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The Complicated Way to Turn on a Flashlight
jangobongo writes "A machine built by the Purdue Society of Professional Engineers employed an outer-space theme and used steps that incorporated a bouncing water balloon, a fireman action figure fleeing a fire and weights attached to a spinning bicycle wheel to win the 18th national Purdue Rube Goldberg Machine Contest. The winning machine told the story of rocket being launched. As the rocket traveled into space, a meteor hit Earth and started a fire. While the mock fire was put out, the rocket turned on the flashlight to shine back down on Earth. A short video clip can be seen here. The contest was filmed by the Game Show Network to be featured on the network's show, 'Games Across America,' at some future date."
1.2Mb .mov
:)
This ought to stress-test the machine.
Here, here, here and here
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I guess CNN is now the place to go for breaking geek news.
Heres a link just in case. Mirror
you post a 1.2 meg video on the front of slashdot which activates 50,000 people with fast connections to right click and download, thus setting a server on fire...
but do I get filmed? nooo....
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Anybody remember the Honda commercial like this?
A short video clip can be seen here.
Not anymore.
Didn't Sierra do this with The Incredible Machine?
So civilians figured out what the US Military does everyday.
You haven't heard the one about how many Purdue Society of Professional Engineers does it take to turn on a flashlight? :P
Use Minidisc? Join the Minidisc.org forums.
The webserver is hosted on the flashlight..
This will be great for me! Where can I order? I will never have to worry about people using my flashlight batteries up again, as long as I don't keep the operation manual nearby. This is similar to the solution I put in place with my laptop. Students used to come in and drain my laptop's battery when it ran Windows. Now my laptop runs Linux. When tehy try to use my laptop, they tell me my laptop crashed. I wonder if those who attempt to use this new light emitting will think it is broken or something...
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In any case I read the AP feed and it confused me.
What is the point of a machine contest, where the machines are needlessly large and complex. It really sounded like the ideal machine did one basic function and then 12-14 extraneous and overcomplex functions.
Was the contest specifically about how to make tasks more complex than necessary? Like an obuscated code contest for machines?
(usually the code seems a fair amount more useful/clever than this machine though...)
how many Rube Goldbergian machines we use without realizing how much so they are...yeah, that was english.
Take for instance my friend's cell phone, it rings; like, as in ringing. You know, the sound a bell makes.
Well, to me the funny thing is how much processing has to occur to create this ringing sound - all the decompression, digital to analog conversion - how some IC's are monitoring the juice from the battery - all to mimic a simple, age-old bell.
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Check out my Music Video!
From volume 2 of the Kama Sutra, I presume.
That's almost as bad as having a Vice President's oilcompany winning US oil contracts in Iraq... Oh wait!
The things that come out of really great minds that are really bored consistently baffle me. Cases in point: The USB fishtank, the belt-driven watch.
They could have just used this
You really have no idea what you're talking about. Rube Goldberg was the name a cartoonist who died in 1970. He was the one who began the trend of creating ridiculous and complex devices for accomplishing mundane tasks, such as a machine the size of a room built for the sole purpose of making a piece of toast.
Thank you for your feedback.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Might I add one of Rube Goldberg's first attempts?
Not Quite Rube Goldberg
Maybe the movie is transferred via morse code over the flashlight. Must take a while to turn the flashlight on and off.
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Actually, both this contest and the Honda commercial were inspired by Rube Goldberg machines.
In case you haven't heard of him, he's the great grandson of dances with wolves.
There are, if you can believe it, real flashlights that are almost as complicated. This one has a thirteen page user's guide in addition to a quick start guide and a reference card.
(The LED Museum is a site that all nerds should bookmark. I believe it's been Slashdotted before.)
Tom had much more complicated techniques.
Of course, by having to explain it, it looses teh funney.
Bleh!
[NT]
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
It's not really a video of the machine in action, as one would expect. They could have cut down their traffic by 80% by simply mentioning that in the article blurb.
It's a film by some swiss artists called "The way things go": http://www.frif.com/cat97/t-z/the_way_.html
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
here is a torrent dude: xbmodder.us/rub.torrent
... the Mars Rover had a night light.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
You've obviously never actually set a schoolgirl on fire..
(I don't reccomend the experience without earplugs)
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Shouldn't this whole article be modded -100000 redundant?
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
No description of a good Rube Goldberg device is complete without the phrase "...which scares the chicken, who lays an egg, which rolls down a tube..."
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...licensed, or what? Can't we see it now?
How dare those engineers tantalize us with the story and the photos and the frustratingly short clip!
I would love to see a video of the contraption operating from start to end, as I'm sure many other people would.
The whole ad was real, nothing was faked. People usually have a problem with the wheels rolling uphill, but they are real wheels just with top weights in them so lowering the center of gravity makes the wheels go uphill slightly.
Commonwealth readers may be more familiar with Heath Robinson (1872-1944) than Rube Goldberg (1883-1970).
My rube goldberg machine involves the evolution of Gerbles until the point that they are capable of building thier own flashlights and turning them on. I hope there isn't a time limit.
I've been teaching science for 25 years - the complicated way to turn on a flashlight is apparently to hand someone a bulb, a battery, and a wire and ask them to make it work. It's amazing how many people (kids AND adults) can't do this or do it after many many wrong tries.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
if I looking for rocket
him name is hopkin red rocket
\_______ |
|_______> -0-
/ |
I lost my rocket
555-3228
Love, Jerry
P.S. I'll find my rocket
Who took my rocket
Who found my rocket
[ObZen] One needs to have teh funney in order to lose it...
A waist is a terrible thing to mind
Thank you for your feedback.
Microsoft website, is that you?
*gives funeral rites to now-burning networkmirror.com servers*
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
..and I'm proud to say that we keep things complicated around here! -jajawarrior
A very small section was fake. If you recall the prevous slashdot article, the pipe rolling was CG'ed, because their warehouse was too small to hold the entire contraption.
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Click here, you know you wanna!
i found this as i was poking at the site:n ner.mov
http://news.uns.purdue.edu/mov/2005/rube05localwi
it seems to be the long version of the machine. it's 1:01 in length and 3.3megs big. since it's not the opening post and probably wont be modded too high, i don't think there should be any bandwidth problems. but if there is, shoot me a email and i'll mirror it.
HD Trailers
First off, this was posted within 6 minutes of the article going up, at which point browsing at 3 I didn't see any other comments of this nature.
Secondly, it was posted at 1, did it really warrant being brought to 0? Maybe if it were at a 2 or 3, sure, but a 1 was just too high for you I suppose.
Seriously guy, find something better to do with your mod points than to jerk around other ppls karma on posts that are clearly meant to be humorous. +1 Funny doesn't bring you up but negative mods bring you down. Some say the system's broken but I think if people bother to use it with this in mind it works just fine. Next time moderate something that will make a difference, nothing significant has been achieved by modding this from 1 to 0 and it really wasn't clogging up the board at a 1.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."