Rube Goldberg Quotes

I am a human Rube Goldberg machine," he said. "I do simple things in complicated ways

You have a pet theory, one you have been turning over for years, that life itself is a kind of Rube Goldberg device, an extremely complicated machine designed to carry out the extremely simple task of constructing your soul.

It's probably wrong to believe there can be any limit to the horror which the human mind can experience. On the contrary, it seems that some exponential effect begins to obtain as deeper and deeper darkness falls-as little as one may like to admit it, human experience tends, in a good many ways, to support the idea that when the nightmare grows black enough, horror spawns horror, one coincidental evil begets other, often more deliberate evils, until finally blackness seems to cover everything. And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity. That such events have their own Rube Goldberg absurdity goes almost without saying. At some point, it all starts to become rather funny. That may be the point at which sanity begins either to save itself or to buckle and break down; that point at which one's sense of humor begins to reassert itself.

america...is the interplay of three hundred million rube goldberg contraptions invented only yesterday

And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity. That such events have their own Rube Goldberg absurdity

Behind each door of what-if lies an unanswerable question that unhinges an infinite Rube Goldberg machine of probabilities. The life we have is the only one we will ever know, and even that with tenuous certainty.

We trigger each other, it seems, some dysfunctional Rube Goldberg mousetrap, a laugh, then a slap, a razor gliding over a mirror, a glass filled, a glass emptied, a ball rolling down a length of pipe, a pipe filling up and overflowing with smoke. On our best days, we see each other for all that we are, and we find a way to make each other better.

Be your own dentist!

Professor Butts walks in his sleep, strolls through a cactus field in his bare feet, and screams out an idea for a self-operating napkin.

I have so many problems with this plan that I don't think I could list them all even if I wanted to try," said Sam. "On second thought, no. I really want to try, because this isn't so much a 'plan" as it is the Rube Goldberg version of a suicide attempt.

If you stand up for your rights you’ll be criticized, put through the ringer, dragged into court, arrested, pepper sprayed, sucked into an overcomplicated, Rube Goldberg bureaucracy the mistakes of which become your mistakes and which will drive you insane with stress. Wouldn’t you rather be providing service with a smile?

Governments are nothing more than elaborate Rube Goldberg apparatuses, operating with absurd inefficiency. Why walk ten steps when you can make it there in a hundred?

America,” wrote Kilgore Trout in MTYOAP: “is the interplay of three hundred million Rube Goldberg contraptions invented only yesterday.

Many of the younger generation know my name in a vague way and connect it with grotesque inventions, but don't believe that I ever existed as a person. They think I am a nonperson, just a name that signifies a tangled web of pipes or wires or strings that suggest machinery. My name to them is like a spiral staircase, veal cutlets, barber's itch—terms that give you an immediate picture of what they mean.

It's probably wrong to believe there can be any limit to the horror which the human mind can experience. On the contrary, it seems that some exponential effect begins to obtain as deeper and deeper darkness falls--as little as one may like to admit it, human experience tends, in a good many ways, to support the idea that when the nightmare grows back enough, horror spawns horror, one coincidental evil begets other, often more deliberate evils, until finally blackness seems to cover everything. And the most terrifying question of all ,may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring unrelenting sanity. That such events have their own Rube Goldberg absurdity goes almost without saying. At some point, it all starts to become rather funny. That may be the point at which sanity begins either to save itself or to buckle and break down; that point at which one's sense of humor beings to reassert itself.

It was a Rube Goldberg disease. A change in the sequence of a gene caused the change in the sequence of a protein; that warped its shape; that shrank a cell; that clogged a vein; that jammed the flow; that racked the body (that genes built).

She stopped shrieking after a moment. It wasn't the crazy looks she drew from the other pedestrians that made her stop. And her damaged sanity hadn't managed to repair itself. She'd left something behind in that apartment. Something she'd always taken for granted. Faith in a rational world. It was like a tiny cog had been removed from her brain, and all the gears were still working, but a slight wobble was slowly and inevitably stripping the teeth until one day, without warning the Rube Goldberg device that was her mind would fall apart with a loud SPROING.

Dr. S didn’t notice. “Do you remember the cartoons of Rube Goldberg? An inventor of the most ludicrous contraptions. You know: a lever is pulled, causing a boot to kick a dog, whose bark motivates a hamster to run on a wheel which winds a pulley that raises a gate that releases a bowling ball and so on? Until, at the end, finally, the machine does something incredibly mundane, like making a piece of toast. Yes? Well, as it turns out, that’s the world. All these incredibly complex, inscrutably intertwined Rube Goldberg machines that can only be seen in retrospect when something happens.

The gospel: a promise that joy does not depend on what is given but on its givenness.

Sam blew out 10 candles and in the distance Mary Lou Retton received a perfect 10 on her floor routine. And he almost felt like he, by blowing out the 10 candles at the precise moment that he had, had been what caused her to get the perfect 10. He fanaticized that the universe was a Rube Goldberg machine. If he had blown out only 9 candles, maybe the Romanian girl would have won instead.

The vital aspect of the electoral college was that it got the Convention over the hurdle and protected everybody's interest. The future was left to cope with the problem of what to do with this Rube Goldberg mechanism... The Electoral College was neither an exercise in applied Platonism nor an experiment in indirect government based on elitist distrust of the masses. It was merely a jerry-rigged improvisation which has subsequently been endowed with a high theoretical content.

According to Isaiah it is necessary, at least for a time, that the messiah go unrecognized. It is crucial that, at least for a while, he remain hidden, that he not shine forth, that he have “no form, nor comeliness” and that he possess “no beauty that we should desire him” (Isa. 53:2). The Messiah’s coming must be delayed. This is necessary, at least in part, because the very act of recognition has messianic force. The shock of recognition changes us. The advent of the messianic depends on our seeing what was previously unseen. It should be no surprise, then, if the messianic is initially obscure, hidden under a rock, given in a grove, or stowed in a stable.

In sin, we come unplugged. When we refuse the givenness of life and withdraw from the present moment, we’re left to wander the world undead. Zombie-like, we wander from one moment to the next with no other goal than to get somewhere else, be someone else, see something else—anywhere, anyone, anything other than what is given here and now. We’re busy. We’ve got goals and projects. We’ve got plans. We’ve got fantasies. We’ve got daydreams. We’ve got regrets and memories. We’ve got opinions. We’ve got distractions. We’ve got games and songs and movies and a thousand TV shows. We’ve got anything and everything other than a first-hand awareness of our own lived experience of the present moment.

We’ve lost our way” is how another manifesto author, Andrew Hunt, put it in a 2015 essay titled “The Failure of Agile.” Hunt tells me the word agile has become “meaningless at best,” having been hijacked by “scads of vocal agile zealots” who had no idea what they were talking about. Agile has split into various camps and methodologies, with names like Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) and Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD). The worst flavor, Hunt tells me, is Scaled Agile Framework, or SAFe, which he and some other original manifesto authors jokingly call Shitty Agile for Enterprise. “It’s a disaster,” Hunt tells me. “I have a few consultant friends who are making big bucks cleaning up failed SAFe implementations.” SAFe is the hellspawn brainchild of a company called Scaled Agile Inc., a bunch of mad scientists whose approach consists of a nightmare world of rules and charts and configurations. SAFe itself comes in multiple configurations, which you can find on the Scaled Agile website. Each one is an abomination of corporate complexity and Rube Goldberg-esque interdependencies.

Indeed, as predicted, when the gene encoding the hemoglobin B chain was later identified and sequenced in sickle-cell patients, there was a single change: one triplet in DNA-GAG-had changed to another-GTG. This resulted in the substitution of one amino acid for another: glutamate was switched to valine. That switch altered the folding of the hemoglobin chain: rather than twisting into its neatly articulated, clasplike structure, the mutant hemoglobin protein accumulated in stringlike clumps within red cells. These clumps grew so large, particularly in the absence of oxygen, that they tugged the membrane of the red cell util the normal disk was warped into a crescent-shaped dysmorphic "sickle cell." Unable to glide smoothly through capillaries and veins, sickled red cells jammed into microscopic clots throughout the body, interrupting blood flow and precipitating the excruciating pain of a sickling crisis. It was a Rube Goldberg disease. A change in the sequence of a gene caused the change in the sequence of a protein; that warped its shape; that shrank a cell; that clogged a vein; that jammed the flow; that racked the body (that genes built). Gene, protein, function, and fate were strung in a chain: one chemical alteration in one base pair in DNA was sufficient to "encode" a radical change in human fate.

Family is not the only thing that matters. There are other things: Pachelbel’s Canon in D matters, and fresh-picked corn on the cob, and true friends, and the sound of the ocean, and the poems of William Carlos Williams, and the constellations in the sky, and random acts of kindness, and a garden on the day when all its flowers are at their peak. Fluffy pancakes matter and crisp clean sheets and the guitar riff in “Layla,” and the way clouds look when you are above them in an airplane. Preserving the coral reef matters, and the thirty-four paintings of Johannes Vermeer matter, and kissing matters. Whether or not you register for china, crystal, and silver does not matter. Whether or not you have a full set of Tiffany dessert forks on Thanksgiving does not matter. If you want to register for these things, by all means, go ahead. My Waterford pattern is Lismore, one of the oldest. I do remember one time when I had a harrowing day at the hospital, and Nick had a Rube Goldberg project due and needed my help, and Kevin was playing Quiet Riot at top decibel in his bedroom, and Margot was tying up the house phone, and you had been plunked by the babysitter in front of the TV for five hours, and I came home and took one of my Lismore goblets out of the cabinet. I wanted to smash it against the wall. But instead I filled it with cold white wine and for ten or so minutes I sat in the quiet of the formal living room all by myself and I drank the cold wine out of that beautiful glass crafted by some lovely Irishman, and I felt better. It was probably the wine, not the glass, but you get my meaning. I will remember the impressive heft of the glass in my hand, and the way the cut of the crystal caught the day’s last rays of sunlight, but I will not miss that glass the way I will miss the sound of the ocean, or the taste of fresh-picked corn.

As F. Enzio Busche beautifully describes it: [If we are] enlightened by the Spirit of truth, we will then be able to pray for the increased ability to endure truth and not to be made angry by it (see 2 Ne. 28:28). In the depth of such a prayer, we may finally be led to that lonesome place where we suddenly see ourselves naked in all soberness. Gone are all the little lies of self-defense. We see ourselves in our vanities and false hopes for carnal security. We are shocked to see our many deficiencies, our lack of gratitude for the smallest things. We are now at that sacred place that seemingly only a few have courage to enter, because this is that horrible place of unquenchable pain in fire and burning. . . . This is the place where suddenly the atonement of Christ is understood and embraced. . . . With this fulfillment of love in our hearts, we will never be happy anymore just by being ourselves or living our own lives. We will not be satisfied until we have surrendered our lives into the arms of the loving Christ, and until He has become the doer of all our deeds and He has become the speaker of all our words.3

There is only one reason people have children: they're programmed to. Whatever reasons they may have for it - selflessness, wanting to pass something on, having so much love to give - I don't believe they choose children any more than naked mole rats decide to start tunneling. Human beings are basically big complicated Rube Goldberg contraptions constructed by genes to copy themselves, and only as an unintended side effect build mosques, make screwball comedies, and launch interplanetary probes.

The construction of such complex systems by natural processes seems quite unlikely when we first confront them as a whole. However, our ability to recognize and understand the components of metabolisms and to interpret them from a phylogenetic perspective has slowly made it apparent that rather than being elegantly designed assemblies, metabolisms are nature’s “most wonderfully contrived Rube Goldberg machines” (Knoll 2003). All metabolisms are constructed of components, smaller, simpler sets of reactions, some of which are so versatile that they can function in two or more different ways. These components have been cobbled together in various ways in different groups of organisms, and the contraptions work. But metabolisms are not the wonderfully elegant things they may seem on first or superficial examination.

it is a jury-rigged result—highly inventive in places, totally stodgy in some, fantastically Rube Goldberg in yet others. As implausible as it must sound, the machine that holds the whole of our modern life in place “works in practice, but not in theory.” No one can see, grasp, or plan for the whole of it.

This is going to be the most . . . what is that name—Goldberg? Yes, Rube Goldberg–inspired operation I have ever imagined. Are you sure that we do not need to trigger it all with a hamster on a wheel?" "I dunno," Jackie said. "Do you have a hamster on board?" "Let me check the medical supplies . . .

If you think of what you’re doing too probabilistically where you have all these different steps, and there’s a chance that all these steps fail, then the conspiracy is very complicated, like a Rube Goldberg contraption, where something is just going to break down for one reason or another,” Peter explains. “What Mr. A convinced me of in 2011 was that this is not a statistical concatenation of probabilities—it was that if we simply executed on a few of these things correctly you would win.

But this wasn’t the end of it. Normal malware executes its code in a straightforward manner by simply calling up the code and launching it. But this was too easy for Stuxnet. Instead, Stuxnet was built like a Rube Goldberg machine so that rather than calling and executing its code directly, it planted the code inside another block of code that was already running in a process on the machine, then took the code that was running in that process and slipped it inside a block of code running in another process to further obscure it.

It was a Rube Goldberg contraption that someone had once said looked like a flying bedstead. The nickname had stuck. The Bedstead had a jet engine that pointed straight up, and hydrogen peroxide thrusters mounted at all angles on an ungainly aluminum frame.

Some film buffs then and even now may consider Soup to Nuts, released September 28, 1930 little more than a cinematic curiosity but such an assessment couldn’t be further from the truth, particularly with respect to Ted Healy’s popularity, the continuing transformation of his supporting players Shemp, Moe (then billed as Harry) and Larry, the intrigue of Rube Goldberg’s projects and debut of the five-year-old Billy Barty as Junior.

else, if the whole universe is God’s overly complex Rube Goldberg machine,

Living, she never ceases to die.