Slashdot Mirror
The Mathematics of Futurama
mclearn writes "Did you know that the writers of Futurama have a collective set of degrees that would rival most think tanks? Here is a hilarious site on the mathematics of Futurama -- specifically this article (pdf). The same authors have also researched the mathematics of the Simpsons, mentioned on Slashdot long ago."
So does this work or what ?
Smile, don't click...
OMG FIRST COMMENT COOL!!!
well, it's put to good use ;)
fp
Smart enough to NOT get cancelled?
Je t'aime Stéphanie
So this may mean that Futurama is a comedic view of the future? Scary....
My math says have a glass of frost pist!
Let me guess... masters degrees in folklore and mythology?
I always save my last mod point to mod up a good troll. You people are too serious.
... into the thermodynamics of melting web servers.
Translation: One of the writers has a bachelors in political science.
Bed they didn't calculate that!!!
sorry....
Ohana means family. Family means nobody gets left behind or forgotten.
Maybe they can put those degrees to good use and write a proof on the Slashdot Effect? They should have collected plenty of data right about now...
~Berj
too much tv programs on the stupid today
Anyone know a good source of Futurama episodes via Bit Torrent? SuprNova and all the others seem to have only a handful of episodes. Preferably, something in the same way that the Buffy and Red Dwarf and Simpsons and South Park bit torrents are done... a whole season per download in high quality. There are sites dedicated to South Park bit torrents and sites dedicated to Simpsons and so on... but I can't find any Futurama ones...!
I should know by now that anything Simpsons related is instantly slashdotted :/
The site appears slashdotted already (and there weren't even any comments on the Read More when I found the article).
I wonder if the Slashdot effect has anything to do with infinity plus one.
theres nothing like a tall glass of SLURM while your waiting for a /.'ed page to load.
Uh oh, a PDF file. Server meltdown in 5...4...not responding...
HAH.
Of course, appstate.edu ranks up there with Zeb's College of Learnin'.
The question is how many of them are honorary? I mean, I would give the simpsons writers honorary degrees for all the times i laughed my ass off.
Evolution or ID?
No amount of degrees will save that poor server from burning up when the ./ crowd go after it like an angry mob.
MOD THIS OFFTOPIC NOW YOU COMMIE PINKO BASTARDS!!
The man tapped to head Iraq's new interim government has vouched for the authenticity of evidence that links Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attacks.
Though the notion that Iraq played a role in 9/11 is considered heresy in U.S. intelligence circles, newly appointed Iraq Prime Minister Ayad Allawi said in December that a document purported to be from Saddam's intelligence service that places lead 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta in Baghdad two months before the attacks was indeed "genuine."
"We are uncovering evidence all the time of Saddam's involvement with al-Qaeda," Allawi told the London Telegraph at the time. "But this is the most compelling piece of evidence that we have found so far. It shows that not only did Saddam have contacts with al-Qaeda, he had contact with those responsible for the September 11 attacks."
As reported by the Telegraph at the time, the document - a handwritten memo dated July 1, 2001 - provides a short resume of a three-day "work program" Atta had undertaken at Abu Nidal's terrorist training camp in Baghdad.
Nidal was executed by Saddam's secret police in August 2002 in what some suspect was a bid to keep him from telling what he knew about 9/11.
Since Farnsworth said at the horse track when his horse lost in a photo finish:
"No fair! you changed the outcome by measuring it."
It was that day that I knew that Futurama was for me, since I figure the vast majority of casual viewers watching it would not have a clue. The fact that they thew a quantum computing reference out there that would be above 99% of the viewers told me this show was different, and it was for me. It takes balls to do jokes that the majority of people won't get. And that earns my respect...
That and the numerous Rush references...
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
The site seems to be slashdotted.
Here is Googles' Cache.
i guess they should be proud
--I swear, it was a case of isolated idiopathic hemibalissmus
Was an episode where they had a horse race and the announcer goes "And in a quantum finish, the winner is so-and-so!" and the Professor says "No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!"
Since I was dealing with quantum physics in school, that got a chuckle out of me.
Some one find out the rate of change of
/.ers who derive pleasure viewing the counter running like a formula 1 car's odometer
the counter on the page
For wicked
counter
20 GOTO HELL
The show made me hurt with laughter so many times while the wife looked at me like I'm an ID10T. Well maybe I am, but the show made it clear why you shouldn't use GOTO statements.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
holy crap that was fast. Site's basically dead after 10 comments. I'm trying to get a mirror up at:t hsci.appstate.edu/%257Esjg/simpsonsmath/futuramama th/
http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~pnelson/www.ma
So far I have the index page and a few pictures, but they'll go up as I get them.
You mean they are the harlem globetrotters here to use their genius to save the world?
link to PDF
-=no karma whoring=-
This all reminds me of the old saying that at its most advanced, mathmatics is indistinguishable from magic.
All those lovely Escher pictures similarly show the ways in which selective use of mathmatics & physics can create imaginary worlds that, while they could not necessaily occur in reality, "feel" realistic.
Another magical view of the future was the original Futurama Exhibit at the World's Fair .
here is my own .edu sacrifice to this great subject!
FuturaMath
And it got cancelled. Typical.
If the creators of Futurama decided to strike out on their own and sell episodes of the show on the Internet, I'd definitely buy them.
I can only hope.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
With all of the smart people making the show it only leaves dumb people to cancel the show!
the more popular degrees become, the less they are worth, go ask any employment agency
ago, many of you hand...don%'t And person0al
+ Run it a few years
+ At the height of it's popularity: cancel it
---
= Fox Network
AC comments get piped to
A google.com cache link.
Take care.
K3n.
when will they write about The Mathematics of Won Ton Burrito meals?
The degrees are very liberal and the think-tank is very small.
If I recall correctly, one of the main writters had a masters in mathematics.
It is interesting to listen to the commentary tracks on the dvd's. For example, in "Roswell that ends well", Fry (one of the main characters) ends up going back in time and accidently kills his grandfather. While consoling his grandmother, he ends up in bed with her and thus becomes his own grandpa allowing the future to remain "intact".
On the commentary tracks, they get into this large discussion about how they tried to find the steady state solution for the amount of DNA in Fry that was pure, and they ended up working on it for quite some time. In the end, they give an email address and ask the public for the solution.
Then they got into a large discussion on the causality of time and how they should only time travel forward.
Good stuff.
people's faces at and personal need to scream that irc.easynews.com fucking numbers, In aadition, it there. Bring the deal with you Elected, we took anybody's guess
1729
When Srinivasa Ramanujan, the great Indian mathematician, was ill with tuberculosis in a London hospital, his colleague G. H. Hardy went to visit him. Hardy, trying to initiate onversation, said to Ramanujan, "I came here in taxi-cab number 1729. That number seems dull to me which I hope isn't a bad omen."
"Nonsense," replied Ramanujan. "The number isn't dull at all. It's quite interesting. It's the smallest number that can be expressed as the sum of two cubes in two different ways." (Ramanujan recognized that 1729 = 13 + 123 as well as 93 + 103.)
Copied from here
I guess it was worth the 5 minutes I spent searching for it.
its a Simpsons joke! sheesh!
May you be touched by His Noodly Appendage. RAmen.
Apparently, there are a whole bunch of us that think it smart *not* to watch Futurama. I *get* it. I just don't think it's funny. These things happen.
JOIN THE GNAA!! Uni7ed States. corporAte around return it practical purposes,
Bender: I need a calculator.
Fry: You are a calculator.
Bender: I need a good calculator.
why they killed off the show? was is something to do with loosing focus with the cash cow that is the simpsons....?
> "Well, sure. For example, Bender's serial number is 1729, a historically significant integer to mathematicians everywhere; that "joke" alone is worth six years of grad school, I'd say."
For us non-math-geeks here's a bit on 1729
Among other things "It is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways."
Operator, give me the number for 911!
is orkut still down ? I feel miserable.
is an 'Aleph-null'-plex!
Kristin Gore (Al Gore's daughter who worked on Futurama) and Rupurt Murdoch (Right Wing shill).
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
But yes, what an amazing episode.
One of my favourite scenes is the hippie universe:
Freakworth: "Dig it! All of you fitting in this box is like, seriously freaked up."
Farnsworth: "Nonsense! Why, there's a whole universe in there."
Freakworth: "Dude. There's a universe in all of us."
Freak Amy: "Right on, professor Freakworth."
[Professor Freakworth proffers a flower to Professor Farnsworth]
Farnsworth: "Get a job!"
WHY FOX WHYYYYY?????
There are murmurs that Matt G is trying to resurrect Futurama on the Cartoon Network... let us pray that it is so.
Read Pynchon.
On the wall in the apartment that Fry and Bender rent together for one episode is:
10 HOME
20 SWEET
30 GOTO 10
Get an advanced degree in mathematics or physics, and you will come up with the idea to put "St. Pauli Exclusion Principle" on a six-pack of beer in a cartoon, and only a few geeks who like to stay up and watch Adult Swim last night will get the joke.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
teen: Why did they cancel Futurama?!
Same way they could justify it for : ... which costs money. Of course the hundreds of users doing so may drive up the bandwidth bill at the distro's server end, but hey.. not their problem.
/DIVX's
:)
1. Linux distros
Whether they only use a small part of their bandwidth, or the whole thing, their ISP bill isn't going to get any higher. So might as well download the thing for free rather than getting the boxed set CD / DVD in the mail
2. FOSS
Same thing - how many of you have even dropped a penny into a paypal account for a FOSS project ?
Hey, it reads 'free' right ? Why bother paying them anything ?
3. Non-free copyrighted MP3s/OGGs -(feeble karma whoring attempt)
1 & 2 were legal. This one, just like ripped Futurama episodes, isn't (save the ol' "I have it on DVD, but my dog at the DVD, so I just want to download what I had already paid for"-argument).
But nevertheless, people do download MP3s/etc. of non-free copyrighted works off of services without payment to the copyright holders. Yes, I know, there's ITMS and whatnot, but the amount of users there (who are not the subject of this post) pales to the amount of users on 'alternative' services.
So, really, what did you expect ? More to the point, what makes you think they feel any need whatsoever to justify it at all ?
IP 'theft' is rampant, and though I may not agree with those who partake in it, I'm not naive enough to think that some words of ethics/wisdom are about to change these practices.
I convinced a friend of mine not to download the leaked MS source code. First I appealed to his ethics - no luck. Then I explained how it could taint his coding practices - that worked. Gee, who'd've thunked.
Eh. End rant. Could go on and on about this
Many of you are praising Futarama as being the geek fest, but the problem is alot of the humor in the show rates along side crud such as SNL. They use heads of current celeberties so they can make poor pop culture jokes, which destroys the atmosphere and the richness of their non-existing society. Of course, it's a lot easier to have a one episode swing with a current celeberty then it is to develop a new creative character.
Remind me again why Richard Nixon is funny?
I'm sick of parallel Bender lording it over me with his cowboy hat!
"You can't shut us down! The Internet is about the free exchange and sale of other people's ideas!" - Nappster nerd in I dated a Robot-episode.
The owls are not what they seem
The article refers to 1729 being "a historically significant integer to mathematicians everywhere". If you're not a mathematician, 1729 is Ramanujan's number -- the smallest natural number that can be written as a sum of cubes in two different ways:
1^3 + 12^3 9^3 + 10^3
In a Samurai Jack episode, a town folk is telling Jack there's two roads ahead of him.
:-)
Jack: "Which road leads to the Dragon's Lair?"
Town folk: "The left one."
Jack: "Where does the other road lead?"
Town folk: "Space Ace."
If THAT ain't obscure I don't know what is.
I was still laughing 15 minutes after that, though.
P.S.: If you didn't get that one, the keyword here is "laserdisc games".
How many pounds in a gallon.
"Technology.....the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it." Max Firsch
At the risk of over analysing your already ridiculously over analysed statement, doesn't this defeat the purpose of the original, which is that it is only 3 lines long? I.e. part of the joke is that they could have just written '30 HOME' but instead they put a GOTO in there. So writing the whole thing out in 6 lines with an if statement really misses the point.
RTFA, please.
David X. Cohen, Batchelors in Math, Harvard; Masters ComSci, Berzerkeley
Ken Keeler, PhD in Applied Math and Masters in EE
Bill Odenkirk, PhD in Inorganic Chem
Jeff Westbrook PhD in ComSci
J. Stewart Burns, Batchelors in Math, Harvard; Masters in Math Berkeley
Perhaps a bit more hard-sciency than the PolSci asshats that populate the average Think Tank.
"Good news everyone, we're getting 500 visitors per second!"
...aaaand I'm a choad and totally missed your joke. Glad I could post that in the blinding fog of my unearned self-regard.
My favorite reference was when the gang went to the movies, and it was an "Aleph-null plex". That is, the number of movie theaters was countably infinite. How horribly dorky!
--
Gary
+ Run "Sunday Afternoon Football" Half an hour late and not air the episode that was skipped.
That one's a Fox trademark... complain nobody watches your show, even when you don't air it.
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
My favorite futurama quote of all time:
Fry: Oh my god!
Bender: Oh your god.
They didn't all have beards, although that would have been great, they were all dressed in cowboy garb.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Now, granted that wally world will in a number of years the the ONLY place to buy stuff, at least in america, but ill be damned if i'd purchase anything like dvd's off eByay. Buying from walmart at least means that the people who deserve the money from the sale get it, i.e.: the idiots who canceled it in the first place.
And God knows that they need the money!
You mean he's stuck dying in a hostile environment with no means of transportation back to his intended home?
Yeah. I'll agree with that.
So really brainy guys with lots of degrees can come up with useless crap too?
why didn't they calculate the /. effect on their servers beforehand and load-balance appropriately?
8.345 roughly
That is if you use water as the reference substance.
And that is also assuming that you are speaking of weight on Earth. Otherwise it's 8.345pounds mass of water.
Your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
...aaaand you can't spell "bachelor" either. Insert obligatory joke about dateless, lonely Slashbot stereotype.
Link has been Slashdotted...
Here is the Google cache of the PDF in HTML format.
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
I knew the very first episode that these people were geeks when Bender was drinking liquid FORTRAN.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Its a quote from Arthur C Clarke, who, at the time of posting is still alive.
The key difference between a Programmer and a Senior Programmer is that one of them is Mexican.
is worth something after all.
Harvard gives B.A.'s (which they call A.B.'s) in physics, being as Harvard College is devoted almost exclusively to liberal arts, and is not an engineering or trade school.
10 HOME
;-)
20 SWEET
30 GOTO 10
(Score:0, Redundant)
Redundant indeed
You can't take the sky from me...
I would love to see this brew avaliable in the stores. I had mentioned this to ThinkGeek once but never got a responce :(
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
What?
For those interested you can watch Futurama every night, and Family Guy almost every night on Cartoon Network during Adult Swim (Of course all the episodes are reruns). Here on the east coast it starts at 11:00pm.
I think the Adult Swim website has the show schedule and the episode names.
www.adultswim.com
I believe that was a joke making fun of "Think Tanks."
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Check out, the video from archive.org on the Futurama exhibit. They have 100's of video of all world fairs and the like if you want to waste an afternoon viewing them.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Bah, I meant "Commodore LXIV" of course. Sorry!
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Gotta love reproducable bugs.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
Bender: "Ahhh, what an awful dream. Ones and zeroes everywhere... and I thought I saw a two."
Fry [comforting]: "It was just a dream, Bender. There's no such thing as two."
If you pay close attention to all the 1s and 0s popping up in his nightmare, just before he wakes up they actually do throw a 2 in there. Brilliant.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
I would if I could see throught the magic smoke that was their server!
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
http://users.cis.net/sammy/grandpa.htm I remember when my teacher in high school played this while we were studying genetics.
An artist asked me for something for him to write as grafitti on the wall of a game (I can't remember if it was released) so I suggested "squeamish ossifrage". Hey, this reference lark is easy!
Don't knock having a batchelors in political science! It could be worse, it could be a B.A. in philosophy (AKA the "would you like fries with that?" degree)
This from someone with a degree in political philosophy...
I've got her for Linear Algebra this summer.
did the article die a slashdot-induced death? i can't seem to navigate to it.
I watched it at lunch today. The Klein's Beer was more entertaining though. :)
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Thats where all those MIT and Harvard slackers work.
In the same show there are Klein bottles with wine.
On the Simpsons when Lisa sees Comic Book Guy's TShirt
... well some just stun you with how perfect, and yet how obcure they are. It's like a little gift from the writers to you. :)
C:\Dos
C:\Dos\Run
Run Dos\Run
LISA:Ha, only one person in a million would find that funny!
COMIC BOOK GUY: Yes, we call that the "Dennis Miller Ratio."
MST3K is much the same of course - references whizzing past your ears through the whole show, some you get and some you don't. And some
Kevin
...the mathematics of quantum neutrino fields.
Or is that the mathematics of won-ton burrito meals?
waah waah
There's been a number of good shows that never really had a chance at gaining an audience.
Take FOX's main revenue stream: The Simpsons. It didn't have a whole lot of eyeballs it's first couple of seasons. But FOX was new, and didn't have anything better to try out. It also put the Simpsons on in arguably the best time slots there could possibly be for a new show, with no heavy hitters up against it on other channels. Simpsons eventually drew the crowd. All the news propaganda and churches denouncing the show (highly controversial stuff at the time) didn't hurt either, I admit.
Now take Futurama. They put it in possibly the worst position they could: After NFL games, pre-empted a number of times with no repeats. Heck, even my Tivo couldn't figure out when it was airing half the time. 6 or 7 of the episodes I saw for the first time was when it aired on Cartoon Network, and I loved the show! Family Guy was pretty much the same way, with the same results. They didn't give it much of a chance.
Recently, they did the same to the show Wonderfalls. A very good show.. Produced a whole season, put it in a bad time slot, showed 4 episodes, then pulled it. That's not even a geek humor show, they just killed it dead.
Firefly aired for what, 3 episodes? Maybe 4? And out of order as well? And I believe it was up against ER or something with equally ridiculous high ratings draw too.
Shows have to build an audience. You don't get an instant hit overnight, or even over one season. The success of so many of these shows on DVD shows a couple of things:
a) TV execs are morons who have no idea how to build a fanbase.
b) Brilliant shows do have a large fanbase despite the total BS numbers that Nielsen provides.
More than anything, the fact that shows like Firefly, which didn't even air a whole season, are selling so many DVD copies should show the inaccuracy of the Nielsen system in the first place.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
...so reflective...
Farnsworth: "It's a parallel universe"
Fry: "Are there an infinite number of them?"
Prof. F.: "No, just the two."
Back in the very early days of alt.tv.simpsons (circa 1992), one of the regular contributors was a Dave Cohen. Already knowing that he contributed to National Lampoon ('baby elephant walk...'), I've always wondered if Futurama's D.X.C might have been him.
:-P :-)
(Of course, doing a Google now confirms it. I've been out of the loop for too long...)
Cue the remark about fans becoming too involved with a favourite show...
--
Chris Baird,,(a.t.s FAQ maintainer 1992-1993)
Batchelor: portmanteu word signifying an unmarried mainframe coder.
From 'Pinky & The Brain'
Brain: Are you pondering what I'm pondering?
Pinky: Oh, I think so Brain, but SNOBOL for Windows?
SNOBOL is an early-60s era programming language. The only reason I caught that joke was one of my professors mentioned it offhand the day I saw that episode. I am forever impressed by the writers of P&tB because of this quote.
Recently, CN reran the first episode, and I noticed that you could actually see Nibbler's shadow before Fry falls into the cryochamber.
If anyone has the first episode as originally aired, was the shadow always there, or did they edit that into the scene for syndication after they did the episode with the brains?
If it was always there, I'm seriously impressed with the planning that went into the story arc.
I just wanna know if I was the only one that did the caculation of Fry's intrest on his 93 cents? (on a Ti-83 none the less, they used a palm, wusses)
Also, who else here was the only one in the room cracking up hen the professor complained about the quantum finish?
Those little things that go into futurama are what make it worth my time to watch, and that is sying a lot.
--
Honor system DDos. Please "ping -f 24.247.68.40&"
md5sum
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
As close as I can figure, it means "Others hate SQL" . Is that right?
Why should I argue rationally with someone being irrational? I'll just mock them instead.
You mean he's stuck dying in a hostile environment with no means of transportation back to his intended home?
No. It means that the fish in its natural environment has absolutely no need for a bicycle.
Smae thing with people not needing god.
Here is a Futurama related link:
www.turanga-pages.com
Worth a visit, Futurama fans!
This page does not represent Fox.
Ugh! A batch of comments all pointing out trivial errors in quoting a cartoon. They must be taking a break from quoting Monty Python episodes.
Let's see, how can I explain this without blowing your mind? Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle tells us that at a specific curvature of space knowledge can be transferred into energy. Or, and this is key now, matter.
It doesn't?
Well, some people struggle with Heisenberg.
Look, here's a toy. It goes up and down on a string isn't that fun?
This is, of course, all according to Dr. Meatwad
A man without God is like a bitter fool who spends his time writing inflammatory sigs.
My favorite was in the halloween episode. Bender inherited a house. When 0101100101 appears on the wall in blood, everyone asks Bender what it means and he say's it's just gibberish, then he looks at it in the mirror and screams.
In college I took a 'Film 101' class which was basically a class showing movies that upped the ante as far as movie-making goes. At one point, the professor, a complete smart ass, informed the 300 person class of mostly frat boys and sorority sisters that, (I'm paraphrasing) 'You need a sledgehammer to beat any idea into the viewers' head'. This was right after his ranting about 'Titanic' and I highly doubt that a 1/3 of the people in there got it. Most people do not understand subtlety. Hence the reason that great shows like Futurama have been cancelled.
At least Fox takes a chance on these shows, but unfortunately, they tend to get cancelled after the first or second season. It's not that the average TV viewer is an idiot. It's just that when they get home from work, they want to turn on the tube and not think. TV has become an escape and to watch 'reality' bs only offers people a greater escape from themselves. Expect more of the same.
Just my thoughts...
David X. Cohen - MSc in Computer Science (Harvard)
Bill Odenkirk - PhD in Inorganic Chemistry (Harvard)
Ken Keeler - PhD in Mathematics (Harvard)
plus a bunch of others I can't remember.
By odd coincidence, it was just a couple days ago that I was watching "Lesser of Two Evils" and got inspired to write a little program to determine whether Bender and Flexo's serial numbers really were expressible as the sum of 2 cubes (although I didn't doubt for a moment they were... just to ruin everybody else's fun, the answers are 119^3 + 119^3 = 3370318 and 952^3 + (-951)^3 = 2716057). Astonishingly, this anecdote failed to impress a job interviewer who asked me what kinds of things I did to keep my programming skills sharp. As if I want to work somewhere that doesn't appreciate a nerdy Futurama fan!
From the activity sheet:
In the DVD commentary, David Cohen goes on to say that it's tricky to find the cubes. Well, he's right. Here's the trick, in case you were interested:
3370318 = 119^3 + 119^3
2716057 = 952^3 + (-951)^3
No one ever said the cubed numbers had to be positive.... and yes, I'm a dork for working this out!
i so totally know this guy
The best description I've read explains things in terms of a fridge full of beer.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
The calculation is not correct (in current real-life banks).
Banks nowadays only allow you to have full cents on your account, so every year the amount is rounded to the nearest cent-value after calculating interest. This leads "only" to 4.20E9 Dollars after a thousand years instead of 4.28E9 as with the mathmatical formula...
If you don't know what to do with such an amount of money: what would you do with a trillion (1E12) dollars? There's a novel by Andreas Eschbach about a guy inhereting such an amount from his grand-grand-grand-... father from 400 years ago ("Ein Billion Dollar" in german, dunno if it's available in english)
Fox is only doing what makes them money. Our society has become so wrapped up in reality TV crap that we refuse to relax and let the funny in. Futurama is absolutely one of the best shows ever made and that's the only reason it lasted as long as it did. Fox held on to it even without the ratings, yes, pushing it around and screwing up its time slots, but held on none the less. If the veiwing audience would be less obsessed with crappy singers and stupid "whats-the-grossest-thing-I-can-eat" shows, we could continue to enjoy intelligent programming in the form of humor. Regardless of the form this humor comes in, Simpsons, Family Guy, or Futurama, it is being rejected by those viewers who refuse to acknowledge a more "realistic" look at society exists in the subtle and intelligent jokes in these shows than silly "reality" shows.
As a computer, I am amused by the faith you have in technology.
Keep hoping. The animation quality on that show does not come cheap. Do you remember the ill-fated return of The Critic in Flash? It was terrible. If you cant afford good animators you can't afford good writers. You need x amount of capital to get the ball rolling and I believe Fururama was VERY expensive, moreso than the Simpsons.
Time is also against the Futurama fans, whatever "synergy" the creative team had has changed. Its simply not feasible to expect them to suddenly do high-quality work again from such a long hiatus, and thats assuming you can even get all the people.
Production is a very odd thing, when there's a good team they do good work. There are probably two to three episodes of Futurama which I think are low quality and the rest are really just gems. The problem is the network idiots didn't know they were holding a diamond and wouldnt give them a consistant timeslot.
Ideally, the Simpsons should have been cancelled after the first season of Futurama and Futurama would have taken its place. There's only so much you can do with the Simpsons and its simply been done, over and over. Futurama would have given Fox a new platform to create comedy and sell lots of commercials
They dropped the ball, and here we are. Expect the Simpsons to become a horrible shell of what it used to be (many will say its already happened) and a sad "had it coming" cancelation instead of a proud exit.
So with all that math knowledge they still couldn't count there way past 72.
Episodes that is.
Damn sad it was cancelled.
Presently here, but not there.
I believe that Robert Heinlein actually capped this long ago in a short story titled - IIRC - All You Zombies. If you have not read it, I won't spoil it by telling the paradox that RAH came up with.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
GOATSE in above post.
"Software is like sex: the best is for free!" -Linus Torvalds
"Shooting DNA at each other to make babies. I find it offensive!" -Bender
"You mean Bender is the evil Bender? I'm shocked! Shocked! Well not that shocked." -Fry
= - = - = * ~ * ~ *
Fry proves it! There is a conclusive link between Linus and Bender; one of them is an evil Bender and the other is just Bender (evil)!
call it a B.S.
Though I am only 15, and don't consider myself a nerd, I thought I should comment. In earlier posts it has been said that Futurama didn't really appeal to the mainstream viewer, but I would have to disagree. Even with all the jokes that only really 'nerds' would understand, there are still plenty of things that appeal to the rest of the viewers. Though some would say I have "the defining characteristics of that garbage pile's fans- an absurdly short attention span, the intelligence of a houseplant, no sense of humor, and no ability to discern good from bad." I still enjoy the show and often find myself bursting out in laughter. Yes, I'm a fan of Family Guy and all those other shows, but it doesn't mean that I don't also enjoy (or even love) futurama. I have actually only just started really liking the show since my brother bought the dvds. It was never that the mainstream viewers didn't like it, it was that it never had good time slots.