I think what I like best about the retrospective shows is when they highlight myths I only barely remember- the ones that aren’t on every other retrospective show they do. Last night, it was the first myth to make their countdown that made us smile. We barely remembered the landing a plane with just an air traffic controller to talk you down. Not only is it an impressive result, it reminds you how skilled air traffic controllers have to be. This guy not only knows his own maximum stress job, he apparently has the control panel of a plane memorized.

Of all the flat fixes, only two actually seemed viable to me, not because of how well they worked, but more due to the likelihood of me being able to pull them off.

Those two were the stick to make a sled and driving on the rims. But where do you go hiking or camping that there’s straw lying around, or even enough tall grasses? And unless you were cutting down a Christmas tree, whose going to have a chainsaw to make the wooden wheel? Same type of question for the manhole cover. Welding materials but no spare? Spare me.

About the myths: I’m not surprised you can’t dodge a bullet aimed at your chest, but what about one aimed at your head? That would require much less movement.

And while water may not be compressible, it is easily displaced.

 One thing they did last night that bugged me- when the timing foil for the gun didn’t work at first, they did not show us how they fixed it, or tell us why it didn’t work in the beginning. I learn as much from their experiment set up as I do the experiments, and I really wanted to know more.

I love it when they do a whole bunch of mini-myths, like the sound effect section with Adam and Jamie. It’s funny that they have to bring in an “expert” when it comes to the punches, as their expertise is with movie special effects. I guess special effects and sound effects guys don’t talk a lot.

Physics thought experiments are also fun.Newtonwas a genius, and you really wouldn’t believe how well his laws hold up to just about everything. However, I don’t think it ever occurred to him to take jet engines and flame resistant material into account.

What I loved about the swimming through bubbles myth was not that the myth was plausible, but for different reasons than they expected, but that the different reasons were so much simpler than the original hypothesis. Adam and Jamie thought that maybe you couldn’t swim through bubbles because they changed the water density- no, its because they cause the water to move. Simple.

As for splitting the tree, they may have put the smallest amount of explosive that would detonate in each bag, but 25lbs of explosive, really? Try 10lbs before you tell me you used as little as possible.