"MythBusters" and the Joy of Technology

In more than one hundred episodes, the hosts of Discovery Channel's MythBusters have made many strange and amazing devices. Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, along with Tory Belleci, Grant Imahara, and Kari Byron, have built a two-story Newton's cradle, a salami-powered rocket, and a pair of metal teeth that could catch a bullet in midair. In each episode, the hosts take apart and transform familiar objects, raise everyday activities to absurd scales, and create things that no one has made before. Here, Unger discusses how Mythbusters present a vision of technology in which the material world can be endlessly transformed by playful activities.