Anyone else catch the Mythbusters cell phone driving episode 1830

One of the best shows on Television, IMHO.

The premise of the show is that they put urban legends and "myths" to the test. There are no actors. It's more like a reality show than anything else. For each hour-long episode, they choose a few "myths" to test. The last episode I watched (I think it was a re-run), they were testing a myth that one of them heard on the airplane. Basically, the myth was that when you are in an airplane that is making an emergency landing (controlled or otherwise), the "brace" position is designed to break your neck so that the airlines won't have to pay for years of medical care. (it's cheaper to pay a wrongful rest settlement than pay for years of medical care) To test it, they built a kind of airplane pbuttenger compartment and DROPPED IT repeatedly from a crane to simulate airline crashes. Then they had dummies positioned in various seats-crash postures rigged up with sensors to see how much damage (injuries) they sustained in various positions. The conclusion was that the "brace" position that the air crews suggest is actually somewhat effective at preventing rest if you are on an airliner that crashes. So as they say on the show, the "myth" was "busted".

Many of their episodes are hilariously funny, and all of them are entertaining. Some of the myths they test are outrageous. Like one of them was a legend where a worker was supposedly thrown (catapulted) by a hydraulic lift. The myth was "busted" in the sense that they learned there was no way a hydraulic lift could act as a catapult under anything close to normal operating circumstances. But then, they set about finding what it would take to MAKE THAT HAPPEN, under ANY circumstance. They had a whole boom lift positioned on a pivot point setting on a couple stacks of shipping containers, so that it acted somewhat like a catapult, throwing a dummy "Buster" into the ground. Great fun!

The best part of the show is not what they prove or disprove, but how they go about doing it. I mean, who else would think to make a catapult out of a boom lift and put it on television? Or who else would attach a bunch of rockets to a throne and try to send a "king" into space that way? Or shoot chickens out of a cannon through an airplane windshield to see if there was a difference between "frozen" and "thawed"? Or attach a jet engine to the top of a clbuttic car to make it "fly"? Or build a flying machine out of vacuum cleaners? The stuff they come up with is crazy, as it's all based on urban legends. But they recreate it all, no matter what it takes to do it.

However, I think they dropped the ball while they were trying to test whether a cell phone conversation while driving was as dangerous as driving drunk. Their conclusion is that it was "confirmed". That is, they concluded that talking on a cell phone is indeed just as dangerous as driving drunk. It MIGHT have been a good test, if they were actually drunk. -Dave