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Originally Posted by Baby Lee
First segment on interesting interaction of 'steampunk' early tech and some of the most cutting edge tech of today.
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I can't tell you how much I enjoyed that whole video series. As a kid, I was fascinated by Rube Goldberg devices and while this device has the appearance of one, it is actually an incredibly efficient machine for some very important math before the advent of computers. The whole design of the machine was in perfect harmony with its purpose. It is the perfect combination of imagination and common sense. Personally, it was especially cool since we do a fair amount of Fourier analysis and simulation in our research on noise biology.
The math described by this machine is the same math used to compress electronic signals in MP3s and is the same math embedded in living systems. It is just a thing of beauty.