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Dear MythBusters: Please share your data

By rallain on May 14, 2009.

I think the Mythbusters have a wonderful opportunity for educational outreach. Take this week's episode. One myth was to see if arrows fired from a moving horse penetrated more than arrows fired from a standing position. They first did this with real horses, but they said the data was not convincing.

I am pretty sure they had more than 10 trials recorded (there was a glimpse of the notebook). I would love to see this data and find (or let students find) the standard error of these measurements. This would be a great exercise to see how this whole uncertainty thing works.

As long as I am asking for stuff. How about you (the MythBusters) also provide your slow motion videos in a format that can be used with video analysis? There is a ton of great stuff there. One problem is that I never really know the frame rate of their videos.

Adam, Jamie, please contact me when you have this set up. I will owe you a beverage.

PS - if this data is already out there and I just have not seen it, sorry.

Tags
analysis
lab
mythbusters
Physics
uncertainty
data
measurement
slow motion video
video analysis
analysis

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Dear Dr. Allain,

What a great idea! We'll send you the data right away ... better yet ... why don't we have you appear on our show to talk about your blog?

Cheers!

Adam