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Purdue Students Win Rube Goldberg Contest
Dekortage writes "How long does it take to make a burger? Students from Purdue University's Society of Professional Engineers won the 2008 Rube Goldberg contest with a device that requires 156 steps to assemble a burger. According to the team captain, 'We put 4,000 to 5,000 man-hours into this machine since September, and all the hard work has been well worth it.' That's a long time to wait for dinner." Here's a video of the winning entry in operation.
That's Goldberg.
http://www.rubegoldberg.com/
"To create a burger, you must first create the universe."
It doesn't even make a burger, it just shoots you.
I read burger, but I see orange juice...
that's pretty impressive. (It should have said in TFS though that it was their objective to make it have as many steps as possible) But I do have to wonder if it maybe wasn't the case that some of the steps were useless - things like "turn burger 1 degree clockwise, turn burger 1 degree anti-clockwise" - but I suppose even so it is an impressive feat of uselessness
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
I couldn't help but notice that with the crappy camerawork you have no idea what process is going on at once. Can anyone find a better video?
How many steps to make it a combo?
I watched the full video, and I didn't see any hamburgers get made. Did I miss something?
The winning entry according to the article was the burger maker. But the video linked in the summary is a machine making orange juice.
The video seems to be of last year's Perdue entry (which was an Orange Juice machine)
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That's not the hamburger video, that's the cracking an egg video.
Their website is an annoying mess of flash, so it's hard to get the real link.
I like my hamburgers without the pulp.
Geez... 14 comments and the vid's already slow as molasses dripping from December scrotae.
Imagine if a human did all of those steps. He would burn more calories than he consumed.
Burgers as health food? Who knew.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"The economy is doing great."
Engineers working on burgers is one more example about how the pedestrian U.S. education system has facilitated the
collapse of the U.S. economy. Your selected Criminals-In-Congress simply don't want to announce it publicly for fear the
revolution WILL be televised.
Next year, can we please build an insanely complicated machine which will beat the entire membership of the Phi Chapter of Theta Tau with the Naughty Web Designer Stick? After being exposed to their Flash Monstrosity that's something I would like to see happen over and over again.
I like to see a device where cows go in one end and BBQ ready burgers come out the other ...
For mechanical details, take a look at the one in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_Run'Chicken Run' animated film
Mr. Tweedy: What is it?
Mrs. Tweedy: It's a pie machine, you idiot. Chickens go in, pies come out.
Mr. Tweedy: Ooh, what kind of pies?
obviously NOT a USAian.
how many steps does it take to boot up Linux on a Rube Goldberg machine?
Still no cure for cancer. Sounds neat, though.
This is clearly a thinly disguised promotion for the Incredible Machine 4!
credits to YouTube they really know how to deliver bandwidth
the linked video is slashdotted already whereas if it was hosted on Youtube they can take the load
if you are gonna host video yourself at least prepare for it
That is a tasty burger!
...a Rube Goldberg machine designed to reset these Rube Goldberg machines?
Seriously! I thought this country was running out of engineers? Guess we just needed better problems. For anyone interested in a bit of GolDberg fun, try the made-of-Lego Great Ball Contraption http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&output=googleabout&btnG=Search+our+site&q=lego%20gbc
Truly team effort in creating time wasting fun.
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I am sure that all admins can attest to the fact that MS products require a ridiculous number of extra steps to perform simple tasks.
In tribute to Rube Goldberg, the web site is done in Flash instead of HTML, and all the text is really bitmaps.
but my order from Acme (2400 m of rain gutter, 100 rolls of duct tape, 4 kittens, 3 model airplanes, one rocket engine, one giant rubber band, 120 sticks of dynamite, 3422 lengths of 2x4 and one anvil) hasn't arrived yet.
The local big-name burger still takes a minimal staff of about 6, and maybe 20 during rush hour. A lot of the work is taking the order, making payment, and filling the order. We havent really progressed that much past the automats (cafeteria vending slots) of the 1930s or Ray Kroks one-button milkshake machines he sold before starting McDonalds in the 1950s.
A couple years back I saw self-serve terminals at a MacDonalds. But it was a GUI disaster and complicated to use. It had lots of subscreens for each category and you could get lost easy. I, a software engineer, had trouble not to mention less computer literates.
an ANSI committee has appointed a prize-winning team of Purdue engineering students to draft the new C++ standard.
>Here's a video of the winning entry in operation.
Duh. Bye bye video.
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If you like this kind of stuff, get a copy of The Way Things Go (1987), a 30-minute documentary of a whole series of events, each triggering the next.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
GO BOILERS! :D
http://icanhascheezburger.com/
They'be been asking for this for quite some time.
Purdue is one of the best, if not THE best engineering school in the country.
I would have thought the first step was killing the cow or pig. I guess it is back to the drawing board.
If the pattern goes 9am, 10am, 11am, why isn't noon 12am?
I'm a member of another chapter of the same engineering fraternity and have competed in the Rube Goldberg competition. The contest is a farce. Purdue wins every year. It's held at Purdue; Purdue profs are the judges; it's held during Parents' Weekend for Pete's sake. Purdue knows before anyone else what the requirements will be and they don't have to worry about making their entry portable enough to go further than across campus. The headline should just read "Purdue holds Xth annual Theta Tau Rube Goldbeg Contest" because them winning is pretty much be assumed.
I would have had the first post, but do you know how long it takes for a Rube Goldberg machine to type for you?
Clicking on the image gives you a SMALLER version of it, and an option to BUY it. Buy it. Seriously. I laughed.
I was just wondering if anyone in the US used (or knew) this term. In Britain, it is used over Rube Goldberg machine after Heath Robinson, the English journalist and cartoonist, who earlier took an interest in such convoluted contraptions.
Lovely :)
And may I recommend a set of original sketches by Rube Goldberg: http://www.rubegoldberg.com/
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