quite a bit of time explaining how they were going to construct something and then showing how they actually built it. It became pure entertainment--devoted especially to blowing things up--once the show achieved success.

Another example of a show descending to the lowest common denominator: The first years of "Biography" on the A&E Network had stories about explorers, scientists, and world leaders--Michelangelo, Henry Ford, Julius Caesar, Marconi, Marco Polo--but now it's nothing but celebrities.

Agreed, the earlier episodes were better, but I still don't think they were great. The last season of the show (when it was just Jayme/Adam) was actually fantastic though.

I've never actually seen any of the biography series (I just associate it with shallow celebrity profiles) I'll have to dig up the earlier episodes, thanks!

I do wonder how the show by the assistants will do on Netflix. I too cannot say I'm a fan of the original. Their snowplow episode hit way too close to home and came to entirely the wrong (and a dangerous) conclusion. Testing anything having to do with snow, ice, and curved road surface on a flat, dry runway is doomed to failure with horrific reporting of results.

[I get it, no criticism of Myth Busters allowed]

The problem I have with Mayday is that there is only about 10min of footage repeated over an hour (45min + ad breaks). Most of the time is filled with summaries (after ad breaks), suspense (obtained by temporarily truncating explanations), questions and hyperboles. Also, it's very US-centric, as if no citizen of other nation were as competent as US ones. Multiplied explanations for the same fact feel like they think I'm 5, and the repetion feels like brainwashing. I come out of watching feeling like it would fit in 2 minutes, even though the original non-repeated content is probaboy more than that. I'd love if they could do a cross-season episodes: "It has been found that (spoiler alert) flight XYZ failed because of reasons A, B and C. The cause A happens over 3 accidents, let's study the 2 other causes. C happened when landing the space shuttle too and in the building collapse in another country. (etc)"

That's pretty common and makes the show way cheaper to make. Discovery did a what if dragons were real "documentary" which probably had a whole 10 minutes of footage stretched in an hour. The constant repeats after every commercial were hideous.

https://youtu.be/7MFtl2XXnUc

The important thing about Mythbusters is that they have an idea and they test it. Their methods aren't always the best (or even good at all), but they take the right approach: they get an idea, and they try to verify or invalidate it. Pretty much anyone who watches an episode can think of a way to improve the experiment, and I think it's good that the show provokes that response.

I see the value of Mythbusters in being able to calibrate your perception to those aspects of real-life physics that you don't typically see in normal life. How does it look like when there is a gas explosion in a house? A hand grenade blow? A bicycle trying to be ridden on the bottom of a pool? Thanks to Mythbusters, I really do understand these things pretty well now.

A more recent mini-show that gives you a similar discovery experience (albeit at a smaller scale) is the MrGear channel at YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCo6DJdltbIub80bLiyJRv3w

Maybe you won't learn a lot from MythBusters, but it went a long way to imbibe a maker spirit in you. That I think is crucial to becoming a better engineer.

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