ctrl.altered.mind

I stumbled upon this ~13 minute video of Rube Goldberg machines designed as part of a contest for a Japanese game show. I’ve always been fascinated by these well-designed and accurately coordinated, yet highly counterproductive complex machines. For those who don’t know, a Rube Goldberg machine or device is any exceedingly complex pataphysical apparatus that performs a very simple task in a very indirect and convoluted way (via Wikipedia).

(Update) I was meaning to also add a link to the famous Honda commercial that uses Honda parts to create a nice Rube Goldberg machine (and the link to a parody as well), but forgot :P. Thanks Sean!

On a side note, watching this video sequence reminded me of a beautiful quote in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s 1972 movie Bawarchi.

“It is simple to be happy but so difficult to be simple…”

- Anon.

.. you need to use the Windows Task Manager to terminate a non-responding Windows Task Manager! I don’t know how I managed to pull something like this off at work, but I must’ve been doing something really bad. I’ll put this down as another symptom of the ‘Its a Friday evening and I’ve nothing interesting to do’ syndrome.

I was surprised to find a special package when I went to the clubhouse to pick up some other stuff. Funny!

(I blanked out the addresses to avoid hate mail and potential lawsuits )

I saw this video several months ago, but came across it again and thought I’d post back. A classic re-enactment of a host following Pac Man is a welcome study break! I’m sure this would have had to be U of Michigan’s engineering library.

Link to Boing-Boing’s post on this on Dec 21, 2005.

I saw this featured on Rocketboom, and found the video on (where else, but) Google Video. Simply amazing!