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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."
Smart enough to NOT get cancelled?
Je t'aime Stéphanie
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.
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
theres nothing like a tall glass of SLURM while your waiting for a /.'ed page to load.
HAH.
Of course, appstate.edu ranks up there with Zeb's College of Learnin'.
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.
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.
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!
+ 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.
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.
Buy the DVDs, cheapskate. Lots of people worked hard to make Futurama happen, and you want a freebie. How can you justify that?
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.
I hate to be a twit, but in this one case I'm gonna say it:
Buy the DVDs!
The show was funny and deserves the support of its fans.
Man, I'll copy DVDs of crappy Hollywood movies I get from Netflix all day long, but those TV Show boxed sets I buy the day they come out. 20 or so hours of entertainment for $50 (or $20 on ebay). They seem like a pretty good deal to me.
I've come to the conclusion that the only way that anyone will make more TV I'd actually like to watch is if I spend money on the things that have been produced already. They wouldn't keep making Star Trek crap if people weren't buying the old stuff.
All that said, I see at least the entire first season on suprnova.org right now.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Bender: I need a calculator.
Fry: You are a calculator.
Bender: I need a good calculator.
> "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!
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.
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"?
That's my favorite Futurama episode. I like the ones where Fry kicks ass (the Devil's Hands one is good too).
What a great show. It had a bad time slot and was probably too geeky for mainstream. In fact, I was part of the problem. I didn't even watch it very much when new shows were coming out. I had this "Simpsons wannabe" attitude and thought the show was OK, but nothing special. It was only years later that I discovered how great the show actually is.
3D animation, technical references galore, very funny.
I almost fell out of my chair when on that one episode there were a bunch of aliens (invaders or something?) coming out of a spaceship making all sorts of arcade references and such, then one goes "All your base are belong to us!"
The ratio of people to cake is too big
teen: Why did they cancel Futurama?!
Aliens wiping out the earth was in the pilot episode. When Fry is in the cyro tube it shows the world being destroyed by flying saucers, then being rebuilt to around a bronze age and being destroyed again. I think it was mainly a satire of The Time Machine.
Learn something new.
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
"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
If you like Futurama enough to want to see it come back, then buying the DVD is basically the only way to prove to Fox that it's worth it. It tells them a) you love the show and b) you love the show enough to spend good money on it. That last one is probably the more important bit.
Personally, I think the slightly geekier audience of Futurama vs Family guy didn't help its dvd sales; geeks are probably more willing to search out for Bittorrents/kazaa/emule/gnutella of a show, while the mass market is content with dvds.
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".
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."
Sorry, but it had to be done:
Me lose brain cells? Ha ha ha ha.... why I laugh?
Stupid sexy Flanders.
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
Futurama isn't coming back, but it could tell Fox that their audience enjoys funny "mature" cartoons (mature as in not kid stuff, but not XXX either).
:)
Of course, nobody should buy any DVD expecting it to count as a "vote" for their favorite show. Buy it if you want it. Don't expect something to come of it.
is worth something after all.
- Hey, why didn't the building Fry was in get destroyed?
- Um...
- Uh...
- Because... Shut up!
[ all laugh ]
I can't remember exactly who said what, but it was really amusing listen to them nitpick thier own show.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
10 HOME
;-)
20 SWEET
30 GOTO 10
(Score:0, Redundant)
Redundant indeed
You can't take the sky from me...
http://users.cis.net/sammy/grandpa.htm I remember when my teacher in high school played this while we were studying genetics.
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
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.
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)
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.
"I had this "Simpsons wannabe" attitude and thought the show was OK, but nothing special. It was only years later that I discovered how great the show actually is."
You discovered that you would like the show, not that it is great. Futurama is for geeks. It is smart in a "Geek" sort of way. The Simpsons is smart, but you don't have to be a Slashdotter to get the stuff.
Face reality: You were right the first time, sort of. I wouldn't call it a Simpsons wannabe, but rather "Simpsons in the Future" or
"Slashdot Simpsons."
There is nothing special unless you are a geek. That's why Futurama won't come back. It *only* appeals to geeks (like "Firefly," but better).
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
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!
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.