Very cool machine, but it seems to only have one degree of freedom. I would have thought that the vertical movement was pretty significant as well. Building a machine to wiggle a building sized object up and down would be pretty damn hard I imagine, though.

"So...we might have recruited three young girls and that guy who made OK Go's famous Rube Goldberg machine"

Would have nice if they could have found a woman to build the machine. It's a nice sentiment, but all they're showing me is these girls playing on a toy someone else built. But I really hope this helps; I think the princess mentality hasn't done society any favors.

Here's an depressing question that keeps running through my head: What do you suppose the ratio of fictional female engineers/hard-scientists to real female engineers/hard-scientists is? what about male?

I was gonna say how can we prove that which way the cat "flips" isn't also somehow also determined by a factor we can't measure. I suppose its kind of irrelavent. If we can't measure it then to all intents and purposes it may as well be random.

Anyway, I remember as a kid thinking that if we could build a machine with enough inputs then we could predict the future perfectly. I then got to thinking about the kind of paradox this would cause - getting a prediction of the future would change the future unless the machine also somehow could account for this. Anyway, I was quite disappointed when I learnt about quantum, although I thought perhaps it was the universe's failsafe against the sort of paradox i imagined this machine would create

Anyway. Reality is fucking wierd.

I feel like a golem -- an IT golem who's been forced to build the machines that banks will soon use to enslave us all.

But I'm almost finished, and I can't really let this whole year go by without doing some political advocacy.


In reply to this comment by gwiz665:
Good to have you back in arms. Where have you been hiding? Are you like a political golem that only comes out in election season?
In reply to this comment by NetRunner:
>> ^gwiz665:

What a muslim thing to say.
>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:
'Marxist' and 'Communist' have become the battle cry of the truly clueless.



I've missed you guys. :

3 more comments have been lost in the ether at this killed duplicate.

>> ^xxovercastxx:

>> ^shinyblurry:


You have to ask yourself, if he's willing to lie about his education, what else is he willing to lie about?
I got about 10-15 minutes in and couldn't listen anymore. I like hearing a well-(in)formed counter-argument but this guy isn't even on a high school level of scientific understanding.


Not only that, but even in the first few MINUTES he already doesn't understand the very NATURE the way the brain interprets data and information. He's spending time talking about this important ability in humans yet leaves out ALL of psychology and neuroscience and what they have to say on the subject. Guess what they have to say? So he goes on and on talking about this WORTHLESS notion of design and doesn't understand that his brain is forcing him to BELIEVE this IS TRUE! All you have to ask him to disarm him is , "Why? Why does it look designed? Why?", then watch him splutter till his brain explodes, you know why, because due to psychology you BELIEVE it does, WITH BIAS--and it goes deeper too (much how you see optical illusions, why do those appear to be optical illusions? I don't know, why does that image appear to be designed?)--he will NEVER be able to answer that question, cause quite frankly he doesn't have the education obviously needed to do so.

His entire speech was over in the first few minutes, let alone ten to fifteen. Doctor my ass, "I" could lecture him into oblivion (as I'm sure a great many other people here could too).

This is why I've watched about three of shiny's video embeds (this being a semi-fourth as I only watched enough to know it was an epic failure). They all come from Christian based scientists that have credentials from said "Universities" or "Colleges" (next to public school, these are actually a step down in your learning experience) and are woefully unexperienced, have literal no knowledge IN THE FIELD they supposedly are talking about; or even worse they do terrible even IN the topics IN their field. This stuff works wonderfully for the religious media, religious politicians, the religious faithful, BUT you never see CERN, ITER, MIT, NASA, The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA's JPL), and the various host of scientific federation teams and organizations working on ALL sorts of projects. They are never together because the other side only presents LARGE quantities BUNK "science" and BUNK or JUNK "scientific" videos. They are rightfully scorned by the media and the true scientific establishment.

You have to understand that the nature of what this man was saying in his video, like what @xxovercastxx said in his post, it's complete garbage. You can't even listen to the first minutes of it because he's already missing the boat. NO ONE except for fellow Christians will come out in support of this man's argument. There will be no "HOLY SHIT, HOW COULD WE NOT HAVE SEEN THIS" moment, because the man is an idiot. While shiny will think it's just bias and bigotry at work on the part of media and "THE WORLD'S SCIENTIFIC MINDS" (that's a lot of people shiny), they'll continue to build us useful things like planes, computers, fusion reactors (2018 for the first one), rockets, satellites, medicines, gene manipulation (already here)--->cures to genetic diseases (around the corner), cars, buildings, bridges, machines, new limbs (2030-40; stem-cell research could go FAR faster depending on how much we help), never dying (this one is tricky; some say 20!, I'd say more around 30-40 years out, BUT who gets it and what happens when we do get it--it could get scary), dams, should I go on i could list ALL night and never stop--scientists have done SO MUCH for us and still do. They are literally are best chance for a better future. People like the man in video are dangerous. They cause distrust and give mis-information about the greatest men and women that live on this Earth (other than those that are TRULY selfless souls, looking out for others always). People like that create a "rot" a disease in society; it's the "depression you feel in the air here in America. I point MY FINGER at them as the cause. They WILL NOT let progress nor happiness win, they are only concerned with what they "think", and what they "think" is not right.

What will these Christian scientists make, invent, or create for humanity, to help? Dams, cars, trains, light-bulbs--no...more videos to show scientists they're wrong... What did you get taught in school?

Some 20 years ago a group of slaughter houses came to my university to ask us to build similar machines. Before these machines, humans did this kind of work. Next to humans costing more, a bigger problem was that people who wield chainsaws at work to cut through meat tended to stop seeing the difference between their wife and the pig and would take the chainsaw home to work off hours too. Statistics said that 1 in 10 would eventually do that, a huge increase vs the rest of us.

They couldnt find students for it though. No one had the stomach.

>> ^therealblankman:

>> ^BoneRemake:
>> ^therealblankman:
>> ^TheGenk:
Oh look, it's a copy of a design used in the alps for decades...

What are the odds? I have a question though, which would you choose if you were the operator and your life were on the line using it on the steep side of some mountain gorge?

The one that has decades of experience building the machines as well a company with a fantastic reputation. Both of which I know nothing of, but thats what I would go for. Reliability is paramount as well.

That's the only "right" answer of course, but it's not always the same answer that the bean-counters come up with.
On an unrelated note... nice package. Was it cold out?
Chances are both machines are manufactured in China anyway, which is where Chinese stole all the design plans from.

>> ^BoneRemake:

>> ^therealblankman:
>> ^TheGenk:
Oh look, it's a copy of a design used in the alps for decades...

What are the odds? I have a question though, which would you choose if you were the operator and your life were on the line using it on the steep side of some mountain gorge?

The one that has decades of experience building the machines as well a company with a fantastic reputation. Both of which I know nothing of, but thats what I would go for. Reliability is paramount as well.

That's the only "right" answer of course, but it's not always the same answer that the bean-counters come up with.

On an unrelated note... nice package. Was it cold out?

>> ^therealblankman:

>> ^TheGenk:
Oh look, it's a copy of a design used in the alps for decades...

What are the odds? I have a question though, which would you choose if you were the operator and your life were on the line using it on the steep side of some mountain gorge?


The one that has decades of experience building the machines as well a company with a fantastic reputation. Both of which I know nothing of, but thats what I would go for. Reliability is paramount as well.

>> ^jonny:

>> ^robbersdog49:
I love stuff like this. In the "civilised" world we'd spend thousands on a machine to put those guys out of work.

While putting at least twice as many people to work building those machines.


I don't buy that argument at all. I'm betting the man hours it takes to build a machine are far less than the man hours it would save in use. If this wasn't the case we wouldn't use them.

>> ^robbersdog49:

I love stuff like this. In the "civilised" world we'd spend thousands on a machine to put those guys out of work.


While putting at least twice as many people to work building those machines.

>> ^Norsuelefantti:

Yeah, fighter pilots are awesome, they get to kill people from a safe distance! Wohoo!


Can we tone down the righteous indignation a notch? This isn't a video showing someone getting killed by a plane or anything like that. It's simply a display of engineering and skill.

I'd love to think that one day we can build fantastic machines like that, not for war, but for play. Personally, I'd love to give that a go, looks like epic fun.

No, he sued the Patent Office for not giving him perpetual motion patent. The court ordered the NBS to test his pile of shit. The DC to AC converter surprisingly was low efficiency. Of course the troofers on the internet will claim that there was all this magical RF energy he made from large wires and arcing (sparks). But there is no reason if this really works that you cannot power the machine off of itself and run forever.


http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/590/is-it-possible-to-build-a-machine-that-generates-more-power-than-it-uses

JOE NEWMAN UPDATE

Some years after the preceding was first published a Straight Dope reader in Mississippi sent word that Joe was in the news again. According to the Mississippi Press, Newman said he was ordered by God to marry both his 30-year-old secretary and her 8-year-old daughter. Newman complied--God presided over the ceremony--and happily notified the world in a 12-page press release. (One copy was sent to the Ayatollah Khomeini.)

The only problem--well, maybe not the only problem--was that Newman was already married to a third woman. Authorities promptly removed the eight-year-old from Joe's home, though he said he had not consummated the marriage. Newman, who once ran for president on God's instructions, angrily declared that this shabby treatment was going to get God really PO'ed. "I wouldn't be a bit surprised if this does not result that God will place misery upon the state of Mississippi.... I can see the handwriting on the wall and the people of Mississippi had better wake up."