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tomasz-19
Reviews
Deadliest Warrior (2009)
Pseudoscience at its best
Having heard of this show coming to television, I was initially excited. Using science to prove the lethality of a warrior straight out of the history books sounded like a show I wanted to watch. And so I did. The first episode was mediocre, but I figured, "it's the first of its kind, they're just figuring out the ropes." I was wrong. This show uses an excel spreadsheet (yes, that "sophisticated" program) iteratively to generate a statistical victory 1000 times. The values, which I'm guessing are from 0-10, are entered by the computer programming "prodigy" into various columns defining various traits being evaluated. Everyone seems to get super excited by ridiculous things such as high speed footage more so than forces and accelerations measured by the "sophisticated" accelerometers used, which in my books, are common place, as found in many of today's touchscreen cell phones, cameras, etc. More on the front of sophisticated technology, they uses speed traps to measures velocities of projectiles. Oh, you mean like in Olympic track events like the 100 meter sprint? Lame. More importantly, for a show supposedly based on science, they violate one of the first rules of experimentation; change one variable while keeping all others constant. How can I determine the lethality of two different machine guns when one is used to obliterate a torso, while the other is used in a spread to shoot 10 subjects in a room? Ridiculous. Finally, as a mechanical engineering student myself, I am thoroughly disappointed by the engineer in the cast applying all this so-called sophisticated technology. For someone to have been trained for a number of years to think in a logical manner, the sheer fact he accepted a role on this show is somewhat disheartening. In general, I have nothing good to say about this show, other than it makes science seem like a wrestling match. A true shame. But I suppose I shouldn't expect anything overly intelligent coming out of the Spike TV production studios. I think I'll stick to MXC. At least I know it intends to be ridiculous.