Recently my friend Jan Gregor gave me several vintage technical magazines. One article in particular caught my eye, as it had to do with a prop seen in an episode of Mythbusters. In this case the article was about the infamous “Chicken Gun.”
If you watch the Mythbusters video, the “myth” is detailed as having been an interaction between British Railways and NASA. Well, right there the myth is a priori “busted.”
This magazine article is from 1943, which pre-dates the creation of NASA by about 15 years!
Now, to be fair, I believe that Mythbusters did useful testing in trying to determine whether it matters if a frozen chicken has different terminal ballistic characteristics than a thawed chicken. But as you can see if you compare the Mythbusters video with the REAL chicken gun, it’s clear that real researchers use unplucked chicken carcasses rather than plucked carcasses. I’m sure it was easier for Mythbusters to get their hands on frozen chickens, and I’m sure using unplucked chicken carcasses would have drawn viewer complaints.
Ruffled a few feathers as it were…
My essay is not really a criticism of this particular episode of Mythbusters. But one of my longstanding issues with the TV show is that they do a uniformly poor job of prior research into the “myths” they want to test. Or if they actually do the prior research, it’s never mentioned. Real science always includes references, but with Mythbusters we have “TV science” which almost always cuts corners.
Again, to be fair, several episodes have identified quite specific instances where the “myth” or more properly the claim originated. I thought raising a sunken boat with table tennis balls was quite an elegant episode.
A higher resolution scan of the original Chicken Gun article can be seen here.
Yesterday I was talking on the telephone when I heard them; two sonic booms. The sound was loud enough to rattle the windows of my house, though not disruptive enough to change the conversation I was having about sandblasting media…
I knew they were sonic booms because I’m 47 and I used to hear them periodically when I was a child growing up in Missoula, Montana. A sonic boom has a very characteristic sound, unlike a firecracker or a gunshot, in that it’s a double noise. This is caused by the dual pressure waves emanating from the nose of the aircraft and the tail. I remember learning this as a child, because my mother allowed me to buy a book at the Missoula Mercantile entitled something like “SST” which stood, of course, for Super Sonic Transport.
At the time, there was a great debate as to whether commercial supersonic aircraft should be allowed to fly over the United States, and this book was a timely and informative source of popular information on the subject.
After I got off the phone yesterday I drove down and bought my bag of abrasives, returned home, then got on the Internet to look for news. Indeed, two fighter jets had scrambled due to a small passenger plane having violated the temporary no fly zone around Boeing Field.
The last time I was in Missoula, I spent quite a bit of time going through the microfilm morgues of both the Mansfield and the Missoula Public Libraries. I was looking for something else, but chanced across the following news story from page five of the Missoulian, dated July 13, 1985. The text within the image is essentially illegible, so here is a transcription. Please forgive me for not including the human interest story of one Karen Simons who “likes the sound caused by military planes flying at speeds of more than 2,000 mph at altitudes in excess of 80,000 feet.”
Reconnaissance aircraft pegged as noisemakers
Supersonic, high-altitude, photo-reconnaissance aircraft out of California’s Beale Air Force Base apparently are responsible for recent sonic booms that have jarred windows and shaken walls in the Missoula area.
Staff Sgt. Cliff Davis of Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls said Friday that Air Force SR-71 “Blackbird” aircraft of the 9th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing have been flying over U.S. air space on training missions and refueling exercises.
Built by Lockheed and classified as top secret, the 107-foot–long planes fly at more than 2,000 mph at altitudes in excess of 80,000 feet, said Davis, who called them “the world’s most advanced strategic reconnaissance aircraft.”
Davis, who has been handling sonic boom complaints from Missoula and neighboring towns, said Thursday that the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command in Nebraska has been helping with complaints. Friday, however he said complaints are being processed by Beale AFB.
Davis said the Air Force and the Federal Aviation Administration try to choose flight corridors that avoid highly populated areas. He said Beale officials have been notified of the Montana complaints and that they’re going to try to work out the problem.
What’s interesting to me about this story is that it became news because it happened in 1985. My memory is that sonic booms were more or less gone by the early 1970’s. There’s clearly a bit of unintended irony as well, because if the story is being reported in the newspaper, with a photograph of the airplane included, it really can’t be “top secret.”
What’s disturbing about the two sonic booms over Seattle yesterday is that it caused massive telephone call overloads to the 911 emergency systems in the area. First off, it’s a testament to how lame, ignorant and fearful so many people are who would call 911 for such a thing. More disturbingly, it demonstrates to terrorists or potential terrorists how easily the 911 system can be overloaded and brought to its knees. What better way to initiate an attack than to disable the fundamental emergency reporting network?
In a less dour vein, it reminds me of a simpler time, when there were separate phone numbers for police, fire and other services. When people would see a UFO, they would often call the police, which makes me to wonder what the police were supposed to do about it; arrest the UFO?
Somewhere in the organic chemistry curriculum, the concept of chirality must be introduced. The usual and customary example is the human hand, which which is generally issued as a pair; a right and a left. In fact the very word “chiral” is derived from the Greek word for “hand.”
In the macroscopic world that we inhabit, most of the things that are “handed” are solids, like the brass threads on a compressed gas tank. Compressed oxygen threads are right handed, while fuel gasses are left handed. It’s so important not to confuse the two they were designed to be impossible to be accidentally threaded into one another.
Today the mental image that might pop into one’s mind when we think of “black leather glove” is O.J. Simpson and the infamous courtroom one-liner “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” But many years ago the black leather glove created another media sensation; this time it was two leather gloves, and two men.
The scene was the winners podium at the 1968 summer Olympics in Mexico City. The following photograph became infamous almost overnight:
The Wikipedia entry on the incident provides an interesting backstory as to why Carlos is wearing a left handed glove:
Both U.S. athletes intended on bringing black gloves to the event, but Carlos forgot his, leaving them in the Olympic Village. It was the Australian, Peter Norman, who suggested Carlos wear Smith’s left-handed glove, this being the reason behind him raising his left hand, as opposed to his right, differing from the traditional Black Power salute.
But unlike a hand, which is solid and three dimensional, a glove is topologically a two dimensional surface, at least in the sense that it has two sides, an inside and an outside. Since most of us have no practical reason to be turning gloves inside out, we often don’t consider a glove to be “sided” as we think of a sheet of paper as being two sided.
So if a topologist had been on the podium with Carlos and Smith, they might have proposed that Carlos evert Smith’s glove, and so maintain a degree of symbolic consistency.
And to prove that this is not just a flight of fancy of mine, I went to the trouble of everting my own black leather glove to show it really works! Here is a right handed glove worn on my right hand:
The same glove turned inside-out, worn on the left hand:
In 2003 Mythbusters investigated a “myth” or event that allegedly occurred in 2001 aboard an airplane. Kudos to Mythbusters for at least giving us oblique references as to their source material for the “myth.” From the meager hints given on the TV, I was able to find this website, which can be translated into English using a variety of tools, including Google.
Google translates it as follows:
Woman was hungry for the SAS WC
An American woman on an SAS plane en route from Scandinavia to New York was sitting on the toilet for several hours, said TT. She tried to flush without getting up, but then formed a vacuum and she got stuck, write the Norwegian tabloid VG’s online edition. – It was impossible to get off her, “says Siv Meisingseth at SAS in Oslo to the newspaper. In New York, managed to dislodge the woman technician.
TT
Published: 2002-01-21
Mythbusters set out to test the “myth” in classic fashion, using models instead of real human beings. Thankfully their test design was able to incorporate some really good TV-grade science in modeling a prosthetic butt from a real butt. Good science should always document each phase of the test procedure and Mythbusters was up to the task:
In any event, Mythbusters couldn’t duplicate the supposed suction event. Frankly I have no quarrel with their test design or conclusion, although it should be noted that some obese people have trouble simply standing up. It’s possible that the story may have become confabulated from “failure to stand up” to “being held down by the suction of a toilet.”
Strangely enough, this was not the first time such an incident had been reported. In 1992 Led Zeppelin’s tour manager Richard Cole wrote a book entitled Stairway to Heaven: Led Zeppelin Uncensored. ISBN 0-06-018323-3. On page 250 Cole recounts an episode involving John Bonham aboard their rented Boeing 720B:
“One afternoon, on a flight to Cincinnati for a concert at Riverfront Stadium, the Starship had been in the air only fifteen minutes when I heard banging and shouts coming from the bathroom.
“Get me out! Get me out!”
It was Bonzo. The bathroom door was locked. I hit it with a couple of Bruce Lee kicks. The door trembled, then it collapsed. There, before my eyes, sat Bonzo, perched on the can with his pants down, literally unable to move.
“Help me, damn it!”
As hard as he was trying, Bonzo couldn’t stand up. Apparently, a mechanic had not properly sealed the vent beneath the toilet, and air pressure was literally sucking him down, keeping his ass anchored to the seat.
I grabbed Bonham by the arms and pulled him free. “Oh, my God!” he gasped, feeling terribly shaken but not hurt. He pulled up his pants and didn’t seem the least bit embarrassed by what had happened. He was probably just happy to be alive. As he returned to the main cabin of the plane, he mumbled, “I’m never gonna trust a toilet seat again.”
If I’m interpreting Cole’s chronology correctly, this event would have occurred in 1973!
Several years ago, I watched with great interest an episode of Mythbusters concerning the “myth” of electrocution by urinating on the third rail. According to Wikipedia this was part of the first season, episode three, original air date October 10, 2003. I watched with great interest because I believed that I had read about this very “myth” many years ago.
First off, we must consider that Mythbusters is not “real” science in the sense that it is peer-reviewed and published in scientific literature. It’s television, and on television there is often an appeal to the lowest common denominator. Thus as time went on, Mythbusters became less scientific and more sensational, with episodes dealing with farting, shitting, and lots and lots of explosions. Oh, yeah, and that hot chick with the really nice rack…
But let’s take a close look at this particular “myth.” First off, in real science, whether performed by amateurs or professionals, you list prior research. Mythbusters almost NEVER does this, and certainly didn’t in this episode. Yet the “myths” have to come from somewhere. It was telling that the third rail episode named the victim as “O’Malley,” the stereotypical drunken Irishman.
Mythbusters, and in particular Adam Savage, have been embraced by skeptics as well. Savage has given public presentations at JREF conferences, and is considered by many a celebrity skeptic. But is it a good idea for skepticism to embrace a TV program that engages in sloppy science? A fundamental problem in the whole concept of Mythbusters is in the name itself, which presupposes that the claims they are testing are myths. Yes, I understand that “Claim Testers” is simply not sexy enough for TV. Too cerebral! Not enough explosions! More tits!
Good science CANNOT presuppose that any claim, at least those that are not logically impossible, to be a “myth.”
But lets get back to the “myth” of the electrocution death of Joseph Patrick O’Malley, who was in fact a real person and not a myth at all! How did Mythbusters botch their test design and come to the wrong conclusion?
Pressure! Mythbusters correctly concluded that under the circumstances of their test design, an electrolyte stream’s laminar flow would break up into small droplets, and thus be unable to carry an electrical current from the third rail to O’Malley’s penis. The problem is that Mythbusters used a feed flow based on one trip to the toilet by Savage. Well, as any man knows who has had a hugely full bladder and no prostatic hypertrophy, a vastly more robust stream of urine can be produced than that seen on the Mythbusters test dummy. This is because of the simple reason that one can bear down on the bladder with one’s abdominal muscles! You have a simple case of grossly unrealistic test conditions.
But an even more egregious breach of scientific protocol was committed in this episode: Empirical reality trumps theory and test design.
In 1967 a book was published entitled Where Death Delights written by Marshall Houts about Milton H. Helpern who was the chief medical examiner of New York City at the time. Chapter 15 is entitled “Be Careful What You Do to the World,” and details the strange case of one Joseph Patrick O’Malley, who died of electrocution by urinating on the third rail of a Bronx subway.
On page 287 Houts writes:
“Dr. Helpern made his determination of ‘accidental death’ on the basis of three small burns. One burn was on the inside surface of the right thumb, on the inside surface of the right index finger, and the third covered a somewhat larger area on the head of the penis.”
On Page 289 Houts continues:
“The fate of this particular Joseph Patrick O’Malley also involved the third rail of the subway. This is the ‘hot’ rail through which 600-volt electric current passes to furnish the energy for the subway trains. It parallels the inside rail of each track and is embedded in cement so that it is covered on three sides. The fourth side is open, facing the train, so that the contact wheel of the subway train can run against this ‘hot’ third rail to pull in the electrical current to move the motors.”
“The burns on the head of the penis and on the thumb and forefinger were obvious electrical burns.”
“For one reason or another, this Joseph Patrick O’Malley elected to literally urinate on the world at this particular time. The stream of urine had come into contact with the 600 volts of the third rail. The current coursed up the stream to cause the burns on his body as the electricity entered it. In all probability, he was dead from electrocution before the train ever hit his body.”
What’s particularly galling about this episode is this statement by the show’s announcer at the very end of the episode: “In fact, there are no recorded cases of O’Malley, or anyone else, dying like this in the New York Subway.”
Bullshit!
Remember, just because someone wants to wear the mantle of “scientist” or “skeptic” doesn’t mean that they are above scrutiny. Unfortunately this particular episode of Mythbusters was more like Monsterquest…
Where Death Delights, Marshall Houts, 1967. Library of Congress Number 67-21513
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