A Crazy Cambridge Contraption

lhdentra writes "A few friends and I got bored one weekend and decided to build a contraption. Remember the Honda advert? We think ours is better." This took dedication.

Comments

for the clueless

[Anonymous Coward]

honda commercial

Slashdot is getting scooped by memepool now.

Re:for the clueless

[amembleton]

The wheels' centre of gravity is offset, so it is above the centre of the wheel. This means that as the wheel slowly rotates, its centre of gravity starts to fall whilst the tyre itself appears to climbs uphill.

Re:for the clueless

[Sinus0idal]

The Honda commercial wasn't original - it copied an old short film Der Lauf der Dinge (The way things go)... Imdb link

Re:for the clueless

[madprof]

"In fact this slashdot page is the only thing that told me it was a honda advert."

That's the point! This Slashdot page just did some of Honda's marketing for them. The ad is such that at least a fair number of people will discuss it and even if you don't remember which car manufacturer it was, you'll be reminded by someone else.

The ad is really very brilliant. Great entertinament, but also a very effective way to spread the brand image.

Re:for the clueless

[quiddity]

search google for lauf.mov
or
http://www.tcfilm.ch/MOVIE1/lauf.mov

Re:for the clueless

[ErikTheRed]

And all of these pay homage to the old Rube Goldberg cartoons from the early 20th century.

You should have built...

[Anonymous Coward]

a high bandwdith server first.

Re:You should have built...

[VC]

Mirrordot.org mirror of the video

ummmm.. down.

[peculiarmethod]

I wanna see the contraption, but the thingy-ma-doo went ka-blooey.

That's the most obvious slashdotting-bait site.

[AtariAmarok]

That it, describe something that sounds interesting. On the web site, make big the mistake of forgetting to add a nice little PNG or JPG of it so we can see what the big fuss is about. Instead, ask EVERYONE to download between 5 and 12 megs of movie file just to see what it looks like. Oh yes, and host it on a low bandwidth server. If that is not slashdotting-bait, I don't know what is!

Re:Pictures, anyone?

[Concerned Onlooker]

Sure. Right here.

Isn't it nice when things just... work?

[Lisandro]

Oh, wait, site's Slashdotted. Never mind!

Re:Slashdotted already

[Exstatica]

i have a mirror of it. http://www.exstatica.net/slashdot/196237/ enjoy :)

jolly good show

[Stalyn]

Oh dear
What is it?
I've spontaneously combusted
Well, I am sorry
Oh it's quite all right, I've grown tired of living
Ah, very good then
For the best
Yes indeed

Re:Faked Honda Commercial

[po8]

I believe the tires were weighted internally to achieve this behavior. Counterintuitive, but not cheating.

Mirrored

[Exstatica]

I created a mirror... http://www.exstatica.net/slashdot/196237/ enjoy :)

Link

[Ceirren]

Thanks to mirrordot for the...well....mirror http://mirrordot.org/stories/4a5348d4e9a30ecdb1883 7ab66bcbcbf/index.html

Pure Genius (And Coral Link)

[g_bowskill]

Wow, this looked really awesome! Much more realistic than the Honda one (Which was still pretty cool) in my opinion.

I managed to get to it via coral:

http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk.nyud.net:8090/lwh21/ma chine/machine.avi

Enjoy!

Got the torrents up :)

[xbmodder]

The contraption.AVI http://thebrokenwargames.gotdns.com/con.torrent and the machine.avi http://thebrokenwargames.gotdns.com/machine.avi.to rrent the honda video will be up in a few minutes. stop downloading it if you can. I need the video to make meta.

But this IS the contraption!

[AtariAmarok]

The slashdotting was all part of the plan. This story is not about a contraption. Rather, this story is just part of a contraption:

1. Slashdotter creates site that requires each person to do a 12 meg download to find out what is on it, and submits it to Slashdot.
2. Timothy looks at it, decides it is cool. In the process of looking at it for review, he slashdots the site.
3. "Contraption" story is added to Slashdot. Thousands hit it within seconds, further banging away at some fragile server in the UK.
4. UK server-farms transformers start to smoke. One explodes.
5. Power spike would seem rather small, but it does make its away through an Atlantic cable where it hits an electric relay system near Cleveland, Ohio.
6. Cleveland's vintage "Enron meets East German War Surplus" relay blows out. Cleveland once again has a big blackout. Free TV's for all: loot early and loot often!
7. Ensuing crises causes calls for demands for the resignation of United States energy secretary.
8. Energy sec is good friend of President, so he can't fire him. But he has to do something, so he sacks the Surgeon General.
9. Without a surgeon general, health standards go down, including dental standards.
10. I get a nasty tooth-ache.

Thanks a lot, lhdentra!

Their next contraption should be:

[TheGuano]

...a DIY steadicam:

http://slashdot.org/articles/04/04/09/1929235.shtm l?tid=188&tid=97

Never mind the Honda ad...

[b00le]

this is the true original.

The way things go (Der Lauf der Dinge) by Peter Fischli and David Weiss, 1987
Inside a warehouse, a precarious 70-100 feet long structure has been constructed using various items. When this is set in motion, a chain reaction ensues. Fire, water, law of gravity as well as chemistry determine the life-cycle of objects - of things. It brings about a story concerning cause and effect, mechanism and art, improbability and precision

- and it lasts 30 minutes. Hypnotic, beautiful

Rube Godwin

[AtariAmarok]

" I've never seen it but I have been told about one called the "Hitler Killer" which was started when a hen laid an egg "

See title. Rube Godwin's Law was named after the fact that in any fierce Internet argument (first Usenet, now elsewhere), whenever someone discusses ungainly contraptions, someone will always ask "but can you kill Hitler with it?"

mirroring

[yack0]

web server on fire...

the original

the edited type movie

The honda wagon commercial - still a classic

Enjoy

Re:Faked Honda Commercial

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the only cut in the Honda cog is at the exhaust (muffler) section when it rolls across the floor (because they couldn't fit all the components in), apart from that and the 606 takes later, its all real, we discussed this here when the advert was first released

Of course the big hoo-haa was Honda (or their agency) was taking all the credit and collecting numerous prestigous creative awards when they (or their ad company) blatently "borrowed" the idea from Rube Goldberg's "Lauf der Dinge" (the way things go) without giving any credit to Rube, all while giving some bullshit story about being inspired by Mousetrap (the board game) if you see Rube's film (1987) you will see the plagiarism for yourself.
I guess Picasso was right ? "good artists copy, great artists steal"

That is, award winning multi million dollar production companies certainly do.

Re:Should not take you long

[Tumbleweed]

The British can actually say words which comprise more than one syllable

Huh?