Just curious how the experts are assigned to their respective teams? On last week's episode (land yachts) when they introduced each expert, they said "the orange team chose so and so to be their expert this week". It's the only time i've heard them say the team chose the expert. Anyone else notice this or have a comment on it?

BW

-- Brad Will (duke33@yahoo.com), April 11, 2001

Answers

Yup, that must have been a mistake in the script as the teams don't choose the experts. What we try to do is find two experts who are experienced in solving the problem in different ways - so hopefully we wil have a show that demonstrates two contrasting enginnering techniques.

-- Andy Bell (andy.bell@rdfmedia.com), April 11, 2001.

Hmmm...i found this from a robert llewelyn chat transcript online... "Robert Llewellyn : No, they can't look stuff up. But each team chooses a specialist, who generally has a fairly good grasp of the problem they're facing. I've never known a team to find an engineering book on the scrapheap ;)" Anyone want to comment on it?

bw

-- Brad Will (duke33@yahoo.com), April 11, 2001.

Think about this just a little bit. How could a team possibly choose an expert, when they don't know the challenge untill the morning of the build. The experts are assigned and they know which team they will be working with ahead of time. We met our expert, Waddy Thompson, the evening we arrived. He was sworn to secrecy and did not let on what we would be doing. We met the other team and the commentator that evening also. There were no clues or even comments about the challenge, which was what we expected, what you see on the show is when we learned what we would be doing.

JustJay

-- JustJay-captain-Three Rusty Juveniles (justjay@neo.rr.com), April 11, 2001.

Jeff of the NERDS said that they were allowed to bring a couple of books with them. So they brought a CRC handbook of chemistry and physics and an all around general principles engineering book. Along with some fancy calculators of course. They are intelligent, but come on. How else do you think they came up with all of those fabulous equations? (Sorry, Jeff.)

-- William Barrett (wildbill65401@yahoo.com), April 11, 2001.

It's just part of the 'fiction'/'drama' of the show when they mention stuff like 'The X-Y-Z team has wisely chosen as their expert...' Of course they don't choose ^_^, that would be silly :)

-- Ryan Gavigan (gavigan@soyokaze.biosci.ohio-state.edu), April 11, 2001.