Watch this rube golberg video

[LCHIEN]

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...87879320&hl=en

So mr Hank lee, can you get this (see attached pic) translated for us? I gotta know what it is.

[crokett]

That is very cool. Someone has waaay too much time on his hands. I want to know what it says to.

[charliex]

Okay some people have way too much time on their hands. But it was sure fun to watch.

[MilDoc]

Extremely inventive devices!

[scorrpio]

I suggest you try and get your hands on an old computer game by Sierra, The Incredble Machine 2. (The Incredible Machine 1 is basically same, but a smaller gadget selection). A real fun game, and some puzzles are downright hellish. And it has sandbox mode where you can build your own contraptions.

[Hoyden]

very time consuming, both to make and to watch. enjoyed it very much.

[Perfidiajoe]

I remember a kids toy several years back, "Mouse Trap" I believe you had to build something such as that to catch the mouse.

[Peter59T]

It says Pythagora's switch

Nice link! I spent way too long watching this last night and just had to ask a friend in Japan. I can now ease your curious minds:

The sign says Pi Ta Go Ra Su Itchi, which is the Japanization of the name of the mathematician/philosopher Pythagoras. Sounding it out you realize it spells “Pythagoras Switch”, which is what the Japanese call Rube Goldberg type machines. It is the name of the Japanese show where these things appear (rather fittingly, I suppose). Why the call them that? My answer doesn't cover that.

There was a really clever Honda commercial along the same lines:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...mmercial&hl=en

[leehljp]

Peter Got it right. But the actual letters say:

(edit in Peter also got the spelling right for display to foreigners. But to Japanese they would probably do it this way:

pi ta go ra

SUi cchi

The "cc" in cchi the word above gives the "chi" sound a harder sound, which is a part of the Japanese alphabetical sound. BTW they don't have a "th" sound here.

I logged in earlier and followed the link but for some reason your graphic did not come up.

I would like say something about the difference in Peter's spelling and my spelling. For those of you who do not speak two or three langauges there is something interesting in the language culture that I never learned while studying languages in the States - that is the number of kinds of dictionaries available.

There are 4 kinds of dictionaries here for Japanese-English.
For English readers/speakers:
1. English to Japanese, all written in English and Roman alphabet system.
2. Japanese to English, all Japanese words written in the language of the Roman alphabet system, and English words of course written in English.

For Japanese readers/speakers:
3. Japanese to English in which the definitions are written in Japanese alphabet system and character/kanji.
4. English to Japanese in which the English word is written in two forms: Japanese alphabet system and the Roman alphabet system, with all explanations in Japanese Kanji and kana alpahabet.

For this reason, you will often see two different spellings of Japanese words in the Roman letter alphabet system. It depends on who the target person is as to which to use.

That is enough for today's trivia.

[DUD]

Amazing, man that took sometime. Bill