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Discovery: Welcome to our live chat with MythBusters Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman. Likely you're coming here having just seen the premiere of "Cell Phones on Planes," but don't feel compelled to keep your questions limited to that episode. Adam and Jamie are here to answer your questions about the series, mythbusting in general or whatever's on your mind. So ask away.
Adam: Hi to everyone from San Francisco!
Jamie: I'm here too.
Logain8955: How do you choose what myths to test? Do you guys sift through all the suggestions or are they handed down to you from Discovery?
Adam: The process of choosing myths is a long and involved one. Currently, about 30 percent of the myths we get are from the show's fans, either from suggestions posted on the Web site or from e-mails that Jamie and I get directly. We always try to look for things to test that have some basis in the physical world so that we can test them. Consequently we refuse to do aliens, and we'll probably never tackle Bigfoot.
Jamie: Today and yesterday we were having fun creating whirlpools that will be put into an episode to deal with "Whirlpools of Death," the ones that would suck a ship down. At this point, after about 60 episodes and about 150 myths, we're getting into our groove with the science of these kinds of things. We started out (I believe it was yesterday) with a little cappuccino frothing machine in a cup, looking at small whirlpools. Through the course of three days, we're working up to what will be tomorrow a 55-gallon drum to create whirlpools in, and in about another week when the tank arrives, it will be a couple of stories high and involves a massive turbo pump, we think. We'll be seeing what it's like to be inside a whirlpool. That's a classic example of the kind of myth we like to do because we're able to get some sort of logical progression getting near to death.
Adam: Usually it's me that ends up getting a little more scared to death!
Wolfyhound: Has there ever been a time that Jamie's shirt actually did get dirty?
Adam: Jamie's shirt does, in fact, get occasionally "dirty." But it rarely goes beyond small dots of oil or hydraulic fluid or some small amount of paint. I believe that, years ago, he developed some kind of personal force field, as well as a miracle fabric that keeps his shirts absolutely pristine. A little known fact is that Jamie has one shirt for every day of the week, like Einstein.
Jamie: No comment.
