OK, that's it. No more History Channel, plus they're going to get a bunch of emails.

They're currently running a show called Countdown to Armageddon, which is so crammed with pseudoscience and superstition presented as fact that it's bursting at the seams. The final break was when a renowned authority on history and its effects on the future came on the screen: Dr. John C. Hagee, one of the loudest, most repulsive, most anti-science (and possibly fattest) of the fundamentalists who are attempting to drag the United States back into the Dark Ages.

As I fought to keep my dinner down, I quickly switched channels. That's it, the History Channel has crossed the line and has lost one viewer permanently.

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Ahhhh, come on...the History Channel wants some ratings, too!

Okay, okay, I know, they should have better principles than that, but they know this kind of pseudoscience sells (as do wacko conspiracy theories, as is clear from their "Conspiracy" series they recently ran). And, of course, we have a country filled with people who actually believe there will be an Armageddon one day, so they eat this kind of stuff up.

But the History Channel also runs excellent shows that actually illuminate history, like the "War of 1812" from a couple months back. So skip the obviously nutty shows and hope that they pay for the entertaining historical shows. But don't give up on them completely!

Ye gods. Things are really going downhill on cable, aren't they? :roll:
(It's not just the History Channel. TLC, Discovery Channel, even bloody Animal Planet if you can believe it... The whole "Discovery Network" thingamabob is screwed up.)

(Oh, and the SciFi channel. They're going to do a miniseries of Darwin's Radio and Darwin's Children soon... Not Bear's best work, but good enough that the idiots at SciFi are sure to absolutely butcher it. )

You forgot to mention one of the richest too. Check this out. I saw only a small part of this travesty. I noticed it when I was channel surfing and I saw John Hagee.

Huh. Well at least the Canadian History and Discovery channels haven't descended into the pit... yet.

Links:

http://discoverychannel.ca/_home/index.shtml
http://www.history.ca/

Daily Planet on the Discovery Channel is especially good.

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

God, Hagee sounds like a real filth.

It can't be as bad as the many UFO shows the show. Honestly.

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"I may disagree with what you said, but I'll fight to death for your right to say it" Voltaire

Amen. I remember when I could turn on DSC and see interesting science shows, no matter what time. Now it's nothing but "Monster" and redecorating shows. So give that stuff its own (suitably named) channel, and let me find some educational content!

Amen again. I'm the person I am today thanks to Discovery Channel. I watched it every Thursday night when they had the Thursday Night Line Up back around 199?-1996. It was still good up until around three years ago. Bye bye Beyond 2000, Invention, Next Step, Know Zone, World of Wonder, Movie Magic, Wings, Why Didn't I Think of That?, Wild Discovery etc. Hello stupid bike shows. Ever have the feeling of wanting to twist someone's head off? The only good thing on the channel now is Mythbusters. It's a good thing I'm not having any kids because they can't have the joy I got from it.

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If we don't play god, who will?-James Watson
I never think of the future, it comes soon enough.-Albert Einstein
The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.-Tom Waits
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo.-Enoch Root, The Confusion
When I was a kid, if someone brandished a shrink gun he'd get a little bit of respect!-Myron Reducto, Harvey Birdman

They are screwing around with the second season of Mythbusters, too. Adding *ahem* conflict ala that stupid chopper show, plus hyping up an artificial deadline to create tension. What tension? Who cares if it takes them two days to test how many ballons it take to lift a kid instead of one day, it adds nothing to the show. Just test the myths and forget about the supposed drama.

I never really liked mythbusters at all. I don't think that their standard for proof is very high, and I don't really care for the juvenile preoccupation with seeing things explode.

If they don't have some drama or excitement, nobody will watch. I'm not quite sure what you are saying about the standard of proof - almost everything they test gets branded "myth." It isn't a great show, but it can be enjoyable sometimes, and I like to see this type of thing a lot more than shows that take nonsense at face value.

Yeah, I certainly don't like shows that take everything at face value either. I guess standard of proof isn't the right way to say it. I don't like the experiments they come up with. Actually some of the things are hard to validate. Putting a cell phone in an air gas mixture and then calling it, and when an explosion doesn't happen does not "prove" that cell phones have never been the cause of a gas station fire. I am not claiming that cell phones are the cause, I suspect that the very few fires that occur at gas stations are caused by static discharge, but I don't believe that they came close to proving it in any way. It was a vehicle for them to cause a big explosion and then giggle and jump around like a couple of idiots. To be fair, after I watched the first episode I stopped watching for a while. I have probably seen 3 or 4 shows at best, but I am not interested in seeing any more. It just doesn't "do" it for me.

This is why I have switched to the Science and the Times/Discovery Channels. There are still some mistakes, but they put a lot of effort into their shows. Oh, and Discovery Wings is about to be renamed, The Military Channel.

I agree 100%. I watched one episode and that was enough for me.

The problem is lack of credibility. I have relatively little knowledge of the war of 1812, so if they fudged it completely I might not notice. I have to trust them to get it right, with proper research and careful editing. Based on their recent obsession with pseudoscience, I apparently cannot trust them to do so. :-?

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On the other hand, just getting a feel for how hard it is to break a barol full of bricks instead of taking the cartoon physics for granted is good to experience.

Some demonstrations, such that a penny moving at terminal velocity will not cause serious injury, is is more conclusive conclusive.

I also found the Breathalyzer episode to have been fairly well done. They actually had a police officer do the testing.

Is it a bad sign that one of the better episodes was filmed while the hosts were drunk? :-k

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

I recorded a show on vitamins and will screen it first before showing it to my family as educational. I just can't trust them, and might not know, like in the one that started this thread, the particular players involved.

What we need is a trustworthy resource. Just like you can look up movies on imdb and look up song lyrics and such, wouldn't it be nice to look up a show and get a quick icon as to whether it's woo-woo or good science, and comments/reviews by people? Even a good show can have mistakes, and that would be a place to list them and see-also's and updates.

Does such a thing exist?

Anyone want to help start one?

--John

i kinda get the feeling that this very forum is the best place to find out how good the "science" on tv shows really is.
as for the quality of the programming on the Discovery networks- i personally think they do a good job most of the time. i like Mythbusters and the "bike shows". even if they are not exactly "scientific" in nature, they can have the effect of getting people off their butts and thinking about how stuff works and maybe do stuff. it sure beats "reality tv" anyday.
and explosions are always cool- they get your attention just like back in high school when the science teacher would make something explode to show how physics and chemistry affect our daily lives.

They got a lot of heat on that story and had a followup. The issue was specifically if cell phones could cause a fire, static was a different issue. I think they left the door open on the cell phone issue in the followup - rare but possible. Static caused fire, on the other hand, is fairly rare, but definite. Apparently women tend to get back in the car more often than men during fueling and getting in and out of the car seat then contacting metal (to remove the nozzle) is a good way to cause a spark. Ouch!

I watched almost every episode of the first season of Mythbusters and thoses were pretty good, some stuff they concluded was wrong, but for the most part they did a good job. But I'm agreeing with a lot of the comments on season two, especially piecemealing out the "big one" throughout the show to keep you watching, really annoying, do it, [dis]prove it, on to the next one.

They've had some good ones, showing that shooting the gas tank won't cause a car to explode (and that Jamie's a crack shot too) and that hiding behind a car door won't protect you either. But then they failed to show how an engine block will.

The gas mileage with A/C versus open windows was also a good segment. Using a computer to get the instantaneous fuel efficiency and then doing a "real world test". But I think they play up the "danger" of doing too many laps in the racetrack. Why couldn't they have just used a normal road (and coasted to the side when they ran out) or a "real road" test track instead of a racetrack?

TLC use to be my favorite channel but it was one of the first to slide into the reality/sensalism realm and now seems to be the Extreme Medical Crap Channel.

I have to agree with others that the standard for "proof" on Mythbusters is sometimes not very high, and occasionnally their tests have poor controls. I recall when testing the "aluminum foil & Coke will clean chrome" myth they compared the results of foil and Coke with water and cloth then concluded the foil and Coke worked better. I just sat there wondering why they didn't use foil for the control as well - for all we know the Coke does nothing and it's just the foil that works.

After that I've only watched Mythbusters a couple of times.

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Now while I might be amused by Cthulhians, I don't necessarily distrust them to carry out the functions of government. -- JayUtah

What's it like being a skeptic in the Middle East? Check out my blog.

You think Hagee is a real filth and despicable? Check out Paul Crouch, the creator () of the Trinity Broadcasting Network, which hosts Hagee and other vermin:

Link One

Link Two

Link Three

Ready to send some money to these folks?

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In the UK I like Discovery Home and leisure. Fishing at the weekend, Matt Hayes and John Wilson from the UK and a loony Australian guy. Cars and DIY all week. They show several US shows including the New Yankee Workshop. Brill

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Filth and vermin really don't sound like productive, constructive names to be calling these individuals. They may or may not be crooked, and they may or may not be preying on the weak or ignorant, but calling them filth and/or vermin is sort of cheap and tactless in its own right.

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"I'm making wheatloaf. It's like meatloaf, only with wheat"
"Isn't that just...bread?"

I used to try and explain that to my fellow skeptics, but it never works. They don't seem to understand how getting in a believer's face, a la Penn & Teller, and shouting "YOU ARE A COMPLETE BLEEPING BLEEPED BLEEP FOR THINKING THAT, YOU IGNORANT BLEEPING BLEEP!" tends not to have the desired effect.

The Democrats are doing the same thing. "We lost because people are stupid" is not going to get them anywhere whether it's true or not. (Disclosure: I'm libertarian with a small "l").

It's calling a spade a spade. What they're doing is crooked. Here's some background based on personal experience.

In 1979 my step-grandmother started calling family members to ask them for money. It turned out she had given all she had to one of these TV con men (Bakker-PTL (Warning: adult language)). Her life savings were wiped out and she then had to live off the generosity of her family until her death. From that point forward although she lived a long distance from her nearest relative, we had to monitor her financial activities very closely to make sure the money we gave her was used properly and not sent to some millionaire TVangelist.

She was not and is not the only person living on limited means to get cheated by these types. These scams continue to this day. Read the links that were provided in the above posts. Be sure to notice the common theme promoted by these crooks that persons who can't afford to donate should do so anyway.

Any persons/group who cheat the poor and elderly out of what little money they have are filth and vermin. That isn't shouting in their unethical faces. Instead it's calling a spade a spade.

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Heehee, those two yobo's are always good for a laugh, though they're far from the only one. One of the architects I work for says nothing makes a man an atheist faster than building a church. Having seen the blueprints for what is now a church with the largest performing arts stage on the east coast of the US, and seeing the amenities the Pastor put in his private suite... LOL, I think there's a seminar out there that trains televangelists on how to fleece the flock, its hysterical what goes on behind the scenes.

Back somewhere near the topic. I've about given up on television of any sort for information. The Hitler Channel (a play on the name, no indicator of its politics) is about the last one standing with at least some air time dedicated to useful analysis, even though its typically slanted to whomever their pet historian for the project was. I agree that TLC, which no longer tries to market itself as The Learning Channel, and the Discovery Channel have about fallen into the rut of useless programming for the sake of rating and advertisement completely. They're following the pattern established by MTV and VH-1, which now rarely show music videos. They've reinvented themselves into something less informative, but more marketable. I almost wonder when the first episode of "Where are they now? Astronomy Edition" will air.

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The last time I felt a warm fuzzy feeling, I was informed by my doctor that it was just gas.

I'm actually here having read all the new posts on the MythBusters Message Board. I would like to point out that, according to their producer, they do actually do a lot of things that don't make it to the show, because replication doesn't get ratings.

the History Channel is better than TLC, but these days, what isn't?

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"