geekosystem

Red Bull did another sports thing! This is The Athlete Machine, a collection of Rube Goldberg devices connected by a series of impressive feats of derring-do performed by what we assume are well known extreme sports athletes. After Felix Baumgartner's jump from space, it seems Red Bull figured the best way to top something huge is by linking smaller, slightly less awesome things together into a sort of extreme sports Voltron.

Because you can never become mesmerized enough by Rube Goldberg machines, the Purdue Society of Professional Engineers set out to top their own record for world's largest functional Rube Goldberg machine. They succeeded, spending over 5,000 hours constructing a machine that is compact rather than the traditionally long contraptions, yet acts more like a transformer with all of its moving tracks. The machine consists of 300 steps, with the goal of blowing up and popping a balloon, but that's not all, as the the machine amazingly completes every single task assigned in the Rube Goldberg competition's quarter of a century history. Basically, this Rube Goldberg machine is ridiculous.

The 2011 Rube Goldberg competition tasked college students to create an overly complex device in the spirit of the famous cartoonists that completes an everyday task. This year, students were challenged to water a flower in as many steps as possible. The team from Purdue University did not win the competition--that honor went to the team at UW-Stout--but they beat the previous Rube Goldberg world record with a total of 244 steps when they got their machine up and running after the competition ended. The device shows the entirety of existence -- from the big bang to the forthcoming apocalypse -- and has many a bouncing ball bearing, and mechanized madness along the way. Congratulations to the winning team, and your prizes are, I'm sure, in the mail. Unfortunately, the delivery process will take well over 200 steps, so don't hold your breath. (via Neatorama)

Alex Crawford and Austin Nelson have now probably become very, very good at setting up dominos, which are key to their Rube Goldberg contraption. Their device requires at least two people; the first triggers an instamatic camera which starts the device moving. The other person (or people) sit off to the side where they await the dominos and marbles to reach their final destination and trigger the second camera. It's very clever, and seems almost manageable in terms of size and complexity. Perhaps someone out there is looking for a nice, quiet weekend project? (via Neatorama)

Skyward Sword getting "finishing touches" before release (Destructoid) Welcome to ChatotRoulette! (Dueling Analogs) Gene Roddenberry's original pitch for Star Trek (PDF) (Lee Thomson) Rock Band can actually teach you how to play actual drums (Destructoid) The Japanese Spider-Man is exactly as intense as you'd expect (YouTube) How to make 6 different Rube Goldberg machines (Geeks Are Sexy) Muppets made out of balloons! (Black Cat Balloon Company on Flickr) (Pic via Cake Wrecks)

You might know the rock band OK Go for its music, but you probably know them better for their elaborate viral music videos: "Here It Goes Again," the YouTube sensation of coordinated treadmill dancing, is currently the 57th most popular video on the site; "This Too Shall Pass" utilizes an gigantic Rube Goldberg contraption built over four months by Syyn Labs across two floors; the most recent "End Love" is again another feat of coordinated--this time in stop-motion!--dancing. Now, Babelgum has released a parody video titled "OK Go’s New Viral Video: Giant Pie," which suggests that perhaps the band should stop producing increasingly complicated videos, and simply return to their roots: you know, music. Watch the amusing music video / mock-behind-the-scenes after the jump.

I don't even play Dungeons & Dragons, and I cannot stop watching this video. In the 38 enrapturing seconds that ensue, you will watch a cup, a marble, a chess piece, a pulley, and many more moving parts conspire in a Rube Goldbergian plot to roll a single D&D die.

It is as awesome as it sounds.

Okay, so it's actually a rather high-tech conveyor belt/laser scanner combination, but still. It's two-thirds the size of a football field! The sorter is housed in the newly renovated Library Services building, a renovated warehouse in Queens. The push to automated sorting was made when the Library found it could no longer recruit a full-time sorting staff. The job was just too boring. Now, according to Salvatore Magaddino, who "oversees the distribution of materials" for the Library, one seven hour shift with the sorter can do an amount of work that used to take two days with three times the staff. This allows the library to turn around all of its returns and branch requests within 24 hours of them being delivered to the Services Building.

OK Go! is a Chicago-area band of talented hipsters, known as much for their impossibly imaginative and perfectly executed music videos as they are for their infectious indie pop musical stylings. While cool dudes (and devotees of PRI's This American Life) have cherished this group since the late 90's, they are perhaps best known for their "treadmill video" as well as a slew of other great videos. Somehow, they've outdone themselves, with a Rube Goldberg-esque version of "This Too Shall Pass." Do not deny yourself 3 and half minutes of joy and watch the video.