Adam Savage on StarTalk at New York Comic Con!

8 thoughts on “Adam Savage on StarTalk at New York Comic Con!”

1. This was a thing that was cool.

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2. too bad that they keep rushing to the next item without really exploring the thoughts a little more.

   Trying a too hard to keep it light-hearted. But actual discussion around that kind of stuff would just be as entertaining (at least for me, and I guess for most of tested’s audience :-))

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3. Perfect balance of participants.

   Signed,

   a short person, no wheels, eating celery.

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4. The reason why the Batman would beat Iron Man (if their corporate owners ever allowed them to fight) is that Tony Stark would show up to the battle either slightly drunk or slightly hung-over and way too cocky, thinking to himself, “I’ve got a beyond state-of-the-art suit of power-armour with energy weapons out the wazoo, and what’s he got? Bat-themed boomerangs and a belt-pouch of shark-repellant? Pfft!”

   And Batman would show up to the battle, already knowing every single detail of Iron Man’s armour, including the remote shutdown codes, plus a full psychological profile of Tony Stark and what statements are most likely to cause a mental bluescreen. Because Batman prepares, and if he didn’t have an edge, Iron Man would never get to face him in the first place.

   That’s if the fight took place under comic-book rules, obviously. If it took place in reality, of course Adam would be right. At any given point in the battle, at least one of the 10.000 fictional super-technologies inherent in the Iron Man suit would break, glitch, or electrocute Tony, because the supposition that all these fantastic technologies could exist is far more realistic than the idea that they would work correctly and flawlessly in tandem, every single time. Now that’s fantasy!

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5. Not only does the page not allow me to edit my comment to add this, but after I had already composed almost the entire reply, the page decided that clicking on the “italics” button meant that I wanted to be redirected to the front page and discard everything I had already written. WTF?!

   Let’s try this again

   Adam’s realistic answer to a fanboy-ish “Who’d Win” question reminds me of that time where the guests at some event or another were asked, whether the Enterprise or the Millennium Falcon would win in a fight. It became very clear that the answers they received were based mostly on personal preference in the “Star Wars vs. Star Trek” discussion and/or vague symbolic associations (“The Millennium Falcon is the scrappy, fighty one, right? And the Enterprise is the boring, peaceful, ‘Let’s hold a meeting in the ready room to discuss this crisis’ one – therefore the Falcon wins.”) Then they get to Adam who unequivocally loves Star Wars and adores the Millennium Falcon – and he doesn’t even hesitate to explain that the Enterprise would win, because the Falcon is very deliberately created to be the equivalent of WW2 plane, complete with the death-trap glass bubble gun turrets, while the Enterprise is the size of a floating city, armed (despite its peaceful mission) with frickin’ giant naval artillery and able to shrug off little pew-pew lasers the way an aircraft carrier shrugs of handgun fire.

   Adam is so steeped in the habits of rational thinking, not letting what he wants to believe colour his assessment of reality (or fiction in this case) is such an ingrained habit, that he doesn’t even need to hesitate or take a second to shrug off his fanboy biases. I think it’s fair to say that hosting Mythbusters for 14 years has made Adam a better person.

   Now, who’d win in a fight: The Batman or The Hyneman? 😉

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6. no matter what batman would do to the hyneman, each of the hyneman’s contraptions would still work, dishing out maximal damage with minimised points of failure. so, eventually, batman ends up toast.

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7. I’m getting the impression that The Hyneman would just go, “Naw, I’m not doing this; it’s stupid. I’m not hosting a TV show anymore, so I don’t have to put up with being forced into silly things, just for the entertainment of viewers. Go call Adam’s or Tory’s agents; they’ll do it. I’ll be in my shop getting actual work done.”

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8. The whole “this adversity has made me who i am today so i wouldn’t have changed it” line has always struck me as something people say because they can’t have done anything to change their situation so this is how they make peace with it. People say their adversity gave them more empathy or made them more well-rounded as a person but we’d shudder at the idea of ever celebrating someones newfound adversity as a positive let alone wish it upon them. no one sees a cancer diagnosis as a gift or opportunity to grow as a person and we’d never /wish/ it upon anyone for the potential positive attributes we associate with a survivor only after the fact. There’s nothing to say that if one hadn’t grown up with some debilitation that they wouldn’t have turned out just as fine. Certainly not the /same/ but not worse off for being healthy. I’m sure the blind/deaf community would disagree with me because they’ve similarly so come to terms with something they can’t change but a person would always be far better off with all senses intact than not. Again we wouldn’t blind someone or close off their ears and tell them their quality of life would not be affected so it makes no sense to allow those sorts of conditions to persist if we were able to correct them at birth or any time after the fact. While it’s true that there’s no standard model of human i think there are at least conditions that medical science has determined to be out of the norm for most people and so avoiding those would at least be a start.

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