Pythagoras Switch

[alienistcog]

Apparently some kind of kid's show (or a segment thereof) in Japan, sort of a cross between Rube Goldberg and George Rhodes. Awesome on multiple levels. Bonus: I found this searching for something completely unrelated.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lfy3LreTj1A

Comments

[anonymous]

The entire time I was watching that, I felt this sense of inexplicable dread that something was going to go wrong and the contraption would fail. Every time something almost didn't work, I was holding my breath and gritting my teeth.

I wonder if I'm getting a little TOO into it...

Nevertheless, this is brilliant... and I can just imagine the hours of setup involved just for a run of well under a minute.

I assume you saw the vintage Bing Bang Boing commercial on Boing Boing last week?

- Quincunx

[alienistcog]

Heh, yeah, I was totally thinking of you when I saw these. There's a ton of other clips on YouTube, I just picked the longest one that had a few segments in it. They're all similarly amazing. There are also a fair number of fan-generated ones -- apparently kids who are into the show make their own setups with kits and random bits and pieces and post them online.

Yeah, I saw the commercial on BB -- funny it never took off, eh? I think there were probably just not enough gadgets to keep the options interesting. The modularity of it was cool, though.

The closest thing to either of these I had when I was a kid was a board game called Bonkers. I had a revelation years later that playing Bonkers essentially involves assembly language coding; the game board can be thought of as a chunk of computer memory and the cards as CPU instructions. I think playing that game as a kid primed me to be into computers later.