Rube Goldberg Contest
Video* of this year’s winning… er, contraption?
The challenge was to create machines that would replace batteries in a flashlight in a minimum of 20 steps. The winning team took 125 steps, thus earning a chance to compete in the national competition. Their outer-space themed machine is described in an article from the Purdue site as incorporating “a bouncing water balloon, a fireman action figure fleeing a fire and weights attached to a spinning bicycle wheel.”
…
This is right up there with nunchuck skills, bowhunting skills, and computer hacking skills, don’t you think?
* And I’m proud to mention, this is not mere low-hanging fruit from milkandcookies.com, but something I found on my very own! [Too bad blogs don’t come with refrigerators; luddite self back-patting will have to do]
PS If, sigh, you have the gall not to know who Rube Goldberg is, you can remedy that here. [Actually, if was interesting to learn from Wikipedia that “Rube Goldberg” style cartoons have arisen independently in several different cultures… Which suggests that, like the multiplicitous domestication of pigs, this is an evolutionarily robust tendency– Not, of course, to denigrate the singular contributions of dear Reuben Lucius]
