The Discovery Channel

Who all watches it? I watch it religiously. My question is...

what is your favorite things on the discovery channel? hoping to stir up some nice sciencey discussion.

right now i'm watching A Haunting. I'm a ghostgeek, I love this stuff.

I also watch man vs. wild, bear is my hero. that guy has so much crazy survival knowledge crammed in his head. i can imagine havin a beer with him, watching him start a fire with his shoelace. my sister says if you left him alone in the woods for a week you would come back to find a whole town built, with working plumbing, electricity, and internet!

wow, watching a haunting right now i've got crazy goose bumps. a friend of mine in highschool used to call them 'spirit bumps' which made more sense to me, as geese don't give you those bumps, spooky spirit stuff does.

dirty jobs is also great. watching mike rowe on there, i get the distinct impression that before he worked for discovery he had some crap jobs, because he seems to take great pleasure in doing a horrible job at these 'dirty jobs' and doing things that, if he were actually employed by them and not discoverychannel, he would get canned for, lol! Truly a kindred spirit for me, hehe. I found it both disturbing and hilarious to watch him inseminate a female pig. The episode where he worked in a sewage processing plant was... enlightening. I really feel for the people that process our poo. we should make a bill that makes it so that they don't EVER EVER have to pay taxes!

on a similar topic, I also like The Universe on history channel. recently found out that there is this curious hexagon shaped thing on neptune's north pole. i mean, how could that be naturally occuring???? a straight line alone in nature is something you don't see, let alone a hexagon! wow, that would seem to me to be a big indicator of life on another planet! guess you can't say its proof, not until we get a rover over there like on mars to 'poke at it with a stick."

Well, i'm becoming a real troll here hehe. guess i just needed an outlet. i'd ramble on about the mars rovers, but think i'll save that for a separate topic later on.

Happy Lovely!
Dam0

I like Mythbusters and sometimes How Its Made. Mythbusters is cool because they have all the resouces and money to do the things I have always wanted to try. And evidently a clean-up crew to handle the subsequent mess.

I am sure there are other things I like, too, anything to do with history is my cup of tea.

N.

yes, mythbusters is also great! I caught them in a slight mistake that i keep meaning to write to them about. when they did the pop rocks and coke thing, because of the guy who put a video on the internet of him eating some poprocks then drinking soda and he "erupted" and passed out and went to the hospital, where he was found to have a ruptured stomach.

they tested this and 'busted' it but they messed up. they put the soda into their pig stomach THEN dropped the poprocks in, which ofcourse did nothing because the stomach acids take away a large amount of the soda's carbonation almost immediately. however, if you look up this guy's video on youtube, you see that he eats the poprocks, THEN chugs the soda, and immediately explodes a geyser of soda. the reason is that the carbonated soda immediately interacts with the poprocks that are ALREADY in the stomach before the stomach acid has a chance to absorb the carbonation. hah! I busted the mythbusters! So, if you ever eat poprocks, don't drink soda immediately after, or you will erupt like a volcano of coca-cola!

also, i love history stuff too. they recently did the special on the female pharoah, whose name i can't remember off-hand, they identified her by a molar they found in a canopic jar, it was awesome!

history's mysteries is good. the search for atlantis. oh, and the mayan calendar! 2012!!! The prophecies of Richard Head under the alias mother shipton! boy, was that guy aptly named, richard head hehe.

but yeah, 2012 is going to be an interesting time, the mayan calendar corresponds eerily with a lot of things, not the least of which is the time period in which we will most likely run out of crude oil. that i believe is said to happen between 2010, 2030. I think we have crossed or will soon cross the critical halfway point, but due to the ever-increasing amount of crude we use, the remaining half we have left will burn up way faster. myself, i'm hoping to have my bike-pedaling legs back under me by then...

oh, and another thing that coincides with the 2012 timeframe is the fact that in 2008 the new supercollider(the CERN Large Hadron Collider located near Geneva) will be up and running. I don't disapprove of that necessarily, but i hope they are careful, it would suck to have survived all the stellar calamaties out there and near-earth asteroids only to be sucked into a black hole of our own making, lol!

although if you go to the website for it, they assure safety, but there has to be some amount of danger involved in smashing atoms and creating anti-matter, and 'miniature black holes' and all that. i'm no 'rocket scientist' just like lookin this stuff up and finding out about stuff that could blow up the planet i live on.

wow, think i might actually be able to sleep. hooray for insomnia!

/snore
Dam0cles

I saw the Mythbusters where they were doing experiments with Mentos and Coke, but I didn't see the one with PopRocks. Those things are freaky anyway.

Queen Nefertiti was the last one I saw about an Egyptian mummy being indentified. She was the one whose priests came along after she died and tried to eradicate her from history. It is amazing what they can learn about people that lived so far ago.

I think it TV can be a great tool for learning as well as entertainment.

N.

ah, the one i am thinking of is named Hatshepsut. members of her family also came behind her and erased records of her, but as it turned out is was due to a power play by her nephew i think. she actually was a pharoah, although reading an article on her now, i'm not sure if they actually gave her that title or if she just held power equal to a pharoah due to there being no sons old enough to lay claim to that title in her lineage at the time. the nephew, tutmose III did claim the title eventually, IIRC. a fascinating story from history about a powerful woman.

yea, TV can be great for learning. internet is great too.

yep, poprocks are one of those 'foods' for people who like turning their bodies into highschool science projects. like habanero peppers.

ate one of those raw on a dare once. you'd think the flame-stripes on the evil little pepper would have given me a clue that it was not something you'd want to put in your head. flamestripes on something that occurs in nature are never a good sign. sort of like nature's warning label...

dam0
(and i didn't even get a reward for the dare, just a bunch of
yay-whoos standing around laughing as fire shot out of my various orifices, lol!)

I love DC, I think Bear is cool and all but Les Stroud from SurvivorMan is a bigger badass in my opinion. He goes out by himself for 7 days - no camera crew. That means to take the cool shots of himself climbing up a cliff he has to set his gear up, then climb up... then he has to climb back down and get his camera gear and climb up AGAIN.

http://www.lesstroudonline.com/

There are arguments online about who is better, but I think in the face of it that if Bear ever got into serious trouble, his camera crew would bail him out and they just wouldn't air that particular show. If Les gets into trouble, he has to get himself out of it.

Les usually starts each show with his 50 pounds of camera gear, and a few items that most people in that situation might have. He sometimes mentions that he has to lug the camera gear... usually after a particularly difficult shot.

Yay!


Finally, a good Les vs. Bear debate! awesome!

I agree with you there, what Les does is amazing. I'd like to see Bear's outtakes, see how many times his crew has bailed him out.

I do like Bear's style though, and I think he's got a wealth of survival knowledge, but I do wonder how much of it is him and how much of it is his camera crew or writers or such.

It would be cool for him to ditch the camera crew and go at it like Les does. A lot of the stuff Bear pulls off though, almost seems too perfect, hardly ever see him fail, which leads me to think there are outtakes we're not seeing of him failing to do stuff. you get to see Les fail all the time, but he doesn't let the failure stop him, he just gets back up and goes at it.

Although Bear has a lot more climbing experience than Les, I don't see Les do as much of the climbing stuff Bear does. On the other hand, I don't think I've ever seen Les drink his own pee. Bear has, and /shudder. I can't really say I could pull that off, I think I'd rather die of dehydration heh.

Heh, But Bear says "Glass-ier", and "woh-tah". Lol!

All in all, I like watching Bear more than Les, but what Les does with no camera crew is really cool, i'd like to see Bear switch to that.

I can just imagine what the camera crew looks like, probably all geared up for whatever environment they are in, munching on power bars while Bear eats Grubs and drinks out of elephant dung, /guh! yick. blech! Insert disgusted noise here.

I'd also like to see Bear's outtakes, to see how things go that we don't get to see, and what would be really cool is a Bear Vs. Les special where they take the two of them and drop them off together somewhere and they have to work together to get to civilization. now that would be worth pay per view lol!

Dam0