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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."
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.
theres nothing like a tall glass of SLURM while your waiting for a /.'ed page to load.
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.
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.
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 .
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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 ??? is easy to figure out: 4: Release dvd sets of all the seasons and generate renewed interest in show then bring back on air!
Wouldnt you like to be a pepper too?
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".
...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 futurama quote of all time:
Fry: Oh my god!
Bender: Oh your god.
Sadly, it was more like "too smart to stay on the air." See, American television viewers don't like television shows that make them feel stupid. Instead of watching intelligent, well-written shows like Futurama, they instead watch unintelligent pablum like "American Idol."
It's things like this that make me turn to the Internet, great liberator of properly smart programmes that were cancelled before their time.
Sincerely,
Seth Finklestein
Doesn't Own Television
HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
I never laughed so hard during the Simpsons as when I heard the guy say that.
For a recap, they're talking about how a certain cliff is popular for being used in suicides. And a geek (sounded like the Krusty-Burger fry cook shouts as he's leaping: "Why did they Cancel Futuramaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!?????"
I think that was a good dig by Groening. Fox really shafted them from the beginning. I think he even said so much in an interview.
Man, I miss Futurama. I think I'm gonna watch the DVD's again when I get home tonight.
Instead of watching intelligent, well-written shows like Futurama
Is this the same Futurama where the lead character went back in time and had sex with his grandmother?
Close, but this is more accurate:
1. Take one Great Show that will have a built-in initial audience because of who's creating it, and stick it in the Time Slot Of Doom.
2. Watch Great Show continually get pre-empted by NFL football, but do little to nothing to ensure that Great Show can be seen by fans at a regular day and time. Bounce Great Show around in your schedule like a pinball.
3. Totally ignore the creator of Great Show, who's Previous Great Show almost single-handedly saved your network in it's early years.
4. Wonder why Great Show just can't seem to get any ratings. Cancel Great Show because it's cheaper to run Previous Great Show reruns in the Time Slot Of Doom.
The hell with Fox. There was a time that they were a pretty kick ass network, but like every other network they've fallen into the pit of Reality TV. Futurama deserves to be on Cartoon Network.
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.
I think you mean "did the nasty in the past-y".
- Tony
Yeah, they're pretty dumb. Isn't it an amazing coincidence that they're as successful as the other major networks which have been around much longer?
Come on. I loved Futurama and I loved Firefly, and I'm pissed that they were canceled, but I can't paint it as a bad business decision. This very article (about the advanced math in the show) makes the point that it didn't really appeal to the mainstream viewer. "Mainstream" may translate to "those slack-jawed idiots who can't even code in C" in your mind, but in the coffers at a TV network "mainstream" means "the main stream of our revenue - large numbers of people who like the same stuff". And I don't think that "the height of its popularity" was ever that high. It's a big hit with geeks, but most of the non-geeks I know aren't interested or don't seem to "get it".
Personally, I think the problem is that there is no way for people to pay different amounts for shows. When you watch network TV, you're paying with your eyes. Number of viewers determines their advertisers, and that's where they make the money. That means that a mediocre show, which will mildly appeal to everyone, is more profitable than a show which will be deeply loved by a small group of people. If the compensation was somehow better differentiated, I think we'd get better shows.
No, I don't actually have a good system of differentiated compensation to propose, short of buying the canceled shows on DVD. Sorry.
10 HOME
;-)
20 SWEET
30 GOTO 10
(Score:0, Redundant)
Redundant indeed
You can't take the sky from me...
That's Fox's fault. Futurama kept on being pre-empted by sports, moved around and basically becoming a programming ragdoll for Fox. The same thing happened to Family Guy, they had less episodes made (50, compared to Futurama's 75) and they are coming back on the air. Some buzz is going around that Futurama could share in the same fate, it's possible because Fox doesn't own the rights to Futurama like they do with Family Guy. Groening and Co. just made episodes and Fox paid them to show them on Fox.
I've watched extensive hours of The Simpsons, Futurama and Family Guy and I've come to this conclusion...
The Simpsons is the series with the biggest environment. Have you seen the picture with about 200 people from The Simpsons on it? They mix humor with a wide spectrum of different characters and get a great show.
Futurama has the best writing, hands down, no question about it. You listen to the commentary of why certain elements were in it, and you think to yourself "wow, that's pretty sneaky". Plus, the seamless blend of computer animation and hand-drawn animation by Rough Draft Korea makes it the best animated series.
Family Guy has the best jokes IMO. Family Guy doesn't hold punches when they lay down jokes. The Simpsons has their funny jokes, Futurama has smart jokes, but Family Guy has gut-busting jokes that go to new heights. The only thing I'd change is put Lacey Chabert back as the voice of Meg, when I hear Mila Kunis' whiny voice, I think of Jackie, not Meg.
The "grandfather paradox" (what if I went back in time and killed my grandfather - thus my father would never be born, thus I would never exist, thus I couldn't go back in time and commit the murder, so my grandfather would live, so my father would be born, so...) is a sci-fi cliche. Their take on it was great!
Fry, trying to protect his "grandfather", ends up killing him, only to be seduced by his grandmother (believing, in his half-witted way, that since his "grandfather" is dead, his grandmother can't really be his grandmother) and becomes his own grandather. It's gross, it's ironic, it's funny.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
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.