The “Breakfast of Champions” takes on new meaning during Union College's Rube Goldberg Contest May 10.
Let's face it – mornings are rough. Most of us are on automatic pilot until at least 10 a.m. For the hard cases, the clock's a.m. side is as unfathomable as the moon's dark side. What the world needs is more
humanitarian devices to gently jump-start the diurnally challenged. Such
devices could operate in tandem with a bedside alarm clock/coffee-maker combo with optional IV infusion.
The proving ground for such
inventions will be on Saturday, May 10, when 15 teams from schools as
far away as Cooperstown and Warren
County will compete in Union
College's Rube Goldberg Machine Contest. The task will be to build a machine
that uses at least 20 creative steps to pour cereal into a bowl and add milk.
Set-up will start at 8:30 a.m. and competition will follow at 9:30 a.m.
in the College's Field House.
Previous
competition's tasks included opening a bag of M&Ms, toasting a slice of
bread, and making a baloney sandwich. These comestibles are all very well and
good. However, everyone knows that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Therefore, teams will focus on
Fruit Loops, Cheerios, and Frosted Flakes (the earthy-crunchy types may
substitute granola) as they compete in what may be called the Cereal Bowl.
The
competition is named for the late Rube Goldberg, an engineer and Pulitzer
Prize-winning cartoonist. His cartoons appeared in a thousand daily newspapers
from 1914 to 1964. The “inventions,” he said, symbolized “man's capacity for
exerting maximum effort to accomplish minimal results.” His name has become
eponymous for anything that is unnecessarily complex, cumbersome, or convoluted
– used almost exclusively when trying to plumb the Byzantium
nature of governmental bureaucracies, programs, or legislature.
The Rube
Goldberg Machine Contest is sometimes called the “Olympics of Complexity.” That
said, on May 10 at Union
College, let the games begin!