How come I never heard of this stuff when I was there?

Anyway, news reports today state that the Purdue Society of Professional Engineers has won this year’s Rube Goldberg contest.

The mission: Develop a machine in the Rube Goldberg style for making a hamburger.  And by "Rube Goldberg style", that means at least 20 steps are required - and the more nonsensical and fantastic they are, the better.

The Purdue team won with a machine that took 156 steps to do the job...  They reportedly put several thousand hours into this project.  I don’t remember having that much time to spare in school?!?

In engineering, it is usually the case that you want to follow the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid!).  Maybe that is one of the fascinating things about this contest - it throws all that out the window, and rewards the most unusual and ludicrous concepts.

When I was at Tufts, I had one contest where we had to cook a chicken as fast as possible.  My team was the fastest, by taking some risks and putting the chicken in a pressure cooker in the oven...  But we were cheated out of our title by another team that didn’t follow the rules, and used seasonings to actually make their chicken taste good.  Feh!  Who needs that?  I want my chicken in a hurry!  Anyway, that contest aimed for the fast and simple, and didn’t have the wacky appeal of the Rube Goldberg one.

Photos and video follow:

Video from the Purdue University YouTube page:
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8DjQ2DXs7s