First, it appears that the show was shot in March 2007. This past year was a pretty lousy one for snow in the Rockies with generally low avalance risk. Any experiement trying to demonstrate how slopes behave when the avalance danger is extremely high should not have been shot in Telluride this past March. I realize that production schedules are what they are, but sometimes telling the reality should be more important than sticking to a travel schedule. There were places in the world -- even in the US -- where snowfall was plentiful and avalanche danger much higher, even this past year.

Second, it was shot on a sunny spring day. Snow starts to settle as soon as it hits the ground, and the sun accellerates the process. Even immediately after a storm, the risk of avalanche would be greatly reduced to the point where even explosives might not get much of an effect. In one of the later scenes of this episode Adam goes flying in a helicopter from which they toss dynamite to break off avalanches in known hazardous areas. The results? Three slides. That doesn't really spell "high risk" to me.

Third, and just to prove the point, the avalanche experts who declared the test slope "dangerous" had no problem taking a snowmobile up into the slide zone to drop off "buster" the crash test dummy. I've trained with avalanche pros at the major Utah resorts as well as guys from UDOT and USFS. None of them would even think of going up into an area that they really believed was high risk, and certainly not with a noisy and vibration-causing snowmobile. (Snowmobilers are increasingly the cause and the victims of backcountry avalanches.)

At the major ski resorts they follow a very careful protocol of using cannons other devices to do the job from far away and then approach the slopes only very gingerly on skis to further inspect and blast with hand charges. If the slope was really dangerous, a pro wouldn't even stand at the bottom, the way the crew on this MythBusters episode did.

Fourth, early on in the episode, they did a lab experiment using flour on a sloped piece of plywood, and conclusively proved that loud noice can cause unstable powder to slab away and slide. The fact that they could do it in the lab should have suggested that under some circumstances it could happen in nature too. At the very least, you would think they would have noted the myth as "plausible." rather than "busted."

But in the end, their conclusion was that the myths were "busted," presumably because on that one hill, on that one day, with that unique set of snow conditions, they couldn't get an avalanche to happen. And Adam vigorously justified this conclusion based on his application of the "scientific method."

I think he needs to go back to remedial science class.

Taleb talks about this kind of fallacy in his recent book The Black Swan. He repeatedly makes the point that absence of proof is not proof of absence. Just because you did not prove something to be true does not mean that it is false. To illustrate the point he considers the life of a Turkey, who for most of its life can find no proof that the farmer who is feeding it means it any harm. The turkey, for all of it's existance has no proof of any malevolent intent. In fact, the turkey probably thinks the farmer is such a swell guy! He feeds it, keeps it warm, gives it clean water, etc. The "proof" that bad things can happen only comes on the week before Thanksgiving of the turkey's third year, when it's too late.

Likewise is true of financial markets. Watch CNBC for an hour on any given day and you'll see at least one "expert" put down an opposite (usually bearish) opinion by commenting that "people have been saying that for years, and it hasn't happened," as if a failure of some state of the world to occur is proof that it cannot or will not occur. It's one of the reasons I usually watch CNBC with the volume turned down. Why bother listening to people who have already made up their minds and who will dismiss alternatives as being "unproven?"

But back to MythBusters. All they proved is that on that one mountain, on that one day, they couldn't get a yodeler, or a machine gun, or a few other things to cause an avalanche. The day before or the day after, or the next mountain over, or immediately after or during the next storm, they might have.

Prior to this season, Mythbusters was pretty good about this stuff. This season they seem to have begun to run out of "myths" that can be reasonably demonstrated to be either possible or not. Instead, they're attacking situations which are unlikely to be easily duplicated from one minute to the next, let alone proven one way or another in general. The avalanche "myth" is just the most eggregious of these.

If it were just something silly like Mentos in Diet Coke, it would be one thing. But this is deadly. In Utah alone two seasons back, eight people were killed in the backcountry and far more were killed in other states and countries. Many of them were people who should have known better. Some were people who probably didn't know much and whose appreciation of the risks might have been swayed by a piece that accurately demonstrated how dangerous things can get.

Instead, we got an hour that claimed to "prove" that noise and vibration short of a cannon blast can't cause an avalance. And sometime in the next few years some unfortunate skier will head out onto a risky slope, convinced in his knowledge that it is safe because the MythBusters "proved" it on TV.

And Midas will have another sad job to do.

-btc