15 comments

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  chris

  8 months ago

  I'll be watching, but I'm skeptical.
  
  If this show is anything like Smash Lab or worse, Project Earth it will only piss me off with stupid ideas, pseudo science and a complete disregard for the scientific method. I sure hope its cool though.
  
  Also premiering tonight is Time Warp, a show where highspeed cameras are the focal point. Just about anything in extreme slow motion is cool. Hopefully discovery can't screw that up, but i wouldn't put it past them.
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  Dave Moore

  8 months ago

  The thing about Smash Lab that really pissed me off was their disregard for cost. Practical engineering is the fine art of solving complex problems at a reasonable price.
  
  For example you could put your house on rollers to prevent earthquake damage. But is it really worth it over the long term. At the end of that particular episode one of the guys stated that their "solution" would be inexpensive to add to new house designs and easy to retrofit to existing houses. Baloney. I'd like to see the bill for jacking up my house, adding a substructure that will support the entire weight, pouring new footings under the bearing points, etc. Probably have to mortgage the damn thing just to pay for the retrofit and I'd never get that money back when I sell it.
  
  I want some of whatever those people are smoking.
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  chris

  8 months ago

  Dave,
  I couldn't agree more. The whole show is awful from whatever aspect you want to look at it from. It fails to be cool in its most basic form-showing things smash. They don't have any good high speed cameras and they don't spend enough time showing cool things smash. It fails at the most basic level of what it's trying to do. Awful, awful show.
  
  Project Earth is much worse in my opinion, however. At least smash lab is sold as a quirky group of people smashing things and not much more. Project earth is sold as real scientists doing real science/engineering. As far as I can tell discovery put a call out to all the wacky folks out there with outlandish ideas that couldn't get funding from whatever university they were attending and offered to fund their ideas to real products. These projects are generally ideas that have to be done on such a huge scale impacting the earth in who knows how many un thought of ways that you'd have to be insane to actually do any of them. The few ideas that are half way sane (i can actually only think of one off hand, the floating wind turbine) are so hurried into 'full scale' they have no way they'll work as intended. Their experiments to prove their concepts are so poorly thought out and carried out its laughable. They disregard their small scale results and jump into full scale far to quickly. There's no thought of the scientific method... I'm ranting aren't I? Haha, sorry, i just can't stand this show. I'll shut up.
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  viktoria

  7 months ago

  yeah i feel the same way. They spend hundreds of thousands dollars for their "projects." Most of their projects are no help to us anyway. It's just something to occupy their time.
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  Josh M

  8 months ago

  good point Chris. From the intro videos they seem to just scratch the surface of a lot of what they do, but it's a deeper scratch than most shows. Hopefully they'll get into the details (as much as possible) in the full episodes.
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  chris

  8 months ago

  Josh, I haven't watched the intro videos, I'll be getting my first taste tonight. I understand how an hour long show can only get into so much detail. So i won't fault them too much if they breeze over steps. Hopefully over the course of a season we'll get a big look at all of the various steps at one point or another.
  
  It'd be nice to see a show that covers a real project over an entire season. I'm sure all of us have been on more than one project with enough drama where we thought "boy this would make a good TV show...".
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  jeff b

  8 months ago

  this is great. fun and interesting shows like this do a lot to promote our industry and hopefully get more students enrolled in related majors. i'l be watching.
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  Ricky Jordan

  8 months ago

  Between Time Warp, MythBusters, & Prototype This! tonight....I'll be tuned into Discovery Channel all evening!
  
  Might even do some Twittering during the shows!
  
  Ricky
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  Josh M

  8 months ago

  Ricky Jordan live-blogging his TV viewing experience. awesome :) hope I get to see them all too.
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  Ricky Jordan

  8 months ago

  Unless I get strapped with something I'm not aware of yet...I should be able to do it! Looking forward to it!
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  Cassie

  8 months ago

  As an industrial designer who was raised by engineers, I love shows that disect how things work. Hopefully, this show assumes an actual level of intellegence from it's viewers and does the topic and the machines justice.
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  Don Swavely

  8 months ago

  Finally, a new show that doesn't involve getting killed in Alaska! They have a great web site for keeping the interest of anyone who's interested. I enjoyed exploring their setup and hope they do us all proud!!
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  Chris

  8 months ago

  Woohoo!!
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  chris

  8 months ago

  Well, I watched, but I wasn't super impressed. Everything is pretty dumbed down and I wasn't too impressed with the project they took on. If i look past the project they picked they seemed to do a pretty good job of throwing together a prototype to prove their concept, so that was interesting. I wasn't too impressed with the wasted time of the guys walking around a junkyard and smashing a car with sledge hammers. I would have rather had more detail in other areas. I think the show should sit well with younger folks though. I know I've never seen someone sitting down writing software to get various systems to talk together on a TV show; so thats a plus. Hopefully it exposes a lot of younger folks to new things.
  I did catch hints of smash lab in there, but it wasn't horrid. I'll watch again.
  
  Time Warp was pretty neat though, they stretched the build up to the slow motion footage out a little bit too long at times, but the slow mo footage was worth it.
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  Debra

  7 months ago

  Hey, can you confirm that SolidWorks is actually being used by any of the designers? I heard the backyard waterslide simulator and the fire suit were both designed using Pro/ENGINEER. I think this might just be a paid sponsorship from SolidWorks.
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