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" POPULAR MECHANICS: We just watched the season premiere last night, and it&amp;#039;s a doozy. Who came up with finding out which hits the ground first; a bullet fired or a bullet dropped? ADAM SAVAGE: That&amp;#039;s been a story that I&amp;#039;ve had a particular penchant for for years. It&amp;#039;s a classic physics thought experiment. And at one point--I guess about two or three years ago--I had thought through a way of doing it in scale, and then as Jamie and I started talking it back and forth, we realized we could probably do it full-scale. And once we realized that, it was just a matter of time before we did it.  PM: So why now? AS: Literally, it&amp;#039;s like--we probably, at any given time, we have about 30 or 40 stories on the roster that are possible, and they&amp;#039;re often dependent on location. And bullet fired vs. bullet dropped was very dependent on finding a nice, empty, 500-foot-long building. When we found that building, we fast-tracked the experiment.  PM: How high would you say this particular experiment ranked on your list of really complicated myths? AS: From a methodological standpoint, it&amp;#039;s pretty up there. I don&amp;#039;t know if we&amp;#039;ve ever spent three days on site merely calibrating all of the equipment to make sure everything was happening the way it was supposed to. It was a bear. I&amp;#039;m more excited about the final shot of that episode than I am of almost any other high-speed shot we&amp;#039;ve gotten. JAMIE HYNEMAN: One of the beauties of that particular episode is that--and it&amp;#039;s one of the things that we particularly enjoy--it&amp;#039;s a very simple thing, but it&amp;#039;s very exacting and quite complicated to pull it off right when you look into the details. The simplicity means that it&amp;#039;s easy for a viewer to understand what&amp;#039;s going on. The difficulty is producing something like that high-speed shot, which, for me, once we got into it, was all about that one shot--seeing that bullet come into frame from off in the distance and hit the ground right next to the bullet that was being dropped. So that was cool.  PM: You have a pretty long brainstorming session when you got to that final part of the test and the mechanisms you had designed to drop the bullet didn&amp;#039;t work out. How frustrated were you during that process?  AS: You know, Jamie and I have very different working styles. But we both operate on the same procedure that we can&amp;#039;t build anything or proceed with anything until we have the thing we&amp;#039;re moving towards in our head. The difficulty is getting the vision that&amp;#039;s in your head into the other guy&amp;#039;s head through a process we call arguing. For us, that kind of consternation we may feel going back and forth is a key part of the process of how this whole thing works, and it happens on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, on every story. And at some point, it&amp;#039;s part of us playing devil&amp;#039;s advocate with each other, it&amp;#039;s part of trying to poke holes, and honestly, while it&amp;#039;s frustrating at times, we also have a great respect for how the process goes.  PM: And the end result was completely worth all that work and frustration.  JH: Yeah. And I guess, you know, for us the process itself is the joy. That process of getting it into your head and understanding it is where it&amp;#039;s at. AS: Yeah.  JH: So I&amp;#039;m--maybe me more so than Adam--I don&amp;#039;t care about the result so much. I enjoy the process of that exchange that we have when we&amp;#039;re trying to recreate the entire situation inside our brains, and we manipulate it until we figure we can get a result. That&amp;#039;s the point. That&amp;#039;s where we learn things, that&amp;#039;s where we&amp;#039;re in our element. PM: So, looking forward to the rest of the season: Do you have a favorite myth that you took on? AS: Probably one of the most fertile and popular subjects we continue to attack is fuel-efficiency myths. And I know it&amp;#039;s one your readers are particularly interested in. We&amp;#039;ve got a doozy coming up on Nov. 4 called &amp;quot;Dirty vs. Clean Car.&amp;quot;  JH: You guys [Popular Mechanics&amp;#039;s auto editor Larry Webster] were out here for this one. AS: Well, Dirty vs. Clean is a monster of a story, and the outcome is absolutely gobsmackingly cool, and we had a crazy amount of fun doing it.  PM: What&amp;#039;s the myth?  AS: This is a myth that came to me via my twitter feed, from one of my tweeps. And they said that a dirty car is more fuel-efficient than a clean car, the theory being that the dirt on the car has a golf-ball-like effect, creating some kind of slipstream boundary layer that allows the car to get better fuel efficiency, because it&amp;#039;s more efficient aerodynamically. And we really put that to the test, spending a couple of days playing with wind tunnels and water tunnels at NASA, and then doing a bunch of full-scale driving on some very hot days in Concord, Calif.  PM: Now that you&amp;#039;ve guest edited an issue, and have an intimate understanding of what our readers like, are there are any other myths you think that PM readers in particular will enjoy? AS: Absolutely. We were looking at the board awhile back, and our producer sends us stories that they&amp;#039;ve been thinking about, and they had some household myth stories, and then had some segments in there on duct tape. And the minute we saw that, we said, &amp;quot;Duct tape is worth more than a segment. Hell, we could a whole half show--actually, we could do an hour on duct tape! We could probably do five or six hours of programming on duct tape alone.&amp;quot; On Oct. 14, we&amp;#039;re airing what we think is the first of many duct tape specials. The build team did an astonishing job doing some amazing pyrotechnics with duct tape, and we pushed the engineering of the material to its limit, and had a lot of fun doing it out on San Francisco Bay. PM: How did you push duct tape&amp;#039;s limits? AS: It has to do with water. Very exciting. I don&amp;#039;t want to give away too much.  PM: Are there any myths that Kari, Tory and Grant did that you wish you&amp;#039;d been able to do? AS: There&amp;#039;s always a few when we see them; we say, &amp;quot;Oh my god, that looks like so much fun!&amp;quot; Their segment on the duct tape hour is crazy fun. They&amp;#039;ve just completed a story that actually won&amp;#039;t air in this next block, called--what was it? I can&amp;#039;t remember what it&amp;#039;s called, they&amp;#039;re in one of those diving suits.  JH: &amp;quot;Death by Diving.&amp;quot;  AS: That is one of the best segments that they&amp;#039;ve ever done on the show, in terms of science and clarity. It&amp;#039;s just a lovely segment. Yeah, I mean, that&amp;#039;s the best part of this, when you&amp;#039;re having fun and you also wish you could be doing more of the same. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a4675/4332948/>